Welcome back, everyone, to ABG Investor Days. My name is Henrik Hintze, and I'm an equity research analyst here at ABG. With me now, I have another company that I cover, Nexam Chemical, and the CEO and CFO of the company here to present for us. We'll start off with you, Ronnie Törnqvist, CEO.
Thank you, Henrik, and thank you for listening to this presentation about Nexam Chemical. I will start off with a small summary of the most important thing that is happening right now within our company. We have a segment where we work with recycling of plastics. That segment has been worked upon for a couple of years, and we are finally moving into the scale-up phase with many proven cases in this segment, and that's quite significant for our development going forward, but I will be back on that point during the presentation. Nexam Chemical, in the world, so to say, is working on the future of plastics. We make additives that you add to plastic materials to make them better, higher performant, but also more circular and sustainable. By that we work on recycling solutions for plastic materials.
A lot of the additives that we do develop and produce and sell are patented, and we are working a lot with our IP portfolio. Based on the same fundamental concept of reactive chemistry in combination with plastic materials and some other more passive elements, we make these additives, so you could say that we have a relatively narrow niche portfolio of materials that can improve plastic materials, but they land in very, very wide application fields. We work on customers that are active in lightweighting, miniaturization, microelectronics segments, and we, on the other hand, work on high-temperature applications of composite materials, for example, in jet engines and other advanced applications, and we also have a lot of activities going into renewable energy, in particular wind power, and also are very active then in the handling of waste and recycling of plastic materials.
And both of those segments are obviously driven by very strong sustainability megatrends. We'll come back to you a little bit to how we divide our segments. Just a little bit of view of where we are right now. Since a bit more than a year, we've been working on a total remake of our strategic direction of the company. We have decided to focus our activities on additives that enhance the performance of plastics and make them more circular. And we build a global business around this, really focusing on improving these materials. We also have set a target to become more profitable and drive a profitable growth over the years to come. And we are becoming, or have become, much more market-oriented. We still have a strong technical base, a lot of R&D and know-how in the company, but it has become even more market-driven, you could say.
Those were the foundations for the strategic reviews. And that led to an accelerated cost program that we have pulled through, which was, you could say, terminated with success in the beginning of this year. We have done a sharpened commercial strategy, which I will come back to. And we have especially put ourselves in a situation where we can fund our operations and our developments and our initiatives with our own cash flow so that we don't need to search for external money to keep doing what we love and where we see that we have a good fit in the market. So a little bit on the commercial focus and the segmentation of where we work.
We have decided, it was a year ago more or less, that since the value add that we bring to our customers is that we change the properties of their materials, we have divided it into which properties that we actually bring value inside. One of them is lightweighting, where our materials are used to make structural foams of PET, or polymers in general, but in particular PET on a commercial scale, that is used as a structural material to lower weight and improve performance of systems. The major application today is in the wings of wind power units, but there are many other applications in that field. Another segment where we have world-leading, really niche products is that we make additives that can take the most temperature-resistant plastic that can be made by man, so to say, and pull them even higher in their temperature resistance.
For example, in jet engines and very hot microelectronics, we can push the borderline of where to use plastics from maybe 300 degrees Celsius, continuous use temperatures, to 350 degrees Celsius. And that opens up a lot of application fields, both in electronics and in especially aircraft engines. Another very important area for us is to work on the aesthetics of plastics, mainly colors, but also additives that provide the potential for plastic components to maintain their looks, so to say, over time and also their function over time. And then we have the segment of recycling, where our additives really enable recycled plastics to be used in much more advanced applications or to use recycled materials that would otherwise not be good enough, so to say, for industrial use and make them usable.
Yes, and we'll go a little bit deeper into the recycling area, which is a little bit of an internal startup, you can say, that we've been working on for more or less three years, and where we are starting to feel strong market traction and where we see huge potential in the future. In general, you could say that we have a broad portfolio already of tailored additives that suit a broad range of applications. In every case where we reach commercial success and application, it is driven by the business case for our customer. So they're either saving money or can do new products. So it is always related to money.
And then it is a very nice side effect that it also leads to a lot of CO2 savings, because as soon as you can recycle the plastics instead of burning it, or even worse, putting it in landfill, you can save, so to say, CO2. The general plastics production is 400 million tons per year, approximately, and it is predicted to grow, and the predictions made a few years back are being fulfilled by reality. So it's kind of a, if you look at the problematic side of plastics, a sad occurrence in the world that it's actually increasing the production of new plastics. But on the same time, it's quite hopeful that the recycling markets are growing at least as fast, especially in, call it, the rich parts of the world, but many other areas too.
There are very ambitious targets to increase the content of recycled materials, for example, in packaging in the European Union, but also in other parts of the world. We see a really strong growing segment here and a need to make more advanced plastic materials. An example of the customer value proposition is an example from thermoformed packages, such as you see in cherry tomatoes or grapes or chicken packaging and so on. It can be produced by expensive recycled bottle-grade materials, and you can add a little bit of production rerun, which is a very cheap grade of material, and you have to add a little bit of virgin material for the ultimate food contact. Using our technology, our customers can use much more of the lower-cost materials and still achieve the same good product.
So in this particular case, which is food trays, you reduce the raw material cost by 30%, you add 6% of the cost of our additive, but in the sum, you save more or less 25% on the product cost. So that's a great offering. We did a press release about the customer that is using exactly this type of business case, and we see that there are numerous recyclers around the world which could do the same thing. So we have a proper value proposition. I will try to explain also. When you recycle plastic, you lose value in the material. It is the polymer molecules that are really cut up during the use and reprocessing.
The more times that you recycle the material, the lower the viscosity becomes, the shorter the polymer chains become, and in the end, you get a very brittle material that is not really usable. The University of Turin has done an in-depth study on this and managed to, so to say, mimic the recycling processes. And after nine cycles, you're more or less into half of the viscosity. By using our active ingredients that tie the molecule up again, inside the recycling step, you get back to a value which is in level with the fourth recycling cycle. And it's easy to think that if you put this into every recycling cycle, it will stay very, very high-level material. So the number of recycling loops that the material can live through becomes much, much higher.
So instead of just maximum four times recyclable or something like this, we can increase that to maybe 40. And that's the physical effect. Global plastic production, 400 million tons, approximately. About 10% of that is recycled or bio-based material or chemically recycled plastics, but the majority of the recycling is mechanical recycling, which means sorting, shredding, remelting, and use it as a new raw material. The rate is, of course, too low, but it's interesting to note that the products where we have good additives and solutions actually apply to more or less 50% of the global volume here. So the growth potential is enormous for this. And we really need to work on, let's say, the next level of technical height of these recycled plastics so that it can be used in more applications.
But now we go back then to our business update, a little bit of the financial side, and I leave the word to my colleague Marcus for a few words on that.
Thanks, Ronnie. I will show you some numbers and give some guidance about numbers, where we are, and we'll leave it also where we expect to be in the future going forward. Roughly, we have a quarterly status of 50 million SEK. The third quarter is a little bit the vacation period. So that's we ended up at 44. We have a margin of 47%. That's the best so far. We had an EBITDA of roughly 1.2 million SEK. And our cash flow is really now on a stable level. And now we talk about the net cash flow.
So that's really been a focus area for the last one or two years, that we can fund our own operations, but also our investments for the future, for the R&D people, the business development, and also CapEx. We got some significant orders that we will deliver on for the coming year. We've been what Ronnie just mentioned, in the high-temperature area. That is come with the aircraft and aircraft engines. We are also starting to more focus on Central Europe. We employed a new sales manager, a new business manager, and he will be located in Germany. That is still a little bit of a greenfield for us, to be honest. And Germany is a really big market, and of course, the country is very close to it. We have, during the last two years, working on margin, margin improvements.
We have been doing insourcing, efficiency work, but also to really go into the details on every single product that we produce and see if we can make it cheaper, but still have the same property or do it in a different way, so at the moment, we are at 47%. That's pretty much on a stable level for us now. We will be somewhere between the range of 45% to just above 50%. Here is how the cash flow has changed during the last two years. This is for quarter one to quarter three, and as you can see, we are very close to have a net cash flow now of zero, and here is another thing, because looking at our financial numbers, they seem that we are on a very stable level. It doesn't happen so much, to be honest.
We have been on 50 now for the past two years. But actually, we've had some the wind market, that is what you see this light blue, whatever it's called; it's been going down. We have actually taken market shares within that segment. Two years ago, we were only working with three customers. Now we're more or less working with all customers that are in this wind market. We can also see that finally, we have to say we are a little bit always a little bit frustrated that recycling doesn't really pick up, but it really now starts to pick up. I guess Ronnie will come back to that, because that will be the future. I guess you heard a presentation from the OrganoClick. We are very much on the same here when it comes to scalability.
At the moment, we can actually double our sales or even more without investing more. We actually have proved this on specific months. We will also see this in December for us, because even if the quarters, they're very much on the 50 million SEK, we can see that in individual months can be really much up and down. Now I'm actually heading back to Ronnie again.
Okay, thank you, Marcus. Just, yeah, so in summary, we expect to remain on this high gross margin level. With growth, we have actually grown quite a lot, you could say, over the last year, but we have also had a weakness in the wind market. When that one picks up again, it will be quite good for us.
So you could say that we had a growth of more or less 15%-20%, but also a loss of the same amount. But we continue to hit really hard on the growth factors for us, which is in our case, customer presence, be out there on the market, work together with our customers, and develop new applications, which we have done then successfully, but the result is unfortunately flat. But we continue to do so, and we see that the markets are bottoming out, so we expect growth going forward. This is a view on how our product segments look like, and we'd like to develop a little bit of that. More or less half of the sales volume is in aesthetics. It's a base business. It's quite stable.
It's on our home markets in the Nordic countries and in Eastern Europe, because we have locations in Hungary and Poland also in this area, and it's a really good base business for us. Then we have these segments of high temperature and lightweighting, which are a growth engine. We provide innovation, driving those businesses forward, and we are gaining market shares within them all the time, and they provide a lot of opportunity, and that has been the basis for the past growth in Nexam. But now with recycling, this is moving from a startup to a scale-up case. It's about 4% of the sales right now, but it is growing fast, and we see that there is a lot of opportunities there.
Yeah, we have solutions for 50% of the plastics out there, and we think that we are, even though we are funding it by our own earnings and so on, we see here that this is something which could be compared to really speculative companies that are active in this field. So we are, you could call it defensive, safe, but a stable investment, but we also provide an element of extreme opportunity also inside that total case, so to say. Just coming back a little bit, because there were some investor feedback on what we have in the pipeline. We don't speak about the specific terms about potential opportunities and these kind of things, but we work a lot through a long chain of events, and when something becomes launched into production, we talk about it.
But I can assure you that we have a lot of things going on. Now I see that we are approaching our time limit here, so I will just touch on that we are in a turnaround situation. We see growth ahead of us. We are active on growing markets in both the fields of recycling and over a long period, seeing the wind energy market is also strongly growing, as well as the high temperature segment. And I own a fair part of Nexam shares myself and everybody else in the management, and this is because we believe in the case. So we have very ambitious plans, and we have found a new stable level where we can fund our own investments, so to say.
So with that, I would like to thank you for listening to our message and go over to the questions and answers together with you, Henrik.
Yes, thanks a lot for that, Ronnie. So maybe first on margins then. You say that your gross margin is now at a good level, and I agree. So from here, what's going to drive the margin and what are reasonable EBIT level margins for a company of your type to achieve?
I'll start then, Marcus. I think we have reached, like Marcus said, we are in a level where we can see that in this range, 45%-52%, somewhere there is our natural habitat in terms of margins, looking at the type of customers we have and the type of products we have. Some are much higher, of course, single product, but some are much lower also.
And this is a kind of product mix that we can stay in. We have had some mishaps on that. But I think this is a, if you look even 10 years going forward, this is where we can be. Even if we grow to become a billion turnover company, so to say, we can still maintain that type of margin. And what was the second question? That was EBIT. Yeah, on the EBIT and how much it falls down. Right now, we have about 35% of whatever additional sales we achieve. So if we would double the sales, which we have the capacity to do, we would approach 20%. So that could be a long-term, really far out there objective to achieve.
I think that we will, any quarter soon, we will go through the EBIT zero level and start to build a positive EBIT development.
Yeah, okay, very good.
Anything to add on that?
No, absolutely. We haven't really communicated any financial goals. We had one, actually. That was to survive on our own money, but also to not only just survive, but also fund our own investment activities. Because that's what we're doing. That's actually a significant amount that we put in business development, product development, every single year. Now we fund it ourselves. That was our first financial target, to be honest. Our target is obviously growth as quick as possible in order to hit through the next wall, which is 60 million SEK per quarter, because then we will be positive on the bottom line. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Then continue from there going forward. Yeah.
All right. You mentioned the specific case of the recycling business where you see 25% cost savings for your customers. Does that mean that you think that over time you could raise the price?
There is some kind of limit there, isn't it, Henrik? It needs to be an interesting business case. There is always reasons to remain competitive because the dynamics doesn't remain the same. There is always new materials coming on the market and so on. I think that our margins for that particular product are actually quite good. They're above our average. And I think we need to be more or less there where we are to have a really strong business case for the customer. So it's good business for us and for them.
Okay, very good. And then to maybe follow up on the R&D organization, you mentioned you are funding your own investments there and you have a lot of activity there. I'm just wondering if you could comment on, is this mostly additional products within the application segments that you have today, or are you also looking into other opportunities beyond the lightweighting and high-temperature and recycling?
Yes, I would say it's mainly within the segments today, but as they will look in the future. We have a very tight customer contact and listen around, and we're invited to all these international conferences for recycling, but also a lot of international relations with customers, and there will be changes. Electronics industry will move to higher temperatures because then you get a higher performance in the electronics gear.
So we have a lot of R&D labs around the world that work on the highest temperature applications there. So we remain in the high temperature segment, but it will be different in five or 10 years. The same with recycling. There we are developing specific grade for, for example, textile to textile PET recycling, which will be a hugely important part of becoming sustainable in that clothing industry, so to say. And that doesn't really exist yet, but we're working on those solutions and so on. So I think within our segments, we have a lot of growth opportunity going into the future. But I will not say that we will only rest in these four segments forever. We are also open to others, of course.
Of course. Thank you very much for that, and thank you all for listening. Thank you.