PCBs are the backbone to any electronics that we use. I mean, you get in a car, and you start your car, and your dashboard lights up. That's all PCBs. Without the circuit board, you don't have your iPhone, you don't have your radio, you don't have your computer, you don't have your remote control to your TV. So PCBs are everywhere.
To make a good quality PCB, it requires a lot of efforts because we need to control the factories in details, have control over the ingoing material, over the process, controlling the factories, over the outgoing quality, and you need to have a good control in all the steps, from the design to the manufacturing.
The main difference between NCAB and our competitors is our ability to innovate. In searching for the right factories, the way in which we develop factories, the way in which we support technically. We're always trying to be one step ahead.
Hello and welcome. This is a historic and exciting day, our first Capital Markets Day. I'm Christian Salamon, Chairman of the Board. We have—I think you are here almost 40 people from all over the world, I was almost going to say. At least welcome from Finland, from many of you from Sweden, France, bienvenue, Germany, herzlich willkommen [Foreign language], U.K., U.S. I know some people got stranded in the U.K. with a flight that was canceled. You're all very welcome, and there are also listeners and viewers online, very welcome, both who are looking live and looking afterwards.
So thank you, and really thanks for giving us the time to talk a little bit about NCAB and showing you what company we are, and, you know, let you make the judgment if it's great or not. This is historic. It's, we're not a startup, but we're still a fairly young company. It was founded about 30 years ago, with the entrepreneurs having the idea of supplying customers with printed circuit boards of high quality, good price, but without investing and having the large CapEx situation of a manufacturer. To choose the suppliers, the factories, which are the best factories for the specific printed circuit boards. 15 years later, the founder was getting older and decided to retire, and the company was for sale.
So, in various ways, I received that message, looked at a, you know, short description of the company and said, "Nah, this is not a very attractive industry." Right? Printed circuit boards, complicated manufacture, large volumes, you know, commodity, you sort of imagine, no, you know, lots of big manufacturers. This is a small company, turnover of about SEK 300 million. I mean, this is the-- I'd worked with industries and analyzed, and I'd worked with private equity many years, and I saw, I was so sure. I was sure this is not a good industry.
But of course, you're a little bit curious, so set up a meeting with then the CEO, Hans Ståhl, and, you know, you start to see, well, this is something different. This was not one industry. This was a niche in the PCB industry. Low volumes, high complexity, high mix, so a very, very particular part. It's custom products. Each product is manufactured for a specific purpose, for a specific customer. A product which is in the realm of the total end product, a very small part of the cost, maybe a couple of percentage points, but if it doesn't work, the whole product doesn't work. And you can't just change it because it's at the heart of a product.
So it's very expensive for a customer if there is an error or a fault or if the quality is not right, but represents a small price. It's a fragmented industry with interesting potential to consolidate. It's an industry where there is some volume effects. So if you can consolidate a volume for a-- You know, take the small batches or the small, the large number of smaller batches for a large group of customers and consolidate that, and helping your suppliers, the factories, to come with a high volume, you're helping both your customers and your suppliers. So suddenly, you know, so you saw that this is a—this is probably a very attractive industry.
You had this company, which was, you know, small but growing, but with a sort of mediocre profitability of around, you know, 5%-6%. And then it was interesting to meet Hans Ståhl, who was, on paper, the CEO, but the company was run by the entrepreneur. So, you know, Hans had very interesting ideas, and he was, as you know, many CEOs, very, very passionate, and he was very passionate about the products, you know, as passionate as you can be about PCBs. But the interesting thing was this, he was equally or maybe even more passionate about sales, about selling, about managing a sales force, about marketing. 'Cause this is also a game of selling and marketing, and that's a bit unusual.
So that was very interesting, and with that background, you sort of said, this is a, this is really a small gem, where also Hans' ideas could blossom out, in the new situation. So, I, without the money to make the whole acquisition myself, I joined forces with R12, who I had the pleasure of working with in many other situations. We have similar views on ownership, developing companies, supporting the business over a long term. So we embarked on a longer development journey, and a development journey, which, you know, had many, many aspects. Started out by recruiting a CFO. The company didn't have really a financial organization. It was the entrepreneur who did it on his own Excel sheet, and when we made the acquisition, he actually--
You know, we couldn't get the numbers right, and at the end, he also admitted: "You know, I'm sorry, the balance sheet doesn't balance." So we said, "Ah, this company probably needs a CFO." So we recruited Anders Forsén. I had the pleasure of working with him in an earlier situation, back in time, who's built up a, you know, a very competent and professional, finance organization. We worked in many other areas. For example, HR, which is, again, extremely important. In a small business, you know, CFO has sort of direct access basically to everyone. But now that we have grown, to develop people, to recruit the best, to do training, we have an NCAB Academy. You know, Eva Holm was recruited as HR manager, has done a fantastic job.
So the team was actually expanding. Operations was, of course, important. At that time, Anna Lothsson was heading that, developing the whole—what we call the factory management organization, i.e., the way, the people, and the organization in Shenzhen that is working with then mainly the Chinese factories that we worked with. That organization works with all our suppliers around the world today, although still the majority is China. Today, our CEO. You will meet Anna later today. And today, the COO, Chris Nuttall, has developed that further. You will hear from him, too, and do ask difficult and tough questions. Sales and marketing has been and was important already then. We have a great organization.
We've developed the, you know, the regional structure from a small company, where basically a couple of countries, mainly Nordic countries, were driving the business, and today it's a global organization, where we have, you know, our regions, our Eastern, our American, our European, Nordic regions with people like Benjamin Klingenberg, who's here today. Benjamin, we'll talk a little bit about how, you know, that business, how we view it on the sales and marketing side, regionally. Howard Gough, who's in the U.K., who's not here today. Our organization in the U.S., which was developed from scratch, started out by some acquisitions about 10 years back, and today, our biggest operation.
And also, you know, very interesting sales operation in a country like China, where you would say, you know, what role does NCAB have, where the, you know, many of our suppliers already are? So, you know, a really interesting development and not the least the sort of the key drivers in our business, which are our MDs, our managing directors in the different geographies. And I think hopefully, you already have a view on that, but you will feel it maybe more, hopefully today, that we are working very, very hard to maintain this decentralized, type of working.
So we view a managing director as the businessman who is basically running the business in, whether it's in Germany, or in France, or wherever it is, with you know, as much real authority and responsibilities as we can have, and where we try to keep a very lean headquarters and support organization, which sort of sets the boundaries for how you operate. But the business and the business decisions with customers, those are made locally, and that's, I think, very important to understand, to understand our business.
Sustainability is popular to talk about today, but about 10 years ago, through a you know initiative from one of our then board members became an interesting topic to think about, you know, how could that be, and how could that be, if so, a part of our, of our business, of our strategy? Of course, we had to live up to requirements like RoHS and, you know, waste handling, et cetera. But, you know, could that be more? I think we were maybe a little bit lucky with that foresight, that we started to think about how can that be something which gives us an edge in our commercial discussions with customers? And from the beginning, I think, Hans, you talked to Hans about that, but customers were not very interested.
They say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you should do what is required." And then, of course, that has changed a lot, and it was an interesting way to start to talk to customers because that was an angle which no one else had. I mean, today, that has, of course, developed very very much, and I think we're very proud that our customers are trusting us, that we do our bit in helping them in their business and in their sustainability efforts, and in their customers' sustainability efforts. That's, that's very much a commercial, I mean, it's nice because we do the right thing, but it's, it's very much a commercial decision and a commercial part of our strategy.
We also went through a bit of a major change in our company where, you know, you go from a very strong CEO who is sort of developed and been a mother of many of the strategies we have in the company, Hans, to a new leadership with Peter Kruk, who we were happy to recruit as a fantastic talent. So that is, for us, it's a sort of a big, big step in our journey. And of course, it-- I want to mention the role that the board has. And as owners, we have jointly here with R12, we have been very instrumental in sort of driving things.
But I think we also have said that it's important to try to recruit really, really top people to the board of directors. And I think the example of sustainability is a good one, where, you know, that came from not from one of us, but another board member. We have Magdalena Persson here in the back, so talk to her. Hans Ramel from R12, who, together with Per Hesselmark, has been, you know, pillars in our board. Jan-Olof Dahlén, who has, for age reasons, left the board. Super strong operational person with fantastic experience. Gunilla Rudebjer , you know, with very much coming from the, among other things, super strong on the financial side.
So what we say is a little bit, I mean, it's maybe a bit of a platitude, but, you know, to our customers, we say that we are, they should demand world-class products and world-class service from us. I think the way we would think, I mean, we are also owners, we say, you know, we as owners, and you as owners, should demand world-class talent and people on the board to support and help and control, and all the things a board should do for your company. So this is a, this is a historic moment. Our company was founded 30 years ago. The new ownership, the change in ownership 15 years ago, or 20 years ago now.
Our listing in 2018, and then, you know, a couple of years later, about two years ago, less than two years ago, it became part of the Large Cap list on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. So we're super proud of, and I think this is our first Capital Markets Day. We're really, really happy that you're here and, and use the opportunity. We will try to be as open as, you know, we can within the boundaries you can have as a public company, but use the moment to push us, ask questions, and, you know, or, both, sort of formally here with questions, but also informally as we meet and interact.
So thank you, and with those, this little short introduction, I hand over to Gunilla Öhman, who is our IR manager, will talk about practicalities and introduce the program. And I hope that you will, at the end of the day, that you will walk away with, you know, you understand because you follow the company, but that you will walk away with a even more feel for how NCAB, NCAB is providing value, you know, to the customers, but also to other, you know, suppliers and other constituents that we have, number one. And number two, and maybe more important, number two, the quality and the breadth of the team which is working with this.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Christian. So, I just want to give you some short technical advice before we kick off our presentations. So, toilets are in this direction and by the entrance. Fire exits are in two ways, over there and over there. And then I ask you to put out the sound on your mobiles. So that was our technical information. So, we will start off with introducing Peter and Anders, who a lot of you have met before. And, after each presentation, there will be a short Q&A, and then there will be a longer Q&A after the final presentation. So Peter, you have been with us now for almost three years.
Yeah, just about three years now.
And Anders, as Christian told.
I've been here a long time, about, 16 years.
So--
I know the company very well.
Is there anything surprising you?
Of course, always. But I think we learn a lot. It's a fantastic company, and we can develop a lot.
Please kick off your presentations.
Okay. Thank you, Gunilla. So let's see if I can move forward. All right. So Anders and I will start talking and give you an overview about NCAB and our business concept. As you know, we are working with printed circuit boards and printed circuit boards alone, so the product you see to the far left. Our customers will then mount semiconductors and any kind of electronic components to create a PCBA, and that becomes then the brain in any kind of intelligent product. As Christian mentioned, everything we do is customer and product unique, so there are no standard products that we are trading back and forth in this industry. We as a company, we are focused on printed circuit boards for demanding customers.
We aim to supply these on time with zero defects and also sustainably produced, and giving our customers the overall lowest total cost. That does not mean that we're the cheapest. Normally, actually, we are not the cheapest in the market, but we provide greater value for these demanding customers and make them more competitive. Our vision is to be the number one PCB producer wherever we are, and we serve the world through 16 companies across the world. We have now, globally, around 615 employees, and we use some 31 factories to cover, say, 95% of our overall sales. We don't have any in-house manufacturing. It's all working with outside partners. As we're looking at demanding customers, our focus is also on what we call high-mix, low-volume customers.
So we are staying away from high-volume consumer products like PCs, mobile phones, consumer electronics, toys, et cetera, and instead, our focus is much more on industrial applications. In these cases, you generally have a very high product value. The PCB is only a couple of percentage points of the total bill of material. The demands on quality and performance is generally quite high, and also, these customers, even if they may be global leaders in their industrial fields, they are still, in the large scheme of things, small consumers of printed circuit boards, and they struggle to have both the competency and also the ability to buy from the leading factories.
So we can provide a lot of value with them, helping them optimize their design and secure the right kind of supply, and it also creates an environment where there is less price pressure in the market. Over the years, we've built up a big variety of industries that we're serving, all with individual demands, special requirements, but we have now a broad portfolio where we don't really have a strong reliance on any specific industry. We also do not have a strong reliance or dependency on any specific customers. I think our top 50 customers represents less than 50% of our overall sales. So quite a solid position in the market, with a lot of sort of offsets in different economic times.
We have a way of operating, which we'd like to describe as being integrated PCB production, and in the way that it differs from a pure, kind of traditional trading perspective. It's based on two parts where we kind of stick out, and one part is the strong customer presence, where we have the local companies operating in direct interaction with our customers in local languages, being able to sit down, engineer versus engineer, to help them optimize their design. I think in RFQs that we receive, maybe around 30% of the designs we get, there is something where we can see an area where there can be an improvement.
It could be either something that creates or represents a quality risk or something that drives cost, and by working with the customers, we can help them optimize this, and then we can match that to which will be the best factories to produce these specific parts and the volumes that our customers require over the time period that they were looking for. And then we have a very smooth way of handling the deliveries over time with EDI connections to customers and an operating system that maintains tracking of supply. But we also have a strong customer or sort of strong local presence in the factory side. So we have our factory management organization, which today is around 120 of our 615 employees.
They are able to be in the factories on a more or less daily basis. They can work then to secure supply, secure quality, and do regular full sustainability and quality audits, and also keep track of the supply flow. But we also work on developing these factories so that they continuously improve their performance, but also to work with our portfolio. What new technologies do we need to introduce? What other factories do we need to handle and bring on to our portfolio? And I think that way we have a situation where we are local in both ends, and we can really take full supply responsibility for the entire supply chain. And that is something that sets us apart from many of our competitors. You may have seen cases where factories try to sell directly to customers.
They are struggling to handle, especially for high mix, low volume, and for demanding customers, to handle the customer interaction in an efficient way, to really work through the technical details. And at the same time, if you're a local regional trading company, you are not really being able to handle the supply side or the factory side of the equation. So I think in that position, we are somewhat unique in our business setup, in the way that we are fully integrated in both ends, both on the factory side as well as in the customer side going forward. So looking at our history, and this is actually a picture from the marketing campaign where we were entering the U.K., in roughly 10 years ago. And I mean, it's been a company of continuous growth, from the start in the early 1990s.
As Christian described, we had some three gentlemen starting up a business or stopping to manufacture printed circuit boards and instead starting to trade. For maybe the first decade, the majority of our business was then in the Nordics. It was an expansion in Scandinavia and into neighboring countries. Followed a second decade where there was more step into the European markets. Also, activities in China started to be happening, so a further internationalization of the company. You could say from roughly 10 years ago, we entered into the U.S., first through an acquisition of PD Circuits, which was followed by M-Wave, and then came some other acquisitions as well in other parts of the world. Now we've seen in the last, say, five years, a continued strong organic growth in all of our regions.
But on top of that, we started more an active consolidation of the market by acquiring smaller, local, regional players in the global market. It's also been a development of profitability over the years, both with the growth, but also in terms of improving our margins. And we have a number of steps that has happened in the company. I think the company has matured in its capabilities. In the late 90s , we did our first part with medically approved. We also followed up with automotive OEM-approved parts in the late 90s. Early 2000, around 2006, we started up our factory management, so it's something that we've had now for more than 15 years as part of our business.
That was then part of in becoming an integrated part in our business model of being really the fully integrated on the both customer and supply side and taking full responsibility for the supply chain. We've continued with technological development. We have parts that are now, part of, of space applications since some 10 years ago. Sustainability audits was started around 2011, but I think we did our first sustainability audit report in 2014. We were listed on Nasdaq Stockholm in 2018, with Hans ringing the bell, and we had a nice award in 2022, where we were awarded Employer of the Year as well by Brilliant in 2022.
A long journey for the company and maybe some, Anders, you can give us some more specifics around what's happened since the IPO.
Yeah, thank you, Peter. So looking then into how we developed since the IPO, it's about 5.5 years ago, and I mean, we're a completely different company. I think we had a market cap of SEK 1.2 billion. We are now, well, about SEK 10 billion. Thank you for the sound. And also, I will say that we have a development of the company. I mean, see, the revenue was about SEK 1.4 billion at the IPO, and now we are SEK 4.5 billion. And we have been growing both organically, as we said, and also together with acquisitions. At the same time, we've also been able to more than double the EBITDA margins. I think we have been really successful in growing the company and growing it profitably.
You can see the two areas where we see the growth in profitability is both through improved gross margin and of course, also through higher efficiency and scale advantages. The little drop you can see here, 2020, was mainly due to two acquisitions, which much lower gross margin than the rest of the group, and then we continued the journey to year by year, grow the gross margin. Then to put some numbers on this one as well, we can see the difference since 2017, before the IPO, and now. We have managed to have a 23% growth year by year from 1.4-4.5. Gross profit or gross margin has improved about 4 percentage points during that time.
So, I mean, despite we have introduced the growth, we also make sure that we can have a higher profitability in that growth. And then looking into our costs, we see cost has improved 90% per year compared to 2023 on the revenue side. So we're also utilizing some kind of scale benefits in this area. And we've gone in EBITDA from 7.7%-15.2%. And then also, finally, we can see that we have the same return on equity, about 38%, 2017 and now, but we do this now on a solvency, which was double versus 2017. So I think we have really managed to develop the company in a good way and utilize the size in a smart and good way.
Then finally, I think also it's important that we run a fantastic business model, which really lean balance sheet, and we have a strong cash flow all the time. So you can see over this five years, 5.5 years, we have managed to have about SEK 1.6 billion in EBITDA and SEK 1.2 billion in cash flow. So on average, 76% of the EBITDA is falling down to cash flow. This, of course, gives us a very strong confidence that we can continue to grow and do investment for growth. The only year which was a bit different was 2021. That was the year we had a lot of logistic problems due to the pandemic. We had to create more buffer stock.
We had much more goods in transit, but then it came back again, so now we are in a good level again. You can also take a look, I mean, we have acquired companies for about SEK 1.5 billion since the IPO, and we have had a cash flow of SEK 1.2 billion. So we've almost been self-financed for the organic growth and for the acquired growth. So that also gives, at least me, very strong confidence for future opportunities in our growth. And then, capital employed has increased, mainly due to goodwill in the acquisitions, but also looking at return on capital employed, it's been stable, and I think the most important part here is the working capital in relationship to last 12-month revenue. We were about 8%, we are now back to 8% again.
We had a peak in 2021 due to the logistic situation, but I think this creates a very, very strong flexibility for us, and it's really good, I think. That was a little bit what happened financially the last five years.
Peter, what about the future?
So if we start looking at what, what the market looks like. So this is data from 2022, where you have the global PCB market of a value of $82 billion. And here you can see the bars showing a little bit of where is the production of the printed circuit boards. As can be seen, say, Europe and U.S. are quite small, whereas China and rest of Asia is really the powerhouse for manufacturing of printed circuit boards. If we try to turn it around and see where are the printed circuit boards consumed, where do people mount the components on the products to create, then you get a slightly different picture.
Then you can see that both Europe and North America grows, China goes down, and volume is then shifted from China out to the rest of Asia and to Europe and North America, primarily. So you get a little bit of a different picture looking at that. And then if we try to look and say, "How does it look when you start looking at high-mix, low-volume markets?" and our estimate is that high-mix, low-volume market is around 30% of the global market. If you then look on that view, then you get even further shifts, from the market, where you see the big volume producers in Asia goes down, and you can see that, relatively speaking, Europe and North America holds their ground somewhat, around $4 billion-$4.5 billion.
China goes down to around 6%, rest of Asia around 8%, and Japan around 2%. If you look upon the global market, you can see that then, say, Americas and Europe represent, well, maybe a third of the global market in terms of PCB consumption in the high-mix, low-volume market. But I think it also shows our relative market shares in these specific regions, that even in our market in the areas where we have the highest market shares, we only have around 7.5% market share, and in the U.S., we have less than 2%. So a lot of growth opportunities, even in the markets where we are our strongest, and you could argue that in 2/3 of the market, we have very small positions or opportunities for longer-term growth.
If you look upon the global development of the printed circuit board market, the $82 billion in 2022, we are right now looking at a 2023, where the expectation is that the market is going to be down, so coming down to around $74 billion. But then the projection is that as the market economy sort of solidifies, that we will see continued growth, again, driven by Internet of Things and in other areas that will expect the market to grow again. So even taking from 2022, there's an expectation of a 4% growth in the coming five years, and if you look from the 2023 number, it's a projection of around 7.5% in the coming years. So overall, a longer-term positive view of the growth opportunity for the market as a whole.
Our strategy for attracting the market is starting out from the bottom left corner; we remain with a complete focus on printed circuit boards. We do not see an interest in trying to expand into other product areas. The market opportunity is big enough for us to continue to exploit going forward, and we continue with an asset-light model. We don't see benefits of acquiring manufacturing capability in-house, but instead value very much the flexibility it gives us to work with outside partners. We have a lot of opportunities to grow our market shares, so we are focusing on further penetrating the markets where we're already active, both for getting more top-line growth, but also to get even deeper in with our customers, providing them with more value, more high-tech services, and thereby also improving our margins with these customers.
We have a lot of opportunities to grow geographically, and we are taking steps there to expand geographically, both strengthening parts of regions where we're already active, but also maybe stepping into new markets. Here, M&A can be a good means for us to accelerate some of those processes. Then finally, the market overall is extremely fragmented. There are a lot of, say, small mini NCABs, like companies that started out maybe 10, 20 years ago, but have only reached kind of a local or regional position. So there is a lot of opportunity for us to acquire a number of these companies and thereby consolidate the market.
And with that, we gain even further advantages from our size, which gives us better commercial terms with the manufacturing side, and it gives us also abilities to invest in tools and services that our smaller competitors cannot do. We introduced last year a new set of midterm targets. We came out of 2021, where we had done around SEK 3.2 billion of sales and around SEK 400 million of EBITDA, and we set targets for 2026. You can say that in 2022, we were performing, say, significantly above that trajectory plan. 2023, the market is a little bit more headwind, but we have very strong confidence in that we can continue to drive towards these targets. Again, we will continue to drive with a net EBITDA, EBITDA less than 2x, and we will be distributing available cash.
As Anders mentioned, we have a cash flow strong business, so we expect to make dividends in the order of around 50% of net profit.
Okay. Gunila?
So thank you, Peter and Anders. We'll start off with a short Q&A on this session, and I'll start off by asking on these financial targets. We are reiterating the same financial targets we had before, and some of you are asking us: Is this SEK 8 billion really feasible?
Absolutely. We believe very much in this. I think we've said that when we built the plan, that we could do roughly half and half by organic and half of it by acquisitions. We've had 2022 with us with a strong organic growth and also some good acquisitions. 2023 might be on the organic side, a bit softer from the market perspective, but we see opportunities both on the acquisition side and then in the future years also to stay on that plan to SEK 8 billion.
On the other hand, the SEK 1 billion EBITDA seems a bit low, maybe with the margins we have at the moment, is usually my question.
I think, I mean, for us, I think we see an effect when the market right now is facing a bit of headwind. It gives us a lot of opportunities on the sourcing side. So it means overall, that prices right now in the market are down, and if we, by our organization, can make a good job, we can actually improve our gross margin. So it gives us an opportunity in this period of time to have even stronger EBITDA margin in terms of percentages. Had we had a kind of a more normal market, maybe we would have seen a higher top line, but maybe not necessarily the same rise than in the EBITDA numbers.
I think our view is that we come again from a situation where we have, we want to continue with the profitable growth in the company, but we will also be continuing to invest in new markets. Expanding into new regions may mean acquiring companies with a lower profitability or also setting up some greenfields. With that, we still believe that we can continue to have a good, strong growth and a healthy profitability.
Thank you. Some more questions? Yes, Claus.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Cool. No, I mean, just a question on sort of the capital deployment side. I mean, one could argue you could actually deploy your cash through M&A a bit better than actually giving it in dividends in that sense. Could you maybe elaborate why you still want to keep sort of 50% dividend policy in that sense?
I think we've not set a strict policy that we will be dividing - making dividends of 50%. I think for our view is that we have a ambitious acquisition agenda. We have, since the last couple of years, done two-five acquisitions per year, that over the time will probably grow going forward. But we also know there's a time sequence to these projects. So the 50% is more indication what we expect potentially this to be. It could be less in a year if we have more attractive acquisition targets.
Can I ask you one more question?
Yeah, sure.
Now, so I mean, you showed the slide on production and consumption being quite different between Europe and U.S. and China, basically. Could you maybe talk us through what the developments are currently? Because we're seeing a big shift in the sort of globalization, how that impacts you both, I think, on the production and the consumption side.
Yeah. I think what we're seeing right now, actually, in the, in the production of printed circuit boards, we don't see major shifts for PCBs, actually. I think you can see that the European, American sides of, of production is somewhat stable. Maybe they're not declining quite as fast as they were earlier, but there is no investments in more capacity in Europe for PCBs. I think what we see is that the assembly work is moving, so I think we will see probably the consumption staples, that might actually move quicker to, to Europe and, and Americas than what we've seen historically. And that would actually be a benefit for us. But so far, the, the areas where we see the investments of maybe nearshoring is more on assembly work and on very IP-sensitive components like semiconductors and microprocessors.
Thank you.
Thank you. Henrik?
Yeah, you said gross margins perhaps surprised you a little bit on-- Are there any other surprises that you feel since the IPO?
No, I think, I mean, of course, I think maybe the profitability has increased more than we thought. But I think also we have seen the scale of advantage. When we're growing, it's easier to sort of pocket the profit in a way. And also this high gross margin development, the last one year or so, is very much dependent on the price situation, as Peter said before. We have seen now that prices is going down in the factories, and of course, we also lower prices to our customers, but not as much that we can negotiate with the factories. So probably the gross margin we see right now is a combination of that we have also have lower revenue. Our main task for the organization is to keep the gross profit stable or grow the gross profit.
The currency is not worrying you at all?
No, not, not very much. I think we are buying and selling in U.S. dollar. So of course, and we have very few costs in Swedish krona. The main thing could be between U.S. dollar and euro, because we have our gross profit denominated in U.S. dollar, and we have main costs in euro. So of course, if that changes dramatically, that could have an impact. But our gross profit is very much decided from the U.S. dollar, both buy and sell.
So I had a question here from the web. By the way, we are open to take questions from the web, for those of you watching us. And this is from Göran, and he wonders how exposed we would be if China decided to invade Taiwan. How big would the impact be to your business?
I think the answer is very, it would be huge, I think, but it would not necessarily be tied specifically to the printed circuit boards, because you have the whole semiconductor industry dependent on Taiwan and China already, so. And I think we'll come back a little bit more to that when Chris and Anna will talk about our sourcing and our manufacturing side, to see what we're doing to potentially partially offset that risk as well.
Thank you so much. So let's go on in the program. Do we have one more question? Sorry.
Thank you. Well, artificial intelligence is on everyone's lips nowadays. Is there something that benefit you as well?
I think it might drive further sort of need for advanced electronics and, per se, that could be a driver. Then you can also say that maybe there are some things that come into play part in some of the tools to help design products. But again, it is a quite complex process, and everything is very much unique. So I think the human interaction that we provide our customers is a key factor. So I think if anything, I think it might drive further, more advanced electronics, and that could then also be a positive.
So, thank you Peter and Andres. We will see more of you later on. So welcome, Benjamin Klingenberg.
Thank you.
Benjamin, you are our new, quite new VP for Europe, for our segment, Europe. And you're also the MD of Germany. So how long have you been with NCAB?
Since 3.5 years now. Can you hear me well? Good. So 3.5 years. I started end of 2019. I still remember, Hans, you hired me a while ago, together with Howard. So, remember our meeting in Hamburg. That's how it got started again, actually.
What did you do before?
I'm a PCB guy by heart. So, this is actually not my natural habitat, talking on an investor's day. My natural habitat is selling PCBs, motivating people and teams all around the world in an international environment, selling PCBs, but only PCBs with a high quality. This is what I like, what I've always been doing. I've been working for 10 years in a company building laser machines for the PCB production. We supplied them all around the world. Then I moved a little bit to the sales, where I recognized that this is where my heart beats. So I've been with NCAB for three years, or two and a half years before, as an outside salesperson in the north of Germany.
Then I moved for six years into one of our competitors, who also runs a production facility or three production facilities in Germany. Coming back to the question or the topic that was on the page before, why don't we have our own factories? I can tell you, our business model makes sense.
Is it any difference to work for NCAB or for a competitor?
It is. Actually, as Christian said, where is he? I don't know. There. As an MD, you get a lot of responsibility, which I like, and I don't know, Hans, if you remember when you said, "Uh, why do you want to come back?" And I said: Because I don't like micromanagement. You get a lot of freedom here as an MD. You can act like an entrepreneur, and you can build business, of course, in certain boundaries, as it was mentioned before, from the group. We have our mission and our vision, and this company only works if you use it the right way. But inside of these boundaries, you can really grow and yeah, be active and go forward, and that's what I like.
Thank you. Kick off your presentation, Benjamin. We're curious.
Yeah. Thank you. So again, welcome to my presentation. It will be about the segment, Europe, and I will, first of all, explain a little bit the wording. What does Europe mean in NCAB terms? It was explained a little bit before. NCAB was born in the Nordics, in Scandinavia, and this is also why the geographical Europe, as you see it here, is divided into two. We call it internally segments. One is a Nordics segment, which is Sweden, Finland, Norway, and also the Baltic areas. This is so to say, our home market. My responsibility is the so-called segment Europe, with all the countries connected to it, which you see here below, more or less the center of Europe, and by far one of the biggest potential markets that we have for us here in the Western world.
What do I mean by this, talking about potential? The potential is big. The PCB demand numbers here in million SEK or the countries that my European segment is about is huge. As it was mentioned before, there is still a comparable low market share that we own. It was growing over the last years, but still there's a huge potential. Today, I will tell you a little bit about how we focus the growth. It will be about two different ways of growing. Of course, everybody of you knows, one is organic, one is by acquisitions. But every of these ways of growing has its specialties, and especially in the PCB world, it is special. I will tell you a little bit about that.
As I'm not in my natural habitat in such an investor day, as I said before, if you have any kind of questions, please always also raise your hand, ask, and/or later in the question and answer session. I will hear later if you have any further questions, so-- Good. Yeah, talking about growth, this is the growth of the European segment. Again, the numbers in millions SEK. What you've seen here, all the names below the curve, are names of acquired companies of the past. The way we are doing it is also unique, in my opinion, and this also comes back to the question: why do I like to work here?
For example, Flatfield, one of the first acquisitions that I was allowed to be involved with, with Flatfield is a Netherlands company that has a significant part of its business in Germany, which I was the MD. So what happens? You're the MD of NCAB, suddenly you get the notification Flatfield has been bought, but they have their business in Germany. So you need to find a solution. You need to find a solution to keep the employees happy, don't take off their business that they have been growing for years in Flatfield. We need to make sure that our employees in NCAB don't get afraid, that they are getting, they are losing their customers, and we need to keep the customers happy.
This is something where we found a very good way to work together with the acquired target, to find good solutions, to merge companies, and to find good solutions to set up the combined forces in a way that the customer recognizes that together we are even stronger. Prevent in Italy was a very much isolated acquisition, mainly in Italy, I would say to 90%, then followed by SAS and META, both of them mainly in Germany. Elmatica was again a one of our biggest acquisitions so far in Norway, but also, again, business spread over the whole world. It's a lot of work for the management to check where does the business happen? Why does it happen? What do we need to do to keep it?
And this actually is also something that I got involved with in NCAB, and it's really a lot of fun to interact with these different shareholders and stakeholders. That's a nice thing to do. Kestrel and in the U.K., Bare Board Consultants , again in Italy and one of the latest acquisitions, DB Electronic, in Germany. And I will explain a little bit about the strategy of acquisitions later. Let's first of all check again about the growth strategies. As I mentioned, growth will be happening in all our markets in Europe. We have a comparable low share of business. There is still room to grow. We are engaging with a lot of bigger OEM customers also, but it takes time.
I've been a sales guy on my own in the printed, printed circuit boards for a while ago, and when you engage with a customer, went from the first warm call you are doing, the second, the third, some even stop after the third, but you need to go further. You need to visit the customer. It takes you half year or a year. But from the sample orders in the printed circuit board, it sometimes takes you another half a year or a year. So you need to consistently be working on this organic acquisition, organic growth, to win, but then also to keep the business. But the good side of it, if you're in, you're in, because these little green things that you see on your tables, you cannot sell them by a catalog. There is no catalog about a PCB.
Every PCB is tailor-made for the product. You cannot take your PCB out of your mobile phone and put it in your notebook. It's all tailor-made. So we need engineers. We need to be close to the customer to explain our values, the added value we bring, and to make sure that the customer trusts in what we are doing. And this is what our sales teams all around the world is doing on a daily basis to grow organic. Main focus markets, despite the ones we are already active in, is East Europe. East Europe, we see a big trend of business from West Europe moving to East Europe. This is a little bit the relocation that has been discussed earlier, especially assembly business. I don't personally believe there will be new PCB productions being built in Europe in the next years.
I don't believe that for certain reasons, which would be a little bit too far here. But the assembly work where our customers are is definitely a trend to East Europe. We will put a stronger focus on Switzerland, which is below my responsibility of my German team, but we need to have local people to serve local Swiss people. Same in Belgium. They belong to the Netherlands organization at the moment, but we will also build up own organizations there and similar analogously in Portugal. Of course, focus in many different markets. Talking a little bit about the potential, we are focusing on, as an example, the German market on two different kinds of customers. One is the OEM customers. What does an OEM for us mean? An OEM customer owns the printed circuit board because they build the final product.
That might be a sensor, where the sensor company buys the PCB, they assemble it on their own, they build it in their own product. This is an OEM for us. EMS companies, which you see the red dots here. EMS companies are service-providing companies. They work for smaller OEMs that cannot afford to have their own assembly lines, so they use the service of an EMS. They ask them to buy the boards from us. They ask them to buy the semiconductors. The EMS assembles them and then ships them out to the end customer. What is the difference? This now comes a little bit down to how do we do sales. Every industry, every product is tailor-made and is different, and this makes it demanding but also super interesting.
We are focusing on different industry sectors, as it was said before, and every, every industry has its own language, I would say. If you talk about, for example, aerospace, they talk about AOG, aircraft on ground. This is just a word, but you need to know it if you want to sell PCBs to these customers. Same in automotive, same in medical. They have norms, they have rules, they have laws, and you need to understand this to be able to talk to those customers that are buying. Most important is the sales mindset, and this is extremely important with the printed circuit board. As I said, a printed circuit board is a tailor-made product, so very often you are not only doing sales, you need to engage with engineering. And in engineering, you can do miracles.
You can do cost saving, you can printed circuit more, more, more reliable. You can scale it, you can bring it to a faster time to market by doing the right things. This is super important for us, where we are also coaching our employees frequently, regularly, by different ways. We have our own academy internally, where we have videos, where we have quizzes, where we have training sessions. We do on-site trainings. We do these so-called blitz sessions, which I like the most. It's a nice thing to do.
You meet with a group of people, you take one task, for example, winning a new customer, and then you take out 5 or 10 customers that you want to win, and the group discusses how we can approach these customers, what is special with the customer, how to create an elevator pitch, and then the group separates for one hour. Every person in this group takes one customer and does a one call, and then they gather again, and they share experience. This is the way how we are winning the most amount of customers and the most amount of new part numbers and products. This is one of the biggest investments that we also do in our company. It's investment in our people, in the knowledge, and in the education of our people. The good thing is that it's visual, it's measurable. We see the growth.
We see especially the growth in companies where we put these efforts. And so I would like to step to the next slide.
one, one question.
Yes.
What are those things? Cookies or?
This is where my say, my PCB heart starts beating again. You see these green things on your table, and this is-- I would not recommend to eat it. Actually, the yellow part around it, it's resin, and I think there's one piece of PCB on the table over there where you see there's a hole in it, right? Yeah. So somebody stamped a rectangle out of this PCB, and they've put it in here. Because the PCB was invented before the Second World War, where the people needed to put wires between all the components, and the wires were completely chaotic, and when there was vibration, wires got broken. So to be more reliable, they invented the PCB to put the wires on these printed circuit boards like copper traces.
But someone, the PCB on top was not enough anymore, so they needed to move in different layers and connect them. And what you see here may be a little bit difficult from far away, but you see these shiny parts. This is copper connecting 1, 2, 3, 4 or even 48 layers with each other. Some of these connections are small, some are big for different reasons. So this makes us look inside of the PCB, and this is also why our customers need a reliable PCB partner, because when they get the PCB, they see the little green thing, but they don't see what is inside.
They need to trust us that everything that is inside, which is consisting out of or ex- is being generated by tens, dozens of different processes in the factory. They need to rely that what we are doing is reliable and makes their product work for a long time. So, I could tell you hours about that. So yeah, it's a microsection, by the way. Short word. Good. Let's ask a customer. We have one customer, from Germany, a company called Leuze. It's an OEM for us. I said OEM has their own products. They assemble the PCBs on their own, and they decided to buy from us because we are making their products more reliable by our PCBs. So let's listen to Nadine Gürsch .
She will be in a short interview and explain a little bit how her customer experience is working with us.
Thank you very much for taking the time to meet with me.
Thank you.
How long have you been working now with, NCAB?
Our business relationship started in 2018 with the first order of prototypes, and in 2019, everything was tested and approved, and we started with the procurement of the series production.
What was your initial impression of NCAB in the early days?
We were a little bit skeptical if our quality demands could be implemented by a distributor who receives his goods from China because so far we have mainly had direct contact with manufacturers in Europe. After we received the serious deliveries, the quality and all delivery reliability was good and could be confirmed, and this was the starting point for our business in future.
What key benefits do you see from working with us?
Yeah, I think NCAB has a very authentic company philosophy, and this is lived by every employee we had contact so far. And there is a reliability that complex and time-critical projects are taken very seriously by the NCAB team and are handled with a great care. And we have proactive communication through the newsletter via Benjamin Klingenberg and also through the complete NCAB team. And we have an exchange at an eye level and not the sales pressure. We don't feel the sales pressure from NCAB, yeah.
Yeah, nice feedback to the team in Germany. And this is one example of many, how a customer experiences what we are doing or the team is doing on a daily basis. And as you recognize also here, it took quite a time until business starts. But when you're in, you're in. It's a million-dollar customer for us now, an A+ customer, which we have a long future with. And also here, we are working on different projects. They are moving to Thailand, for example, with their production. Discussion was also ongoing here about relocation. We are also preparing supply chains for them, so there are many different areas where we are cooperating with such customers. So far about organic growth, let's talk a little bit about acquisitions.
Before I've explained a little bit about organic and what does it mean for the people, and that we need to train people. If you do an acquisition, you suddenly meet a bunch of people that have not chosen to work with you, but they have been forced by the acquisition, and this is a special situation in the life of every single person, which NCAB gives us a lot of freedom to talk to everybody of those acquired employees, talk about opportunities for them in our group, and keep them engaged and keep them working with us. Also, this brings us to the point that NCAB has a name in the market, and it's a very positive one, because targets for future acquisitions are meanwhile approaching us, so sometimes we don't even need to search for them.
Acquired companies have been working in a very different way in the past. The so-mentioned company, Flatfield, before. The customers have been happy, yeah? And also, we from the outside, we recognize Flatfield is a company with a high quality standard, high reputation on the market, and the customers told us the same. After one year, when we talk to the customer again, and we ask them: "How does it feel now?" And I'm doing this on my own, frequently, because I believe this is important also to get attention from the management into those customers.
Their feedback, "Yes, we have been happy with Flatfield, because we didn't know how good it can be." And now they're experiencing a way better quality performance, delivery performance, and engineering support from NCAB, and this makes them stay with us even after an acquisition, where you might always have a risk that customers or employees fluctuate, but they don't. Surprising or not surprising, very often when we do acquisitions, we have an overlap of customers that we have in common of roughly 10%, sometimes more, sometimes less. It again shows us the market is huge, and it again shows us that different business models have different targets.
But also, if you're in, you're in, because there have been customers that we have tried to approach by NCAB, but they always said: "No, we are happy." And suddenly we buy a company, and they are with us, and they recognize, "Okay, it can be so much better with NCAB." So super interesting times to do these kind of acquisitions. And of course, we see scaling opportunities. We have also seen this, Anders, you said it, before, we had a gross drop in gross margin due to an acquisition. Of course, if we consolidate this into our numbers and they have a lower gross margin, this is what happens. But we see a lot of opportunities in every acquisition with our scaling opportunities that we have in NCAB, our supply chains and so on.
By working carefully with these acquisition targets, we can lift them, and this is also a very nice opportunity for us. Now, what kind of characteristics do we have? I would call it the golden age of acquisitions for us, in Europe. Many of the companies have been founded in the end of 1990 and 2000 by people that have been in the age of 30 or 40. Most of them will retire quite soon, but they don't have a succession. So there are companies on a daily or weekly or monthly basis that are going to look for a succession, and that said, we have a market name already, which helps us to proceed here. The main target is about EUR 10 million, sometimes a little bit smaller, sometimes bigger.
Of course, we also have strategic approaches to have supplies, to have different markets for supply chain. Of course, it's always a good alternative to a greenfield. As I mentioned before, to grow organically in a market, it takes you sometimes one or two years. Sometimes it's better by an acquisition to start up in a market. So far about organic growth and acquisitions, what is the long-term situation in Europe? We will see a loss and a drain of know-how in printed circuit board engineering know-how. In the last 20 years, a lot of printed circuit board factories in Europe have been closing due to the cost pressure, due to regulations, due to other topics. Several of them found their niche, and I believe the trend will slow down.
It will still go on, but still, the PCB know-how of electronic engineers is decreasing. And this is where we are focusing with our academy actions, with our training sessions, with our employees, and try to work on a know-how dominance, this is how I would call it, in Europe, because the PCB production is and will be for quite a long time in Asia, and this is at the moment where the know-how is, but there's also the gap of time zone, language, and so on. This is why we need to be on site, and this is why we need to have the know-how here, and this is what we are working on long term. There was a question coming up about AI. I'm working with printed circuit boards since a while.
I've been laying them out on my own when I was a trainee, and still 20 years, 23 years later, the same software is being used. It is the same software being used in PCB production. There are approaches of AI software solutions coming up in the market every now and then, but we did not see one that was so successful that it could be a game changer for us so far. Every PCB, again, is tailor-made, so many processes involved, you need to have the skilled people to make a difference, and this is what we do.
Thank you.
Thank you, Benjamin. I think this is very exciting, and I think many would ask what I'm thinking of. So this expansion to Eastern Europe. When will that be, and how will you do that, and where?
We are present in Eastern Europe. This is what you've seen already. So we are present in Poland with a local division. We are present in North Macedonia, so we are approaching, again, the two strategies. One is that our MD, Slobodan, from North Macedonia, is now approaching different countries. He's working actively in Serbia. He's working actively in Bulgaria. He's going to shows and other topics to present NCAB, and he's winning new customers already. And the other, of course, is to look actively for acquisitions.
Any questions? Yes.
Hi. Thank you. Do you see any difference in willingness to pay across the markets, if you go into, for example, Bulgaria or Serbia, as compared to Germany, for example?
Yes. For sure, every market is different. Every market has its specialties, different mentalities of people. I would say even though Switzerland speaks German in some parts, I'm a German. If I would go there, I would have a tough time to sell. People buy from people, and that's the same in the printed circuit board, so you need to be local. You need to speak the language. You need to be on site, explain what is the challenge in the PCB. This gives you the ability to improve the product of the customer, and if you are not on site, if you're trying to do this remote, if you're trying to do this by an online shop, I don't believe this is successful.
I tried it once, in my career with an online shop, to provide an online shop to the purchasers in a big organization. It didn't succeed because it was a shift of responsibility. Suddenly, the purchaser needed to type in tailor-made specifications, so if they do a typo, they are wrong. If they send the data to us, we take full responsibility. We take care for their product. So we need to be on site, and we need to speak their language and be close to the customer.
So, can you then say that pricing is kind of uniform across the markets?
No. Also, this is surely not the case. Again, countries are different. You have countries where you have barely no local production, and you have, for example, also countries that have a trading history of their past, that are used to trade and to work with foreign countries like Hong Kong, China, or other countries, where you see the trend to buy direct a little bit more often than in other countries. So definitely you need to evaluate the pricing level on different markets, and it's always also depending on the kind of customer that you approach.
So this is what I'm always telling my sales staff: "You need to find the right customers. If you approach the wrong customers, you will not be successful." NCAB is a Ferrari, and if you go with a Ferrari on the field to go farming, it will not work. Bring it to a racetrack, and there it will work.
So more questions? Yeah, over there.
Yes, I'm just curious on your hit ratio on M&A. I mean, how many companies do you analyze or visit before you do a purchase?
We have always an active acquisition funnel. I cannot tell you about the global hit rate, but I feel confident that we are able to convince targets if we talk to them.
I was more referring, when do you say no? Not when you don't say yes. I mean, what-- How many companies are just not investable or they don't exist, the non-investable companies?
We, of course, do our sorting. Some customers or companies that we approach as a target, sometimes you get published numbers that are not always that reliable or show you the real picture behind. So when we dig a little bit deeper by our consultants and our M&A team, we recognize that they are maybe smaller than they are originally supposed to be, and then we do an exit because it's not worth the effort. So there are different criteria that we get for the acquisitions that we need to follow, and I would say we are comparably successful with acquisitions.
Okay. So thank you, Benjamin.
You're welcome.
Very interesting. So we are moving on in our schedule, and next are Anna Lothsson and Chris Nuttall. Very welcome. Sourcing and China factory management sustainability.
Yes. Yes, correct.
You are both quite long time with NCAB, right? Anna, when you started?
2005. After four years at Ericsson, I had the opportunity to join NCAB, working first with the strategic sourcing, supply, and also together with Chris, come along and R&D in China, built up factory management. Then, yeah, couple of years back or many years back, focusing on sustainability.
Chris, you are COO today?
Yes.
You've had many other positions in NCAB, too?
Correct. When I started in 2009, I was responsible for operations and quality in our U.K. office, and then moved to France and looked after global quality for the group. Still living in France, but now responsible as the COO. As Anna said, before that, in 2009, I was working for a competitor. A little bit like Benjamin, this is the only industry that I've been in. A PCB champion at heart.
PCB nerds.
Oh, thank you, Gunilla. Thank you.
Very welcome. Start off, please.
Okay. Well, I'm gonna talk about factory management and our sourcing activities. You've heard a little bit from Benjamin already about how that makes a difference. I'm going to dig a little bit deeper into this. Now, the challenge that anybody has when sourcing a source for any of their products is finding a producer that can meet their needs consistently and offer a reliable product. Now, to find a PCB factory, it's really not that difficult. There are 2,700 factories globally. But the challenge is finding a good one that can meet our aspirations and expectations for quality, reliability, and delivery. So that means that when we select a source to bring on board as an approved factory for NCAB, we have to be absolutely sure that they can meet the demands of us, but also our customers.
You saw on the slide from Peter, aerospace, medical, automotive, these are some high reliability areas, so we have got to get it right. So how do we rise to that challenge? At the heart of it is our factory management team. You recognize this text comes from our mission statement. I add a little bit more, and it tells you who are our factory management team. Now, they are the specialists, and they are responsible for ensuring that our supply chain continues to have the ability to meet the needs of the market and the customers. Equally, they support all of our local companies, as Benjamin's outlined, in delivering upon those promises and supplying into those demanding customers. Is this something that's easy to do? Absolutely not. But the level of depth that we go into, I think makes factory management one of NCAB's biggest USPs.
So here are some comments from the customers and also some of our sales team. Now, you'll be glad to know I'm not going to go through all of these, but I'm gonna pick a couple out, and I'm gonna start at the very end. One where we have dedicated people. With our purchasing power, because we're consolidating our spend in a number of factories, even though we have over 120 factory management, we actually train and educate factory staff. So these are not salaried by NCAB. These are factory staff that are 100% focused on our products and our customers' orders, and we train them in terms of quality, inspection, engineering, and also how they actually produce the board, so they are actually focused on us. I'm gonna go right to the beginning as well, strong relationships.
Now, this is something that's quite often underrated, but having deep relationships within our factories, from quality managers to the very top, the presidents, the owners, that means that when we need it, we get absolute priority and all the support we need. There are many instances where our customers, we have to pull rabbits out of hats for them. Having those strong relationships enables us to do that. And the final one I'm going to mention is local language. That, for us, I heard Benjamin use the word game changer. This is a game changer for us to be able to do that. Whether it's doing the audits in the factories, working on improvement plans, or even building those strong relationships, that is something many of our customers cannot do if they're trying to go direct. So we're working with the factories in their local languages.
But having all that isn't enough. We've got to be on site. What you can see here, the blue dots are where we have our factories, the yellow are where we have factory management teams. So we can see here, in Asia, we are on site constantly in our factories, and if we're not on site, we can have rapid action teams on site with a matter of hours, should we need to. That's something that's really hard to do if you're on average 9,000 km away. You simply cannot do that. The other element is that where we're based in our factory management teams, we're close to the actual where all the factories are. So this means our factory management teams are recruited from within the industry. We bring on board the expertise on how to build a good circuit board.
We've got designers and engineers that have done that in the factory, so they know what it takes to ensure that we maintain that high standards that we shoot for. And that is something that I think if we talk about the acquisitions, with all this additional support and service that we offer, that translates directly to an improved service offering for our new customers that come on board. We help to augment the service and the support that they can give. Now, what's the volumes that we have? What are we dealing with? You can see here we've got 31 main factories across the globe, over 3,100 customers, and in terms of numbers, some quite high numbers, but the real high one is the 360 million circuit boards that we supplied last year, that we're responsible for. Quite a high number.
So how are we doing? You've got four KPIs. I'm just going to take a moment or two to explain what they are and why we think these are market-leading numbers. The first one over on the left, that's our quality performance, but on an order level. So the amount of orders we ship, what is the quality performance? And in this case, if we have an order for 5,000 boards, as you have on the table. Well, not 5,000 on the table, but you can see the pieces. If only one of them is defective, that is 0% quality. So that means that 99.6% of our orders, percentage of our orders, are absolutely fault-free.
And the industry average, I would say, is somewhere 95%-99% when we look at our colleagues that have come from competitors, and we look at the factory base in general. The second number is defective parts per million. So out of every million circuits that we submit or supply, how many can we expect to see defective? And in this measure, the lower the number, the better. And just to translate that, in terms of from parts per million to percentage, that equates to 0.06%. So on a piece level, we're running at 99.94% quality. Given that we make 21,000 new parts per year, we make prototypes, and we also make serial production, that is a, that's a number that we're happy with.
We always want the target to go down, but where we are, we're below the existing targets. But we also have automotive customers, where our agreements are single-digit PPM, and we are hitting those targets. The third one, well, that's delivery performance, and again, if a customer wants 100 boards to ship on Friday, if we ship 99 on Friday, that's not on time, that's late. So this is full quantity on time. The final one, I think, is perhaps the most important: What do our customers perceive our performance to be? This is our whole customer service, and this looks at questions in multiple areas on technical support, order management, service. The industry standard is high 70s to low 80s, so again, we're above the standard. So we're very happy with these numbers.
However, I'm always under pressure from Peter for improving these year on year. How do we do this? We've got nine steps that we look at, and it starts from the very beginning, from sourcing to managing and maintaining the factories. Sometimes things do go wrong. We have to deal with that in a professional way. I'm gonna talk a little bit about sourcing in the next slide, but one point I do want to be clear about: We're not looking for new sources year on year. Where possible, we're looking to develop long-lasting, strong relationships with our factories, and we actually work to develop them. I will flag a couple here. We've already spoken about the dedicated teams in the factories. That's point number six.
Point number three is about having our quality teams on-site in the factory, looking at product, training, educating, monthly meetings, process audits. Point number four is about delivery, and we've got a very proactive approach. Every day, our factories update us on where our orders are in production. So rather than trying to act on issues when we know orders are going to be late, we will proactively push orders. We look at what is at risk, and that's how we achieve our delivery performance that I referenced. Now, in terms of sourcing, I don't know if you can see, but we split it into three distinct areas here. Now, Stage 1 is our sourcing team's day job, and that is, even if we don't have a specific program, they're looking at these 2,700 factories, and they are having a look.
They're categorizing it by technology, geography, the scope of approvals that they have, and they're looking to understand, out of this big, long list, what is a short list? What are potential NCAB class factories? Stage two starts when we have a dedicated or defined, I should say, sourcing needs, a specification, if you will. Stage one is to look at that specification, compare that against our existing factories within our AVL, and also have a look at the shortlist. And when we have a look-- When we understand then what are the potential candidates, that's when we're on-site, that's when we're assessing, that's when we're loading samples, evaluating them in the lab, and you'll see some of the processes we undertake in our laboratory during the break.
And then I'm gonna come back to the actual audits that we undertake, but the third part is a controlled ramp-up. Even with all the work we do in sourcing, nothing tests a factory like being under load conditions. So what we do, we have a limited number of orders that we can supply, that we can load at that factories, because we know at some point, something will go wrong, they will fail. So we encourage them in this period to fail faster, so we can work and get them back up to speed. But coming back to the audits, we do three types. The first one is quality or production audits. The second one is engineering, and that's where they take the data that we get from our customer and convert to manufacturing files. That is the instruction on how they're going to manufacture.
The third part, which is-- Well, Anna, I'll let you explain that.
Thank you. Third part is sustainability audits. It's a high focus on this when it comes to secure human rights, health and safety in production, environmental climate impact. Here we are doing audits as well with our partners, just as part of the sourcing approval process, and also as a development program going forward. I think many of us have said today that strong relationships makes a difference, and if we don't have it and don't work long term, then we'll never make a change. So the way of conducting audits is nothing special. It's a normal audit flow, so to say. You have an opening meeting, but there, of course, you need to have the one that takes the decision in the factory, the owner or the management team, so there will be change if we have findings.
We are reviewing loads of documents. We have a local team in China, which is, of course, great. I have also been there auditing, but not being able to read Chinese or interview the workers, local team is essential. And also, during the pandemic, when everything was closed down, this work could continue over there. So it's a huge benefit, and also our customers see this also, that we secure this on site for them. You might have heard new reporting requirements are coming on due diligence in supply chain. This is where we can show the customers that we are working proactive on this, and that we have findings, we find things, and we improve them.
I don't know how many of you have been to a PCB factory or manufacturing, but walking around there, that's where the real things happen. So also being able, with our own NCAB eyes, to tell what reality looks like, that's also a very good, and also a credible point when we talk to customers. And not being afraid to be transparent, that's actually key. This is how it looks like in the electronics industry. We interview employees, and also we make, of course, an audit report afterwards on the findings. We have a closing meeting, of course, what they have done well, but also what needs to be improved. And then, of course, we would like to see the improvements. And then we go back, and we do a follow-up audit to make sure that they have improved on site.
So our team in China, three people at a time, they go to the audit, they stay there for at least two days, and they follow this flow. We look through the management system, secure the human rights, health and safety, go through working instruction, time sheets, payrolls. And we are not only looking at the production site itself. Many workers live on site in dormitories. So what are their living conditions? Do they share rooms? Do they have heating? Do they have privacy? They also have most of their meals in the canteen, and I think we learned during the pandemic that we need to be prepared to not spread any disease. So in the canteen, there are also certain rules. We have findings, of course. Doing an audit without findings, I don't think that's a real audit.
And we can only do this by being on site. A few things that we have improved over the years. Firefighting equipments that had not been correct, that has to be fixed. Emergency exit signs, evacuation drills. Yes, usually they have had it for the day shift, but they forgot about the night shift. Also, when it comes to climate, environmental impact, wastewater treatments, huge amount of water is used and loads of chemicals. So how do they treat the water before it lets back into the pipes? Waste handling and recycling, employee insurances. This is actually, we have had a few sourcing products stopped because they didn't have insurances in place for all the workers.
So that's a stopper, even though we have commercials, technical quality, everything is, looks great, but they have to fix this before we going ahead to approve them. Young workers' rights, should not work night shift. There we will also have findings, wage and overtime calculation that has not been in order, and so on. But we are very proud of what we found, and also the factories have also seen us as helping them to develop and also to continue to be transparent and show the real world also to the customer, and also what we do to improve it. So it's an important part of our approval process of our factories.
Thank you. Well, I think we're very proud that this is an integral part of our sourcing process, and as Anna said, we have actually stopped our sourcing activities until these have been corrected. Even though we have a need, but if we're not ready and they're not meeting our demands, we won't move forward. But then in terms of approving a factory, this graphic, as you can see, you've got the technology on the column on the left, then we have different volumes, from prototypes to serial production. Factories tell us they can do almost anything. In this case, they can do everything apart from the flexible technology. But with our team that have come from the industry, we're able to judge where will the factories excel.
If I use the analogy about my 100 boards coming on Friday, approving them in the green, that's where I'm gonna get my 100 boards on Friday. Not 99, not 96, but I will get a 100. If we look at it on a product level, what this looks like, here you can see the trace and space, effectively the circuitry and also the smallest hole. Now, these are quite complex numbers. As the technology increases with circuit boards, these features get smaller and smaller and smaller, and we're at 63 microns here. To put that into perspective, human hair is somewhere between 75 and 100, so these are really complex products. Factories tell us they can do this, but our team, when we're auditing, we have a look, what is their yields? What is their quality performance? What complaints do they see?
How many orders of this technology are they building? Only if we're happy with that will we approve that technology. What we approve, this goes into our quoting software. This goes into our AVL, which means we can only place orders here, not over there, because on the left, that's where I get 95 boards on the Friday. Here, I get 100. You'll see that-- I think you'll have some time with Nimrod later today. You'll have a look at our quoting process. You'll be able to see this in place. Now, I've spoken a lot about the what and the how, what we do. This is a little bit on the why. What are the benefits? We've already touched on some parts earlier, but here, all the work that we've done gives us the broadest and deepest offering in terms of having the right sources.
In terms of technology and volume, we can meet probably about 90%, 99%, I should say, of our customers' demands. The other side is that having this multi-sourcing model means that we can ensure that if we have a problem with one of these factories, for whatever reason, we've got at least two more factories that can fill in and meet those demands. The other side, this ensures that commercially, we have a little bit of healthy competition as well. Now, I heard a question earlier about China and other geographical countries. This is a little bit on where we are in our sourcing solutions. Excuse me. We've got two pie charts here. The one on the right is where we were at the IPO.
The one on the left is where we were at the end of our financial year last year, and here we can see 93% in China. Since then, we have almost reduced our dependency on China by almost 10%. But what is interesting to know is that even with the other supply chains available for our customers, 85% of our customers are very happy with the service and the reliability, and the security of supply that we get from our China factories. So I'm quite proud that even though we're offering these sources, at the moment, our customers are still selecting China sources. Now, we have made some recent additions to our AVL. As you can see, most of these ones in Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, they're focused on a higher technology, HDI, rigid-flex, some complex things.
But also we've got two in Singapore and South Korea to support our aerospace and defense business. We've also had a recent project where we're bringing on board in Thailand and Malaysia, and we're getting some of these factories across the line, some we've already landed. But what's interesting to know is that already on this list, we've got one of our existing China factories has broken ground in a construction in Thailand. There are another five factories that we know, that we're working with, that will do the same. So by 2025, we will have in total, six. Interestingly enough, the laminate manufacturers, so the companies that produce the raw materials, they are also investing, and there will be, I think, five sites in Thailand as well. So we will have a very vertically integrated supply chain there.
So I think this is where I think we'll see some, some growth. But on that note, I will pass to you.
Thank you. So continue with sustainability then. The electronic industry has a big challenge when it comes to become sustainable, and we are looking into, of course, where are the risks and where do we see where we need to mitigate them, but also we see a lot of opportunities also to drive this positive change. And coming back to that, it's not only us working alone on this. We need to have this strong relationship and strong collaboration with our customers and also with the suppliers that we choose to work with. And we believe this, as coming back to this, that being transparent and really show what challenges there are and what we have to do together, it has becoming a very big USP for us as well.
Customer really appreciate this, that we are open, that we can provide them with information, and also solutions that we can work together on. And as you have heard here, during the presentation, sustainability or the mindset is not new to us. We started with our first trial on the sustainability audits in 2011, and we have developed it since then, and now it's becoming part of our development program for the factories. We launched and implemented a sustainability strategy in 2014, and we started also to report. The first year, everyone was asking: What should we report? What can we say? What are we doing?
But actually, looking at sustainability, you already do a lot if you work with quality and you work with design for manufacturing and optimizing your processes. And then, of course, over the years, it has developed to be more involved on human rights and health and safety and, of course, now the climate impact, as well. We updated our strategy last year, listening to investors, and to customers, and we interviewed also employees, and also we updated it a little bit. It's still focusing on the supply chain, our own operation, as well as, the customer side, what we can do there together. There's a stronger, how to say, wish or requirements on the climate side, but still also, of course, on the social accountability part.
So how to ensure then sustainability of the operations in the PCB factories? One part, as we mentioned, is to have it as a part of the sourcing process, but also as part of as our development program. The biggest impact and the highest risk is, of course, in China, and that's where we have our team as well. Two years ago, we also started to be more focused on renewable energy in the supply chain. We actually got this question from customers as well, especially the ones that are green themselves or would like to lead this change. "It's great. We know you can produce PCB that is not our question. How much renewable energy do you have in your supply chain?" Yeah, that's a great question when you have all your manufacturing outsourced.
So it's quite a job to get this information, but when we have the partners that we work with, we are happy to have the information from them as well. They also see it as a benefit for them to develop. But before the PCBs goes into production, we can actually already in the design phase minimize the risk of environmental impact and also to drive this positive change. Design for manufacturing, to support our customers already very, very early in the design stage to optimize their product to be reliable, but also to use maybe less material, and also then to optimize it to run smoothly through the production.
And then, as Chris mentioned, our factories are approved for different type of technologies and volumes. So then it's up to us, of course, to choose the right factory for the right product. And then continuously to work proactively in improving quality assurance over, and over, and over again, together with our factories. This picture is from one of our factories in China. It's the wastewater treatment area, part of it, and then you can imagine how much water that is used and need to be treated afterwards from all the chemicals that has been used. So, this is also something that we look into in the audits. So when we optimize the design and we work with the high-quality performance factories, then we will have less environmental and climate impact, because there will be less scrap, and we will use less water, electricity, chemicals, and resources going forward.
Talking about climate impact, greenhouse gas emission need to be cut by half by 2030. I think you all have heard about this. Two years ago, we started to map our climate impact using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to map it through the Scope 1, 2, and 3. No surprise, our biggest impact is in Scope 3, the supply chain, 99.4%. So of course, we have our offices, we have our company cars, and so on, but that is not the biggest impact. So our way going forward now is that until 2030, we should be fossil-free on our Scope 1 and 2. That means the energy we're using in our facilities worldwide, as well as the emissions from the company cars.
And then we have the big challenge together with the manufacturing and the supply logistics supplier, and that is, of course, the Scope 3. And here, we have to work really tight with them on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and also to start not maybe to transport so much by air than we do today, instead going to the sea transportation. Talking about value add, here we also add value to our customers. Last years, we have been able to actually tell the customers what their footprint is, and this is, of course, a lot of questions coming on this because they have to report on it, and also we would like to work together to reduce it.
So this is just an example what we can bring to the table at the customer meeting, what their climate impact is, so greenhouse gas emissions, how much is with transportation, how much is with manufacturing, and where do we need to focus. And also in this example, you see everything goes by air here, but if it goes by boat instead, the emission will reduce dramatically. The same also on the production site. Now, when we have data, how much renewable energy our manufacturing partners have, then we can also, hopefully in the future, more direct the products to go into the more that have a higher portion of renewable energy and being more energy efficient. And I think the discussions we have had here now with the customers has been really, really successful.
It also helps them on their journey and for us also to add more value to the customer. Journey continues. Continue the collaboration, of course, with our suppliers, but also with the customers. It's not only about climate impact, it's also about what materials are out there. PCB material laminate today, they are actually not so environmentally friendly. But we have found and are looking into a couple of R&D projects when it comes to laminates, so hopefully that we will be able to be part of this change as well going forward. Transparency, we are reporting annually, sustainability report. We are also provide data to the Nasdaq ESG portal, and also two years back to CDP, Climate Disclosure Project portal.
I think maybe some of you also can get the data from there. Also this year, we have answered a major, or a massive, I should say, questionnaire by EcoVadis, which is a company that provides service to assess on sustainability, and you get a rating. This is something that we are now waiting for to see where we are. We usually say that you can work with sustainability, of course, but or either you choose to work in a sustainable way. I think we, over the years, have been able to integrate it into the business model that we have, both when adding value to the customer and also to secure our supply chain.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Anna and Chris. So, it's interesting to hear that sustainability is now an USP and something that customers appreciate, but where are your competitors in this degree?
I would say they are behind.
Far behind or just behind or--
Yeah, I think so, from what we hear from customers. They are so happy what we can provide to them when it comes to data, but also transparency on how it looks like in factories when it comes to health, safety, human rights, I would say. And on the climate impact that we actually have focused not only on our Scope 1 and 2, which is minor, but also on the Scope 3.
And Chris, these charts you showed, these pie charts on production in China, what, how will this evolve in the next couple of years?
I think that that's wholly dependent upon our customers. We've already got options outside, but we still have our customers that are placing orders in China. I think we've got two types of customers. We've got those that investigate outside of China, just to tick the box to say that they've done it, because there is a cost delta. There is a cost delta. But equally, we have customers that are moving outside because they've got an activity to mitigate their own supply chain risks, much in the same way we have. So I think the shift is coming. I think we will continue to see outside of China grow, and the sources that we have complementing already the secure supply chain, that will continue. But as for the timing, I don't know the volumes. That is wholly customer dependent.
All we can do is present or continue to present reliable supply chains.
These new factories that you have are sourcing.
Yes.
Do they have the same quality and price as, as your existing factories?
Same quality. Technical levels, yes, that's part of them getting on board into this stage. The latter end of the process, we visited 10 factories in Thailand and Malaysia. We've ended up with three because of those very reasons. There is a price difference because of, obviously, the costs of manufacturing there. But I think as the material perhaps changes, and as I mentioned, we've got material providers moving there that may reduce some of the cost, but there is a delta.
So, questions? Claus?
Yeah. I have a follow-up question on the pricing side.
Yes.
Could you maybe elaborate a bit on the gross margins as well? I mean, can you actually defend your gross margins when you move over to some of these factories in certain, sort of Thailand and so forth?
We have to. I think that's the market conditions, and I think if we were selling on price, then we would struggle, but we're not. We're selling a service and the actual reliability that our customers get, that I think will keep our margins secure.
Maybe considering as well, because I guess you have quite high volumes as well in China, right? In some of those markets.
Some of those, yes.
Yeah.
Some of those.
Do you have much higher gross margins than in that case, or a markup in that case than your competitors do in those markets as well, or or?
In terms of the specifics, I'm not 100% sure, but I think obviously if we're offering higher volume, that's why our model is high mix, low volume. If we are focused purely on high volume, then we don't offer the same value. Many of our customers can go direct. So our focus is on the medium to the high mix. That is where we really add the value.
Sure.
Hopefully, that answers your question.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you.
One more question behind you, Jonathan.
Right here. Thank you. Could you just speak to the relationship as you've developed the factories? So how long the relationship continues on with the factories, like, the average length, exclusivity, things like that?
We're working with factories now that were here before I was here, and that's 13 years. Our aim is to have these long-standing relationships. The challenge is, as I mentioned, finding good factories, and that includes healthy factories that can continue to invest in the future. Some of our factories now that make complex product, when we first started with them, they were making standard product. We've worked with them, we've helped them to grow as they've helped us to grow. It's almost like a reciprocal relationship. I don't know if that answers the question?
Yeah, just trying to get a sense of, does it ever come a point where they're working with other customers, they're working with other people, 'cause they hit the, kind of like an exit velocity?
There will be a number of our factories work with a number of our competitors. But the way in which they work with us, well, we offer better service, we offer better quality. We've had instances where from the same source, we've had boards going in for qualification, and one of our competitors has used a similar source. We win the order because of how our boards appear. The specification that we have, we have a higher specification that our factories must achieve, so that gives better reliability through how the board is constructed and also with the reporting that we get. As we mentioned, when we're shooting in the areas of high reliability, we want to make sure that what comes out of the factory is absolutely built to spec. So one of the other slides I had were all the values. We've actually got some of the market-leading first article inspection reports.
But not just first article, every batch is analyzed to make sure it complies. So when we add these things together, the offer from NCAB outweighs what our competitors can offer from the same source.
Thanks.
One more question here in the front.
How big part in average are you buying from the factories?
Sorry, I don't quite--
How big a part?
How big part? How, how much in volume or in money—in average?
Of their spend or our spend is with them?
Of what they are selling.
Well, put it this way: I think in our main factories, we're probably within the top five or maybe one or two of them within the top seven. So our aim is that's why we try and consolidate. 'Cause part of the challenge that we have when, as you heard, Benjamin is working on integrations, we also inherit a lot of factories. So part of the activities that we do is where we can consolidate our spend so that we retain that prioritization within the factory base. If we dilute too much, we're at risk of becoming one of the crowd.
A question here in the front.
Just one question on how often you lose customers, that go direct to the factories?
Oh, I would probably have to defer that to Benjamin, but I do know that we have seen customers that have gone to test the water elsewhere, and then they come back because the grass is not always greener. But Benjamin, is there anything you would like to add onto that?
Still a little bit technical.
Check that.
Don't have my mic anymore. So this happens every now and then, we have to say. We are not the only one consolidating the market, so there's also consolidation going on in our customers. So if a big group buys a smaller company, very often you see purchasing strategies being implemented, and this make them move a part of their business directly to China. But on the other side, we also see it the opposite way, that in every different countries on companies they have make bad experience, and this is exactly what Chris just said. If you buy a PCB from NCAB, from company A in China, it's not the same. We have our own team, our own specification, our own reserved machines on site, which makes the difference, and we see this in sales every now and then.
Of course, we need to be aware that there might be movement, and there, you need to be active in sales to always bring new targets into the sales funnel, new customers, so you can fill up and grow.
I have a question from the web here, and that's about India. Are there no factories in India to source from?
There, there's quite a lot. We looked at India, but we had some concerns. Two concerns actually stand out that I'll mention just now. When we started reaching out to a lot of the factories, a number of them were interested in our spending, but they also wanted us to invest, so have some level of shared ownership. The other element we have is, while India, I think, has grown on a technical level, the concerns that we had about the environmental and the sustainability demands, those elements of the supply chain, we elected to focus in, as we see, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.
You think--
But for the future, we've not really--
India will come in there and-
Possibly, but I think at the moment, we're seeing such a shift of the manufacturing in terms of the raw materials and the investments. I think that's where we will continue to focus. But again, part of stage one of our sourcing activity is to keep looking at these geographies. Much in the same way, whilst most of our manufacturing is in the Pearl River Delta, Southern China, we're also looking at where we're growing in other provinces within China as well. So we will continue to look in India and other regions.
More questions?
I know Christian said, "Ask me a lot of questions." I think we've had quite a few so far, but any more, I'm happy to answer.
So otherwise, we'll have a break, a coffee break, and there is coffee being served by the entrance, and there's also two different activities where you can have a look, and in the room behind us is the quoting process, the system, Nimrod, that Chris mentioned before. On the other side is the lab, where Kenneth will show you how to check the quality of the PCBs. So, we said half an hour, so I think 3:30 P.M. will be perfect.
But just one thing to add, if I may, Gunilla. I n the laboratory, can we keep any food or drink out of the laboratory?
Right.
That's the only requirement we have.
So coffee first or last? Yeah. Okay, welcome.
Thank you.
So welcome back. I hope you had a nice coffee, and for you in the room, that you had some interesting discoveries, regarding our PCBs and why there are so many nerds about PCBs here. So now we have a very exciting session. I hope you will find it, M&As, and it's Anders Forsén and Hassan Elsayed .
Thank you.
Thank you.
Anders, you now know, if you didn't before, but Hassan, who are you, and how long have you been with NCAB?
So I joined NCAB in February 2021. Before that, I started my career at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I worked there for almost 10 years as an auditor, then I transferred to their corporate finance. Before joining NCAB, I worked at AP2, which is a Swedish national pension fund, as an investment analyst.
Start off.
Okay, good.
The floor is yours.
It's great to have Hassan here, of course, that can help us with the acquisitions. We also have to mention that we have one resource in U.S., Kelly Davidson, who is supporting us with scouting for companies and for acquisitions. So we have an important team. As you know, M&A has been an important part of our growth story since the IPO, and it will continue to be important going forward. The reason is, of course, that it gives us quicker access to new customers. As Benjamin told you before, it can take one-three years before we see the volume in a new customer. So therefore, acquisitions is a very good way to get new customers we can grow with organically. It also gives us access to good employees.
I mean, the market is tricky right now. It's good to find good PCB knowledge. So by acquisitions, we also get hold of a lot of good new people and a number of new colleagues, both in group management and the other areas, has come through acquisitions. So I think it's a good way to see how we can take care of the people in the acquired companies. So looking at over time, next couple of years, we will say that we will have growth about 10% coming from acquisitions. Of course, it could vary from year to year, depending on the targets we find and so on. But over time, it should be about 10% growth from acquisitions.
That is what we said, that the financial targets was about 20% growth from 2021, and about 50% of that should come from acquisitions and 50% organic. And it's also important to note that we really do the acquisitions to secure that we can have organic growth from the new companies. So the plan is not just to make an acquisition and let it stay. The target is to see that it can grow, and we will come back to some results of that in the presentation. And just I mean, we have been rather active on the M&A market since the IPO, where I think we did three or four acquisitions before the IPO, and now we made another 13 acquisitions since after the IPO.
You can also see we have acquired roughly SEK 2 billion in revenue, gave us about 28% in gross margin and 11% in the EBITDA margin. So overall, the acquired companies have had a little bit lower gross margin and lower profitability than NCAB on average. And then we have paid roughly SEK 1.5 billion for those companies, as we said before. So of course, one thing is to do the acquisition, that's part of the work, but the most important thing is what we do afterwards, because we would like to integrate these companies into become a really NCAB company. And to really get the synergies, we need to do the integration very properly. So, Hassan, how do we do the integration?
Thank you. So we at NCAB have three guiding principles that shape our integration approach. Our first objective is not to disturb the acquired a company's day-to-day operations. We understand the value of maintaining business continuity during the integration. This not only reassures customers and suppliers, but also ensures a stable environment for development and growth. Our second objective is cultural alignment and talent retention. We at NCAB try to focus on fostering a culture that embraces our shared values and principles, and by doing so, we can also hopefully enable to keep talent, talented people, but also facilitate a smoother collaboration between us and the acquired company. And of course, the third objective is the driving force behind all of the acquisitions.
That is the pursuit of value creation and fulfillment of synergy objectives, and Anders will soon talk about the most common synergies that we see related to our acquisitions. So who is responsible for the integration after an acquisition has been announced? As you all know, we have a decentralized business model, so the local management teams, they are the ones who are responsible for the integration. They decide the pace, they monitor progress against defined milestones, and guide through the processes. Our most recent acquisitions was in Germany and U.S., so the local management teams there, they have the experience, and they work quite independently during the integration.
But if we would do an acquisition in a country where the local management team does not have the same experience, then we at the group function level will be the ones responsible for the integration, while at the same time educating and supporting the local management team. And as you can see here displayed, we have examples of our main work stream leads and some of the activities. And during the first 100 days, we usually say we listen and learn. But there are some activities that we focus during that learning phase, and I would say marketing and sales and people and culture. Of course, the people are the most important when we do an acquisition, so we focus on the onboarding, so they learn about our way of working, our culture, and so on. And of course, the customer is really important.
We try to focus on meeting them quite early, so we can present them who we are and our unique selling points. Marketing also does make the company a part of us, so we can focus maybe on the office branding. While operations and IT, that takes a longer time, and during that phase, we try to learn and understand, are there some ways that they do better than us, so we can maybe copy? Of course, suppliers, it takes a really long time to understand, can we keep them or should we exclude them? It usually takes between 12-18 months before a company is fully integrated into our group.
Good, thank you. So looking into the synergies we normally find in acquisitions, and I would like to emphasize that we are not doing acquisitions to try to cut cost or save money on employees and so on. We believe very much that the acquisitions will be the next step in a bigger organic growth in this company. So we would like the companies to grow. And we can see that in almost all cases, little bit what Benjamin said before, that we get higher quality and better service. And when the customers realize that, it's easier for us to grow the revenue in these companies. So I think that has been proven as well, that we see that we can continue to grow.
We also normally have a broader factory portfolio, meaning that we can sell maybe more high tech than the smaller companies can do to their existing customers. So we can also sell different kind of products to the customers. That's one way of improving or growing the revenue. And then, of course, what Chris and Anna talked about, the factory management team, is no one else in the industry have the same kind of factory management team or presence in Asia as that we have. So of course, that also creates a lot of value. So if we add on a lot of sales resources or companies in Europe, North America, we can utilize the factory management team we have in Asia in a very good way. So that, that's also very supportive to secure the growth.
Then improved gross margin, and another important part, I mean, due to our size and buying power, we are able to source most cases better or cheaper than our competition. That means that we rather quickly can improve the gross margin. Sometimes we have the same factories, and then we can rather quickly adapt. If there are other factories, it will take a bit longer time, but maybe after one-two years, we see here clearly an improvement in gross margin. We also have stronger logistic solutions, and there we also can see that scale is important, so we can typically add on our logistic solution to acquired companies to make sure we do some savings on freight and maybe smarter solutions.
And of course, we can also see some scale advantages when we acquire companies, and that will be both in acquired companies and old NCAB, because as long as we grow, we can see some benefits in our old organization as well. And finally, last but not least, improved working capital. Also, due to our size, we have maybe between 90-120 days payment terms with the factories. The smaller companies we acquire are between 45 and maybe 60 days. So of course, that also gives that we can pay part of the purchase price by just adding on a better payment term, which is also, of course, important. And you can also see that many smaller family-owned businesses, they don't really care about if they have too much inventory or trade receivables and so on.
So there are also an area where we normally can, by being a little bit more proactive, reduce inventory, reduce stock level, and so on, to also improve the working capital. So there are many areas where we can see synergies, but important is that we can continue to grow the business. And then we try to set some numbers on the result from the acquisitions. As we said, it normally takes one to two, three years before we see the effect on the improvement. So we took a look on the eight acquisitions done 2019 to 2021. We acquired those companies, they had total revenue of SEK 1.4 billion.
Now, last 12 months per June, they were up to one point-- over SEK 1.6 billion . So we can see a 21% growth in these companies. But I think interestingly, is that we managed to improve the EBITDA gross margin with 4% unit over this period, and also the EBITDA margin is improved by a little bit more than 4%. So there are clearly synergies in our acquisitions. And on average, for these eight companies, we paid an EBITDA multiple of 6.6x. There were a number of big acquisitions with a bit higher EBITDA, so we were a little bit over our average. And if you take a look on the EBITDA level here, 2023, it's 3.9x. So I think we clearly have shown that we can make a huge value add or the value creation in our acquisitions.
And what we say, of course, this is also to make sure that we can continue to grow organically. So we talked that we had to work with our pipeline. So how does the future look, Hassan?
Yeah, so on the M&A pipeline, at the moment, we have approximately 50 targets on our shortlist, with an estimated revenue of SEK 3 billion. As you all know, previously, we have focused our acquisitions mainly in the U.S. and Europe. But as you can see here, we have also started to identify targets in our segment called East.
Okay, and then quickly, maybe you have heard this before, but the two recent acquisitions we made was in Germany and in the USA, closed in May. They are a little bit similar, both of them, because they, they're both working with quick turnarounds, and they complement our business in a good way, both in Germany and in U.S. They have the prototype business, and especially this DB in Germany, they did not do any volume at all. It was very much very short prototype series. So we believe that we can take care of the volume as well afterwards. So that would be an add-on on the revenue side. And together, these two companies will create roughly SEK 350 million in yearly revenue.
Just to give you some flavor of what does the sellers of the company, why do they sell and what do they think? Here is a few words from Saul Kennedy, who was selling Phase 3 to us.
Hi, Saul. Nice to meet you again. Can you please give us a short introduction to Phase 3 Technologies?
Phase 3 was co-founded by myself and my partner, 13 years ago in the Silicon Valley. I had had a previous run of 20 years in the PCB industry working for one factory. But I thought the wave of the future was having multiple factories that could basically assist and help customers with the diversity of technology, quantity, and lead times. And we've been very proud to be in this space, which I think is the future of the PCB industry.
So why then selling to NCAB?
The main reason we sold was we thought we'd hit a plateau. We built it from 0 to 17 employees, and we really thought to take it to the next level, which our customers were kind of nudging us to do. We thought we needed to team up with someone who had a lot of experience. We happened to run into the number one person in our space, NCAB. We thought was a very attractive partner to partner up and take us to the next level, and could offer us, things that we felt maybe we couldn't offer.
So what do you expect now from this joint company between NCAB and Phase 3?
Well, the biggest benefit so far, the NCAB way is the people are the most important part of the business, and NCAB has come in and made us part of the family, made us feel very safe. The expectations are now we've expanded our offerings through marketing, through human resources, through factory management teams, through all things that we didn't have or had very minimally. Now, the offering that NCAB comes as, in mass and scalability has really made us enthusiastic, really felt us that we are now number one in our space. And aside from investing in our culture, the transition has been seamless, and they've been very respectful of what our team's success has done. And now I think all they can do is enhance that and help it grow further, as we expand NCAB.
A few words from Saul Kennedy in Silicon Valley, and I think. I mean, so far, we are four months into the integration. We have learned each other, we have met a lot, and our American team has been there visiting them and so on. And I think that we see a lot of synergies starting to come, and starting to develop. So it is a very good way. And also he mentioned that all the customers so far is very, very happy with the transition. There were, of course, some question marks in the beginning, but I think every customer, all customers are very satisfied and see that this will as be a benefit for them. So this is very much how we can see many of our transactions go. So by that, we'll lead the table for some questions.
So thank you. What is new? I think in what you've shown is the calculation of the eight acquisitions and the PE after synergies or growth, but also that you are planning to start acquiring in Asia. Before this, you only mentioned U.S. and Europe. So where are you looking? What kind of companies, and when will we see this?
So, our main focus right now is Southeast Asia, for example, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore. If you look at the target size, it's between SEK 50 million - SEK 100 million . And when the first acquisition will come, we can't say, but it's a new market, new area, but we're hopeful, of course. But it takes time.
Exciting. So, questions?
Thank you. So growing by 10% per year from acquisitions, as you get bigger, would you rather buy more companies or bigger companies?
I would say that we need to buy more companies. I mean, the most companies that are out in the market are in the size of EUR 10 million -EUR 20 million , or SEK 100 million -SEK 200 million . So I think we need to increase the speed year by year. We also have gotten more experience in the integration teams, and we have now experienced people both in North America and in Europe to make the integration. So probably we need to speed up the number of acquisitions, but-- And sometimes you can also say that a smaller acquisition might be easier to integrate than the bigger one. So it would necessarily not mean more work in the integration phase.
How often do you see these new, new targets emerging? I mean, do you already have a good view of the lay of the land, kind of, or do you see new players coming in?
Competing with us, or?
No, targets.
New targets.
Yeah, I think, yes, we just went through this shortlist of companies, and before we had said it was about 43, 44. Now, you mentioned 51 on the list. So we have seen that we have added on more. And of course, we are constantly trying to scout the market for companies. And out of this long list of 200 companies, there might be more of those who seems to fit on the shortlist when we know more about them, so.
Okay, thank you.
So I have one question here from the web, mentioning 51 target companies on the shortlist. What is actually-- What does-- What stage are the discussions in order to be on the shortlist? What, what is the-
Criteria are?
Criteria.
Of course, PCB trading company, no production or assembly. If we have the financial information, we look at above at least SEK 50 million, and of course, in the markets where we think it's interesting for us. But, it's difficult. We want, we don't want to exclude an early stage because many of the websites are not updated. So you think it's a PCB manufacturing, but they don't have it. So you have to make a further analysis and contact them sometimes, and I think META was one of them. We thought it was. They had production, but they did not, so.
But we are not in discussion with 51 companies.
No, no, no.
No.
So I mean, we are in discussion with a number of companies, but not 51. The 51 is the one that we have through our investigation seen should fit us. And then, then also, I think you have to remember, I mean, these are privately owned companies. From the first initial contact, it might take six months, or it might take six years. Because they are privately owned, they need to think about this, and I mean, Phase 3, for example, with, in U.S., we had the first contact 2019, and we closed the transaction 2023. With Prevent in Italy, I think we had the first contact, Hans and me, was it, I don't know, 2016 or something, 2015, and we closed it 2021. So, so I mean, you need to have a lot of discussions ongoing on a very low speed, so to say.
But some of the others were faster?
Absolutely. It could be six months as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it can be both, but sometimes it take longer time because normally we approach the companies, and they are maybe not for sale at that time, so.
We've learned that when they say, they say no, maybe we can come back in one or two years and they say yes, so it's a long.
Some more questions? Yes, over here.
So to my understanding, you are changing the name to NCAB Group and then adding the acquisition name. Can you tell us a bit about your reasoning there?
The reasoning? Yeah. I think the reasoning is that we believe so much that we can, in the brand name NCAB, use marketing, use our position in Asia and China much better. So it has been very important for us to change the name because we would like to invest in the brand name, and if we should have kept all the local names, we would not have been seen as a big player. So I think that's an important part of being globally big player. And also, I mean, we are selling the same kind of thing. So if you compare us to other compounders, maybe they do different things, and then they can keep the brand name because they are selling completely different products.
We are selling printed circuit boards only, and then we would like to use the benefit of having the scale in the name.
Yes?
Maybe, well, are there some acquisitions you would deem as less successful? And in such case, what were the consequences, like higher times to integrate or stretching while using more resources, and what would be the lessons learned?
Yeah, it could take longer times to integrate them, of course. Maybe we saw the second acquisition in USA might have been one where we lost some of the customers. In a way, I think we knew from the beginning that these customers were maybe a little bit more too high volume and not that high tech, but we were rather eager to get the second position in US. And I think we kept most of the customers for four or five years, but then we lost them. So of course, you can say that that is a little bit of a mistake. So we need to understand the customer base in a better way to make sure that they have the customer that we would like to continue to work with.
I can also add, I think during the COVID, it's difficult when you can't visit them. That also always takes time for the integration because we've noticed that the most important is the communication, both ways. So I think it's really important when we do an acquisition, that we visit them quite often, so they can feel a part of our organization.
But I think it's important to add that we have really, during this time now, and also these certain acquisitions, that we have got a much stronger process of doing the integration. We learned a lot the whole way, how to do this in a smart and efficient way, and I think that will help us in the future.
There's another question from the web here, and that is: How are the acquisitions planned to be financed?
Of course, as we said before, we have a very strong cash flow, so that will be a big part of that. I think as we said before, I mean, we have acquired companies for SEK 1.5 billion over the SEK 5.5 billion last year, and we have had a free cash flow of SEK 1.2 billion, so it's almost self-financing. So I think we'll continue that way. Then, of course, we still have a really good relationship with the banks and so on, if we need to have a higher loan. Our net debt is still below 1x, and we said the target should be up to 2x. So we do have headroom and good firepower for further activities.
More questions? Yes, here. Oh, okay. In the back.
Have you seen any changes on prices to buy companies?
No, not really. I think, I mean, these companies we're looking for are the small. They are not really a big market for them either, so they don't have so many alternatives. Maybe the discussion right now might be that we can agree on maybe an EBITDA multiple, but then what is the prediction for next year? Typically, the seller right now have a higher prediction than we believe in, maybe. So there might be a discrepancy in the discussion.
And how do you h andle that?
W e have, sometimes we have used an earn-out. That that's a way to, mitigate that, that we say we agree on the fixed price, and then we typically say what the development of gross profit for the next year, then. If, if they reach what they expect, then they will get the money, and if not, we don't have to pay that. So that's one way of mitigate that.
There's one question in the front, Carl, here. S orry.
Yeah.
You already touched on it a little bit, but can you elaborate a little bit more on-- All right, on the one side, you have kind of this concept of decentralization, not disturbing the operations. At the same time, you have potential synergies and improvements, et cetera. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what are the best ways to kind of introduce these suggestions for improvement, et cetera, without making, for example, the seller or entrepreneur feel like you're enforcing stuff on them?
I think we, as you said, we have about 100 days to learn and listen. We try to really listen to them and adapt to what they do. Then, of course, in the end, we will try to find the same kind of way you're working. But then it always boils down to that decision making with using which factories you can use of the approved factories, is down to local company, which customer, how to work with the customer. So in some way, we like to say that all the decisions connected to the fun part, doing the business locally, is done by the MDs in the companies. And we try to support them with the framework, which might be the factory panel, the factory management team, and IT system, and financing.
But the idea is to have as much as the decision making of how to utilize the best business is done by the people.
Right.
I think also, we—I mean, from many acquisitions, we also learned a little bit about how they use different IT systems. I mean, we have learned both from the acquisitions in Italy and Netherlands, that they have, in some way, smarter IT tools that we could try to adapt and embrace for the whole group.
So, Carl?
Yes, yes, the question on the competition for the acquisition targets. I think you have one, one, competitor that you recently listed and brought in some cash. Are you seeing increased competition on the deals, or?
No. I mean, if you go back a couple of years, we were competing with Fineline, and Germany's airline company. They are now acquired 100% by Chinese factories, so we don't meet them anymore. On the other hand, ICAPE, as I said, got listed two years ago, and we meet them now and then, but no one else, really. I think we have a very strong message to the market, and I think also for many of these sellers, it's so important that you treat the old colleagues or employees very well because they, so it's not only the money, it is about the process. So far, we managed to have a rather good reputation on how we have integrated the companies, which supports us.
Yeah. And then just one question on the, what is it? The succession planning when b ecause I guess often, they want to retire to some extent. How do you work with that, and approximately how many of your acquisitions do the CEOs leave eventually, and how do you work with replacing them, et cetera?
In most cases, they will leave and typically within 6-12 months, because it is a plan. There's one reason why they're selling. But then we have time to sort of replace them and use their network with the customers and so on. We also have areas, for example, in USA, the first one we did, David Wolff , who's owned that company, is still part-time working for us. So we have you have different options, but most people are, of course, selling for a reason.
Okay. Thank you.
So more questions? Well, then. Thank you, Hassan and Anders.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Welcome back, Peter, for concluding remarks.
Very good. So it's been a long day, but I think you've hopefully enjoyed meeting a lot of my colleagues here, giving you more insight on how we operate as a company. We are a company with a long history. Of course, everything depends on where you come from, but for our terms, we're now celebrating 30 years, and it is a history we're very proud of. I think it's been a tremendous journey, both in terms of growth, but also in terms of profitability development, and also some of the capabilities that we've developed over the years-- I think we are now in a situation where we have a very strong, unique selling points. We have a setup where we can provide the customers strong support locally, engineering, helping them become more efficient in a very lean way and efficient way of dealing with them.
The way we have grown has created a model where we have significant purchasing power. The factory management organization we have, the technical capabilities we have, gives us big leverage and increasing competitiveness versus many of our competitors. And then we have the factory presence, the fact that we are present also in the factories, making sure that we can really maximize performance, but also a very stable and reliable supply of products for our customers. And these things, three things combine to give us continuous improvements and competitiveness versus our competitors. So we see a lot of opportunities to continue to grow as a company. I mean, we are today a globally leading, supplier of printed circuit boards. I think we have doubled our position versus our competition since the IPO, and yet we only have 2% market share in a very fragmented global market.
We also have a strategy on how we believe we can grow. We are going to remain focused on PCBs. We're gonna stay asset light. We see opportunities to grow organically and continue to develop our relationship and margins profitably in this industry, and then we can also expand to big parts geographically, as well as continue with an M&A agenda. Key to our model that we have described in some cases is really also the core of our culture and the decentralized model we have, and the entrepreneurial spirit we have, which I hope you've sort of partly sensed in the dialogue with Benjamin here earlier today. In really where our local companies, they own the business, they take the business decisions with their customers. They choose which of the factories to use and where to place which products.
I think it helps them to be better, more attentive in the eyes of their customers, and to make better business decisions, rather than to sending questions back to a central office where we are too far away from the customer. The way this works, though, is, of course, that we invest in, while being decentralized, we also invest in a common framework. We have a shared vision of who we want to be and what we want to do and for whom. We have a clear vision of striving to be the number one PCB producer wherever we are. We have shared values about how we act and what we stand for as a company in the eyes of our customers and in relationship with our suppliers.
We have a shared overall arching strategy that covers all of our companies about sort of which paths are we choosing, what choices are we making to take us towards the vision? Our values is something that dates back to around 2005, was generated by the whole group team at the time in one of our group conferences, and some of you may recognize Anna here to the right from 2005. The values are quality first. We are always focusing on delivering quality and quality in everything we do for our customers. We believe in strong relationships. This is a people business. We are selling, we are delivering PCBs, but we are, in fact, very much a service organization, bridging between factory, leading factories and demanding customers, and we take full responsibility.
We take full responsibility for the whole supply chain, which gives the customers confidence in us that we will handle the whole supply chain, both in good times, but also when things are tough. And some of the things we invest quite a bit in developing our culture and our way of working. We do a lot of trainings. We do onboarding sessions with all new employees and especially with acquired companies. We have trainings for sales, both for inside sales, CAM sales. We do technology leadership trainings. We work a lot on business development, the entrepreneurial skills, in our local management, as well as running global workshops and live sessions.
I think Benjamin mentioned, we have also actually built up our own e-learning academy, where we have sort of brought together a lot of the trainings and a lot of the know-how we have in the organization around how we sell as a company, how we work with customers, and this is, of course, great tool for onboarding, but it's also very good for refreshing once you've been in the company for some time. And this is something that now continues to develop and become stronger and stronger over time. But we are, of course, we are a company focused on, on making good business decisions.
We are also very much a sales-focused organization, so we are a company where we have a lot of sort of incentives in the group through our organization, where people are incentivized both on sales growth, but also what we call contribution, which is basically EBITDA, but also factoring in the cost of capital. So we have the asset-light model instilled in all of our management throughout the group. We also have senior management invested to a large degree, as well as the board into the company. We have a long-term incentive program, which is tied to value creation, as well as the share price development. And then, of course, we hold the group together through a continuous dialogue with our local companies, where we have monthly reporting from our companies on their performance, goals, and activities.
We do quarterly business reviews, where we think a little bit ahead, how do we develop the company for the future, not just look upon the latest weeks or months' performance? And then we also work on the both global strategy, but also on local strategies in the companies based on their specific market conditions. So it's a decentralized model, but it's also a decentralized model where we try to leverage scale as we're growing. I mean, one part of this is the industry sector business development. Businesses are different in different industries. If you're talking to a rail application, the demands here, the lingo is different, the certifications are different than if you are in medical, for instance.
I think we are trying to, sort of as a global group, we have successes in some areas, so maybe we have been very strong on electrical vehicle charging and renewable energy in some of the Scandinavian countries. We're now packaging that know-how and bringing that across to other markets so that—if you're then going into the Netherlands, you can accelerate the growth in those segments by piggybacking off the know-how we have in the group. These are now things that we have been developing over the last couple of years, more and more. We invest in technology and sustainability leadership. We have our Global Technology Council, where we have active working group looking to develop new technologies.
If it's a recyclable material for PCBs or the latest technology that's gonna come beyond what our customers are currently asking for, so that we can always stay at the forefront. We are also looking to become more digitalized as a company and have even better efficiency against cybersecurity. We have, over the last couple of years, been investing in our IT platforms, and we'll be introducing new platforms rolling out throughout the organization here in next year. We also have made certain select recruitment and strengthening of our global organization. Technology, we have a global technology director, which happens to come from one of our acquired companies. We've made strengthenings to our logistics team to really encompass and capture the global logistics opportunities, as well in sourcing, as well as strengthening our team in IT area.
This is now-- I'm very proud of our group management team. I think you've met some here today. I think there are maybe some more here. Eva and maybe you can rise up, and Sanna as well. So we have some more people here as well today, even if they've not been presenting. I mean, we have a very good, strong mixture of people with very long experience, both from NCAB and from the PCB industry, as well as some people, like myself, coming from the outside, bringing some other ideas, as well. And now I think we have six different nationalities represented in our group management team. So I think we're well set up for taking the company on its continued journey.
But even more important, I think, is the strength, the skilled, engaged employees that we have throughout the group, and these are some of the pictures where we still try to bring together the whole company on a regular basis, if it's every second year, basically, to workshop together, build relationships, and take the company to the next level. So we are a company very proud of our history, but we still think we're in the beginning of that journey, and that was one of the reason why I chose to join NCAB. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. We will get a short concluding summary from Christian, from our Chairman's perspective, and then we will have a Q&A session.
Thanks for giving us your time this afternoon. You know, I started out by saying that, you know, we should try to give you a better feel for how we are providing value, number one, and the other one was to give a picture of the depth and breadth of the management team. I hope you got that with you. When we had a chance today to talk about a couple of the areas where, you know, in the value creation issue on our factory management, super important, on sustainability, super important, on, you know, M&A, with the team there, with Hassan and Kelly and-- You know, it wouldn't happen without those people. So hope you did get a feel for that, for the people. You know, do talk to us afterwards.
It's a lot of, you know, fantastic individuals, but I think as you, Peter, describe it, and, you know, you're leading this team, it all comes together when, you know, everyone works, and we kind of say that we have a family, you know, a family atmosphere. It's an organization which is. We have a Scandinavian type of leadership, but at the same time, it's pretty clear expectations on people and on performance. So I think those sort of characterize. And it's difficult to describe a culture in words, so it becomes just, you know, words on a PowerPoint. But hopefully, you get a little feel for that, and we could then continue to talk about that for days. We would love to, but wary of your time, of course.
You will be invited back to these kind of sessions. With that, over to Gunilla and Q&A.
Thank you.
Thanks.
So now we have a little longer Q&A session, if there are still questions, and I got one from the web about the total market, which you showed, Peter, in the beginning that it was this Prismark estimate in bars that was estimated to be down 10% in 2023, and you are currently reporting 25% decline in order intake in constant currency. Does that mean that you are losing market share, or how to interpret that number?
No. Oh, no, we do not believe we're losing market share. I think the order intake is, of course, influenced by a number of parameters. You have also here the big shift in order lead time that we've seen in the last couple of years. So if you say, during 2021, we had extremely extended lead times. Now, we are to lead times which are shorter than normal, and that influences the ordering pattern. That, and on top of that, you also see some element of inventory adjustment with customers. So I think that is what's sort of creating short-term effects right now, which is governing that.
Questions from the room?
Thank you very much. I mean, at the beginning, Christian, you, you sort of lined up a lot of the landmarks in your history, going from basically a small company in Sweden and, and then branching out to different geographies and so forth. And I'm just curious, sort of where you are today, what are the biggest strategic changes that will sort of shape NCAB in the next five years? If you can mention sort of a couple of them.
Yeah, I think we still have, in the same foundation, a similar strategy. I think what has happened over the last, say, three-four years, has maybe been that, say, the acquisition side has become more of an integrated part of our growth strategy. Whereas maybe, say, go back 5-10 years, maybe then acquisition was more seen as a way to enter a new market. Now we see it on top of that, it's also part of consolidating and accelerating growth. So I think that has been maybe the biggest shift over the last couple of years, and I think there is still a lot of traction in our basic model with that addition going forward.
All right. And then another question. I think China and sort of the trade war has been on our lips for quite some time, and y ou're obviously quite central in that. But PCB so far quite unaffected, one might say. Could you maybe sort of detail, is there anything sort of keeping PCBs from being brought up in the discussion? I know it's not a sort of a strategic or a defense-critical component by itself, since it's not intelligent in that way. But still, it's a pretty big trade ship for China to use in such a scenario. Could you maybe go into that and speak on that a bit further?
I think, as you said, it's coming much lower down in the pecking order of priorities for, for most markets. But I think as you said, as I think Chris outlined also, a number of customers are asking that question, and we are providing options for our customers already. So some part of our volume has shifted to, to out of China producers. I think we have a portfolio of factories which could make that share already bigger today, but I think it's a little bit of wait and see with, with the majority of our customers. China is still very much the main engine room for printed circuit board manufacturing. Both the printed circuit board itself, but also some of the raw materials going into printed circuit board manufacturing.
So, right now, I think customers are generally happy with the production there. Some are looking to see how they can potentially de-risk, and we are offering that opportunity. But in general, everyone is happy with the supply chain as it is, currently.
Some more questions?
There's someone there.
I'll just proceed then. So, on China, from a wider perspective, maybe the country in itself is not accelerating as the world would expect. So, but what do you see in your markets?
No, I think you said-- I mean, that is something we have seen clearly this year, that China, as a local market, is slower. And I think that has an impact on the whole industry and partly also some of the European markets who do trade with China also. So I think that has been one of the reasons why we also see right now in this year that the market is down, but it's also partly market down being connected to pricing decreases, because Chinese factories are extremely capital intensive, so they, of course, try to run their factories with as much filling grade as they can. And that has led to prices coming down, which is accounting for some of the drop in the total volume in the market today.
You mentioned in conjunction with the latest quarterly report, that those prices are maybe not high enough to be sustainable for these factories. How long do you think that they can maintain these levels?
It's difficult to say, of course, and it will vary from factory to factory, but I think some may need to change or start to take out capacity. Because then you had a situation where, starting at the second half of 2020, demand started to increase, and then you had a tremendous volume increase. I think the global market grew by some 25% in 2021. And I think both factories were struggling to keep up with that, and they were also then adding capacity. And now you've come to the other way around, where lead times are starting to come down, demand has gone down a little bit, people are working with inventories, and now at the same time, they've added more capacity online.
The PCB factories. A lot of it is continuous processes, which you do not really want to stop. So some will continue to run factories even they have poor utilization rates, but it only goes for so long. So I guess we'll need to see how the overall general economy develops and Chinese development as well, and to what extent factories will have volumes enough to either scale up again or if they will need to take out some capacity.
I got a question here from the web, asking: You mentioned the geopolitical risk with China and Taiwan as specific operational risk. Have you set up a contingency plan if such a scenario would happen?
Yeah, I mean, we've been working for some time to build a portfolio of factories outside of China and Taiwan. I think this is part of our planning already today, and as I've mentioned, we have access to capacity beyond what our customers are currently buying from us. But it is also a little bit of a chicken and egg discussion that we need to have with our customers, because whilst we may have factories with whom we have cooperation agreements, should something happen, everyone can't move day one. So I think that is where we also have dialogue with some customers who maybe feel that they have a big spend.
They will decide: "I will choose to place a portion of my spend outside China, even if it's a price penalty to that, I want to have a foot in the door should something happen, so I'm already having a head start of being able to shift some of my volume.
We also got a question on gross margins. Is there a normalized gross margin that we will see once this factory utilization is normal?
That's a little bit tricky to say. I think over the years, we have continuously been able to develop our gross margins. I mean, if you go back 10, 15 years, our gross margins was in the low 20%. Now it's above 30%. I think what we've seen in the last, say, six-nine months, has been a rapid increase in gross margin, and that has been largely accompanied to the fact that prices have started to come down in the market. And as such, we have trained our organization also to work with make sure that we don't give. We need to protect our gross profit for the product, which means that in effect, if prices go down, gross margin percentage needs to go up.
I think also we've been able to gain effects from our size and our sourcing organization to maybe get better savings than the market as a whole. Should the market turn around and prices start to go up again, I think some of that will flow back. I think as others have communicated also in some of our quarterly discussions and other forums, that, I mean, right now, we are showing very high gross margin and also very strong EBITDA margin percentages. They are, of course, partly connected to the fact that prices are down in the market, and we can get extra gross margins. Had pricing normal, we would have seen a higher top line, but not necessarily a big jump than in the EBITDA profits, so.
Not necessarily lower gross margins?
I think the gross margin percentage would have been, sort of, wouldn't have been as high as, as they are right now, had we had a more kind of stable price in the market. I think we would continue to see steadily improving gross margin. I think that is our aim, and I think we are getting continuous improvements from our growing scale and our sourcing activities. But I think the recent, say, increase we've seen has been more tied to the volatility in the pricing market.
Okay. More questions?
Part of your business is also-- Sorry, yeah, I think part of your business is also doing business with Chinese customers, so China for China.
Yeah.
I would be interested to know what's the outlook on this portion of the business and what's the value added that you could bring there?
Yeah, I mean, I think it is interesting. I think the business, our business in China was predominantly started, I think, when we followed some European, American customers whose headquarters had a subsidiary in China. But I think today, most, by far, most of our business in China is Chinese, directly to Chinese OEMs and Chinese EMS companies, which is quite interesting that we can act as an intermediary, selling from a Chinese factory to a Chinese OEM and still have gross margins North of 30%. And I think it has to do with our focus. I mean, we're focusing very much on really demanding customers who really needs good technical support, and I think we add a lot of value for those customers. I mean, the Chinese factories are very good at producing, but maybe not as good as providing that kind of technical service.
And also, even those customers, they might also be too small to have access to the best factories, even if they happen to be in the same market. So we see continued opportunities to grow our markets in China. I think the, we had expected that the market in China would have been more positive in 2023 after the, restriction from pandemic were lifted. But I think we've all seen the Chinese economy has not taken off in the manufacturing industry as many had hoped, so. But we expect that to come back, and, we will continue to grow in that market.
Maybe just one question. If you're seeing any increased competition on price, as the volumes now are a bit lower, I guess some of your competitors maybe have their quite stable operational cost, maybe they need also volumes to be profitable. Are you seeing any signs of improved price competition?
I mean, I think we can see that the prices in the overall in the market are going down, but I think, I mean, in NCAB, we are selling on value and making our customers more competitive overall by giving them the overall lowest total cost. So we've never been competing on price per se. So, I think we are handling that pretty well.
Okay.
Some more questions in the room? So well then, thank you very much. It has been a pleasure to lead this discussion and seminar, and very many good questions. You are, of course, welcome to continue, discuss, and ask questions while we here physically will move to take some snacks and drinks. And for you on the web, thank you very much for looking and listening. Thank you.
Thank you.