Hi, and welcome everyone to today's Investor Days. My name is Stefan Knutsson. I'm an equity analyst here at ABG, covering the service sector. And our next company presenting is Prevas. And with me today, I have CEO Magnus Welén. Welcome.
Thank you very much. Thank you all for being here. It's very good to see such a large crowd. Surprisingly, very good. So we start with this presentation about Prevas. My name is Magnus Welén, and I'm the CEO of Prevas. So I will start a little bit about the brief facts. What are we talking about when we hear the word Prevas? We are an engineering consultancy company, to make it very simple. We work with advanced technical solutions for demanding industrial customers, to make it very, very simple. We were founded in 1985 in Västerås, Sweden. We have grown with quality since 1985. And today we are a Nordic company with close to 1,100 employees working in the Nordic market. Our strongest market is Sweden. Then we have recently invested in acquisition in Finland. I will come back a little bit more about that.
Then we have a large operation in Denmark, but also in Norway. So we are a true Nordic company today. Last year, now it feels quite a long time ago, actually, 2023. But the last year we made SEK 1.5 billion in turnover, and we made SEK 169.4 million in EBITDA. So that equals to a margin of 11.4%, which in our business, I would say, is rather decent margin. But before I deep dive into Prevas, we should have a look upon some of the trends that are affecting us, affecting me and you and everybody else. These are some of the trends that are affecting Prevas, affecting you, affecting me, and the world. It's a lot of things happening. These are technological trends. These are political trends. A lot of things happening. And one view upon this is, is it a threat?
What on earth are we to do with all of this change that is happening all the time? That's one view. Another view to look upon this is, this is possibilities. And this leads me to the tagline of Prevas, "Hello, possibility." We love technological development, and we see opportunities in the rapid change that happens in technology. And I believe that this is a good tagline because this is what Prevas is all about, possibilities. Looking into our vision, it's "Ingenuity will save the world." We actually believe that with innovation and engineering and the capabilities that we can provide in Prevas, we can contribute to make the world a better place.
Looking into our mission, it's "We co-create technological advancement for the betterment of all, for the people, for the planet, and for the profit." There are two things I would like to address a little bit more in this. One thing is co-creation. We don't believe that Prevas by itself can actually save the complete world. Of course not, but if we co-create, we work together with other people, with other organizations, with the universities, with the customers, also with the society, then we can make a major difference as well. One example here is we will now start up a research project together with SSAB in Sweden, Celsa Steel in Spain, Högskolan i Skövde, and three research institutes, and the purpose with this project is to actually build a digital twin of steel manufacturing.
The purpose is to reduce the need of carbon dioxide, increase the efficiency in a steel manufacturing process. By doing this, we can support and help on a broader scale than we do in our everyday business. That is a good example of co-creation, I believe. The second thing I would like to emphasize is the word profit. We believe in Prevas that profit is important because that is more or less the result of everything we do is measured in profit. If we have satisfied employees, customers, deliver a lot of customer value, the result of this, the consequence of this is profit. We talk a lot about profit in Prevas today. We are a profit-driven company as well as all of the other things as well, of course. What do we do in Prevas?
We work in two different areas, sustainable product development and sustainable production development. We tend to say that the products we support to deliver, they are physical, advanced, and connected. This white box over here doesn't look so impressive, does it? But it actually is fantastically impressive. That is a product, it's a blood analysis equipment that we have been developing for a customer. When you come into a hospital and you have sepsis, you need to take a blood sample, you need to send this sample to a laboratory, you need to get it back in order to get the right treatment. With this equipment, you can do that in hours instead of days. That saves lives. That is the most fantastic part of this product.
The other part is, of course, that we have been participating from industrial design, usability, designing the hardware, the mechanical, the sensors, all of the different technologies that are needed to develop an advanced system like this. Prevas has been participating in driving together with the customer Gradientech in Uppsala. We also help the customer with regulatory. This is a medtech product, very high demands, it's a safety product, and you need to meet a lot of regulatory standards, and we are good in that as well, so we can be a one-stop shop in that sense in order to deliver really advanced products like this. That was a little bit about product development. The other area we're working in is in sustainable production development. Here we say that our solutions are sustainable, automated, and digitalized. One example here is, you see, this is from steel manufacturing.
When you heat the steel, you use gas. Prevas has developed an algorithm for doing that in a more efficient way together with a research institute. When you use our algorithm, you reduce the volume of gas needed in order to heat the steel. It might not sound very impressive, but it is actually because you reduce the consumption of gas between 3% and 5%, up to 8%. And it's a lot of gas. It's a lot of carbon oxide that you use. So using our algorithms, these steel manufacturers, they are reducing cost and they're reducing carbon oxide emissions. So it's a fantastic product that we have developed. We are selling it and we are using it to improve at the steel manufacturing sites. And 80%-90% of the steel manufacturing in the Nordic market is actually run through the Prevas algorithm. Quite impressive if you ask me.
Looking into what is equal for all of these areas we work in in production development is industrial IT. We have a very high level of industrial IT in the services that we provide within the production development area. This is our market. Isn't it a humble picture? It's actually the world, and why on earth am I saying that we are aiming for the world? The reason is that we are working with customers working on a global scale with global competition, and they need partners that are on par with their demands, and Prevas today, we are on par with these customers and their demands, so that tells me that we actually are world-class or aiming to be world-class. Might be humble or not, but that's where we're aiming for. Two good things about the customers that Prevas has.
I'm very proud of the customer list that we're working with. These are multinational, very successful companies where we have been partnering together with them, some since our start in 1985. So we have a long-term relationship with all of these fantastic customers. And the five largest that are on here are less than 25% of our total turnover, which means that we have quite low risk in that sense. We are not dependent on one customer at Prevas. Another good thing about Prevas is the industry breakdown because we are positioned in the areas where we see the trend growth. For example, in the defense industry, we have a strong position in defense. In the energy area, we are strong. Life science is another area where we see growth over time. So in that sense, Prevas is well-positioned from a market point of view.
Then a little bit about the Prevas strategy. Very short, very short. I can talk for hours, but I'll make it short. You can choose to be the cheapest, the most efficient in the market. You can choose to be the absolutely best in what you do, a niche player in that sense, or you can choose to be very customer-centric, close to the customer, very adaptive, and we have chosen this. It's a lot of stars. The reason that I'm putting a lot of stars like this is that we have decided to be in the area between best and customer-centricity, and we have a decentralized organization, which means that our units, they have their own strategy, their own offering, and their own way to go to market, and they are different, and it's good that they are different.
And one unit could have like this software I was talking about for furnace optimization. They are the best in their corner. This is delivered from us to Spain, to the U.K., and other markets as well because it's a niche. It's absolutely the best in that area. But we also have units in Prevas that are extremely close to the customer. But this is one way of explaining, so to say, the success of Prevas and the foundation is that we are a decentralized organization. I will not review the rest in detail regarding our strategy. One important thing I would like to emphasize is that we work with diversified business models. We want to create good relationships, long-term relationships with our customers. And that means that we, for example, have a partnership with a customer regarding a traceability system.
We've been working with that system together with a customer for 10, 12, 15 years, and they are totally dependent on this software for their operations, and we support them and have a long-term partnership with them, and we have that in other areas as well, like manufacturing execution systems where you control a complete plant. Prevas has developed them, and we have also the responsibility to maintain them and have the support for those. Those are different ways of developing our business models. Of course, that drives long partnerships and also enables a better profitability as well, so a lot of talk. What about the financial update? What have we been performing in Prevas for the first three quarters of this year? From a turnover point of view, we have delivered SEK 1,155 million. That is a growth of 6.6%, 20% of that is organic, 80% is through acquisitions.
The market within the consultancy industry has been tough. It started to go down maybe five, six quarters ago. And then we have more or less a flat development, quite dynamic market, quite tough market in some areas, which we have, of course, worked a lot with to cope with. But what I'm very proud of is that we have been able to increase our prices even in this market. And that is good for the long term because we need to work with price all the time in order to maintain and develop our margins. And that is very good from that point of view. Looking into the EBITDA, you can see that we have delivered SEK 116.3 million. That equals an EBITDA margin accumulated for the first three quarters of 10.1%. That is not our financial target.
In the industry, it's still okay, but we aim higher than that in that sense. As I said, the market has been quite dynamic, very slow in some areas and very good in some areas, and we have also taken actions within Prevas in order to meet the different demands we see. I will come back to the Finnish situation in Finland, but looking into Sweden, we have also units where we have reduced the number of people to meet the actual demands, but we also have other units where we have grown and recruited more people in order to meet the demands, so it's very dynamic, and we need to be very quick in the way we work in Prevas. We have continued to generate a good cash flow for this year as well. These are the financial targets we have for Prevas.
Our financial target for EBITDA is 12%. We delivered 10% in this rather tough market, and also some challenges in Finland, which I will come back to. In terms of growth, we managed to grow 6.6% this year. Considering the global picture, I think it's close to okay. Looking into our balance sheet, our net liabilities in terms of EBITDA, our target is less than 2%, and we are 0.99%. So we still have a strong balance sheet in Prevas even after this major acquisition that we made. Talking about dividends, our target is to be between 40% and 60%, and last year, or this year actually, we made a dividend of 50%. Zooming out a little bit, this is three quarters. It's quite a long time, but in the global picture, it's not so super long time.
You can see that we have made a tremendous change in Prevas from 2017, where we had very low profitability and reaching up to quite a good level of profitability. You can also see that we have slightly lower margins now for a number of quarters due to mainly, I would say, the market situation, as you can see also if you look into our peers in the market as well. You can see in this graph that we have had a continued growth as well over time. Looking into the situation in Finland, we acquired a company called Enmac, and we took over the company into Prevas July 1st. It's a company with close to 200 employees on eight different locations in Finland. It's a strong platform. They're working with production and process development.
And also a good thing about this acquisition is that we also got new customers like Valmet, Andritz, Kemira, Metsä Group, and Fortum, and also a number of other customers that were new to Prevas. What has not been so good, as some of you or maybe all of you know, is that the start for this acquisition has not been the way we wanted it to be. We were aware that the market in Finland was weak, but not to the extent that actually happened when we took over, also before we took over. So looking into the first quarter in Prevas, we actually made a net loss for Finland. We had taken several actions also before we actually made the acquisition, but also in Prevas when we owned the company.
We started to, of course, increase the market activities, but also reducing with temporary layoffs in order to adapt our resources to the market situation. That has given effect. We can also see that. I wrote that in the last report that September was much more positive. Looking into the accumulated figure in terms of EBITDA for this company, looking into the period before Prevas and also the first quarter in Prevas, Q3, it's 0.2% negative for EBITDA level. It's not at all where we wanted it to be. We have taken actions. I had a question also related to this. Is this due to that the key people are leaving the company? No. The key team is devoted. They are owners actually as well. We have not lost key people in the company.
So in that sense, we have a very, very good, strong team in Finland. They are working very hard. And I would say that it's moving in the right direction. So I'm very confident in Finland looking medium term, long term, and also confident in the work that we're doing in Finland short term in order to mitigate the situation as such. We have a record high offer stock. We have quite good discussions with customers. Our largest customer in Finland, Valmet, received an order of EUR 1,000 million, EUR 1 billion actually. It's a massive order. And we already see that we get positive effects in that in Prevas in Finland as well. So that was a little bit about the situation in Finland. Short term, tough, medium and long term, very good. And it's a fantastic team that comes into Prevas.
Another acquisition we made during this year was Design-People in Denmark, a small company working within digital industrial design, UI and UX, and that makes our development house in Denmark even stronger, so now we have a very good position in Denmark. We also got in some new customers thanks to this acquisition in Denmark, which also is positive, of course, and as a summary before all the fantastic question, why should anyone invest in Prevas? That is a very good question, I believe. From my point of view, Prevas is a premium company. We work with the customers that have the absolute highest demand in the market, and we are able to meet their demands. We are delivering a true premium service to these customers. We have the fantastic team in Prevas as well in order to do that, of course.
We are well positioned in the major global trends like the digitalization, like the climate transition, like life science, and also defense is a very strong part in Prevas. We have a proven track record of profit and growth over time. We have a strong balance sheet. So we, of course, we are also open for new acquisitions in time moving forward. We have a good cash flow as well. Another good point about Prevas short term is that we have very good leverage in terms of now we have a lower utilization than normal. Given that the market is picking up a little bit, you will see quite dramatic, quick, rapid changes in terms of profit as well, given a more normalized utilization. That is also interesting to be aware of. And finally, we have skin in the game. I personally have invested in Prevas.
We had a stock option program that we ran for three years that was converted this spring. This means that the majority of the management team in Prevas, not only the top management, but the global management and also some other key people in Prevas actually are shareholders. And I think that is also important and good long-term as well. So that we sort of say all of us in here in the company share the same agenda moving forward. So I'm very hopeful in that sense for the future. And we have an excellent platform. And that was my presentation, Stefan. And I hope we have some interesting, challenging questions as well.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Magnus, for the presentation. I will start off the Q&A. You mentioned about the market. Our impression is that the overall engineering consultancy market has been quite cautious after the summer. Have you seen any new trends here of late when you talk to clients planning for next year and so on?
Some small minor signs, yes. But also this latest PMI that came a few days ago from the industry in Sweden was quite up also as well. So the indicators are positive. Talking about in the customer base, I would say it's more or less the same discussions as it has been, but very different. Some units, some customers are actually increasing. So it's not a clear picture in that sense. So I would say it's rather flat, unfortunately, I would say.
You mentioned a few end markets where you see possibilities. Would you deem them as really long-term possibilities? And also on the opposite side, do you see any end markets that you feel are really tough and that you would like maybe to decrease your exposure from?
We have actually decreased. One market where Prevas is very, very small is in the retail area. But that has been decreasing over time for us. And we have been working, for example, in UX and UI and also some software development for retail. And that has been very, very slow for quite a long time. So that is an area with very low demands. Another area which influences us on an indirect basis is the public sector. The public sector has been reducing quite a lot their investments. It's not a direct hit for us, but it means that there is a lot of IT-related consultants that are without assignments. And then, of course, they look into the market and say, "Okay, where can we find new assignments?" One area, for example, is defense. One area is industry.
So we see the major change in that sense in terms of how our competitors are working. And I think, this is my personal view, it's quite related to the downturn in the public sector as well.
Perfect. You mentioned a bit about the research project for making a digital twin with SSAB. It sounds like an interesting project. How do you deem the possibility to gain a decent profitability out of those types of contracts?
Put it like this. It's an EU-funded research project as well. And actually, it's funded in that sense. It's not just that we make pro bono work. It's actually a profitable assignment for us. So that is one part of it. But another thing is that we are growing our internal competencies in the steel industry. And of course, that will open up new doors for us over time when we build our internal competence. And that is very important for us to work together with the universities and also these institutes in order to gain the latest and greatest in terms of technology. And there are the upsides, of course, in the customer base.
Perfect. And regarding the profitability trend, which has been a bit tough of late, would you say that, and also coming back to Enmac, it seems like, yes, a tough start, but it seems like you are rather optimistic about the long-term possibilities?
I'm very optimistic about the long-term possibilities for the Finnish team. Yes. That company has been around since 1985. It's a very long-term company that we're working with, quite similar to Prevas actually in that sense. So they have a long-term relationship with their customers. That also they are acquiring services year- by- year- by- year. Now we have seen that these customers have been doing layoffs and they have been reducing quite substantially. That will pick up. In that sense, we are in a good position. I'm very hopeful and very, I think we have a committed team in Finland working very hard to navigate this short-term market situation. Over medium and long term, I'm very positive.
How does the ramp-up of the Valmet order for Enmac look like in loose terms?
We have very close discussions with the customers and also this customer. The thing is, it's a massive project that they have. It will ramp up during 2025. Already we have very good discussions with them. We also see positive effects in terms of invoicing as well. But I have no figures in that sense.
Perfect. I would like to come back to your M&A agenda, which I find quite interesting. You have both expanded geographically and you also acquired a niche design expertise of late. Can you tell us a bit more about your M&A strategy and what you are looking for?
Now we are on the Nordic base. We're not looking to expand outside of the Nordic region in that sense in terms of M&A. That is not what I foresee. But I see that we continue to find the gem, some companies that fit very well into Prevas. And we are very picky in that sense because in the consultancy industry, as you all know, what you buy is more or less people. And if people don't like what they get, then they leave.
So we need to find companies where we have a good cultural match that they add new expertise into Prevas, like the design people in Denmark. They add special expertise to us. They can also be that we're looking into other regions where we are a bit more weak. So we get complementary volume and also services to our customers in some areas as well. So we have a quite broad view on the M&A, but we are very picky. So it can be that it takes time before we get the next acquisition as well due to that sense. And also, of course, we need to navigate the situation we're in as well.
Perfect. I don't know if we had any questions from the audience. I saw someone.
Regarding Enmac, have you had to write off some goodwill or that?
No. There is goodwill. Yes.
You have a margin of 10%-11%. You seem like you are stuck in that. Why don't you have 25% when you are working with so very, very experienced and professional industries?
That is a very good question. Why don't we make 25%? I would put it like we're on that journey, I would say. But to reach 25% in our business, I believe is quite challenging, actually. And that is given due to competition because we have a quite broad range of competitors as well in the market. In some niches, I'm fully aware that we can reach 25%. And in some niches, we have 25%. But in some other areas where we have a broader competition, then it's a much tougher situation in terms of reaching the really high EBITDA levels.
I sometimes get the impression that this is a mindset within the chemical industry that we should have something like 10%-12% in margin.
Could be. Absolutely. I think it's a good question. It's something also we discuss internally because, as you say, it can be in our heads more than in reality. So I think it could be a combination of those two things, maybe. Maybe it's in our heads partly, but I also believe it's also connected to the actual competition in terms of both of those areas, of course. But we try. We try. That's for sure, and also looking into the areas where we want to grow. We have some areas in Prevas with very good profitability. And of course, the strategy is to grow in those areas in order to increase the global profitability in that sense.
We're running out of time, unfortunately.
Thank you for a good question, by the way.
But thank you very much, Magnus, for coming here and presenting with us today.
Thank you.