Nolato AB (publ) (STO:NOLA.B)
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May 5, 2026, 2:43 PM CET
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CMD 2019
Sep 17, 2019
Okay. Since everybody is here, we will start and then welcome everybody to Mulatto and this Capital Day and also to this facility, which is a medical facility that we have had in our group since 2 1,006. So it's also heading up some of the technical design center in this facility. But we will come back to that later on. Today, we have a team of L'Oreal people here to present.
It's myself, Christoph Waltqvist, CEO of the company. I've been with the group for 23 years. And here is the rest of the team, if you stand up. Starting from Per Olar Holmstrom, he is the CFO.
That's me.
And most of you guys know him since many years. We have Johan Eberberg.
That's me.
Heading up the Medical division. We have Karlsson.
That's me.
Heading up Integrated Solutions. And we have Johan Arvidsson. Yes, that's me. And we also have Christophe Glubacki, who's heading up the design center within the Medical division. If you have questions during the presentation, shoot them, but please state your name and be clear about your questions so we can take them.
The agenda for today is we're going to talk a little bit about the group, the strategies of the group and where we're heading with the group and our modified or extended offer to the marketing, some synergies, core values and corporate culture of the company. Then Perola will talk about some financial review of the company of the group, including our targets. I will talk a little bit about our sustainable work and how we do that, plastic as a material, recycling and so on and so forth. Then after that, we will have a tour of the facility and also lunch at the time. After that, Johan Eberberg will talk about the Medical division and the plans together with Christoffer about our expanded offering.
We will then jump into Industrial Solutions, talking about our position, our offering within the Industrial Solutions and the operational focus and efficiency measures. Then we will go into Integrated Solutions and talk about the positioning, offerings, operational focus and the EMC. After, I will conclude with the overall strategy for the group. Is it working for you? Good.
There we go. So the Lotte Group in brief. I will stand over here, I think. Can everybody hear me?
Good. Good.
So the Lotte Group was established back in the '30s in Turco, Sweden, where we still have our headquarters. We went to the stock exchange in the mid '80s. And the group today consists of approximately between $7,000,000,000 a profit of some $800,000,000 good return on capital and approximately 5,000,000, 6,000 people employed. We are working in 3 business areas, as you know, the Medical Solutions, the Integrated Solutions and Industrial Solutions, and they are sort of balanced in size. And we will come into the situation where we see synergies between the markets and so on.
So this is the Lotte Group in a brief introduction. The business concept, it's very simple. We are supporting our customers with high-tech development and manufacturing of polymer product systems. And we have worked with leading customers in these specific markets areas that we have explained. And we've come a little bit into the different customer groups and so on during the day.
You can think that the 3 different market segments or business areas are very different. It's medical, integrated and industrial. And you could think that we would not have so much synergies because it's so widespread. But I think this is actually one of the really strong competitive advantages we have for the group. Because what we can do is we can take knowledge from different market and introduce it to other markets.
So we are working in these specific market areas, industrial with automotive and the lean efficient manufacturing, integrated solution with a lot of new technologies, really pushing technology to the limit and very rapid and medical with a sort of conservative approach and a lot of focus on quality assurance, quality control. And what we can do is, together with these 3 market segments, create value for the customer by taking the best parts of different market and introduce them to the other segments. Behind the curtain, of course, we have the same sort of philosophy around corporate responsibility. We are working with the same materials. We are working with the same production technology and we always work as a solution oriented development partner.
So I think this is actually one of the strongest competitive advantages we have that we can use the different market segment and bring them together. So what we are working then is, of course, technology transfer and exchange of experience between these completely different market segments. A little bit about our journey. During what we called yesterday, 2000 and so on, we focused on having customers. And our main focus was the mobile phone industry.
We had years when 80 percent of our sales was directed to mobile phone. We had industrial, we had medical, but it was smaller as the total portion. We worked as a supplier to these customers. So they asked us to produce and we produced. We have a leading position in Sweden.
We developed our position in Asia and Central Europe, but Sweden was really our base. Today, we are more a solution provider to these customers and partners. It's more a partner approach today. We have balanced the group in the sense that the business areas are more balanced in size, so they are more equal. We are working as a partner and we have a global footprint.
So we have a very strong Asia footprint. We have a very strong European footprint and we have a footprint in the U. In North America. It's not that strong. A little bit stronger today than yesterday since we bought the company, but it's still a possibility for us.
If we then look
into the into tomorrow, we are going for a worldwide solution provider to our partners. We focus on continuous growth within all three business areas as a solution provider, and we are creating a strong footprint on the 3 important continents for our business. So it's actually been a geographic and technology journey that we are continuously on. If we then look on the megatrends in the community and those megatrends being we see globalization, we see aging population, we see digitalization, we see shorter product life cycles, people wanting more for less, but also the community have a lot more focus on corporate responsibility and want to make sure that the products that they are using as a environment and that companies are treating the environmental and the people in a good way. And it's an effect, something on the top of our minds.
If we then look into our customers' behavior, we see that our customers more and more are focusing on their core activities. We see outsourcing in many aspects, both on production but also on development. Time to market is essential for our customers. Internet of Things, connected devices, connected homes, connected cars, we see those kind of trends. We see, of course, competitiveness.
We see also our customers focus more on corporate responsibility. On our side, we see that with our global platform and our excellent relationship within global segments that are growing and working with the technology transfer between different market segments, our strong development skills, our design and productivity and our very well established CR focus, we are gaining ground on these megatrends. They are affecting us in good way. Strategies and the key factors. Our vision is to be our customers' first choice of partner.
So whenever a customer is thinking about a new development, they should always think about auto first. We don't have the ambition to have 100% of their spend, but we have ambition to be top of the mind, their first choice of partner. We are doing this by having a broad customer offering, of course, productivity, the long term approach together with our partners that we are working for Lifetime, helping them to create a better situation for themselves. Of course, ethical and sustainable development, high competence, what we call local presence globally, means that there should be an Nolato facility close to the customer's factory around the globe. And of course, in the background, stable financing supporting this development.
Nolato is a decentralized organization. We have a headquarter of the group consisting of 5, 6 people, governing this 6 people, governing this group of 5,000 between 5,000 and 6,000 people. We are doing this by values and business principles that guide us in the daily work. Those are very simple. We are professional.
We are well organized and we are responsible. And the business is then conducted in a way that the management team are traveling around, having discussions with individual entities around the globe, making sure that the strategies are aligned, that we are performing in a good way and that people are able to make the right decisions. Of course, we have all these standards. I will come a little bit into these later on. But we have, of course, whistleblowing.
We have the quality systems. We had environmental system. We are part of the United Nations Global Compact. But as I will explain a little bit later, that is just paper. What you do in reality and it really matters.
The way people are acting and the way Nolato is acting on the market, together with customers and together with employees, that's what makes the difference. Now if you have any initial questions to me, please shoot them. Otherwise, I will hand over to Parola.
Okay. Hello, everybody. My name is Per Olav Olavnstern. I am the CFO of the company, and I have been with the company for many years since 1995 actually when I started. I am going to give some brief overall information about our financial situation.
To start, some historical numbers. The last 20 years, you can see on this page, showing our development of sales, annual average growth rate every year of 7.6% during this period, of course, including acquisitions, but most of it is organic growth. During the same time period, we have had even more growth when it comes to the EBITA. There we have 8.7 percentages every year. It has, of course, many different reasons why we have a higher increase of that rate than the sales.
But I'm sure one of the reasons are that we have been on this journey that Christer told you about in some of his slides earlier today. Going from more being a supplier to more being a partner and a solution provider. We communicate 3 different financial targets. You see them on this picture here. It's the EBITDA margin, which should exceed 10% and it's the cash conversion where we should exceed 75% of our EBIT result.
The equity assets ratio should exceed 35 percent. The margin, we have been able to exceed the target during this time period. Of course, we have been in a very good business cycle all of these years most of the time. We have also exceeded the equity assets ratio over the time period. When it comes to the cash conversion, we haven't.
And we have chosen to be part of growth possibilities during some of these periods with high numbers. And that has done that we have invested quite much in CapEx during these years. We have also got an effect of a working capital need because of the expansion, of course. And as we measure after working capital need, that has affected the numbers, and we have not been able to reach that target. Some financial trends.
On the left hand side, on the top diagram, you can see the development of sales, and the line is showing the EBITDA development. The last 5 years and the last 12 months in the red calendar. We have had good growth during 20 17 'eighteen, very high growth, I would say. The EBITDA has followed that growth as well. Then we can see a decline during the last 12 months, and that is affected by our integrated solution business area.
We have had a situation with inventory reductions within our VHP segment, which has affected the comparison compared to 2018. As I mentioned, the EBITDA margin has been on these levels on the right hand side. The last 3 years, we have been between 11.2% and 11.7% in EBITA margin, a stable level during those years. Return on capital employed is not a target we communicate separately, but we focus on that internally. We find it important to do.
And it's not only the margin, it's also the balance sheet, which is important in our different business areas. Except for 20 16 and the last 12 months, we have been able to be between 25% 30% when it comes to return on capital employed. Some additional financial KPIs. We have had high CapEx during the recent years and especially 2018, as you see, and also last 12 months. 2018, it was €452,000,000 We expect that we will have about the same rate as we have the last 12 months for 2019, which would be around €400,000,000 To compare, we have depreciation of about $360,000,000 run rate right now.
So we are investing more than our depreciation. We have done that for some years. But as we expect the numbers going down a bit this year. That is doing that we are well invested. We have good production sites, state of the art equipment and room for some expansion.
3% to 5% of the sales, which we find as capital effective, especially within our business area integrated. We have a good balance sheet and a good cash flow doing that. The working capital need is on very limited levels. Tax rate, the last two years, we have been between 21% 22% the 1st 6 months of 2019, even lower than that, just above 20%. The final graph on this one to the right is the net debt development.
The black line is showing the net debt to financial institutions and then take away the cash. And the red line is showing the same time period, but also including our pension liabilities and from 2019 also the new lease liabilities according to IFRS 16, as you know. As you can see, we had the net debt situation during 20 16 when we acquired the Swiss company and the Polish company during that year. We went down to just below €400,000,000 if you include the pension liabilities. Then we have had positive cash situation and filled up the cash.
And when we went out from the June numbers, quarter 2 this year, we had a positive cash situation of €190,000,000 if we don't include the pension and lease liabilities. If we do, then it was a negative number of €337,000,000 So with that situation, we have, of course, strong financial situation, giving us the ability to invest in CapEx where we need. It gives us the possibility to be part of interesting customer projects. And it gives us also the possibility to do further acquisitions, even if we did one yesterday that you might have seen. We expect to pay those about SEK95 1,000,000 for that company in the Q4 of this year.
One page showing more the financial perspective, shareholder perspective, maybe some small numbers on the top one at least, but it is quite high numbers actually. And it's showing the share price development one is then showing the total return, including dividends reinvested in new shares. And if you add up that timetable, the total return has increased with about 1300 percentages during that 10 year period. We have a dividend policy saying that we should pay dividends of at least 50% of the net profit that we have every year. And on the bottom left side, you can see the bottom left side, you can see
the dividend
development during these 10 years, gearing from DKK3 to DKK14 the last period. Okay. Any questions to the financial numbers and this part? Yes?
Can you maybe say something about the organic growth possibilities? To add margin targets and so on, but what I think about top line?
Yes. Our ambition is grow faster than the market. We will come into a little bit of the details later on today, but that's our always our part.
And for the total group, what's that normally really?
It depends a little bit. It's hard to say it over long term, but there are medical is growing 3% to 5% and then the industry is a little bit lower and integrated is more project based. So you have to add up the numbers. It depends on where we see the growth and also the volatility we have seen within integrated. It's hard to put a number on each year.
Yes. Jan Majek, Hernan will comment. On
the working capital, what
would you say
is a sustainable level over time? Maybe 2014 was
a bit exceptional, I guess.
Yes. I would say. And maybe we have had a very good situation lately. So somewhere in between is what we expect. During 2018, it was a bit of a step investment we did.
And Johan will come back and share a bit more what we did within the Medical business area, which has the largest part of those investments. And some of that is also coming into 2019 being paid. But going forward, as I said, we go down a bit as we assess the 400 level this year. And I think going forward, it could be more in line with the depreciation situation we have right now, the 3 60 level. But then, of course, it's depending on a lot of things and what will happen going forward.
We haven't planned anything beyond this year in more detail. So the $400,000,000 level, and I also think we have been in a situation growing the company. We are a larger group today than we were. And that, of course, is doing that the numbers we had some years back. We will exceed those, of course.
Yes. Could you elaborate a little bit about your growth agenda going forward perhaps?
I understand you grow externally to follow customers and
what's the brand going forward?
Yes. On the growth, we anticipate to grow faster than the market. And we are working together with our partners and trying to create the win win situation by increasing our share of wallet and making sure that we are growing on individual customers as well. So most of the growth is coming from existing customer. That is our it's been our target for many years.
And then we add a few large growing customers a year. Thank you. Any more questions for Omer so far? Good. Then I will go into the ESD and plastic as a material, recycling and a lot of
sustainable work.
Let me just get this. This is very key to me, sustainable strategy. It's very essential for us. And if we treat this in a very good way, in a proactive way, we create new business opportunities. So first of all, we have a long tradition of handling our environment in a positive way, making sure that we are decreasing all the targets of our emission, our carbon dioxide footprint and so on and so forth.
But I think the most important thing in this area is actually how we develop new products and which products that we choose to develop and produce for
our customers.
And I think that's really where
we can make
a big difference. And I will come into that a little bit. But it's all about creating business opportunity by greener solutions and managing our sustainable aspect in a proactive way and of course being accountable. If we then look into this, we have a package around the sustainable arena. We are following United Nations sustainable development Goals.
We are part of the United Nations Global Compact. We have our spirit, our basic principles, our code of conduct. We have the right management systems. We have long term objective around surrounding the sustainable objectives. We report Global Compact and Carbon Disclosure Project.
And we have a sustainable report that is according to GRE standards. So we do everything right in that aspect. But really, what I would like to talk to is how we develop and how we treat it in daily business. So our contribution to the more sustainable world, we are doing a lot of efficiency improvements. So we show the graphs later on.
We do sustainable innovations and solutions. And I think here, can do it better because if we always when a customer all come to us and ask us to develop something, first of all, we look at the project or product and make a judgment, is this something that is the right way to do it? And if we don't feel that way, we run and turn it down the whole way. And if it's a good thing that we think fits our way of thinking, then we have an ambition to always suggest a greener solution to the customer. It's not always accepted by
the customer,
in most cases not, but we should always be positioning ourselves for a greener solution. And that could mean different kind of material, assembly solution that is easy to recycle. It could be less material to design of material and a lot of those things. And I think in the long term, our customers will emphasize and see that this is the right way to go. They are not really looking at not all creating business for us.
Of course, we are increasing our usage of bio based and recycled polymers. We are phasing out all kind of hazardous additives to the plastics. We are cutting the proportion of falling raw material in the product. We are offering positive, stimulating and safer workplaces. And we are being a good corporate citizen.
This, I think, is very important. This is something that is guiding our teams when we choose what kind of products that we go into. Polymers, it's a very good material. Plastic is a very good material, but it's misused in so many aspects. So there are a lot of products on the market that should not be made of polymers or maybe should not be used at all.
So the first thing we are thinking about is this from a life cycle perspective, is this product that the customer is asking us to develop, is it a short usage? For example, here is a plastic cup that you use for maybe 5 minutes, then you throw it away. Is that the type of product that is interesting? It could be straws. It could be those kind of short life cycle products versus the long usage when you use the product for many years?
It's a big difference in the aspect of how it affects the environment. That is the first question. The second one, plastic in the nature, that's a big problem when the polymers or the plastic products end up in the nature, in the oceans or somewhere versus the recycle, the reuse. So that's the second one. Can you reuse this?
Can you recycle it in a good way? Then you have the 3rd. What type of polymer is it based on? Is it based on fossil fuel or is it based on bio based polymers? This is a growing area and virtually all polymers can be produced from bio material, from growing things instead of taking up oil and creating polymers.
And if you go this way, you will have a carbon dioxide footprint that is not adding carbon carbon dioxide to the environment. So what we think, we are aiming for green, green, green. But it could be in some cases, if you have a short usage, but you have a good recycling and it's coming from bio base, that's okay, because it is ourselves. And I think the discussion in the media around plastic is trying it's going to be a little bit more, how should I say, balanced because polymer is a great material, but it's misused in so many aspects. And we have to take part of that, making sure that no not so many bad products are put on the market.
If then look into the plastic and where they could be used in a climate smart, it really saves energy. So using more plastic in the car or the aviation industry reduces weight and thereby reduces fuel consumption over long period of time and it can be recycled. So it's a good material in that aspect. Also in the construction industry, plastic are used as insulation material. It's very good.
It's creating and saving energy over time. So it's a good usage of plastic. In the packaging industry, it reduces cost and weight of packaging, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and cost of energy. In the food industry, it makes sure that we reduce waste of food. So you have to look at it in a bigger perspective, the plastic, where it's used and why it's used.
So what are we doing then? The last tool is working towards a sustainable business future. We have actions for agreement tomorrow. We are continuously striving to design and develop environmental friendly solution with less material, less packaging and sustainable logistics management. We are investing in new developments and production method using recycled material and bioplastics, for example, coming from sugarcane.
We are by partnering with our customers in the early stage, we can consider the environmental impact throughout the entire product lifecycle and supporting our customers creating better products. And by using the renewable energy, the bio based and recycled polymers, we are cutting waste and reducing our carbon footprint. So we are saying no to support development and production of products that do not meet our environmental requirements. Then if we look on our environmental figures, this is actually what we are in our factories. We have a target to reduce this 20%, and we're on good track.
But this is more how we run our facilities, how much carbon dioxide emissions are coming out of our factories. Also driving down energy consumption, so better lightning, better efficiency of heating and cooling in our facilities and also taking down the waste volume from our factories. Questions?
Yes. Colin, Samuel here. First of all, what portion of the material you purchased is virgin materials versus
recycled, for instance?
The majority, definitely the minority.
It's virgin?
Yes, it is.
And in 10 years, about 5 years, what's your target?
We have a target to increase. But there's also you have to think that reused material have some today some properties that are effective under the use. So normally, if we are working in the high end segments with a high qualification, then if we when we have reused material, we'd rather sell it to some industry that are working on simpler technical solutions. So it's reused, but not maybe for an implant or a medical device where you have problems with recycled materials. So there are different type of products that can use recycled or dirty material.
More questions?
Johnny Ringstuck, HSBC. Do you see this green agenda or considerations affecting certain business areas more than others?
I think it's in different steps. Different industry have different, how should I say, thinking about this. But I think what we see now is in the mass consumer areas, we see more trends towards this. The medical is always a little bit behind. We can work a lot on design issues, but using non burning material and new materials is always a longer journey with all the approvals and so on.
So it's different between different.
How often do you say no to projects that from an environmental perspective? Is that happening?
How often? Maybe one out of 20 something? 1 out of 20 suggestions we might turn down? Something like that.
And what could it be then? What is the problem?
It could be that we think it's a short life cycle, hard to recycle and it could be done in a better way and the customer is not listening to our suggestions. Those kind of things.
So in the next 4, 5 minutes, we will dive into the Medical Solutions business area. I will
Palo Alto. First of all,
my name is Johan Elivelberg. I joined the Lotto back in 2010, so almost 10 years ago. At that time, I started as the Managing Director for El Alto Meditech, which is this site and the Boto site as well in Loma. So that's why I had some extra knowledge in the tour and did that. Since 2016, I'm
Head of
the Business Area
Medical Solutions. Okay. We have a history with growth. We started up back in 'ninety seven, 'ninety eight with the business Aeromedical. Yet we have been in the medical business since the 50s.
But I think at the end of 90s, we decided a lot of decided to make a business area out of medical to really focus on that. Since then, we have had a pretty nice growth journey over the years. I would say 50 percent of this is organic growth and 50% is through acquisitions. We have done 6 successful acquisitions during this period, and one of them is right here today. We are today a company with roughly SEK2.5 billion internal.
We are a leading development partner and a manufacturer provider to leading pharma and medtech customers globally. We work with, I would say, most of the big pharma or the biggest pharma and military companies. Out of the top 30, I think we are engaged with like 80% of those globally. You can see some of them in this list. We are seeing some years also globally present.
We are not that many companies that actually can manufacture on 3 continents. We have altogether 12 manufacturing sites, a lot of them in Europe, but we are also in Asia and we are in U. S, supplying these kind of customers. And we have a very strong position with the Global Pharma. If we look on the global pharma market, it's quite big.
Say it's like $1200,000,000,000 in total. That includes and MENTEL. Huge, huge, huge market and growing. Out of that, the outsourced market or the medical device market that could be attractive for us is roughly USD 250,000,000,000 And out of that, roughly 10% is where we can act, what we see as our market, where we, with our knowledge and capabilities, can act. The market is growing and has been growing over the years and will continue to grow in the pace of 3% to 5%.
Ambition for the business area is that we should outcompete that. We should grow more than 3% to 5%. And from the previous slide, you can see that we have managed to do that. Of the €1200,000,000,000 €600,000,000,000 is made by the top 20 companies globally. So 50% of the total sales worldwide is actually actually concentrated in 20 companies.
And those 20 are actually they are getting well, they are getting bigger, but the number is getting smaller. There is a consolidation going on, on the market, and it will continue. Other trends is, of course, this is long term business and is long term growth in areas such as diabetes and drug delivery and diagnostics. Those are some of the quickest growing segments in the medical device. Long product life cycles, even though they are getting shorter, they are still very, very Global supply, our customers, they want us to be able to supply that in 3 continents.
And that's competitive advantages we have now when we're operating globally. There is still an increased need for outsourcing. There are some other trends that plastic replaces glass and metal. And also that design is of more importance today. When you use a medical device, you don't want it to look like you are sick.
You want it to look like a mobile phone or some kind of fancy device. And that goes for everything, for everything, actually for content products as well. Other global trends are, like Kristin mentioned earlier, we are getting older. We are not behaving in a good way. We are not exercising.
We are eating wrong things, which creates a lot of need for new drugs. The drugs are accessible more on the global base today. Still 50% of the market is U. S, 25% is Europe, 25% is rest of
the globe.
But it's changing. And another mega trend or trend is also home care. The states don't want to have you in the hospital. They want to treat you at home and you want to be at home as well. So there's a lot of new devices being developed that you can actually treat yourself in the home, such as algae injectors, for example, or insulin tanks or patch pumps and whatever.
There's a lot of new devices coming out from the market. This is the generic sort of spread on medtech devices globally, IBD, cardiology and so on. So that is the sales numbers or divided by sales today. And the IVD, Cardiology and Drug Delivery are segments that are growing rapidly and of course are of interest to us. I will come back to those segments later on.
Our offer for medical solution is 3 divided into 3. The first one, it's product development and volume production of new medical devices. The base is polymer products or polymer steel, but we add more and more assembly and automation into this. And this is the future. There are so many new programs coming on.
There are many, many new drugs coming into the market demanding new ways
of yes,
they need new drug delivery devices to enter into your body. Of course, the outsourcing or in sourcing and transfer trend continues. That started up some 20 years ago when pharma companies wanted to outsource components. Then they wanted to outsource more complex automation and assemblies. And it's still like a lot of manufacturing is going on with steel within the pharma companies that will be outsourced.
And also more and more service will be outsourced when it comes to product development and quality assurance and so on. Development and quality assurance and so on. The last one is our platform products. We have some platform products
customers.
Normally, our customer, they own the patient. They own the product, the IP. They own the demands, what does the patient need, what does the hospital need. We come in with our knowledge of manufacturing and assembly and of course, Product Development. Really, really early with concept development.
If the customer has an idea of something or he has a new drug that he needs a new delivery device for or a new diagnostic component, whatever. We can assist with our own knowledge and with partners in this. We add all the technologies that we have within the group, not only within MediTel, but we utilize everything we know within the Lotto Group into this. And then, of course, R and D. Design for manufacturing and design for assembly.
And a lot of this is now doing is being done virtually or in computers. We will deep dive into this with HubSpot for 15, 20 minutes where you can actually see our capabilities or how you work in a modern way with product development and design and utilizing digitalization tools. After that, of course, industrialization, that's where you add CapEx, you buy your equipment. Operations, you have seen one of the best medical facilities globally today. And that is what we need to be.
We need to strive to be number 1 always. And the way we do that is with continuous improvements. Today, when we interact with customers, we can enter into this in different stages. Of course, more and more starts up early. But still, for example, outsourcing could start over here where we transfer equipment into our facilities.
And of course, this adds more value to our customer. They need to focus on their core business, which is not the medical device development that is often developing on new drugs. We have 2 units within Medical Solutions. We have the medical devices and we have the pharma packaging. It's roughly 80%, 20% in sales.
And the reason for having both is that we have the same
customers on the pharma.
Different ways into the customer,
customer.
And we do medical devices in, I would say, more or less all areas, but some of them are in specific interest for us. And these are the top five areas where we focus. The first one is drug delivery. And it's a broad area, but it's about getting the drug from a container into your body. And there are a lot of different systems.
Diabetes is, of course, a huge area. There are 400,000,000 patients around the world that has diabetes. There are 600,000,000 that has a BMI over a 30 and needs treatment. It's an epidemic more than the disease, I would say. And it's a lot of devices, a lot of insulin being produced to these patients.
And of course, a lot of pen system, infusion device, pump systems, a lot of new development going on, especially with the pump to try to achieve closed loop systems
and
so on. Now most of these devices end up in U. S. And Europe, or I would say almost everyone. The market in Asia is not yet established and that's a huge, huge market for diabetes.
Other parts of drug delivery and why that is in focus for us is there is a lot of new drugs entering the market. There is a trend going away from traditional chemical substances that you take in pills and instead a lot of development into biological based drugs. And there you need some kind of drug delivery system to get that drug into your body. Auto injectors are being developed with us and on the market. There are a lot of different patch pumps programs going on.
Of course, traditional systems also for drug delivery, but it's once again home care. If you can take an out trajectory and administrate your drug yourself instead of going to the hospital, that's what everyone wants. A lot of activities globally in this segment. In vitro diagnostics, it's one of the fastest growing areas. And that started up I think back in the 80s when AIDS was well not invented, but it was disease that appeared.
And then you realize you need to test the blood. And then this is the industry boom and started to expand. Today you do 7 different tests in every blood that is given. For example, not only for HIV but also a lot of other diseases in the blood. But today, it's growing and the technology has gone extremely far.
You can detect more or less everything from human body with just a small, small sample. 1 of the major players in this field is doing 300 tests per second, 20 fourseven, 365 days per year. And this will increase rapidly. And it's also that it's not only for diagnose, it's also actually for developing new drugs. You need to do a lot of testing.
And so it's an area which we focus and that was one of the reasons as well as we acquired a lot of fresh in Switzerland from 3 years ago. They are mainly focusing on this kind of products. Cardiology, it's also one of the fastest growing areas. And that's everything about your internal, your heart and everything. We produce a lot of different products and devices for this area.
You have seen some today very special technology for pacemakers, long term implants, extreme Another big area for us is Continence Care. And as I said to my group, it's not maybe a it's not a fun category to be in. But there are so many people that are suffering from continence problems from ostomy issues. And that used to be a sort of a hidden disease until 20, 30 years when new devices entered into the market. And today, if you suffer from this, you can actually live more or less a normal life.
Some 10, 20 years ago, you were sitting at home because you were afraid to go out and meet people. So a lot of good advice is actually helping people to get back to a normal social life. The last focus area here is pharma packaging. And here we talk about, I would say, high end pharma, adding technology that we have in house when it comes to tightness, for example, child resistant packaging. We work a lot in this area as well with sustainability.
How can we reduce the weight, the packaging? How can we work with green material? We actually have green materials on the market today in this segment. This is the share for Medical Solutions. You can see the same categories, IVD, drug delivery, cardiology, Continence Care, Packaging and then the others.
Some years ago, we were a component supplier and we were acting locally, local, I would say, smaller medtech customers. It was injection molding, thermoplastic, TVs and silicon. Today, we are a system supplier. We add on more value into the chain as automation, assembly, printing, packaging, wherever needed. We work with selected pharma and medtech customers.
We want to work with the biggest and the best, but we want to choose the customers. We have expanded our footprint. As I said, we have 12 manufacturing units dedicated to variable production globally. What we see tomorrow is that the outsourcing trend or the trend that the pharma companies need to focus on the core business that will continue. We will add more value into the chain.
We will offer more and more complete solutions. We will add electronics, possibly that we add drug handling as a phase as well, because pharma
companies are outsourcing drug handling as well.
And we will increase our course is of interest for us and in the end to be a worldwide solution provider to our selected Over the years, we have expanded our business. We started up as a business area back in 'ninety seven. We have one site in Turicot. Now it's called Novato Meditor. And they were mainly producing soft materials, not at all what we deliver today.
A couple of years later, we added our site in Loma and then we entered into plastic production. Still component based, we added plastic to the soft components. 2005, we started up in Hungary. And Hungary today is one of our major manufacturing sites for medical producing high volume medical device and being expanded a couple of times or many times. Back in 2006, you probably heard that we acquired this medical rubber.
And that was mainly for technology to get the silicon knowledge of this facility. And I would say also the reason to Hungary was actually we followed 1 of our bigger customers down to Hungary. That's why we started down there. Back in 2007, we acquired Nalot Servo and that was our way of getting into the pharma business, the pharma packaging. And that has actually been a way in for us and to be able to attract big pharma.
2,008, we followed a customer as well to Beijing, started up medical operations. 2010, we took a step over Atlantic, of course, expansion, started up manufacturing in Wisconsin or acquired manufacturing site in Wisconsin. 11, we started our technical design centers, which Christophe is heading. Today, we have a big design center here in Norway and we have one that we are building up in U. S.
As well with similar capabilities, mainly focusing on early stage product development and design for manufacturing, design for assembly, supporting all the different manufacturing sites globally. 2012, we acquired Novato J Care, which was a former packaging company in the UK, 2 sites. We are now converting 1 of those sites into medical devices, concentrating pharma packaging to 1 of those and then converting into medical device and clean room production. 16, allototref. To get into IVD, as I mentioned earlier, they are experts in IVD.
They are high quality supplier of IVD products for the major players globally. In Switzerland, I would say, yes, not only our company, but Switzerland is the center of excellence globally for IBD. And we also acquired Nolanda Stargard in Poland. And that was to be able to get access to low volume assembly, volumes that is very hard to invest in lot of automation. So that is the footprint as of today.
What has happened the last, I would say, 18 to 24 months is that we have expanded most of the medical sites. You saw one expansion today, but we have done the same in Hungary, when we've done it in the U. K, China, being Kontoor in the U. S. Besides the StarDart is actually now being rebuilt.
We are adding new cleanroom capabilities and we are adding injection molding into that site and transferring knowledge and equipment Sweden. And we also expanded our IBD plant in Switzerland. Good. That was my last slide from the business perspective. Any questions?
Yes.
So two questions, please. So the first question is, first, talk a little bit about the you mentioned the high end pharmaceutical packaging. So just really why is it high end? How is it different to our
sort of tariffs to small packaging? What I mean is that we don't want to supply commodities. We want to add our feature, for example, tightness. It's if you you're not allowed to get air inside the bottles, for example, we have solutions to do that. If you want special caps, for example, or child resistant caps, we add our technology around that.
And so what were examples of the sort of content in those situations where it's vitally important to have air tight?
Well, it depends on the drug. If there is a sensitive drug in that bottle or in that pack, you are not maybe allowed to get air in or moisture or whatever. We have systems to prevent that. And we have solutions to really reduce tight packaging, which is tricky. So that is what I mean.
We aim to do that and use our technology and our knowledge within the field of battery.
And second question is around the sort of I think it was Stargard,
and you mentioned that
you made acquisition for entry into low volume production.
Well, low volume, high value. If we are located in a high cost country here in Sweden, for example, and in several places.
If we
want to do manual assembly, it's very difficult to be competitive. If it's really low volume, but the customer maybe needs 10,000 per year or 20,000 per year, you cannot build a fancy automation solution. You need maybe some jigs or whatever, but you need a lot of labor, a lot of labor in terms. So that with the start of this acquisition, we can actually attract this kind of business.
Okay. And so Poland gives you the opportunity
behind this?
Well, Hungary is more I would say it's more of a high volume contracting side focusing on yes. So that's the reason why we start off, yes. Of course, the labor cost in Hungary is much lower than here and most other countries like Western Europe. But we see Stagor as the site in addition to Hungary. Yes?
So I have a question regarding growth. So growth grows at 35%. Yes.
Historically, organically, you've grown quite well above that.
Is it possible to just break down
for what is what of
the difference? Is it
the outsourcing trend? Is it new clients, new product? Is it possible to get a sense?
Well, I would say it's a mix of what you just described. Outsource and Trent have been very successful for us. We have been very good in attracting those kind of business. And now lately, we are attracting new customers or getting actually a bigger share of wallet at existing pharma and medtech and especially pharma. And we have been successful with the strategy
we have,
with the offering we have after year.
And that's likely to continue. So the story levels are pretty much very too similar going forward at sustainable levels?
Well, I would say more than the market itself. So more than 3% to 5% is the answer on that question.
But of course, you can you will find different quarters, single quarters where we have less because it's not a continuous just a line. So there will be variations.
But we see the growth front. The medical business will grow globally. There's no doubt about it. And we will be a part of that.
Thank you. Yes. Could you perhaps talk about your M and A pipeline within the medical segments?
The M and A? Maybe I will direct that to Or I don't
want to talk about
the M and A pipeline. It's right now, there's a lot of activity in the M and A market. But you know, we talked about this previously, we are very picky when it comes to acquisitions, and we always look for the best companies. We are not looking for just buying for buying. It has to have a synergy.
It has to have the right culture. It has to have
the right quality
level of the company because we will not just buy companies. And those companies, we know the companies. We've been working on them and we continue to work on them. And when they are for sale, we're going to buy them. That's it.
Okay. Another question?
Yes. I have a question to all regarding East Asia. You have a plant in Beijing.
I heard earlier that you've
been there for some years, but it's a low volume or so how do you deal with the advantages and with the disadvantages, secrecy of the company, for instance?
Well, how do we deal with that? Well, I haven't had any issues with that. I think we have been in Beijing since 2,001. We have all the experience of doing business in Beijing. The medical has been there since 2008.
So we are probably taking a little bit advantage of the integrated solutions knowledge of doing business in China.
But we don't have a technical design center in China. So if it's a completely new system, it's developed somewhere else and then produced.
Yes. Okay. Can
you say something about the selling process? How many sales employees you have and how they work, how they target customers, what you prioritize and the pipeline also maybe?
Well, the structure of the London is, as Chris said, it's very decentralized. So we have each and every site, the manufacturing site has their own sales staff. Manufacturing site has their own sales staff to work to support the local customers and also the local customers. So in total, sales I cannot give you a number, but we are many sales reps
in this.
On top of that, we have key account managers working directly for the business area, especially to support these big 20, 30 biggest pharma medical customers globally. Who is requiring one point of contact and where we need to coordinate business. If we have manufacturing in different sites, we need one person to coordinate and support the customer. So we have this global sales and we have the local sales working together.
On Page 33, I think you showed the 5 different product focus areas.
Yes.
And you also showed approximately how much they are. In 5 years' time, do you expect the split to be significantly different? Maybe elaborate on
that going forward.
Well, they were the biggest growth areas on the market is IBD and it's cardiology. Those are the rapidly growing segments. And of course, we will follow that. So we will grow in these segments and we will grow in brand delivery.
And in terms of outsourcing activity, is that the same there? Most activity is found in those areas. Where is it more broadly in trouble?
Well, I would say not in IBD there is not that much outsourcing activity. It's more in that case into drug delivery, cardiology and the others the other areas as well. There are that could be both outsourcing and new product development and probably more of new product development than outsourcing going forward.
Good.
Thank you very much. Then I would like to introduce Mr. Vlobacki and try to describe how it worked with our new offerings and how it worked with product development
I've been in medical industry for more than 20 years, working in different assignments from sales, business development, parent lead, new capital of years in manufacturing. Mainly, most of the time, I spent on the customer end, on the laptop. So back in 2013, I met Krista. And the chemistry was very good. And I left the customer end and moved into Alarmta.
Since then, I'm really enjoying being part of this great company. What I will talk about today is how do we create the competitive position in terms of product development, project services? And why is that important for us is, of course, we had those 2 customers, pharma and medical device. Pharma, traditionally, always outsourcing devices. For pharma, device development is not development.
It's just a
they can do also also small and more compared to what it was 10, 15 years ago. So, and also as you mentioned, the majority, the bulk of the new business opportunity coming to NOLAPO is really coming through new product development and then manufacturing. So for us to gain manufacturing, which is our kind of business model today. We need to provide attractive new product development services and product services. So I would like to quickly give you some more background about what customer needs are, the kind of traditional way of execution of those products and how we see the opportunity based on current environment.
And then I will also walk you through a demo case of how our process is actually working based on the auto injector we actually had to develop on our own just for demo cases because we are not allowed to show any products we are working with our customers. So if we didn't have it, I could not tell you anything compatible. I had a deductible. So as we do our own research on the customers, there are also other companies doing the same. So in this case, PE Consulting Group has senior executives for to prioritize the top concerns when it comes to the new product development.
And it came out as product innovation, reducing time to market, and efficient product development. Our key concerns for that. And I will shortly explain why it's like that. So in our kind of industry, traditional way of execution still today is actually development is based mainly on the brainstorming activities. There's a lot of work done like, let's try this.
And if not work, let's try something else. So it's a lot of trying, testing, trying and testing. We see, as we work with our clients, that a lot of issues are surfing very late in very late stages, which is very costly and time consuming. We see, of course, project delays. There is never plan A working at best, at B, maybe even C and so on.
So this is a big concern. Of course, over on the project budget. And finally, when we kept the design, it seems to be too expensive. So this, of course, is built on many loops from design, building samples, and then testing them. The only way to gain knowledge is actually to build something and then to test And it never works after 1st loop.
You need to have cell loops. As an example, an auto injector which can have between 10 20 components, one loop will be between 3 to €6,000,000 and time, 4 to 6 months. I never seen a project loop. So, FDA did also a research, and they have access to most of the information actually in terms of new product development. And they summarize this that where new drugs takes 12 years to develop in average to move a medical device from concept to the to the market is between 3 to 7 years.
And the average cost is 7 to 3 years. It's 9 lower. We still talk about 10 to 20 different volumes. If you look at the car industry, mobile And why is like that? Yeah.
Because medical industry is conservative. They don't want to change, and they still have importance. So when you look at the time, the lead time and the the project cost is is is interesting to see that when it comes to the lead time, the majority of time is spent on these continuous loops trying to find the solution. And then just 26% of time is really industrialization to get the product out of the market quickly. This is based on our experience, so I don't have any source to this slide.
So when the development work is done, there in 26% of time, because if not good, you waste a lot of money. And then moving back to some other design, that the cost will be very high. So no wonder that top executives say this is a big issue. They really want to address this as as industry move forward. So out of this knowledge, we we actually develop idea of improving the situation and helping customers to mitigate the uncertainties, risk, cost, and time has shaped with any product development.
It seems like a little bit low hanging fruit. And so what we really do, we want to get away from this one, this better empirical trial and error activity and move into that virtual environment and really use the technology, use science, and our experience to do all those expensive moves based on the science and modern technologies. And once we actually derisk the product, once we identify all the issues and solve them, then we move into the factory environment and make one loop on the real equipment, on the real tools with a great knowledge. So the biggest challenge of doing this is really mastering the skills. There's nothing else.
Everything is already in place. But it's very important to make sure that we have a good balance between analytical knowledge and empirical knowledge and our work processes. Traditionally, Novartis is created on the way to empirically write. We have a lot of experts, industry experts, which understand and knows industry processes like molding, like assembly and other. So we really understand this.
We just need to build this analytical team and competence, but we really utilize those experts on that kind of empirical level and introduce that to analytical work. So now we cross and bind those 2 together, and that works really well in in in the project world. So now I will give you a very quick tour of how we do a project based on the lava. It's it's our outer injector, which probably never hit the market, but we need it for for the demo purposes. So the work process is very simple.
We design, we mold, we assemble it, and test. This is most generic way. And today, actually, a lot of companies actually are doing and modeling, doing analytical simulations, but all on the cap models. Cap models are are kind of something you design in the computer and just represent the perfect environment. What we do actually, which is making us a little bit unique.
Although even that, on the virtual design levels, there are not many who's using this today in our business. But there are some. So how do we do this? Let's have a short look into the virtual design. The key in in every project is to really understand all stakeholders.
It's end users, it's our customers, it's the DC centers, all stakeholders and gather the data, which is important for our BDHs and and then cost of creation process. So there's a lot of interactions. And we as Nalato, we're not necessarily would like to be very strong in this area, but we collaborate with our customers because pharma customers, they still would like to own this part, understanding customer needs. But they are not interested for executing this all the way. But they would like to understand what it means.
So we collaborate with our customers, with end users, and we create those concepts. And this is a typical area where people would like to brainstorm. A lot of brainstorming and a lot of group power that some stronger people might influence decision making process. And we proposed and tried to break this early and see, do we have a physical space in in those ideas and solutions which makes it even possible to to get it done? Believe me, many times I've seen that people would like to fight mother nature, which is not the best thing to do.
So what we do here is we actually early on see in our injector has to move fluid. It has to work based on the certain principles, certain materials, technologies, and we can early on see, is this design at all possible to, to get through. So early on, we actually select the the capital designs, which has the highest possibility to to succeed, is not only in terms of function. We also need to talk, think about costs. It's easy to get something done and work if you don't have this cost parameter.
Then basically no boundaries. We can do anything we want. But in every business case, there is a cost involved. If we cannot hit right cost, the business case is getting really, really bad. So once we select a couple of concept ideas, we move this back to the users.
We test this even in a virtual environment and we get the feedback, especially on the things we cannot calculate like ergonomics, like user environment and so on. And when we feel we have something kind of attractive then we move into the next step and see, okay, is that possible in our manufacturing technologies? So starting with molding and see, as Kristin mentioned before, is this correct in terms of material choices, in terms of usage and so on? So we review all the machinias involved in technologies, manufacturing technologies, to see if it makes sense to move on. So some early simple test shows us
a
lot of information, and then we can decide if it makes sense to move on or we have to move it back to a design table. At this stage, it's very cheap, actually. We haven't manufactured any tool at all. When this is kind of looking okay for us, then we move and and try to optimize the part from the dimensional point of view, but also from a material consumption point of view. So as you see, there was red areas, although we have a lot of red in our logo, but we don't like red in design.
So we tried to eliminate red. And with a software which actually optimizes this design basically over the couple of nights, we can improve this and eliminate those red sections. And then we can see, okay, now we have design which will work from the dimensional perspective. And then we do also in the virtual environment measurement reports to our clients saying, here's the measurement report and here's what we can expect from this design and available technologies. If you want to have more, then we need to do additional technology development project because we are getting outside the boundaries of current technologies, which is early warning that maybe not so good to enter these areas.
It's going to be expensive and difficult. So once we went through this and we are happy with this, then we have components to our virtual assembly process. And then we take those a little bit, I would say, ugly, because in reality, they are not perfect. So they are a little bit not perfect like in CAD, and we test them in assembly process. So, and then again, in assembly process, we get the complete assembly and we break it down in some assemblies, define some key parameters to test on, and look in this in more detail.
And in this system, we can really go inside the design, inside material, and see how it behaves during assembly process. See all forces, see all parameters rather than, at best, today, take a high speed camera and look that, my god, something is going wrong. But why? We don't know. In this case, we have full knowledge about why it's working, why it's not working, which material parameters need to be improved, which design elements needs to be improved.
So early on, we are building a lot of knowledge about this design. When we're happy, when we see that there is a room for us that we can use these principles for future assembly operations, we move on and put together ready assembly product and move into the, actually, the testing. And the testing, it's extremely expensive in our industry because when we test, we need to test a lot of samples. So we need to manufacture those samples. We need to build the test equipment.
And the test equipment is very expensive for R and D purposes because it's custom made for the design. So that has to be built. We have to need a lot of samples. But also another thing is that quite often when we build those test rigs, produce the samples, then customers say, okay, let's think about product requirements. At this stage, when you invested in the molds, in test equipment, and you still discuss product requirements, issues.
So but before that, it is very difficult to force them to bring the the the discipline of delivering product requirements. In this loop, we say we cannot go any farther until you give us product requirements complete. So we will force the important questions very early in the process. Once we get requirements, we can do testing. And then we say, okay, let's test.
We do drug test, different orientation. We do a band test. We do all kind of tests very quickly and very comprehensive. We immediately see where we have red areas where we need to improve things. We can change test methods very quickly.
We can build new samples if we need. And when we understand the product performance, we move on and see, okay, what do we need to improve? So we see, okay, how the product actually performs in different test settings, maybe not a flat surface, maybe a little bit angled surface. You see some red areas. You see some damages.
You cannot see things like that in a real test because it goes too fast. So we can we can run this in a slow motion and identify what needs to be actually improved. So we implement some design changes, and then we go back immediately and test. We don't wait for a new set of tools until we can build this again. We immediately do design changes and test again and see how far we we get with with those improvements if we if we are happy or we need to do some additional changes.
And if you see to the left, it's still some red, but on the right end here, the design stop to works much better and the same on this side. So we can do many loops quickly, inexpensively and and actually come to, I would say, 80%, 90% of ready design. There's always something left to do based on the real tools. I don't want to eliminate this 100%, but at least we are taking out major showstoppers of the order. So when it's done in the virtual environment, of course, we move on to the factory environment and do the final testing.
But we don't expect show stoppers at this edge that stage. So this is really it. And in summary, why a lot of virtual design and prototyping here, as you heard before, we really eliminate all the design risk in the early stages. We can understand manufacturing processes much better. We have very deep knowledge about design, about materials, why it's working, why it's not working, what is most critical for this design in terms of design performance.
I think in most of the cases, we will be able to reduce time to market by 50%. Environmentally friendly designs, the government footprint is linear to the amount of material used in the design. So if we take out 30%, we take out 30% of government footprint. It's the easiest way actually today to provide environmentally friendly products. And of course, cost efficient execution.
We don't need those expensive tools and expensive assembly equipments and test rigs to get majority of project work done. So how unique is this? Are we really very unique on the market? This is not about flying cows, really. I think as Christel mentioned before, there are other industries solving similar problems, and we really take advantage of this.
So in the automotive industry, several times and find out that it's not working, especially when they have 36 months in the design process. So they've been forced to do this much earlier. So through our kind of portfolio of different industry areas, we've been able to to to learn from from other industries and develop this model for for industry. Any questions?
Crystal clear.
Yes. Sorry. So you mentioned unique in that it's been it's the process that's been executed in the automotive industry before. But is this process now the norm for all competitors within
the medical crisis? We are quite unique with this. It's not going to last forever, of course, as we start to market this and our customers, which will find out about this, of course, they will follow because it's addressing real needs of customers. Actually, it would be very easy to say that it's possible today because many I mean, aerospace industry is doing this even before car industry was doing this. So the hardware, the software, software, everything is in place.
But to put the people together around this get the skills right, get the work processes right. That's the challenge, and that's takes time. It's not like you can do it in 1 year to find this good engineers. It's very difficult.
Yes?
I don't know what to say.
Of course, everybody wants to
save money and time. So from that
Maga, how hard it is, a simple injector and so why do we need all this heavy stuff? Of course, it's simple. Of course, it's it's simple. And then when we move in the project and we run into the issues and we suggest them, Could you consider to use some of the tools we informed you before? And then the same.
Okay. Do it. And then we do it. And then it shows quite often in the in the meetings, that we can modify the science as we speak with them and calculate and prove to them that their intuition is telling them completely wrong what is the world of science and physics actually is telling. Because in those designs, the the linear relations are not existing.
We all would like to have a logic of linearization. More horsepower, higher speed, things like that we love very much. But in this world, the truth is in the double curved surface. So you need to see the surface and to see, okay, how the surface is shaped, and there is a small peak. And this is the optimum of the design.
You cannot see this by using a normal intuition. There's no way to find it.
That's the solution then. My name is Johan Avi on. I've worked for Nolant for the last 25 years. So I have quite some experience here. Mainly doing a position as Managing Director for different auto companies in both Industrial and Medical in Sweden, in Hungary, where we actually started up in Romania also.
And since 2012, I'm also the Business Area Manager for Novarto Industrial. I will talk about our position offering for our operational focus and I would comment on a few efficiency measurements that we do at the moment. When we look at Industrial, our average growth the last 20 years is 8.2%. But as you can see in the, let's say, last 4 to 5 year, that growth has been quite much higher. Part of it is because of the acquisition of Nolotti Traft, which has a part that is industrial and another part that is medical.
But we also have had a heavy organic growth of last year.
Can everybody hear you well? No. A little bit louder.
A little bit louder. Okay. What we do, we are a leading developer and manufacturer of products and product systems in certain market areas. If you so you enable base picture, it was the same, developing and producing polymer products and polymer product systems. But we do it for different markets, like the automotive, like the hygiene, like forestry and garden.
But then main focus from our side is, of course, as in medical, the customer itself. So we are not a broad automotive supplier. We are not a broad hygiene supplier. We have certain customers in those areas that we would like to focus on. I would come back to that when I discuss partnerships with selected customers.
I will also come back to technology where we discuss that. And our footprint today, what we have developed is that we have a strong base in Sweden. We have a heavy rain outside at the moment. We have 4 facilities in Sweden. We have in Hungary, we have in Romania, we have in Switzerland.
And since this spring, we also started up production our production in U. S. Within the business area. And I will come back to that also. You see a few of our customers.
In our business, quite some customers that we have there, they don't allow us to mention that we are their supplier. We believe it's because they don't want to tell the competition who they use. So that's a good thing then for us. But you can see well known named big players, some of them with a Swedish heritage, of course, since this was our home market and this is the market where we still are really, really strong. If we look here, we divide the business area in 2 segments.
The general industry that contains things like hygiene, where we do products for washrooms, both public and what you have at home. You see some products that you might recognize that is used in the garden and forestry business. And you see a chair also, an office chair. So you might imagine there's a lot of plastics and a lot of parts in that that not a lot of industrial could do. When we look into the automotive, our main focus is technical details.
It's not too many visual details we do in the automotive. It's high-tech details that is that sustains heat, sustains pressure, sustains I mean, part of the construction of the car. If we take our last 12 month sales and divide it into the different areas, I mean, automotive is roughly 40% and has been that for quite some time. So it's not growing faster than anything else. Then we have the hygiene.
It's 15%, 16% of this picture. We have the forestry and gardening, and then we have the adults. So that is more or less the picture where we have our customers. Then our direction and strategy. We are positioning ourselves as a global high-tech partner.
I mean, if we look back a few years, we were a product manufacturer. We had a leading position in Sweden, and we started to develop our position in Central Europe. We had customers. That was the definition, so to say. And we had a focus on technology to gain productivity.
That has been our scope all over the years, focus on technology to gain productivity. If we look today, we are a solution provider to partners and customers. We have still a leading position in Sweden. We have created a strong position in Central Europe, and we are developing our position in U. S.
And today, we have partnership with a number of customers. And we are really benefiting both we and the customer is really benefiting from these partnerships. We still have a focus on technology to gain productivity. If we look for the future, we will be solutions provider to partners. I mean that's our scope, that's our mission, that is what we are doing.
We will keep our leading position in Sweden, keep our strong position in Central Europe. And we will then have established a strong position in U. S. And our business should be built on technology, but also to be even more of a development partner. So if you look at the journey we made, I mean, we started up, had a strong position in Sweden, a lot of customers with a Swedish heritage at least.
We decided that we want to expand the business to grow it. We wanted to go Europe. We did that. We now have a strong position in Central Europe. And lately, we or we have had an idea for quite some time that we want to establish something in U.
S. And lately, we also did that. I would come back a bit more exactly how we did it. So we wanted to do this, let's say, expand our global presence to be able to grow even further. And the next step for us as well is to be a worldwide solution provider for our customers and partners.
So when we talk about deliver growth with customerspartners, I mean, when we select our customers that we want to create a partnership with. It could be an existing customer or it could be someone that we want to supply to. What we then look at is the revenue and growth potential. We look if it's an existing customer, we look at the relation. Normally, we have very long term relations with our customers.
But we also kind of try to look in meetings and say, what's the corporate culture here? Will it match with our corporate culture? Because we also have seen during history, if you don't have the same culture, it's very hard to create partnership and work good together. We also want partners that have a global reach. And there should be a geographical match, that's also a hard word, because that's also then beneficial for us to do things together.
And as I described in the previous picture, the expansion of our footprint, by doing that, then we expand our addressable market. I mean, if we are at a new geography, I mean, we can supply to another market. It also gives us the opportunity to have further share of wallet with existing customers. Things we couldn't supply from Sweden, which now suddenly can supply them from Central Europe or from U. S.
And then once we established ourselves and start to get a name on a new geography, there is, of course, potential for to attract new customers into the Nolato facility at that geography. So this is what we are trying to achieve when we create partnerships and when we expand our footprint. The partnership approach, what do we do to be regarded as a partner to our customers? I mean, first of all, we have to establish extensive relations on all levels of the company. It's not only purchasing and sales, it's projects, it's management.
I mean, it's all over the place that we need to establish relationships. Then we get involved early in the projects. I mean if they if we have a client in the forestry and garden industry for instance, then if they're going to develop a new product, then they will contact Milato, I mean, even before they start to do the sketches or have the ideas to have us on board from the beginning. This is, of course, there is a need then for transparency, honesty, long term approach and shared value. So coming back to the values again.
I mean, if you don't have the same mindset that we should really do this together, then it will never work. I mean, we do everything from components to finished product systems. Again, as early we are involved, the more we can contribute to supply systems instead of just the components for the apartment. We do more than just the product. We have logistics solutions.
We have the right geographies presence and so on and so. So I mean, we are making the life easier for the customer department. Because at the end of the day, our task is to support the partner to create the most competitive supply chain on the market. I mean, if you are in the forest and garden industry, there are more companies in the forest and garden industry than our partners. So and if they fail, I mean, we also fail because it's not our product.
I mean, we are really dependent on our customers' success. So this being a part of a competitive supply chain, it's really to our hearts to do that. And that is what we have to convince our customers about also. When we do this, we become the customer's first choice of partner, which is, by the way, a vision for the group. And as I said before, we wanted for quite some time to have something in U.
S. It would be good for us. And this spring, discussion started, of course, before with a win win situation with 1 of our partners. We started our production at the on the U. S.
Market and then we are prepared to take next steps on that market. And then of course, if you strive for partnerships, then are we doing the right things? And then of course, we're really proud to get these kind of acknowledgments from customers. I mean you can read it yourself, but for the second time in 4 years Husqvarna Group, best supplier worldwide. And you can see we got it $14,000,000 $17,000,000 and actually we got a nice price also in 2018 for from Husqvarna.
And what is here in red, for me, that's the most important thing. That's the best feedback I can get that we are doing the right thing. They listen to the customers and proven to be proactive at all time on all company levels as a true partner. The spirit to exceed customer expectation is part of the all employee DNA. When you get that from a customer, I mean, I'm proud to say that we are partless.
Then added value by production technology. There will be a few more pictures. I mean, you have seen injection modem. You have seen some nice robot cells outside that do assembly. We do the same thing with industrial.
And why do we do it? First of all, it's to support the customer to get a better product. That's, of course, again, our main focus. They get better quality. They get less processes in their own factory.
Yes, they get something that really works all the time. What do we get out of it? We get a higher added value than just doing the injection molding. And this is a sketch. It exists in reality, but still a sketch.
The injection molding machine, I mean, it could be 1 component, it could be 2 components, it could be 3 components, it could be 4 components. When I say component, it's in the same machine you can manufacture up to 4 different materials at the same time in the same product. And then you have raw tunneling. You can insert metal things into the mode to get bearings or other things from the beginning in the part. You can do welding together with other parts.
And at the end, there is a lot of cameras in the cell. And the leakage, which in this case is very important, it's tested on the product and everything is clear to go into the customer's production line. So
this is
not unique in all industries, but as Christophe said as well, it's quite unique in our industry that you really make those solution and integrated processes. Then current situation. Growth has brought us some challenges. We have challenges for 1 entity within industrial solutions. The growth was stronger than anticipated over an extended period of time.
And I mean, our main focus when things happen very fast is to focus on deliveries to the customer, And that has put some pressure on our margin. I mean, we will not fail on the relationship. We will take any cost it would take to be able to supply. And that we have done. And of course, that puts some pressure on
the margin.
The current situation, I mean, it's gradually improving. We have still very strong customer relation. They never suffered. And also, I mean, we see a better machine utilization. I mean, we have more time to improve things instead of just starting up things.
And we see then also improvement in the KPIs. I mean, we measure a lot of things to measure progress. So that is the short comment to the current situation.
Questions to Johan?
I mean, it will have an impact, but it's an opportunity, I would say. I mean, that, I mean, on the things we are doing in this business for certain customers, I mean, if it's hybrid, full electric, I mean, for us, it's still a car and they would need the kind of competence that we could provide to this business.
Yes. You
want to just elaborate on that a little bit more and just say what like what types of things are you providing to cars and it doesn't matter whether it's electric or combustion?
I mean, we're not only making engine parts. That's the first thing. I mean, we're making parts for cars under the hood parts, covers, things like that. You will use in an electric car. You will need it in, let's say, combustion engine car.
You will for sure need it in hybrids. So again, I mean, if you have seen a battery pack, I mean, it's a lot of plastics in the battery pack, and it's a lot of, let's say, engineering that has to be done to make a battery pack work. So I mean, we kind of see as much possibilities
in that.
Does your historic relationship with the auto OEMs still hold you in good stead given that they seem to be outsourcing their sort of battery manufacturers somewhere?
I mean, the battery manufacturer will probably not be done by the OEMs themselves, probably not. I mean, we have an interesting company starting in Sweden called Northport that will supply the auto industry and other industry with batteries. The cars itself, I mean, of course, there will be differences, but there will still be a lot of, let's say, need for our competence into those costs. I mean, every time there is a new platform for car producers, I mean there are a lot of changes into the products, but we can follow that.
Okay. No more questions for you, Jan.
My name is Krogon Karlsson. I've been with the group integrated solutions and I'm been relocated in Beijing since 2007. And no, I don't speak Chinese. You have to give yourself targets that are easy to achieve. And I chose not to learn Chinese and I'm very happy with the result so far.
But there are quite many Chinese speaking Swedish now. Okay. All right. So integrated solutions has had a quite bumpy ride. This is the nature of the business which we have chosen to enter, which has mainly been the mobile phone industry since 1997.
As you can see here, it has been quite flat. And the reason for that is that we I wouldn't say that we chose to have a non strategy which wouldn't support growth, but we were quite cautious doing a lot of investments. Why, you might ask? I have no idea. It's before my time.
Now the reason was that we have been involved with Ericsson, going into Sony Ericsson and now Sony Mobile, which is by the way the longest relation between the sub supplier and the mobile phone manufacturer in the world, which says something about our achievement, especially since they are now fully Japanese owned. But we have also been involved with Siemens, BlackBerry, Motorola, Nokia maybe a few more. And what they have in common is that they don't exist anymore. So after several years of thinking, I came to the conclusion that this might not be the best area to work with only. We are still in the mobile phone industry.
But the last years, we have diversified our business into other types of consumer electronics, we have put a strong focus on growth for our EMC business. And today, we have a more safe situation, which makes me sleep a little bit better during night, also during daytime sometimes. What we are doing is mechanical modules and up to the level of box packing, which is something which we are quite proud of, because this means that your customer has given you the responsibility of delivering directly to the end customer. And when the end customer opens the box, you self know how happy you are on Christmas Eve when that bloody electronic consumer device doesn't work. So that is not supposed to happen.
We also have developed during the years with mobile phone industry, the unique expertise when it comes to cosmetics. And this is not mascara, even though Christophe thinks about it immediately. This is paint. This is print. This is making the product look excellent and makes it stand out amongst its competition.
If you look at our customer base, diversified, of course, because it belongs to different kind of our offering. I don't think that Ericsson needs any further introduction, neither does Huawei. I can pronounce that in Chinese actually. Fitbit is something completely different. But all these companies are very successful, and they have a very good offering.
I mean, I guess you know Sonos, for example, Sony Home Entertainment. They are actually doing quite well days. Delphi, Harman, huge first tier companies within the automotive sector. And for us, it's not the same as for industrial. This is for our eMMC and thermal offering.
We have 7 production units. Our main base is in China, and it will be so also in the foreseeable future. But that does not stop us from expanding our operation in Malaysia to also have an alternative in Southeast Asia. However, from a cost point of view, there is very few alternatives which are better than China. We have divided our business area into 2 parts.
It's consumer electronics. And here you can see that we have diversified from the mobile phones, yet mobile phone remains. BHP is, of course, something that many of you know quite well that we are involved with. Consumer electronics, different kinds, interesting brands, Sonos, Fitbit, Google and so on. In EMC and Thermal, which I will come back to, we have our own brands, our own lot of branded products.
So here it says consumer electronics. And I already explained a little bit how this is distributed, but we have the BHP, of course, as a big part. We still have mobile phones. We have different kinds of other consumer electronics. And we have EMC, steadily growing, not least since we added one acquisition yesterday.
So as mentioned, we would like to a little bit get rid of the volatility in the mobile phone business. For those of you that are following our quarterly reporting, you might be able to make a conclusion that also our new segments have some volatility in itself. But that's that is the name of the game with consumer electronics. You have to feed the market when you introduce something, when people are prepared to pay the premium price. If you don't have volume on stock, then you're screwed because someone that would like to buy something like a mobile phone, VHP, whatever, they will not wait, especially not the customers for VHP because they would they would like to smoke immediately.
But over time, spreading out risk, widening our scope will make our stability much better. Also, what we have learned the very hard way, not least with Japanese customers, is within how to deliver in terms of project management, introducing new technologies, cosmetics. There is no area whatsoever that are even close to the mobile phone industry. And when we bring that knowledge and our way of working and our offering to new customers and prospects within other areas of consumer electronics, they are heavily impressed. So what was new in the mobile phone industry 10 years back, we can still introduce as something really exciting to, for example, Sonos.
The VHP market, we think, will be long term potential. And why is that? These guys are smokers, and they have found a much less harmful way so they can continue to smoke. So they will
not
quit. Looking at sort of the development within BHP, especially this goes for all industries, of course, but we have to focus on cost out in the supply chain, which means that it's not necessarily possible to translate number of chip devices into the same movement in sales because the unit cost must come down. And this is something for Automotive Medical that it goes for everything. But we have quite high purchased content in the VHVs. We are buying PCBAs, batteries, heater elements and so on.
And we, with increased volumes, of course, we push our suppliers down in cost only. Otherwise, we try to keep them up. When it comes to our customer, it's one of the 3 global market leaders. All these companies, they are enjoying all tobacco companies. So it's like turnover as a BNP of an African country or something with a high profitability.
And they have added that for many, many years, and they need, of course, or at least their shareholders who would like them to maintain that kind of delivery. So they are now, all of them, focusing on new products areas, so changing the way of consuming tobacco or nicotine. And of course, that kind of development will bring further opportunities to us. The projects that we are now involved in started up as a development project in 2015. We began volume production in 2017.
So far, Japan is the biggest market by far. And just to give you an idea, First of all, the Japanese, they like to smoke and they like gadgets. So this is like a kinder it's 2 in
the same. So it
has become quite popular in quite a short time. This segment was introduced in Japan back in 2014. And in this product, you are using a type of a cigarette. It's much smaller, but it's still a cigarette with a filter and a little tobacco rod. Normal cigarette, combustible cigarettes, is quite much bigger.
But from a volume point of view today in Japan, the number of BHP type of cigarettes represents 25% of the total volume. So in just 5 years, this kind of behavior or smoking behavior have changed 25% of the users' consumption in Japan, giving, of course the idea that these people believe that 95% and which is communicated by the producers 95% of the harmful substances are removed or they don't they're not getting creative because at 250 degrees, the nicotine vaporize, but you don't get harmful substances as you get from enormous cigarettes burning at 1,000 degrees or more. Of course, these suppliers and our customer are rolling this out on a global base. But in some countries, the legislation process is quite time consuming, but it's ongoing. And again, just to emphasize, the BHP uses tobacco, which is vaporized.
The vapor or e cigarettes is using nicotine oil. We have been slightly involved in that, but we are not now. So everything you read about, nicotine oil with different kind of additives to great taste, whatever have you, we are not in the U. S. Market.
We are mainly or the product we produce is mainly in Japan, Korea, Russia, Italy and so forth. Not U. S. And not e cigarettes. We might if we get opportunity to start all over again with e cigarettes, but for now we are not doing that.
So consumer electronics, what have we done since 97 or 2000? It feels like this is 100 years ago. But at that time, we had production in Sweden. We moved into China. We had sales in Europe and in China.
Main focus, mobile phones, production according to customers' specifications. Today, we have expanded our footprint to 3 different places in China, Beijing, Suzhou and Shenzhen, where we have 4 factories. We are in Malaysia, in Penang. We have added sales on a more global basis. Not global, but since we are focusing on consumer electronics, I mean we don't have salespeople in Romania, but U.
S. West Coast, Japan, Europe, so forth. And as I said, we try to diversify and we are looking for growth segments. It's much easier to get into the supply chain if there is someone who needs to add volume, home security, for example. We also try to collaborate with successful customers because we have also learned that it's easier to have rich customers than poor customers.
We are increasing our presence in Southeast Asia with sales R and D and increased production. We are focusing on further sales Europe, United States. And we also start up different kinds of collaboration. We design houses where we approach new customers together, supporting each other. Maybe we have some contacts, need a design house or vice versa.
Again, growth segments, connected devices, environmental tech, Internet of Things, these are the things that we are looking for. So the same map for EMC and Thermal. And back in 2000 and also after that actually, we were quite a very basic company in HubSpot in Sweden making components, pretty much for Ericsson. Components manufactured from conductive silicon, electric conductive silicon, which give you electric magnetic comparability in electrical systems when you use it as a gasket or a component. But this was pretty basic.
Then the management in that factory, the MD especially, he's still with us, he came up with the idea that we should sell the material instead rather than making the material and convert the material and sell the component. So we make the material. We have some supporting patents. We provide the customer with the application equipment and they use our material in their production sites. And that came out extremely good.
So with that as the base, we have added production. Actually, this is a little bit long. We started in Malaysia outside of Sweden. Then we started up in Beijing. Now we are in the process of establishing also in Suzhou because Suzhou in the Shanghai area is one of the main areas for the Chinese automotive industry, which means e vehicles, which means need for thermal management and eMMC.
Sometimes it comes out really, really easy. Follow the customer, have a good enough offering. Focus, of course, remains on telecom that we have added on automotive. And we are continuously developing new products which are a lot of brands. As said yesterday, we went to the United States, New Jersey, with an acquisition with a very interesting company, which we will come back to.
And we continue to roll out. We have a very powerful sales organization in with EMC and thermal. And of course, Internet of Things, connectivity, everything needs to be shielded from electromagnetic interference or high temperatures. Consumer electronics, again, fast growing. Our customers should have a unique offering.
It's much more easy and a strong financial position. And what we can provide is high technical competence, agility and excellent project management. And again, DHP, our customer, we think is pretty good. Sonos, they are pretty good. Sony Home Entertainment, they are pretty good.
So we can grow together with them. We also have a niche company, like I say, making small adhesive based components. The unit cost for each is not that high, but it's a very interesting offering to bring to the customer because you don't necessarily need to go through the front door. These customers, they have a very strict supply strategy. So they don't just invite people to the right and the left to do the mechanical modules.
But for a tape, special thing, laser activated bonding, something special. There's always openings. And by moving in with this company, getting a vendor code, which has Mulatto, building the relation, then we can add on offerings from mechanical modules point of view, but also from EMC and thermal of course, because we are of course collaborating very much. And with this offering, we have managed to find customers like Google, which are going extremely aggressive into hardware. It's amazing.
These guys have too much money. But in some areas, they are very successful. For this home Google Home Speaker, 1st generation has been sold in 50,000,000 units over 2 years. This is the kind of customers you would like to have, and they pay very well. Not always.
But it's very interesting volume. Today, we are involved in the 2nd generation. We are starting up production now, ramping up. And for these bits and pieces which we are making, we are shipping 100,000 per day. Gore, I will not try to sell you a jacket, but Gore's venting materials are being used quite heavily in electronic systems like in PCBs and so on to protect certain sensitive components from moisture.
Fitbit, number 1 in this kind of sport watches. Chummy, I said that we are not approaching mobile phone customers that much, but actually Xiaomi, they have been approaching us and then we cannot say no. And they are very interested in our offering for less laser activated bonding systems. Dyson, very successful. And I mean, you have to admire a company that can get people to pay SEK 3,000 to SEK 4,000 for a hairdryer.
Even Christophe would need one because he's so cool. Okay. EMC and thermal,
already mentioned,
but the important thing here is that we own this this product with our brands. We have a price list. We have the data sheet. People come to us and ask to buy. And we charge them heavily and say it's okay.
Tri Shield, Compashield, Compatherm, We are market leaders in telecom. We have a very good opportunity in automotive and in other growing segments. So from a customer point of view, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Huawei, ZTE and the number of contract manufacturers. I mean, this is what exists and we are there all over the place. High quality, we are driving innovation, we have thorough application engineering know how, we have very well accepted products, brands, high market share, I said.
We have growth potentially in thermal. And that is because we just started up our thermal development a couple of years ago. The reason behind the little bit is that at least when it comes to telecom, it's the same bias almost often that buys EMC, that also buys thermal. The product ends up pretty much in the same place in the product. And the way of producing the silicon is quite similar.
So it was quite the easy decision. In the automotive industry, we have learned that they need the same solutions. Of course, the applications are different. But already today before we had autonomous vehicles and so on, you have cameras, you have radars in all new cars. And all of these systems requires shielding.
And all these systems require some sort of heat management. If it's getting overheated, the component on the PCA PCA will collapse. And then the car will not. Well, you shouldn't trust the radar anyway if that happens. But it will not happen if they use our solar solutions.
Customers, we are not going for OEM. And the reason is that they are not developing these kind of things themselves. They are relying on this huge global first tier suppliers like HELLA, BORGH, Deadfire, Harman, Veoneer. And in China, we have 4 really good sales guys strategically placed in Shanghai and Sogou area, in South China. And we are chasing a lot of these new upcoming automotive suppliers, e vehicle automotive manufacturers.
There are so many. And it doesn't have to be a car manufacturer. For instance, the world's largest sorry, Volvo, but the world's largest battery suppliers for e vehicles is a Chinese company called CATL. And they are at the moment building a factory for BMW in Germany. They're also building in United States.
So the Chinese car manufacturers will rewrite the map for cars, maybe not next year, perhaps in 10 years, absolutely in 20 years, then you will all sit and dream about BYDs and Yealies and whatever have you. Besides this, especially for thermal, already mentioned about charging stations, of course, buses, very quick charging put extremely high requirements on EUC. But also split lights, LED lamps, digital billboards so many new applications coming up. So from a future picture to the factory built back in 1965. So or maybe a little later.
So this is JBAR, our recent acquisition. We have known this company since, of course, since many years, with not that many, E2C companies on the market. And we have been approaching them for like 5 years, 5 years plus to gain interest. It's a family owned company. As I said, very old, so it's a long process to convince the family to start thinking about selling.
So we have negotiated most of this year. It will of course be a part of Integrated Solutions. Yeah, not the JVAR. The transaction is not ready until we get some more regulatory approval from the related authorities in the United States, but we don't believe that this will be something very difficult. So when we look into this company and what they have, it's more than 500 customers, but they have barely haven't had any sales function.
They have been on the market for a long time, and their customers, they call to them and ask if they can buy something. They also have standard products. What we think is very interesting for us is to be able to cross cultivate what we have in our portfolio with their portfolio, bringing our offering to JBoss customers and vice versa, of course. So we believe that this has very strong potential. And of course, this company being on the market since 19 65 has a very good reputation.
Together with our reputation, it should be a super reputation. So we are very yes, we are very happy about this. We are very positive about this. This will be good. Then we come to the sad part.
We need to pay for it. So I'll leave that to Pavel Olga.
Okay. The annual sales of this company is SEK 150,000,000. We expect it to have a marginal positive effect on our earnings per share already this year. It is, of course, based on the assumption that we will gain these approvals and get into the company and company and starting consolidating the company. We foresee to do that from 1st November.
The purchase price is then approximately SEK95 1,000,000 on a debt free basis. And it would be an EBITDA multiple of 4 to 5 times paying this price for this company. It has a good profitability. So that is the financial situation. We intend to use existing credit facilities to pay for this company.
Any questions on those numbers?
I have a question with regards to the pie chart that you showed earlier with the customer electronics versus the EMC. So like in the next couple of 3, 5, 10 years, how do you see that pie chart evolve and the mix of the 2 different types of products?
I would like to have it look the same, not just bigger.
All right.
Yes. Because both are interesting growth opportunities.
It will change a little bit because what you saw was the numbers 12 months. And in 12 months, it will be a little bit different since the JVAR acquisition.
And again, these are consumer electronics. And I mean, 1 year can differ very much from the other, whilst, of course, EMC will be much more stable. Or is
it everything?
No, no, no. Not everything. They are using huge contract manufacturers for this with those volumes. What we are doing is elements to help with the assembly, like tapes and gaskets, ceilings, these kind of things. Bits and pieces costing maybe SEK0.25, SEK0.5 something each.
But we have a number of them, and the volumes are hopefully quite interesting. But of course, along the way, something might appear in Google where we can bring our offering from mechanical module parts, where we have a special technology, not just simple because these things are very cheap and very simple. So this is something for Celestica or Foxconn or those guys. Yes. Okay.
And what about Sony Mobile? I can't say most of your customers still or They are.
And they are stubborn Japanese. And Japanese, I hope that we don't have any Japanese here, but anyway, this is a good thing about Japanese. They are a little bit afraid of making decisions. And so it's a very long process for them. So what they have done with the mobile phones is they have reorganized.
So these mobile phones now is a part of home entertainment. So they are hiding a little bit uncomfortable part. At the same time, they are
in part. At the same time, they are adopting the way
of working from home entertainment, which is much smarter, because these guys don't doesn't make things as complicated as Sony Mobile did. Complicated means expensive. Because normally when we buy Sony Mobile, we are a little bit astonished by the price. And this is something which they tried to do something about now. Also, they are supplying Sony supplies different kinds of components for mobile phones too, for example, Apple.
And they believe that it's a great advantage to be in the business to be able to develop that kind of components. They also are very in frontline in 5 gs. And 5 gs is something which will not only be known by phones, it would be all kinds of connected devices. And by being in the frontline in that technology, they can bring that those things to other Sony parts. Sony as a whole is quite successful these days.
And they think that the mobile phone part is still important regardless of that they might not make any money. So we are hanging there for sure, and we are getting our share of the projects.
Can I ask a couple more? You had a slide on the prospects in China for these sealing solutions. And are those your own thoughts what you can do with those things? Or how
far are they actually
discussions with customers ongoing right now?
We have discussions with the customers ongoing. We are also working with agent companies, which are already inside in order to speed up the process. But definitely, we are talking face to face not only with the local Chinese, but also all these global OEMs. Of course, they are present in China. Business opportunity is great.
If you have a battery, big battery module, it needs around about 5 kilo thermal paste in order to thermally connect the batteries to this big battery, which needs to be both heated and cooled depending on the season. So there is a great need for the kind of products which we are making. We are not alone, of course, but this is booming. There are for some reason, Chinese government, they have handed out 480 production licenses to e vehicle manufacturers. And of course, many of these are just greens.
Most of them, of course. But these are ideas out in the small cities in China because building a car, electric car is not that complicated. Actually, if you don't try to compete with VW or Tesla maybe. But now they've cooled down this because it's been overheated. So there is a huge interest in China for this, and they are flooding in money.
So there will be things happen.
And the final one, how do you ensure or secure your market position in the DSP category? Because you're exclusive right now and can you elaborate on
Yes, but this is of course, there's no difference between BHP and those and other customers, maybe a little bit because they're a little bit immature still because this is quite new to them. So we have managed to build a good position by helping them. So actually, without knowing it, DHP is now using the same project process as Sony Mobile because we implemented that to them because they had no idea. And of course, we have built relations and so on that there would be competition, absolutely. But we have 22 years with Sonim Norway, so.
To summarize a little bit, we talked about the business environment and the megatrends, and we tried to explain how we can cope with these megatrends and benefit from them. I hope you've got an answer to that today in the 3 different business areas and how it all supports together creating value for the customer and for Molotov, of course. This was our journey. We explained how we took the company from a mainly mobile phone company back 20 years ago with a lot of activities in Sweden and some journey, geographical journey. And then we try to explain how we, in the different business area, are going on this technology and geographical journey, creating value for our customers and also growing Loblaw as a company.
Going forward, we will continue to go on the solution provider path, building strong footprint on the 3 continents and continuous growth across the 3 business areas. And we think these three business areas is creating value together by the technology transfer that we are getting out of the different segments. So that's what was on the agenda for today. Any final remarks or comments from anybody or questions? And I would like to thank you all for coming.
And I hope you thought it was worthwhile coming and a lot of attention, I think. So we're very happy.