It's the 27th of May, and we're here in Karlskoga in Sweden, in one of Dynamics' main sites. We have a full program on the agenda for you in the room, but also for our viewers online. We will continue to talk about Saab's strategic position in the market and how we will capture future growth. We'll talk about investments, and we'll talk about our innovation and R&D efforts for future capabilities. In the program, we'll try to be very efficient on time. We have two Q&A sessions, 20 minutes each, and a small short break in between. We will try to cut at 11:30 for everyone this live broadcast. Without further ado, I would like to invite Saab's CEO, Micael Johansson, to the stage.
Thank you so much, and most welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Including also for those of you who are online, we will also take all the people here to see our production sites and the test center, which I think is also a bit of touch and feel, which I look forward to. If I kick this off, we had to start by looking at what is happening around us. Of course, it defines a lot of how we adapt to the market development. Obviously, the sort of uncertainty in how countries act today in this sort of rather multipolar world is defining a bit of how we think about things. We, of course, have the European sort of ramp-up after decades of underinvestment to refer to. Many countries are now politically stating more defense spending of GDP.
We are heading towards a NATO summit in Hague this summer. Expectations are quite high, but we do not really know yet how to look upon that. Maybe it is a bit different of the view on the threat environment, depending on where you are in Europe. As we see it, the Nordics, the Baltic states, Poland, Germany have, my perception, a slightly different view and are sort of ramping up more quickly. It is not a homogeneous European sort of position on everything when it comes to how much can we and should we spend on defense.
The big thing is, of course, the China position in the world on technology and security and how the U.S. is pivoting towards focusing on China and making sure that they compete with China in all different aspects, which gives us a perception that Europe must take care of our own business to a large extent in our part of the world. Of course, we have the Russian aggression. It's new messages every day. I'm not sure we can sort of expect sort of a quick sort of peace deal, or I can be wrong. It can happen tomorrow, of course. I don't know. It's rhetorics every day. All the aggressions we see lately from the Russian side doesn't give you a perception that there's a big interest for a peace deal from the Russian side. Honestly, we don't know.
How this peace deal and ceasefire is designed is crucially important to how we view the world going forward. Of course, we want to have a peace deal where we can help Ukraine rebuild the country, help them create a deterrence going forward, defense capabilities in the country. It cannot be that we end up with a sort of a demilitarized type of Ukraine, which is a completely different story. That affects the threat environment in our part of the world as well. The EU is incentivizing many countries to do a lot going forward. You've read all about ReArm Europe and the white paper. Honestly, the EU perspective is, yes, good incentives, the SAFE Initiative where you can sort of get under preferential conditions, borrowing money is one of them, but under certain conditions on collaboration.
The other part is sort of some relaxation on the fiscal requirements from the countries. It is all up to the nation still. We have not seen the EU coming together with a big European defense industrial program where we put a lot of money in a common fund to do things together. That is still of uncertainty. This is being developed and negotiated as we speak. We, of course, have many countries now saying that from a political perspective, we put security and defense very high on the agenda, which we have not seen for decades.
We need to think about what capability gaps do we need to fill in the European perspective if we have a U.S. withdrawal to some extent, both when it comes to quantity of things, but also certain capabilities that we have to replace from a European perspective, like airborne early warning, like integrated air and missile defense systems, long-range strike capability. Of course, the intelligence perspective when it comes to space and ISR. It is not a completely clear picture, as you know, all of you, but it is also something we have to adapt to and refer to every day. Looking at the increased defense spending then, one could say that, yes, I think we are only in the beginning of spending.
All the political statements which you see in the bubbles, if you expect us to go from where we were on sort of 1.4%- 1.7%, and this is now NATO Europe. This is not the world. This is NATO Europe. Now sort of at 2%, almost + 2% in many statements in the direction of 3.5%. That means from a defense procurement perspective, and that's the numbers we're showing here, defense procurement, material procurement, not the complete spending, that we are probably like 25% sort of on our way if that would be materialized. We have assumed that the part of the defense spending related to procurement is going from numbers like 20%, 23% towards now 29%. We have assumed in these numbers that it will be 30% of the overall defense spending around 2034.
It's a lot of spending still to be done related to many of the capabilities I just mentioned. I think we still see a long-term growth perspective ahead of us, but still to be defined exactly on what. It's a way to go from political statements, I would say, into capability assessments from the defense forces and then into acquisitions. That takes still some time. Also, the NATO perspective on the NATO capability targets that will be tabled more like this summer for many countries still is something that will be a different setup than before. I mean, it used to be like you have to take care of sort of certain defense systems going by helicopters. You have to do this, and you should take care of the underwater domain. Now I think it will be more capability-driven.
The countries have to assess themselves how they fulfill these capabilities that they will take. It's a big step up. I think the most likely area to be a huge step up is the ammunition and missile capability and integrated air and missile defense systems, which is a gap that we have in Europe today. It's a substantial growth going forward here. What is driving this then going forward? What will happen? How do we view this? Of course, it's, as I mentioned, the rearming of Europe. I think we have been in a very unusual situation that we took a peace perspective of most of the things for decades now after the sort of the wall fell, and we thought that we would have internal peace. That's sort of not from a macro perspective, the U.S.ual situation.
We have a lot of catch-up to do. It is about scaling up, of course, defense forces and having stockpiles of quantities, but also new capabilities, as I mentioned, where we have a gap. I think it is more of an urgency perspective in certain states closer to Russia. We see that in Poland, for example, going almost for 5% already, Baltic states also. It is just sort of a question of how quickly we can get there. Will it be sort of a European Union initiative where we all come together to do things, or will it be a coalition of willing? I sort of, I do not really care. It can be both, but I think it is likely that we will have a number of states coming together to do things together because we have to collaborate more.
If we want to create scale in Europe, we have to make sure that we align requirements and the demand in a way that we do not get too many versions of systems now going forward. I think there are sort of 12 different types of artillery grenades now, not compatible with the different launchers. I mean, we cannot have it like that going forward. It is also important for the European defense industry that we create scale to be competitive in the global landscape, of course. Then it is about the support to Ukraine. We assume, of course, that we will continue to support Ukraine from a political perspective. That sort of involves the defense industry to sort of in some way make them win the war.
When we see a reasonable peace going forward, we assume that Ukraine will be allowed to build its own defense capabilities, its own deterrence, and can work with European defense industries in a structured way to help rebuild that. That will take a lot of effort going forward. It is a long-term buildup, of course. There is the perspective of how will the U.S. now refocus on the Indo-Pacific and let's sort of how quickly Europe takes its own responsibility. I think Europe will create more and more respect the more we take our own responsibility also in the relationship with the U.S. I think the transatlantic link is super important. We cannot sort of create an autonomy situation. That is impossible. I think we always need to work with the U.S. and also have industrial relationships. We need to do much more in Europe.
We must reverse this situation from having 70%-80% spending outside the European perspective and having that demand sort of in the spend more European, I think is a trend that is absolutely something that will be valid going forward. We have systems, as I mentioned, that will take some time to develop and implement in operations in our part of the world. If you try to add this up in a sort of simple mathematical way, you can sort of add these boxes together, but then that comes times how big of a portion now will be by European. That, I think, is the new thing. If we've been on a low coefficient on that earlier, I think it will be a much larger one. All this combined, I think, will give us a substantial growth going forward.
Those will be the drivers for this growth. It is not the Europe sort of in a whole. It will be a little bit different depending where you are in Europe. For those of you who do not know so much about Saab, this is more or less my only slide showing exactly the facts. Last year, we were a SEK 64 billion company in revenue, and we grew almost 24%. We have had a couple of years now average growth of 23%. We have a huge backlog to deliver upon. We employ a lot of people, 3,000 last year, net up. We are sort of 6,000 net up two years roughly, which is substantial. That, I think, will sort of flatten out a bit because we work in a different way.
We will talk more about that, how we sort of optimize and make our production more sort of automated going forward. We are still in roughly 30 countries with the focus of a few countries, which we look upon almost like home countries, which I will come back to. You know our five core areas is now worked in four business areas: Aeronautics, which is all about the air domain, of course, and the Gripen program and the new version, EF version of the system, but also the trainer aircraft T-7. We have a number of initiatives when it comes to sophisticated unmanned capability in the air domain. Dynamics growing a lot. Görgen will talk more about that, but that's why we are here today to show you more sort of tangible things when it comes to the systems and how we manufacture them.
Ground combat and training and missiles are growing substantially, as you know. Surveillance, the biggest area today, is all about sensor capability, how you connect the systems in terms of AI-based C2. It is about passive and active sensors in all domains and also responsibility for the big platform, GlobalEye. We have Saab Kockums, which is the naval part of Saab on the platform side. Surveillance actually deals with the combat management systems on the ships and integrating everything on the ships, while Kockums are doing mainly underwater systems. You know all about the submarines, but also designing surface ships and doing superstructures for surface ships and also having the responsibility for unmanned capability on the surface and under the surface of the sea. That is who we are in a nutshell.
Looking forward and strategic direction, it should be a discussion as well, of course. We look upon these in a number of blocks. Of course, it's about scaling up. It's about sort of making sure we capture the market in a focused way. It's about sort of making sure we're relevant, not now only, but also in one, two, three, five years when it comes to our capabilities and how we embrace new technology and also how we make sure we have the best talent and all the time continuously develop our workforce in terms of competence and how we transform a company from sort of reasonable growth to substantial growth and how that affects the mindset of our employees and the management of the company. Then we have a cross few things as well that are super important to us, which I will touch upon.
That is the digital transformation that every company is doing, digital transformation, but it is serious now for us as well in terms of how software defined we will be going forward. We have employed a Chief Digital Officer who is here today. You have to chat with him later on. I will try to describe what he is doing for us and with us, but it is super important to us for being competitive going forward. Of course, this all has to be sustainable. We will be a leader, a sustainability leader in our segment working with defense going forward. I will give you a few highlights on each block now going forward here. When it comes to growth, we have not only since the war broke out and everyone woke up to sort of spend more capacity, we spend more money on increasing capacity.
Actually, for a long time, we have been a growth company. That is, of course, something that we are proud of. Now we have a little bit of a different situation. You will know our midterm targets, 23%-27%, Kaggle 18%, which is very sort of ambitious. We are delivering upon that, which I am proud of. I just wanted to say that this is a continuous growth plan that we will talk a little bit more about. How we are doing this now in terms of scaling production is super important. This is all about building capacity, which is one part of this. We do that here in the western part of the world in Karlskoga, Dynamics. You will see some of it today when it comes to our production site, huge investments in many buildings and production lines.
Since it is about explosives, it is not sort of one big building. It is many buildings with different parts of the value chain. We are also building new facilities in the U.S., as you know, in Grayling, Michigan. That is going to be a very important part for us to capture that market, but also being able to export from that market. The same thing for India, also a very big market and a good customer to us on the Carl-Gustaf. We will build things there. Aeronautics is about the Gripen production capacity. Do not believe for a second we are only focusing on surveillance and dynamics when it comes to investments. We are investing heavily also when it comes to the Aeronautics side of things and also the Saab Kockums side. We are expanding our capacity in Linköping.
We also have a full-fledged new facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, to build the trainer aircraft T-7. In the southern part of Sweden, we have actually opened up another site in Landskrona, not Karlskoga, to be able to sort of handle the expansion of the production of the submarine side. Much of the steel work is going to be done also in Karlskoga. We have partnered with important sort of U.K. company like Babcock to make sure that we can build surface ships using their sort of shipyard capability and to export that into the marketplace. We are doing a lot here. It is not only about building new buildings and sort of repeating what we have always done. This is maybe the most important part, that we have to do it in a different way.
I wish we could be at several sort of sites at the same time so we could virtually transfer ourselves to other sites because we have a completely automated facility now in Linköping doing the tubes for the weapon systems you saw downstairs yesterday evening, which is we have not expanded in terms of personnel at all, rather the opposite. Now we can have a completely different pace of building the tubes for our different systems like NLAW and 84mm and Carl-Gustaf in a way that we could not do before. We are doing things like, yes, we have to because of the requirement on delivery times. We are sort of duplicating a bit of what we are doing today, but adding robotics where we can. Then we rethink everything also.
We redesign certain things to be able to do it completely in an automated way going forward. We have to do both at the same time because otherwise it takes a while to start a new factory. I mean, that's like two, three years. We have to continue to deliver and ramp up capacity. We have to do this in both ways going forward. It's also about redesigning to do automation, but it's also to automate what we can already in existing facilities. Supply chain is probably the one thing that we see now in the global context that is being much discussed because it's not only about us as a prime and other primes scaling up. We might have the financial muscles to do that, but the bottlenecks are probably in the supply chain.
Sometimes we have to help them invest to be able to sort of grow with us. The ecosystem on how we do things, that is extremely important. I mean, we have to look upon this from a regional perspective. We try to regionalize this as much as possible to have control of the supply chain. You see that quite a big part of the supply chain is in Sweden still. Here we have been lucky to have a big portion of our supply chain around our ground combat and missile perspective. This includes, of course, indirect procurement also. This is not only material production. It looks a bit sort of substantial to be so much Swedish. If you would look on the material part of it, I think it will be slightly less sort of connected to Sweden.
Still, it's important to regionalize, which we do in the U.S., which we do in Sweden. That may be the biggest sort of step we take. Yes, we do think about redundancy. Honestly, I mean, in certain parts where we have volumes, we can afford and have the luxury of having several suppliers to choose from and having them certified and qualified. In many cases, it's a big step to certify and qualify the new supplier for our type of systems and products. You can't have that everywhere, but we're looking into that, of course. We build, honestly, a bit more stock because we need to have resilience if something happens going forward. This is an area where we put lots of effort now as we speak. Let's go to market then.
I just want to underline, we still focus a lot on our main focus areas, which is air domain, the advanced weapon systems, sensors, command and control, and underwater systems. I'm not saying that they will look exactly the same going forward. The technology will develop these areas into having new office, of course. It will be autonomous systems in many of these areas that we haven't had before. I mean, unmanned intelligence systems that can either work on their own in a swarm type of technology setup or man-on-man teaming. That's an important part. We are extremely well positioned, I must say, when it comes to our portfolio. I think if you look at defense companies, there are few companies that have the multi-domain potential in actually combining systems and integrating systems the way we have. We have platforms, substantial platforms.
We have the products, the important ones in the vertical integration, what we do. And we have the connectivity in terms of connecting these things to AI-based C2, command and control. This is extremely good when it comes to the position on the portfolio. If you look at what happened during the last two, three years, the market has grown maybe like, I mean, the overall world market like 9% maybe. Our segment, it's difficult to sort of extract exactly our segments, but that has grown a bit more, maybe 11% CAGR, over these two, three years. We did grow then 23%. Going forward, all the data we can find, and you probably have even more data than I have, but we're trying, we see that there is a continuous growth going forward.
If you look upon the same segment in the world, still around 9%-10% growth. We will absolutely grow more than that because we are also in a European perspective having that potential. That is sort of from the portfolio perspective, a very good position. If you look at the market perspective, then we focus on, of course, you can divide this in different ways, but we tend to look upon it from a NATO European perspective, which is important to us. We have, during the last sort of two years now, 2023, 2024, outpaced our key markets when it comes to that. If the growth has been a certain number, the gray bar here, we have grown more. That is actually true for all the focus markets that we have, including Sweden.
When we have our hubs, what I call the many solves , where we build a portion of our capability with everything, where we invest in R&D, where we have marketing, of course, but also development and production, that is what we have in the U.S., Germany, U.K., and Australia. We still outpace sort of what has happened during these years now, looking back 2023 and 2024. The market growth perspective is also very good for us. If you think about the future then, yeah, I do not know exactly what will happen in the Hague Summit, but I think everyone is discussing sort of beyond 3%. It could be more. We do not know yet. I will definitely be there to sort of make my perception of an assessment of what is going to happen. That will mean substantial sort of CAGR going forward in terms of spend for the countries.
We tried earlier in that picture to show what 3.5% means from a defense procurement perspective in the European NATO. You know, the Swedish government have stated 3.5%, which is adding over time up until 2030, roughly SEK 300 billion, which is substantial. It has not been defined yet. In June, I think they will start looking at and telling more specifically exactly what capabilities those money will be spent upon. That is very much connected to our NATO targets that we will get. That is going to take a lot of money, I think, for Sweden to sort of align ourselves and implement the NATO capability targets. You saw the overall sort of bill now from the U.S. perspective, huge spending going forward. Even though the debt is rather high in that country, they continue to spend on defense.
We still have a strong position in the U.S., and we are growing in the U.S.. Remember, we have important systems that they depend on us performing also in the U.S. There is much talk about will U.S. allow us to use components, engines for the Gripen and so forth. For me, it is not a one-way discussion. We also have things that are super important to them, which they use in their defense capabilities going forward. We are going to help train every U.S. fighter pilot going forward. We have sensor systems that make their big platforms work. If we are not performing, they cannot make it. We have a number of things in their context, which is important to them. Germany, we have been not lucky.
We have been skillfully lucky to sort of involve ourselves in things like taking care of the frigates, one, two, three, as they are called, in terms of refurbishing them and adding all the new systems. We are a big player now on the naval side in Germany and building sites in Germany to do this, both for combat management systems, but also for electronic warfare. We are in the air domain on the Eurofighter with our partner Helsing and Airbus Defence . We have a huge sort of presence also on the naval side in Germany. U.K. is also saying they're going to spend more. I mean, Germany just lately, last week, is really stepping up and talking about sort of 3.5% and maybe even 5%. You have seen the numbers in Germany. That is huge. It is a big sort of transformation happening in Germany.
But also in that country, we're not 100% sure what will the spend be upon. That is a bit of time before we see that. U.K., maybe not sort of the best economy, but they are also ramping up. The question is more like how far can they go because they really want to ramp up from 2.5% to 3% and maybe beyond. Also Australia, where we are selected as the supplier of all combat management systems for the naval ships. We have more than 1,000 people in Australia working that as we speak. Extremely well positioned in our markets as well. That is sort of my basic message. You cannot do this on your own, as I have stated before. There must be more collaboration. I just wanted to underline that we are a collaborative company.
We cannot do what we want to do only from a Swedish perspective. We will not even find all the engineers we need in the Swedish perspective to do what we need to do. We do not have all the capabilities. We partner, of course, because we need strength. We need the market penetration, but sometimes also technology, of course, that we cannot sort of spend money on developing ourselves completely. These are a number of examples of companies we work with. I mean, we have great partnerships also on the Gripen, as you know, with GKN on the engine side. On the missile side, we have extremely good relationships with Diehl in Germany, also MBDA. I must say MBDA is probably one role model for how I hope that we will see defense companies evolve over time, being more pan-European.
My view on consolidation and this fragmentation discussion is probably that, okay, if we can align requirements and demand, if there are some incentives to support that from the EU perspective or coalition of willing countries, you will see partnerships, you will see joint ventures, and eventually, potentially a bit of consolidation. That is, in my head, the way it has to develop. We have fantastic relationships in the U.S. on the Northrop Grumman, for example, on the sensor side. Boeing, I mentioned on the trainer aircraft. Babcock, I mentioned also on the naval side for building ships. That is not only for the Swedish sort of new Luleå class. We hope that that will be the case. It is also for the export market.
We have started to partnering, and we have, as you know, a stake with a new tech company, an AI company called Helsing in Germany. We both have an equity stake, a small one in that company, but we have a partnership with them on how we use AI agents in our systems going forward. This is something we work very diligently, I must say. On the M&A side, I know this is a busy slide. I just want to say a couple of things on this. M&A is a portion of our growth journey. I know you think we have not done a big one for a while, but we have done a few smaller ones that are super important to us.
We do them from a perspective that either we want to sort of embrace new technology, or we need a market position, or we can build something of a bigger system together with them. The ones you see here, we've talked about before. CrowdAI is a part of our hub for innovation in the U.S. in California. They are an AI company which are extremely good. Blueberry is a sort of, I would say, a test platform type of company where we can test a number of things, a rapid prototyping type of company we can work with. Helsing is purely AI and software-defined systems. We're working now with Radionix, a skillful company in Ukraine on sensor technology and defense electronics. We hope we will take the steps to actually work with them more tightly going forward, also inside Ukraine.
That depends, of course, on the development. We have quite a few sort of things in the pipeline, and I wish I could sort of tell you about we're looking at that in this company. Some of them are a little bit bigger, but we are roughly sort of working with, depending on where you are in the pipeline, 25-ish type of objects and more sort of serious around five sort of objects that we look into more diligently. I just want to say this is still extremely important to us. Future capabilities, I think you know that our focus here is on the in the air domain is a lot about the autonomy perspective.
I would not say we will be the company that will build sort of the smaller drones, less sophisticated, but we are definitely now developing a new, a new more sophisticated platform that you can call a collaborative combat aircraft, a UCAV, or a Loyal Wingman. We are doing that within the Swedish sort of investment on future combat air systems. We have our own program, and we are also investing in that. Could be a partnership going forward to create the market perspective, super important to us. We are also, of course, doing swarm technology, and we launched the ginad project. Apparently, the ginad is a certain type of mosquito that I have no clue what it is, but it is maybe reflecting what we are doing.
Swarm technology with sort of less sophisticated, we're agnostic when it comes to the drones as such, but the important thing is the AI-based C2 and how intelligent the swarm can be and how easy it is to use from the operator side. Conscripts must be able to say, go and survey that area and just draw it on the map, and the whole system just flies away and performs that. Of course, it's still a lot about how do you make sure that you cover everything with sensors. We have delivered now really compact passive sensors, which we call Sirius Compact. We built a new facility in Finland to manufacture them. They can be on the land side, on sort of on the ground side, just on a pole, or they can be on a drone in the air domain as well.
We continue, of course, to deliver things like counter UAS systems. I think you will see sort of how it looks like a bit when we go to the test center later on. It is all about autonomous things under the water and on the surface. We said in the market, capital market there, I think in 2023, that we would increase our spending embracing new technology with SEK 1 billion going forward. Now that is more than doubled in our plan going forward. We spend a lot of money on this now, and we have to, to be relevant. I think, do we have time for a short, short film on the ginad thing? You will have a sort of a little bit of a feeling of what that is.
Autonomous drone swarms gather and deliver accurate, real-time intelligence on enemy size, position, and equipment. They adapt seamlessly to various environments. Integrated with ground and air units, these drones enable rapid and precise operations, reducing the risk of friendly casualties. High-resolution imagery combined with AI-driven analysis provides commanders with immediate, actionable insights, enabling faster and more precise decision-making. Software-driven combat capabilities offer unparalleled flexibility and adaptability, allowing continuous updates to counter emerging threats. This dynamic development cycle ensures that the system remains effective and relevant in an ever-changing operational environment.
The thing is, as I said, that it's not a drone pilot needed or anything like that. We have it in operations already. Conscripts can actually use an iPad to draw sort of an area which you want to survey.
If something happens, you lose one or two of these drones, they will just reorganize themselves and continue to perform the missions. It is an intelligence system. It is not flying A to B and then back. It is a completely different setup. Conscious of time, I push on. This is not unimportant. This is really important. I will not sort of dig into every applicant we had during 2024. I mean, it is fascinating to see that more than 200,000 people actually wanted to have a job at Saab last year. I think it was 74,000 people that applied for a job at Saab this first quarter. That is great to see, and that adds lots of important talent to our already fantastic workforce going forward. The big thing I think now that we are focusing on is the culture of who we are.
It's easy to say for me as a leader of the company, then go and think and go and rethink, have a growth mindset. That is not sort of done like this in a week's time. This is a sort of a business where you're not really used to take huge risks. That goes not only for us, that goes for our customer side and acquisition authorities. We have no time. We have to push hard on this. It is actually not possible to grow a company the way we do without delegating a lot. It cannot be managed from corporate management in detail. We have to find a way of having people taking big responsibilities, and they can, and they must dare to take decisions. They must dare to take risk and fail and try again and drive change all the time.
That is something we work really diligently upon now happening. I'm really proud of the development so far. The next thing is maybe one of the most important things that we are now in the process of implementing. That is, how shall I put it? I think the business model in our type of business will change over time. There will always be platforms, of course, but so much will be software-defined, meaning that you have to build your software in a way that we have not maybe done before in different architecture, but it must be upgradable continuously. You have to start thinking about what you want to give the customer in terms of how much can you do only using software. That is also sort of a transformation that is substantial.
Of course, it will be cloud-based, and it will be sort of, we will not focus on sort of all the nitty-gritty details in how you build software, but rather the applications going forward. To be proactive and actually have something that can deliver a capability where we have invested, but we can do a lot of that in software, is going to be super important to us going forward. It must be easier to adopt. It must be something that can change. You see the war in Ukraine. I mean, only the EW battle between sort of how much can be jammed and how you have to adapt your systems every two weeks. That is something you have to proactively be working on. You can only do it by changing your software if you want to do it quickly. That means that the business model has to change.
The customer must sort of support a setup where you, yeah, you buy something, but you buy it from a subscription model. Much like you buy your hardware gadget today, you do not expect that to be completely the same the next few months. You get software updates. It will be the same in our type of environment going forward. It will be data-driven. It will be AI-driven. We now consolidate this into a direction where we will be much more efficient building software going forward. If you want to be AI-driven, you have to have compute capacity. That is why we now are a part investor in the NVIDIA setup of a GPU center in Sweden together with other industries in Sweden. I think that is super important to have a sovereign capability to have your models being to work with your large language models with lots of data.
You have to have compute. Otherwise, you lose your AI engineers. That happens because they know what they want to do, but if they do not have the compute, they will not work with us. This is actually super important. That is headed now by Mikael Ohlsson, who has done something similar with Scania before, and now is doing, it is not the same here, of course. We do not build trucks, but it is going to be the same direction here. Sustainability is, we want to be a leader in the sustainability sector in our defense sector, and that is, we take that really seriously. We have divided this into three segments and then into 11 areas, which we measure with KPIs, how we develop all the time.
I will not sort of dig into the details now, but if I mention a few things, of course, the anti-corruption side of things is absolutely zero tolerance. We have launched a completely new training for all the employees in our company that we now run. That is one example. On the environmental side, we have, as you may have seen, we now use SAF, Sustainable Air Fuels, for our firefighting capabilities, airplanes. We want to use it. You know, the Gripen is also possible to use with SAF, but it is also a production problem on where do you get SAF today. That is even more difficult for the commercial airlines, of course, and industry. We are going in that direction. We have reduced our CO2 emissions from the reference year 2020 to now roughly 30%, and we are going to be at 42% 2030, and then net zero 2050.
That's a couple of examples which we are running as we speak. Of course, the innovation perspective of what we do is I've touched upon that in terms of how much there will be AI innovation going forward, which is also part of our sustainability going forward. This is very, very important to us. A couple of words on both the priorities. I mean, I have many priorities. My corporate management knows that the slide is more busy when we talk about this internally, but if you consolidate it to two, three things, it's of course about the delivery to our customers. We have invested to be able to do that. We have a huge backlog. We're doing well. If you do not deliver to your customers today, you lose the trust immediately because they need it.
They need it for building their own defense capabilities and training, or they want to use it to donate it to Ukraine. That is absolutely super important. It is not sort of a flexible environment where you renegotiate everything all the time. You have to deliver. If we cannot only focus on capacity and sort of building our capabilities like that, we also need to look into the future. What I talked about in terms of future capabilities is the second most important thing to us, and you need to invest money to be relevant using new technologies in the next few years. Also, the transformation about how we work, how much more software-defined we will be going forward, but also how much more automated we will be when it comes to production is key to us.
If we talk about sort of our midterm targets, I think we have a very high ambition when it comes to the 2023-2027 targets. We're performing accordingly as we speak. We have, as I hope I've shown you, a market that supports continuous growth. I don't think at all it's limited to 2027. It will continue for a long time. We have a number of ongoing investments when it comes to capacity, capability that will support that growth also beyond 2027. We also have a number of uncertainties around us. I started this presentation by talking about them. It's about NATO, of course, and how much we step up defense spending. It's about relationships between the U.S. and Europe. It's about what actual capabilities will these sort of percentages of GDP spending transform into exactly.
There is still a way to go to understand that completely, but I'm not worried about continuous growth. Honestly, when we look at our organic sales growth, which is now, as you know, 18% CAGR over this time period, 2023 - 2027, I see a strong growth going forward also. I'm not tabling a number here today in a new sort of time perspective, but I can assure you we will, as soon as possible, when we think we have more sort of tangible material to look upon, revisit these targets and probably next year, if I should sort of say something about the time schedule. The EBIT growth must continue to be better than sales growth. That's absolutely a foundation for us, but also that we generate cash.
This is not easy to say, but we're not going to trade off and compromise our investments on R&D and making sure that the capacity we need to have for this growth is there because then we will capture market opportunities because customers will go to the ones that can deliver in reasonable lead times. That is the way it is. That is the way I see our future, very promising, and I think we're doing really well in a rather unpredictable sort of world that we have to relate to every day. The time where we did the business plan one year and then we sort of looked upon it sort of now and then is over. We think about our strategy every meeting we have in corporate management.
It is a continuous iterative way of looking upon how we adapt to this rather sort of dramatic sort of environment that we have today from a geopolitical side, from a technology side, and also unfortunately that we have a war in Europe to relate to. That is my view on where we are and where we are going. I want now to hand over to Anna, who will be more specific on certain numbers and trends and whostuff like that. Thank you.
Thank you, Micael. Good morning. It is so nice to see all of you here. Some new faces and some of you I have met before. Some of you, you know Saab very well and you know our numbers and you have been following us for a long time. Some of you are new.
What I will do now in my presentation, I will try to explain a bit more how this ambition and the strategy and everything that we want to do within Saab, how that is translated into financial figures, and also give you some highlights on what's important to understand in our business and our financial situation going forward. Of course, share my ambition or our ambition within Saab to really drive this value creation going forward. Micael talked about it, but I think it's good to take a standpoint on where we are and where we're heading towards our medium-term targets. We are on a growth journey. As you know, we have taken large steps during the last years and increased our sales growth substantially.
We are building up our order backlog and we have good sales growth within all our business areas, which is of course enabled by our competitive portfolio, a strong market position, and also that we have increased our employee base during these last years. Equally important is that we have converted this sales growth into even higher EBIT growth during these years. That is fully aligned with our outlook and with our midterm targets. How have we been able to do that? We have had an impact of positive business mix, but also expanding our sales into more international business and also an impact of operational efficiency and cost efficiencies that we have been driving within the operations. I will return to that later on.
Also, I'm going to go through our profitability model, and then you're going to discuss this a bit more. Also, cash flow, positive. During the last years, despite that we have been growing, and we have also, as you know, already started our investments on a fairly high level. We have a positive cash flow and a cash conversion of 64% during this time period. All in all, progressing well towards our targets. I talked a bit about the business mix and the shift in business mix, and that is something that already has happened, actually. By looking at our backlog, how it has developed since 2022 in our business areas, you can see a substantial shift, and we can see that the Dynamics share of our backlog has increased substantially.
We see already that when we look into revenue, before in 2022, we were at 20%. Now Dynamics is at 24% of the share of the sales within Saab. This is a trend that we see continue going forward. That is something that Görgen will elaborate more on when we see his presentation within short. Also, Surveillance, 36%, 35%, keeping this. This is the largest business area within Saab, and this is something that is also going to continue going forward. Surveillance will really play a significant role going forward. That is Carl-Johan going to show us more about later on. Maybe I just want to emphasize when we look into the business mix and how it's shifting and how it is going to develop going forward.
Of course, mega deals such as large Gripen contract, GlobalEye contract could make this shift, this mix change. These contracts are often long contracts. In this midterm time, we do not see any so much large impact from that. If we then talk about our profitability model, this one we have seen, we have used before. We have shown it externally on our Capital Markets Day a couple of years ago. This is something that we really work on within the company as well, of course. What's in the profitability model, the three elements is really that we should have scale on the growth, we should have efficiency, and we should work with portfolio management. When we are growing, we should benefit from scale by having higher gross margin and also be able to scale on our operational expenditures, marketing and sales and administration costs.
Important to mention is that we really have a high ambition to increase the R&D. We are not scaling on the R&D. Both these things, it's also something that is built into our targets. How are we doing this? I mean, then it's very much about, of course, utilization, maximizing on our existing resources when it comes to facilities and tools and also people. We are onboarding people and taking on new people in the group, 3,000 net last year, as we heard. Of course, we need to work with our processes for onboarding and things like that to make it efficient. Also, investing in new technologies such as automation and digitalization are important things to drive that.
You can see here the trend is going in the right direction, partly because of the business big, but also that we keep control and we really have focus on growing the gross margin. That's something that we also work very much on internally to make sure that we can afford our increased R&D spend that we need to have going forward. Also, what's important to focus on, of course, to improve this is also to have solid and good business with good margins. Secondly, efficiency is very much about project execution and deliveries and make sure that we have good contract management and optimize our supply chain and reduce lead times and things like that. KPIs in that area, like on-time deliveries and make sure that we execute on a project, is something that we measure and that we follow.
One thing that you can see here, we talked about, I mean, we increased the number of employees, but we can see the sales per employee, the sales per employee full-time equivalent is increasing, and we are also increasing the number of these less than we're growing. KPIs like that are important for us to track and to measure. Last, portfolio management, be able to turn around a profitable business. Also, if they are not fitting into our portfolio, we should also look into if we should divest non-core business. What you can see here, this is an area we can see here the share of sales in this business unit has decreased over the years from being 10% of our sales to 7%.
We have seen turnarounds in some of our areas where we had had problems before, like the aerostructures commercial business is now much healthier and going forward. Another area where we also had low or unprofitable business was in these, where we do these combat boats, CB19s, very small volumes before. Now we have seen higher demand and then it has been a turnaround. Still, we have business units that we are struggling a bit with and that we are working with turnarounds and we know that the profitability will come later on. One example of that is in the Aeronautics, the T-7 business, for instance. We also, where we're going to have the profitability will come more when we have the serial production up and running.
We also have some issues within the civil portfolio within Surveillance that we're working on and getting a turnaround. To conclude, we are progressing well and the trends and the KPIs are in the right directions. I think we have good plans and actions to continue our profitable growth journey. Next, R&D. Micael talked about the importance of R&D and us being future-proof and future-proof our portfolio. As you can see, we spend a substantial amount of R&D, both self-funded and also customer-funded. We are increasing the amount actually more on a higher level than we increase our revenue. We are aiming towards SEK 5 billion-SEK 6 billion 2027. All in all, we spend 70% of our R&D, 17% of our sales in R&D if we add both customer-funded and internally funded R&D.
That's quite a substantial amount and we think that is something that's important for us to do in order to be future-proof going forward and really make sure that we have the relevant portfolio. Another thing that we're talking about and why we are also here in the Dynamics is talking about our investments. That is an area that we think is important also to capture this growth going forward. We have increased the investment levels since 2022, which has really already supported the growth that we're seeing today. From 2025 to 2027, our annual investments will increase around SEK 6 billion. It's going to be in the range of SEK 5 billion-SEK 8 billion, and we see the highest investment this year. What we can see is that around 65% of our increased investments is going to the Dynamics and the Surveillance area.
Of course, we are going to do investments in cockpits and Aeronautics as well. The vast majority is within dynamics and surveillance. What is important, I mean, what kind of investments are we doing? It is factories, it is offices, it is investments in automation. What it really is about is capacity increase. Looking into the total pie, 70% of the investment is related to capacity increase. You can ask, how can you have a positive cash flow and how are you managing? We want to assure you that this is really high on our agenda to working with our cash flow, to make sure that we deliver positive cash flow. Going through this bridge, you can see from EBIT, despite the strong status, it is generating a solid cash flow from our operation, which is a sign of good underlying business health.
We have chosen to invest significantly in R&D and capital expenditure during this growth. This is from 2023 to 2025. We have around SEK 1.2 billion in capitalized R&D, mainly related to Aeronautics and Gripen and T-7. That is something that we are, this capitalized R&D has decreased compared to previous periods as we have expensed more. That is something that is also part of our strategy going forward. All in all, cash flow delivered + SEK 5.6 billion. If we exclude the looking to the cash flow before investments, it is SEK 15.5 billion during this period. We are really committed to deliver on our cash conversion target. Of course, in a business like this, we need to closely monitor things that are impacting the cash flow. Capital efficiency is next on my presentation.
This is an area where we've been working for a couple of years now, having a program within Saab to see how we can improve our capital efficiency, measuring and having KPIs on that to see that the networking capital in relation to sales is going down, even though the amount is increasing. Important things here have really been to define KPIs, start measuring, and also make people accountable, understanding their role in how they can drive and improve these matrices. It's also very much on terms and conditions to customers and suppliers. Make sure that we take good business with cash-neutral, cash flow-neutral contracts. Also inventory management. You know, we are building up inventories to make sure that we can deliver. That's a behavior that we still need to have. We need to make sure that we can deliver, super important with the supply chain.
We need to do it in a good way. We need to make sure that we buy and have stocks where we need to have stocks and make sure that we monitor that closely. Also part of this project. It goes without saying, project execution is key here, of course, to deliver, make sure that we have good contract management, make sure that the contracts and the projects are delivered. That is definitely a key area. Finally, I'd like to emphasize that we are in a strong financial position. We have a strong balance sheet. Our disciplined approach to capital management provides us with flexibility to seize opportunities going forward. Also what we see in the market with this growth.
Absolutely important is for us for this going forward, we see these organic investments both in capital expenditures and in R&D as the most strategic use of resources because they will generate the highest return for our business long term. That is really one of, I mean, that is our top priority. To add on that, M&A is also an area that we are investigating and looking into as possibilities. We aim to be more active in that area and to buy both on acquisitions. That is not the vast majority, but also a part of our capital that we're going to have as a focus. Last but not least for our shareholders, you can rest assured that we will continue to have a dividend. We have a policy to give a dividend of 20%-40% of our net income.
That is a policy that we remain. All in all, we think that we can leverage on our strong financial position to grow both the company and the shareholder value. With that, I would like to conclude my session stating that we are in a strong position, tracking towards our targets, and that we have the right financial and strategic priorities, and also that we will be able to leverage on the opportunities going forward. With that, I would like to thank you. Also, Merton, we will have now a Q&A together with Micael.
I'll take you to that side. Great, thank you very much. Is my mic on? Perfect. We have 20 minutes. We have to keep the time efficient. Before I open the Q&A session here, I will say, I'll ask every question to be one at a time.
We have two colleagues here with microphones, which will come to you. You get the chance to ask more questions after. We'll start the first question with Sash. Did you have a question there?
Thank you. Sash Tusa from Agency Partners. My first question, but I'll limit it to that, is actually about profitability. It's not about the profitability that you show to us as investors, but what you think your stakeholders, particularly your customers, regard as being acceptable profits or not acceptable profits. Do you have a lot of discussions with your, I mean, clearly nobody wants to pay too much, but on the other hand, the priority at present is delivery. At what stage do you think the profits that you make will become limited by customer acceptance of that?
It's a very difficult thing to judge, of course.
I mean, looking at the times we are in, I think we had this discussion last night. You could say if you are delivering the most capable systems in the market in a certain time where there is almost a panic mode because we need them, you're in a war, you could sort of take advantage of that situation. That's not sort of long-term sustainable, I think. If you look upon the market as such, if you have really excellent systems, you get into now and then a prime position where you negotiate a framework contract with a nation, more or less. I mean, we have an enterprise contract in Australia, for example. We have framework contracts connected to our ground combat side to some extent. You must negotiate. You get your contracts and you get certainty, but it's also the taxpayers' money.
You get to a level which allows you to be, of course, double digits and beyond to some extent in certain segments, like we said, mid-double digits on the Dynamics side, for example. That is also a discussion you have with the country. If they want to be with us, we need to get some return profit-wise so we can continue to invest. It is not like you can, like in other business segments, that you can sort of get acceptance for like 30%-40% sort of margins on certain things. That I do not think we will see in our business going forward. No one is doing that. Some companies are taking advantage of high profits because there is a certain situation.
If you look upon it generically over time, we have to make sure that we have a combination of contracts which are sole source framework contracts. Then you are in competitions all the time where you can actually generate a little bit more profit if you are cost efficient. That's the mix that we have, so to say. It's not easy to say exactly what is the number that stakeholders will accept. It's different in different countries a bit. Some countries realize that we have to continue to invest. Some countries may be a bit lower. I've always said that on the big programs where you are sort of a strategic supplier to someone, you will never get the high double digit numbers. In competition, you can.
In some framework contracts, you would also be on double digit numbers, but it is maybe the lower double digit numbers, but you have a certain quantity. It is a very long answer to a very complicated question. We think about this a lot. We think about it in terms of mix, of course. I must underline that we do not take sort of advantage of a certain situation and inflate our prices now short term. We want to build long-term relationships with our customers.
All right, we have another question here from Björn.
Yeah, Björn, Danske, a similar question actually. You said a lot that profitability sits a lot in the contract. I believe you have changed that. If you can talk a little bit about how you have changed contract management over the last few years.
Contract management is really instrumental to us as a company. Of course, in a volatile type of environment as well, where you can't control inflation and you can't really control the strength of currencies. Whether you can actually offer something in currency baskets or whether you have to rely on US dollars or, I mean, all these things we try to sort of manage in terms of how we contract. We are not the guys that have to take all that risk. That's obvious. The more international you get, the more important that is, of course. The other part of this is not to, since there is less big advance payments in contracts, you have to work really diligently to implement many milestones during the contracts.
You get sort of paid all the time so you do not sort of have long periods of time when you have a negative cash flow sort of dip, which used to be the case a number of years ago. We work diligently to make sure that we have payments according to our spending, so to say, if I put it in simple words, and that the milestones must not be too difficult to sort of achieve either. Also, they are not connected in a way that you still get long times of not getting paid. Maybe those are the most important things to work going forward.
I mentioned new business models that come into play, not much yet, but they will, where we will deliver sort of an initial capability and then continuously get sort of payment for subscription and the anticipated functionality that we will deliver. This is changing all the time.
Maybe to add a bit on that as well, I think just also the awareness, the business mindset, the business focus within the organization. Mike talked about also in this growth mindset. I think we are in a transformation from that as well, really having very high focus on understanding the complexity in our business, becoming a more international company is something that is also that has developed during the years.
You have to avoid getting into firm-fixed contracts, completely firm-fixed with big risks, unless you have substantial sort of risk portions in the contract so you can proactively do things, not to have the risks actually being put into reality. That we avoid as well as far as possible. I mean, that is something that's super important to us. You're right, the contract model is changing.
We have two questions on the second row here, first with Daniel.
Hi, Daniel Lee from WCM Investments, WCM Investment Management. Earlier you mentioned the importance of driving accountability and delegating as the business grows. There's kind of a question around, I guess, the culture of operational efficiency and capital efficiency. What are you doing differently now compared to before in the face of this big growth that's obviously faced that is helping you manage that operational efficiency?
I would say that if you look upon a company like us with four business areas and 19, 20 business units, you have to realize that if I simplify it, it did not used to be the way that we had business units with complete responsibilities in all the areas before. We have gone strongly in that direction, making sure that we have business units that we look upon being sort of the, maybe you could say the highest operational level. They have to take care about the customer. They have to take care about the operational efficiency, the competence in the business units, and also understanding what the capital efficiency parameter of running a business and also generating cash.
That in a smaller Saab, that was more, I would say, on business area level to manage that last portion of capital efficiency and cash flow and some of the operational efficiency. Now that's strongly connected to being a business unit head in Saab. That is a big, that's probably the most tangible example of how we've changed the role of a certain sort of leadership level in the organization. It goes beyond that, of course. Some business units have implemented, because they are at the size of the former business areas, we've implemented product units with also sort of profitability responsibility and on the product portfolio level, so to say. Driving business acumen and having the right leaders at these levels is much more strict now than it used to be five years ago.
The Americans call it sort of budgets and outlays when the money's allocated and when it's spent. A question and a follow-up. How much is the delay at the moment between the money being allocated and it being spent? The second follow-up is, when we see a step change going from, say, 2% to 3%-3.5%, will that time extend so you get an even longer period of growth, I guess?
If you look at two sort of levels of this, it's how the system works when it comes to, okay, we take a long-term plan view from a country perspective, how much we will spend. Then it's yearly budgets, of course. Acquisition authorities are allowed to commit to spending the next few years. That is sort of more or less following the agreed spending level. That is quickly sort of developing.
You have the, how quickly is the money allocated in terms of commitment towards the industry? That can take a little bit longer because the defense forces must sort of define exactly what sort of capabilities they want and what the money must be spent on. That transfers sometimes into an acquisition authority that, generally speaking, has the commitment to spend the money, but they must work with the defense forces. It goes into industry. Often it's competition. It takes a long time before the money actually gets to a contract and starts being spent with the industry. That is still the case, even though there are big movements in the direction of working a little bit more in parallel now so that we do not do it in serial steps. Depends on what area it is, for example.
I want to have more clear directions, not commitment, but from different countries to say, okay, we're going to focus on this area. I can sort of prepare myself with capacity investments. We get shorter lead times. You have the U.S. model, which is like, yes, we're going to run this program. When you contract a company, it's still that you haven't the commitment for all the years. Actually in the U.S., we don't take the full contract into our order backlog. We take it more or less on a yearly basis. Even though the government has said that they will have at least 350 T-7 trainer aircraft, we absolutely don't hold all the contract in the books. We take the yearly, more or less, production contracts that we get. That's the model they use.
That's not the same thing in Europe. In Europe, you commit to a contract and the full value goes into your order backlog, more or less, if I simplify it. I don't know whether that answers your questions, but it's a lag from 3.5% to we have contracts in industry and getting paid. That the whole system is trying to sort of compress time-wise. You have different models on how you are allowed to take things into your order backlog, depending on which country you're in. Maybe I answered a completely wrong question.
We have two questions on this side. Let's start with Erik and then Tom afterwards.
Thank you. Erik Golrang, SEB. One question is difficult, so it's going to be a stupid one. You talked about drone swarms, and you showed some pictures here. I know it was five or 10 drones or so.
We go to China and we see 10,000 drones. Why is that not a relevant comparison? And if it is, how do you compete?
No, no, it's a relevant comparison. It's not a stupid question at all. I mean, this system is completely agnostic in terms of how many drones can be in that swarm. I mean, we've shown up to 50 in demonstrations so far. It's about how many can the Swedish defense in the army sort of use in where they put it in operation. You can have 5,000 drones doing the same thing if you just want to have that sort of quantity. It's not a limitation from the AI-based command and control and the intelligence in the system and how things self-organize themselves if you lose a few and all that. Absolutely not.
We're completely agnostic on the type of drone and also on sort of how many. We are focused completely to implement the functionality of this using AI technology. Someone needs to build the drones. It's not us. There's some production in Sweden, but there's lots of it in Ukraine, but they use millions themselves. Hopefully we can get sort of in coms with these guys to buy lots of drones. Quantity is an important capability as well. I assume the numbers will grow definitely going forward. Our system is not limited at all.
Henric Hintze here from ABG. Anna, you showed a slide with the mixed shift in the business dynamics becoming a larger share of sales. Looking at the order backlog, it's been a much bigger shift than on sales.
I was wondering if you could comment a bit more on your reasoning regarding how much and how fast you expand capacity in this area. What's the reason that you haven't expanded it more? Is it because it's difficult or because you haven't been able to forecast the demand growth here? What's a reasonable order book level that you want to maintain over time? Like, yeah, how much capacity would you need with that level?
You want to start?
Yeah, you can start.
You can talk about the backlog. I just want to say when it comes to the investments and such, how we view the market. Of course, this is normally not the type of business that you get sort of 15-year contracts on. That's one aspect of how much do you step up.
We, I would say, have taken rather big steps compared to others and not waited for contracts to invest to have now quadrupled the output of what we can do this year. Fortunately, we started that before the war started because we saw a growth in the market already then. It sort of went in a completely different direction, of course, when the war started. I think we need to continue to do even more. I cannot think of a board meeting I do not have when we do not have an investment case for more capacity when it comes to either it is automation or a new facility. We do a lot in this area. I wish we had sort of the 15 year-20 year view on what stockpiles do we need in different countries, but that has not been defined to even take the next step.
We will continue to assess this, I must say, but it's based on the fact that normally this is a few years' type of backlog that we're looking at, not the 10 years-15 years. Looking at that, we've taken huge investments, I must say. We're taking market shares as well. We're number one in the world when it comes to ground combats. I mean, we have to make sure that we keep our l ead time short.
No, I think you answered it very well. I think, I mean, as you said, we have already done a lot of investments in Dynamics. That's the reason why we can grow already. What I showed was the investments going forward, really. Not to mix with the backlog.
I must underline one thing because this is an important question. It's not only about us.
It's also about the whole ecosystem that we have around us, making sure that they can grow with us. You probably read about, okay, how do we make sure we have production of powder, for example, available to us and that the companies that we work with, which we do not have in our own control because we do not do powder ourselves. We rely on partners. Everyone wants powder now, triple-based and double-based powder because of the growth around us. That is one example of how you have to make sure that you bring these guys with you and that they are investing in the right places so we can have a resilient supply chain.
There are many examples of that. We have to work rather than sort of only building our new own facilities to do assembly and production of our stuff. We need to have the supply chain in control as well. Some of our investments have to be directed towards that in partnerships with them.
Shift the slide to that side. Let's go with Mikael there.
Yeah, hi. Mikael Laséen, DNB Carnegie. I have a question about Gripen. It remains really relevant for you and for your customers. Can you sort of talk to us about Gripen as a growth contributor to Saab group, medium term, and what you're doing in the next generation fighter area?
Absolutely. It's fantastic to talk about that here in Karlskoga. You like it, Görgen, don't you?
No, it's a very relevant question because, I mean, the business mix can change rather dramatically in how it looks like if, as Anna pointed out, you get sort of one of these mega deals or a few of them, both when it comes to the Gripen and the GlobalEye. We do not sort of speculate. We run campaigns diligently. It looks good, but you never know exactly when you actually get the contracts because it's always political decisions on a very high level. We do not plan our growth sort of based on that. It must be with or without sort of a mega deal. That's important to say. We have a fantastic foundation in this mix between product-oriented sales that are more predictable and also a very nice base on the Gripen and large platforms, but where we have a potential in the different campaigns.
We are negotiating. It looks very good on Colombia and Thailand as we speak, and also in Brazil that wants to extend the contract with 25%. So that, I hope, comes into play. As I've said, this year, most of it on the GlobalEye, we have, and I must say that on production capacity, of course, we want to have a production capacity of around 20 Gripens a year at least in our factory in Linköping so we can cope with the growth on the Gripen side. Then we don't know what will happen with Ukraine if Gripen is going to be sort of supplied to Ukraine. That's a political decision. That will have an effect on us, of course, in how much we need to sort of replace in that case. But that's not decided yet. I can't sort of say anything about that.
There is potential in this direction. We have a big interest from Peru. It's interest from the Philippines on the Gripen side. I know that you're all thinking that everyone is questioning whether to continue with F-35s. Might be going forward. We are open to discussions with anyone that wants to have a mixed fleet or sort of do something else than they decided to. You can't sort of run into conclusions that that will happen that quickly. GlobalEye looks very promising when it comes to the Nordic perspective and the discussions we have with France. As I said, extremely good campaigns. I'm optimistic, but I cannot sort of commit to exactly when and how many of these will be won. It will shift the mix of the business if we are successful.
Do not believe for a second that we are focusing only on Dynamics and Surveillance when it comes to growth. We put a lot of effort in the Aeronautics domain as well, and also on the GlobalEye. That's for sure.
Thank you very much, Micael and Anna. Now it's time to have a short break. Stay tuned. We'll be back 10:20 A.M. again for live. Refreshments downstairs. And back 20 past 10 again. Sharp.
Yes, welcome back. My name is Görgen Johansson, and I'm heading the Business Area Dynamics. I will dive in a bit to what we do in Dynamics and talk specifically about our growth journey ahead. You know a lot about our figures and where we are. We are 23% of Saab. What sticks out is the order backlog that we now have; it's SEK 84 billion. I will come into that a bit.
That has grown significantly the last years. That comes from this. We have a fantastic product portfolio that we divide into five business units. The business units, if I start from the left, is Ground Combat, where we have the support weapons, from Carl-Gustaf to 84mm to NLAW, and our cooperation also with MBDA regarding Akeron. What's fantastic about this portfolio is that we are world-leading. No one is producing as much support weapons as we do. We have, on occasions, 40-50 customers that buy regularly from this portfolio. That has made it possible for us to invest in the portfolio and create a fantastic footprint on the market in support weapons. To missile systems, where we have our own products in RBS 70, short air defense, and the anti-ship missiles RBS 15.
This is built on that we aim to be the natural sovereignty for Sweden in the missiles, combined with working with partners, mainly in Europe, but also we have a partnership in the U.S. These programs in the missile business are very expensive to run. Usually, it is collaboration between countries, bilateral or more countries, that takes decisions on it. That is an important part for the missiles to be part of the coming, both what's happening right now, but also the next generation. For example, the Meteor, we do with MBDA. The IRIS-T, we do with Diehl, the TAURUS with MBDA. The Ground Launch Small Diameter Bomb, we do with Boeing. The mix of supporting Sweden with working with partners is the key for me in the strategy to work in the missile business.
We have had significant growth also here in the orders the last year in this portfolio. In Barracuda, we make camouflage or signature management. We are the largest producer of camouflage in the world. That is a skill that I think will grow even quicker now after what we have seen in Ukraine. The obvious is that we have drones everywhere, so you have to hide. If you are then able to use a camouflage, we have seen very positive effect and get that from the Ukrainians. That has not yet turned out into a large volume from other customers. I think the doctrine will change. I think a lot of customers will buy camouflage, but also decoys in the future in order to be more relevant in the fight. Barracuda is having an extremely good position.
For those who do not know, camouflage is much more advanced than it may look like. It also gives the protection and also gives the time to respond in a good way if you are on the battlefield. I think this could be a fantastic area for us going forward. Training and simulation. We have focused this on live training and preparing the soldiers for what really will happen when they are on the battlefield. We have been very successful so that we have also taken this niche to a world-leading position. We are very strong in Europe, but we are also now taking the U.S. Marines in a large contract. Now when the U.S. Marines will go out and train, they will train with our equipment around the world, which will support, I think, also the growth going forward.
It is important for the customers to train together. They need to be interoperable with each other. We have found a way with our products that we could then scale the training a lot. That is what we see now when training becomes one of the most important things to prepare now. The effects we also see from Ukraine is that you need to be very good and quick in training. Training is also an area where we have a very strong position and have, I think, a good future also to grow further on. My last part is that we are working close with the Swedish customer as their support partner. We also have some solutions, for example, medical care solutions that we foresee will be a good product going forward. I have five business units that all grow now quite quickly.
The strategy behind this is that we have focused on our specific niches. We have said we will be number one in these specific niches and have invested quite much on our own to take us to that position. That is what we will aim for in the future. The second is that if we are not able to be number one, we will join, for example, partnership with MBDA, Boeing to get us to a very strong position and therefore win the business. The third one is to support our home markets now. That will also grow as now also the defense forces grow quickly now in many countries. What we have added now the last years is future capabilities. We have started with our strong customer base to see what new capabilities are relevant for us to address to them.
I will show some example of that as well. We will combine what we have done with also the future now going forward. When I talk to all my employees, I talk about this. This is our foundation, how we view this. We start with the end customer. All my employees should know how should my equipment be used, how much should it cost, in what environment should it be, and so forth. We are pushing a lot to be customer-focused and therefore have relevant solutions for our customer. To be able to be number one, we emphasize a lot our innovations. We put room for innovation among our engineers, but also across the business area. It's not only about the products, it's also about how we produce. Are we having the best processes? Are we effective enough so that we are competitive?
Innovation in a broader perspective is pushed through the business area. On top of that, I will have no chance if I do not have the best people. I will come back to that. I invest a lot in the people, and that is so important for me in this growth journey we have. I will take some example using Micael's picture of the strategic directions. What we have said right now is that the most important thing is to deliver what we have promised. If we have this position on the market, we need to deliver what we have promised. That is what we are, and by that also, the capacity increase, of course, comes because we need to scale up our capacity in order for us to fulfill the large order backlog that we have taken.
If I dig in a bit to what we have done, and in the Ground Combat business, we are aiming to have the production capacity 4x as much up and running in the end of 2025. This has come, and I'm extremely glad. We started the investments already in June 2022. We haven't received any orders. I was up in the board and said we need to invest because I think the orders will come. I got a positive answer from the board, which was fantastic. We started this journey already in June 2022. That was extremely good because it takes two, three years. Now we are heading towards where we could be now in 2025. You have seen that the orders came. We have got the orders. Right now, I have around 40 construction projects going on.
It's everything from building new factories to rebuilding to increase the safety. It's a lot of projects going on in many areas. I will come into some of those. We also then try to change the way we are working because we have now a fantastic chance also to do in another way. I say to all my employees, if we should do this in the same way as we have done it before, it will not work. We need to change also how we will do this ramp-up and how we will produce so that we build for the future and are able then also to drive down the cost and also increase the speed and how quickly we could deliver. Most of the investment is done here in Karlskoga and in Björkborn, where it's the area where we have the production.
It's a huge area, and it's focused on ground combat and our own missiles. The area is 3 km long and 1 km wide. I have marked on the map all ongoing rebuilding and new projects that are ongoing. It's everything from warehouses and the new factories and support facilities and so forth. It's a massive reconstruction going on. I say to my employees, no one will not ever in their careers be in something like this again. Even though they are newcomers in the company, they will never see something like this. It's fantastic what we are doing and rebuilding right now. The aim is to have everything in what we have decided now ready and up and running in 2028, where we have also the newest production facilities up, where we really push the borders of how we could produce this.
A couple of years ago, we made a vertical integration where we bought the tube production from another Swedish company. That now is something that we have in Linköping. Since we are in Karlskoga right now, I thought that I will show you a movie of one of our big investments in how we increase our efficiency, and that is done. We will show a movie here.
Global defense needs are growing rapidly. And Saab faces an urgent and sustained increase in demand. Meeting that demand isn't just about expanding our workforce. It's about transforming how we work. At Saab, we're acting now. We're investing in smarter, more efficient production, automating and industrializing at scale to meet rising volumes with speed and precision. This shift is about more than adding machines.
It starts with smarter product design, built for automated manufacturing, and runs through our entire operation, where we cut complexity, streamline processes, and add capacity where it's needed. This gives us a lot of possibilities for the future to produce different products in parallel. This is already underway. Our newly configured AT4 line is nearing full launch, engineered to increase output, improve consistency, and contribute to more sustainable production. We will increase our capacity roughly 4x, and that is with the same amount of personnel as we have today. Manual tasks are being transitioned into controlled, automated, repeatable processes. Our strategy is to boost efficiency, reduce setup times, and increase volume output. The result? Shorter lead times, greater efficiency, and increased capacity. At the same time, we're enabling our teams to focus their expertise where it has the most impact: on problem-solving, oversight, and continuous improvement.
This is not a future ambition. It is happening now. Across Saab, we are preparing not just for today's demand, but for the future, scaling production to deliver what our customers need when and where it matters most.
This decision we took back in 2022, and now it is up, and I will get out the first tubes now before the summer. It has taken, and it is according to my time schedule, so it has worked very well. It is up and is now starting. This was one of the bottlenecks that we saw. We need to increase the capacity in the tubes. That is now starting to come into production, so I am very glad for that. On the missile business, we are also increasing the capacity. The missile business is more built on that I need to have all my suppliers with me.
We have been traveling around a lot to get all agreements, get all visibility to our suppliers so they invest. We have now signed with all big suppliers so that we could deliver on what we have promised regarding, for example, RBS 70 and RBS 15. That is the major thing to get up the production here as well. Of course, we are optimizing and doing as much as we can as well. It is not so visible, not so many new factories because this is more that we assembled a lot more missiles than we have done before. The key here is to get the supply chain up. We are ready with all of our big suppliers with this. Is this easy? No, it is not.
This is actually quite tough to get everything in order, to have the personnel educated, to have all equipment right, and then to have all suppliers. It's down to the last small supply to get everything together. Of course, we are struggling a bit as well to get everything in order to make this happen. We also then use our partnerships to work this happening. Going back to a couple of years ago when we have other challenges, this is of course much more fun to have this challenge to get this ready. To underline it, it's tough to grow this quickly as we see in all the business units right now. We take other steps as well. As Micael mentioned, we have now taken the first steps also to increase the capacity in the U.S.
We are in Michigan, and it's in a quite small town called Grayling, where we now have taken the steps to build a quite large facility to then final assembly and integrate the shoulder-launched weapons and also the precision fire systems. The place is chosen so that we are close to an area where we, so it's located near Camp Grayling. Camp Grayling is a big test facility so that we also could get the same as we have here in Karlskoga, close to a test facility, which is important for us when we produce what we do here. This is the 10th facility Saab has in the U.S., and it will create the foundation for possible growth also going forward for other weapons and so in the U.S. This is a major step for us.
The first output will go out already in 2026 from this new factory. In the area of future capabilities, as I said, we are talking closely now with the customers. How does the demand look like? What are you looking for? One area which we now are looking into quite deep is loitering munition. Loitering munition is something that we have seen from Ukraine, and a lot of our customers now are coming. We see in front of us that there will be a family of loitering munitions that we will create. We are doing that in close cooperation now with the customer because it's new also for the customer. We need to have them on board when we do this. We are now doing trials and show different types of solutions.
Here we come down to how much should it cost, how should it be operated, how should it work. It is a lot of questions that we work very closely now with the customers to get this ready. This is essential for us to complement our current portfolio also with these new capabilities going forward. We also do things that could have other positive effects. We are hunting cost, and we are hunting lead times, and we are looking into how we could produce these more effectively. We have taken a decision to modularize our 84mm family. By that, we could have, in this case, a casing which is unified in the future for all our ammunitions. Then we could invest in doing this in a much more efficient method. We use less material. We reduce the lead time.
We reduce also shorter distances. Lots of less scrap, and we reduce the cost. When Viktor, who is responsible for sustainability, this is the perfect case for sustainability. Of course, it is. This has matched together in our efforts also to be more sustainable when we come to our products. That was a good step for us to see that we could run this. The most important for me, as I said now, is to deliver and then also to get all my people with me. I gather all my people here in Sweden in the beginning of the year to what we call the Dynamics Day. I wanted to share with you a Dynamics Day. This is one of the keys to get everyone on board. We have Micael there. We have the Supreme Commander.
We have also my general from Ukraine there to talk directly to my people. That is one of the keys that we have also to drive this right now. If I then finalize with what I see for the land domain, I think in many countries now, this is an area which we have not invested in so much that will be important for them to invest in. I think the demand will be there for at least 10 years. We are ready. We have a fantastic portfolio, and we are also investing in new capabilities for the future.
Thank you. Sorry, I got too excited during your presentation. I finished the water. Now, the last briefing and the last topic, I will give you a little bit more insight into surveillance.
Surveillance and dynamics are a little bit of the engines now in the growth of Saab. We address the growth a little bit different because we have a little bit different foundation for our business. Surveillance, you know the figures. We are the biggest business area within Saab. We are a little bit different because we do not address only sort of the land domain and the land fighter. We do systems across domain. You can see the different business units that are represented in the business area. We do everything from airborne early warning, surface sensor solutions, naval combat systems, fighter core capabilities. This is sensor technology and avionics for fighter systems, Gripen and others. Digital battlespace solutions. This is where we do multi-domain operations and connecting defense forces in an effective way.
The next step will be adding AI to that context to make it relevant for the future. The last one, safety and security solutions, is also C2 systems and solutions, but more directed towards the civilian domain. Five business units focus on the military development and one on the civilian side. If we look at the development, it is mainly on the military side that we are growing. We had 19% growth last year on top of 27% growth before. We are growing our workforce a lot to be able to cope with the demand. I will explain a little bit more afterwards. We are not just scaling in our facilities when it comes to production. It is much more engineering content in our deliveries. Different mix in how we scale the workforce.
If we look at the business side of it, we and Dynamics both have a very sort of international business dimension to our business areas. On surveillance level, we also have a very big operations dimension that is outside Sweden. All the business units that I have here have international operations and multi-site operations in different countries. I will come back a little bit more on describing why. This is maybe what you see as surveillance when we take a snapshot of the press releases we have. It might not be easy to find the red thread among all the cool things you see here. It's about facilities, it's about products, it's about AI, it's about corporations, it's about digitizing the army. It's a lot of different activities we do.
If we try just to zoom out and see what the common threads are in this, we do large system integration projects, GlobalEye being one of them. These are extremely complex system integrations that we perform. It's long-term contracts. It's extremely important to have strong contract management, risk management, project management in order to be able to deliver these extremely complex system solutions. We base these integrations to a very high extent on our product portfolio of scalable sensor systems. Here, it's about efficiency and volume. It's a little bit more like what Görgen described on the missile side in scaling up this capability. There's a very important dynamic between these two first boxes. Large system integration, we are good at that because we have good knowledge of the sensor depth and all the interfaces on lower level.
We understand what we integrate, and that makes us extremely good in integrating complex system solutions. It also makes us extremely competent in integrating third-party sensor solutions. It's not just limited to integrating what we provide and what we define. Also, understanding the system integration aspect makes us more competitive on the sensor side, on standalone systems that can scale. We understand what's needed to really integrate these assets into more complex contexts. These two things really interact internally in our organization. The last bullet really scales with both of these first two ones. We provide support solutions to, for example, secure availability of GlobalEye aircraft at the customer hangars or powered by our approaches to secure that ground-based sensors have an uptime and an availability that the customer demands.
That, of course, also scales with a number of systems and a number of customers. All these things create the foundation for the business we do. I will dig into a little bit more of these different aspects. GlobalEye, I would say, is sort of in probably the most obvious system solution and the most prestigious system solution that we provide. This is a state-of-the-art technology system solution. It's not that many industries that can provide this capability in the world. We are the only one, I would say, that has the latest technology in production today. This creates a huge interest. We have been operating in this market for more than 30 years, and we have delivered more than 30 systems to 10 customers around the world.
This is an area where the interest is really picking up, and we need to prepare ourselves to be relevant for the future. Our planning right now is to be able to deliver up to four systems per year in the 2030 timeframe. This is what we deem to be relevant on the marketplace. If we can't meet those expectations, we don't have anything to talk about with our customers. Securing that capacity is about controlling what we sell so that we don't have to redo everything. There are going to be customer adaptations in all these customer contracts that we are in discussion with. We need to have an architecture that we can scale and build on. We need to make sure that we have efficient project execution.
What we are doing now is making sure that we have the supply chain lined up to support this vision. This is very much something that takes time to establish, but we are preparing ourselves to continue the journey on the GlobalEye side. This is, of course, a unique capability in the European context right now, which is gathering a lot of attention to this capability that we can provide to NATO. Another area of large integration projects is what we do on naval combat systems. This is connecting and integrating all the stuff on a ship that differentiates a naval military vessel from a ferry, basically. It is weapon systems, sensors, communication, navigation equipment. It is integrating all these things into a very complex weapon system. Also here, we are good at this because we can provide a lot of sub-content ourselves.
We do a lot of the sensors and fire control systems. We do C2 systems. We're not exclusively integrating our own capabilities to execute these contracts. We have large sub-supplier content on overhaul of vessels and sensor deliveries and weapon systems that are getting integrated into these very complex system solutions. Here is another example of where the engineering content in the delivery and the process of going through a project with the customer is very resource-intensive. A lot of important investments on the product side, but putting a system integration together that is relevant for the customer is a significant portion of our scope. It's long contracts. F123 was a contract that we received in 2022, so delivery in five years. We're on track on that one. Columbia is the latest contract that we signed this year.
Typical timeframe, five years to deliver a capability like this with all the processes of securing an efficient system integration. Another example of complex system projects, we have a unique capability on Fighter EW. The configuration of the Gripen and the emphasis on situation awareness, self-protection, and sensor capabilities, which I would, my view at least, is uniquely strong on the Gripen aircraft and how they have dimensioned different capabilities on that platform, has generated the technology that is unique in the EW area. This is not the technology that is easy to, as an industry, just to insert in any other fighter. Everything you integrate on a fighter is extremely complex to make it work. I mean, things like power consumption, cooling, vibration, high-speed maneuver, this is a very complex environment to fit equipment to.
Especially if you're targeting sort of state-of-the-art, what you can achieve in terms of signal processing and coping with radar signals in this environment. We have a unique capability. Gripen is the foundation, but we're now scaling up for being selected for the Eurofighter upgrade in Germany. We're doing this together with Helsing. This is an excellent system in generating a lot of data on what's happening around the aircraft. In the combination with Helsing and AI, we will be able to take what you get out of that data even further steps for the future. Extremely important capability that is, I would say, unique as the GlobalEye that we can provide in the European context. That's a few examples on complex system integration projects. That's one foundation. We also have a very strong portfolio of scalable products.
These are products that we dimension our production capacity in a completely different way. Here, the lead times, the demand on lead times is much shorter. On many of these, we produce actually to the market. We are defining production targets to meet the demand. For example, the G1X is a very compact radar. Uniquely compact when it comes to the capabilities. It has a relevant range. It's extremely compact and lightweight and can be easily integrated on a tactical vehicle. You don't need a huge vehicle. It can function on the move, which means that with all this context after Ukraine, if you're stationary, you are a target. If you can stay on the move and you can sort of transmit and sort of show your presence in a controlled way, then you can be ahead of the enemy.
This is gaining a lot of attraction for many customers. We have delivered more than 100 systems to a lot of different customers. We produce these to stock, but so far we have not actually been able to stock anything because there has always been a new customer picking up what capacity we have. We are ramping up to 180 systems per year. This is a huge radar production capacity compared to what we have been delivering historically, where we have calculated to tens of radars. We have established production capacity not only in Sweden, but also in Fareham in the U.K. to be relevant on more markets because we believe that now we have an unbalance between supply and demand. In our business, it is important to be on the markets.
We want to be relevant for the future already now to make sure that when demand and supply are balancing out, we are still a relevant provider of capabilities. It is much more software adaptation and integration activities related to these products that need to be done closer to the customer. Another example of a scalable product, this is something that was developed in our startup in Tampere in Finland. We decided to establish ourselves there because they had great competence. We had a decision that let's collect a few coffee tables of engineers in this environment and let's see what they can do. They come up with a product idea quite rapidly. We said, "Let's go for it." Now we had the inauguration of the production facility in Finland. We have a capacity of delivering 600 systems per year soon.
We have customer orders and ramping up towards this capacity. This is a very compact tactical system. There are similar systems that have lower fidelity on their information that they generate that also solve similar problems. We are extremely compact on the high-end niche of this market segment. A little bit connecting this to our investments and what we do. On the R&D graph, you can see on the left, we are consuming a large portion of Saab's R&D. Surveillance is a significant portion of the SEK 2.7 billion that Micael and Anna were talking about. What we are doing now is ramping up the foundation to scale our product offering. Historically, all these products have been stovepipes, but we need to bring stronger synergies to our portfolio.
We are working hard on establishing common platforms across different products to be able to share technology and production investments. We are also investing to secure new capabilities on our scalable products so that we can release that as subscriptions to our customers. The last component of these investments is ToT to be able to operate with these products on multiple sites so that we can be close to the customer and the market with these different capabilities. On the other side, you see the ramp-up we have done on the CapEx investments from 2022 to 2024 is the axis on these. Here, it is a dramatic increase in the CapEx investments. The majority of that, I mean, if we go back to 2022, only 3% of our CapEx investments were to create additional capacity. The rest was replacing old investments.
We're now up at 71% of the CapEx being driven by increasing our capacity in Sweden and abroad and meeting these capacity targets that we are targeting to be relevant for the future. This is not to execute the backlog. This is taking care of the backlog, but creating a foundation for where we want to be as a company in the future. Four GlobalEye per year for the future, 30 RX systems, that's for the Gripen and for the Eurofighter, 180 G1X, 600 Sirius Compacts. That is what we see as relevant figures right now. As Micael said, this is something we are revisiting and discussing. Do we need to increase further, or is this the level we need to execute on? One big portion of the CapEx investments are on establishing new sites. I mean, in every site we have in Sweden, we are too squeezed.
We don't have parking lots, and we are behind meeting the demand of this increase in defense expenditure. We are doing significant investments now to scale up both in Stockholm with Solna Strand and in Gothenburg in Mölnlycke. Apart from that, I talked about the investment to the right in Tampere, production facility and development environment for Sirius Compact, but also a hub where we can do naval C2 systems and support in the development and the integration closer to the customer. Similarly, at Deloitte, we have been expanding our facility there. We are developing our naval combat system also there. That is connected to that capability. Same in Bremen now in Germany, where we are also building a facility to be able to be close to our customer in developing and tailorizing naval combat systems.
On the left side, you see more on the surface sensor side, the production facility and integration and development facility for surface radars that we have established in Fareham, U.K. We are producing 50% of our G1X radars from this facility, 50% from Sweden. We can cover customer demands from different locations and support closer to the customer. On the top left, we have expanded our facilities in the U.S. also to scale with the demand. We have been alluding to what digital transformation does for our business, and that is extremely relevant for surveillance. I mean, our basic business is to generate data and to process data. That is what we do. Of course, software transformation, digitization, and AI will have a profound impact on what we do.
This is very much what we are gearing up to align architectures to make sure that we have the potential to scale system solutions more effectively for the future. One example of that is being able to integrate in a very short timeframe our existing systems to meet new demands in terms of Counter-UAS solutions together with our customers. This is not developing a lot of new products. It's integrating product solutions, but also involving small SMEs to provide unique capabilities into our system concept and being able to iterate these configurations at a high pace.
This is something we have focused very much on and managed to secure contracts with the Swedish Defense Force on a very short pace where we are delivering and developing these system solutions together because it's something where you need to be extremely close to the customer, but you also need to be open to integrate new solutions to be relevant. Other areas that will be hugely important in the European context is, of course, how we integrate now European integrated air defense solutions. We have a role in Sweden. We have the knowledge of integrating complex system solutions. With that foundation, we can also be relevant in providing sensors and system solutions in a wider context. Similarly, with multi-domain operations being sort of the next level of integration where you're integrating functional chains across traditional sort of stovepipes and platforms will be increasingly important.
We are focusing a lot of our future efforts in being relevant in this space as well. I have mentioned a little bit on the people dimension of this and the leading change, very much similar to what Görgen talked about. We have added 2,000 new employees over the last two years. We have actually also added 170 new managers to the organization. This is, of course, a huge effort when it comes to onboarding and making sure that everyone sort of fits into our business and the way we operate things. It is also providing a lot of energy to the organization, driving the transformation going forward. Finally, if we just summarize surveillance challenges and picking up on the different themes, I mean, foundation for what we do, we need to understand how you integrate systems.
Sweden is sort of our strongest reference when it comes to building that knowledge. Based on that, we need to look for what role we play in Europe and NATO. We need to be multi-domestic going forward. We make investment to be relevant in more places than Sweden. Same as Görgen, customer delivery and meeting strong demand. If we do not grow with our customers, someone else will. We need to gear up to their expectations. Contracts might be one thing, but their need is actually bigger. We used to have plenty of time and no money. Now we have plenty of order intake and no time. Time is important all the time. That connects to the capacity and production ramp-up, but also to the workforce since we have a lot of engineering content in our deliveries.
Mitigating supply chain risks, that's the only way we can scale complex system solutions like the GlobalEye. Görgen talked about that. R&D investments to be relevant in the future. There's no point in growing if we're not relevant for the future. We will just waste everyone's time. The last one, digitization and growth transformation. I mean, that is really the foundation we're trying to build this on. We need to scale better. We recognize that. This is part of the foundation for securing that. Thanks, Merton and everyone.
Thank you very much. Thank you. We're back to our second part of the Q&A. I would like to invite back my colleagues, Micael, Anna, and Görgen to the stage for a common Q&A. All right. Shall we continue where we were? We have a lot of questions. I will start with Tom there.
Thank you.
Hi, Tom Guinchard at Pareto Securities. I guess primarily toward Dynamics, but you spoke about the end customer and customer-centric focus. How much variation do you see across the different end customers and how much can you move from customized delivery to modularized deliveries?
If you look right now, I see a quite strong trend towards that the customers actually would like to buy the same. They are talking about interchangeability now. They have not talked about that before, meaning that they are looking to be able to use the same ammunition or missiles between the countries. That will support us in what we do a lot. I see lots of good signs now. If you look at Europe, for example, within NATO, customers are moving in this direction.
Of course, that will give me more possibilities also to scale up and not have so much adjustments to what we have right now. I see a strong movement there, yes.
We move over to that side, Sash first.
I just wondered whether you could, this is really a question for Carl-Johan. There are two parts to it. Just one first. Firstly, Sweden has just ordered or is in the process of ordering Ground Master 300 radars from Thales. Was that a competition that you lost, or should we see that as part of a rather wider exchange of systems with France buying GlobalEye? More broadly, the production volumes that you're talking about for the surveillance business, it looks as if some of these products are becoming essentially attritable rather than capital items.
Have you got the price or the pricing or the costs right for the customers to consider them to be attritable?
On the first, it's actually a question to the Swedish Defense Force on their strategy in securing supply. As I understand it, they want to make sure that they have redundancy in providing the most sort of the larger systems, and they are ramping up their need a little bit faster. They are looking at finding different solutions to regain the sensor chain capability. Yes, I mean, we would have to invest a lot to meet that demand. Sharing among Europe our ability to meet the demand is probably something we need to accept and embrace. Otherwise, it's going to be difficult to grow with all the customers.
The second question, whether, yeah, our customers are accepting the prices for our system when it comes to sort of see them as exposable, I would say yes, but we need to constantly challenge our cost base to be able to support the growing numbers that we foresee for the future. I think we're going to see denser sensor networks going forward. That will be the way to cope with this situation. I think that will challenge us on the cost side at some stage. Right now, I think we have very good price performance capabilities that we can provide. That's not the limitation right now.
Great. We have a question there from Erik.
Yes, Erik Golrang, SEB. I'll try two questions because I didn't pick up if the one question rule was still on, so I guess it isn't.
First, on capacity and dynamics, you showed the 4x figure by the end of this year. We have the U.S. and India coming on top of that. Also, the Björkborn expansion was 2028 finished. When it is all done, where are we then in terms of capacity expansion?
We have not gone out with any figures more than we will be on 4x. The last steps, if we take an example, up in Björkborn, we are investing in a new facility where we will produce much more efficiently, meaning less personnel and so forth. That will not increase the volume that much, but we will be more efficient. What we see in the end up to 2028 is that the investment goes, now we are building very fast and do it in the same way. The next wave will be more efficiency-driven.
We have not gone out. If we take the ammunitions, if I am open about that, I mean, it depends on what type of ammunition you do. We have gone out with this 4x, and that is a general on average, depending on. You know now, since yesterday evening, everything about the ammunitions, some ammunitions are much more complex, take longer time. Therefore, it is hard to exactly say the amount of ammunition. We have not gone out, but we are roughly in the end of this year now, 4x. We will turn this into more efficiency investments going forward. That also then, of course, would give us more opportunities to produce even more. We have not gone out with that yet.
Thanks. The second question on GlobalEye, there were some big words on the slide there with the market potential.
What is the addressable market, do you think, for GlobalEye?
That's an extremely difficult question to answer because it's so political when it comes to all the decisions. I mean, there's no NATO needs to replace, new countries need to get this capability because it is really a game changer when it comes to your ability to control air assets. Our interpretation of what's needed is for us to ramp up our delivery capacity to four systems per year. That is how we interpret it. If we need to scale it up even further, we will make those decisions. If we can't deliver four per year, then we will not be able to support the customer discussions we will have leading up to contracts. That's our assessment right now.
I mean, to add that if I may, I can't be here sitting completely silent.
I'm just kidding. No, but I want to add that, I mean, some time ago, not that long ago, we sort of looked upon the addressable market when it comes to a system like GlobalEye as, okay, U.S. will pick sort of these areas and NATO will be obviously U.S. That was sort of our view. We picked the other countries like Sweden and maybe a Nordic country and some countries maybe in Asia, Middle East, and sort of, okay, that was it. That is not the same thing. It is still hard to judge sort of how quickly will Europe move forward to go into build the European NATO pillar in the way that there is more contribution in kind from different countries to build a complete NATO European perspective.
Will it be an opening to actually get into AFSC, as it's called, the new NATO capability? Because the U.S. is focusing on establishing their capability and the lead time to do that is sort of way beyond 2035. That gives sort of a window of opportunity in the European perspective. Early, we would have said that's U.S. Now I'm not so sure anymore. We have a bigger addressable market. Also looking at the U.S. perspective of the world.
Great. We have a question on the front.
Thank you. Maybe primarily to Görgen or whoever can answer. On government guarantees, etc., I mean, we talked a lot about that quarters ago and less now. It's a little bit of contradiction between need to take commercial investment decisions, but then also you have the government potential guarantees in the background. Is that still very important?
I mean, demand is super strong for the foreseeable future. Would you like to see those kind of guarantees or levels of stockpiles, etc., etc.?
I mean, of course, we would like to have longer contracts that are more visible to also take the next steps in investing. Now we have, on our own risk, taken quite large investments. If we should take the next step, I would urge the countries or the governments to go together and say, yes, we need these levels. Because otherwise, I think the risk profile will get too high. I mean, in the future, to take the next steps, I foresee. Most likely, there will be also now targets in each country. How much should I have in their stores? What is their war stocks and so forth?
That will create the foundation for them to take the next step of also having this longer production contract. That will make industry, not only me, but other industries as well, a possibility to make a business case on that.
On that, I think that's super important. Yes, we discussed sort of taking the next step, the paradigm shift needs sort of some sort of long-term commitments. That's still a valid discussion. Of course, it's about, okay, what stockpile levels would we want to have in different European countries? That builds a business case. Then it's also a long-term sustainable premium that you have to be able to pay also in times that you will not continue to manufacture the volumes that we see today. Still, it's important to have a ramp-up capability if needed.
We will have to be sort of sure that we are in agreement with our end customers and the countries that we're not going to dismantle this again. We will never go beyond sort of a below, I mean, a critical mass in terms of continuous production to have the ramp-up capability. Those kinds of discussions must also take place. You can talk about, okay, security supply in terms of powder factories. If we're going to build a powder factory in different parts of Europe, I assume that those sort of consortiums or whatever you see want to have a commitment long-term that there will be actually continuous production. That's more of the supply chain. Those things are still important. You're right. We don't sort of talk every day about that.
Long-term commitments and understanding the levels, the objectives where we're going more clearly is super important to us.
Micael and Carl-Johan, I think. You've talked about more collaboration across Europe. You've talked about air defense being a priority. You've got the European Sky Shield Initiative. 22 different countries. How do you negotiate, frankly, who does the integration, who does the missiles, etc.? How do you cut that Gordian knot of sovereign capability versus European collaboration?
It's not easy. Absolutely not. I think what it takes, because there's no federal level that can decide, I mean, obviously not. I think countries have to come forward and say, okay, we want to take the lead to this, and we're supported by our industry. We can go with Sweden to say, we want to take the lead in a certain area, and then we create the consortium to do it.
It has to be done that way. Then it's a negotiation, sort of work share negotiation based on your capabilities. Someone has to step forward to say, okay, we want to take the lead, our industry will take the lead, and we create a consortium around that. The difficult thing is not to have everyone contributing actually in terms of we need some share of this in 27 EU countries or in 23 NATO European countries. It can't work like that. It must be based on who has the capabilities today and the coalition are willing. Then we can sort of sell to other countries. This is still something the EU is battling with, whether with the incentives how to govern this. If they launch a flagship project, how will they decide who will lead? They can't.
It must be based on some countries step up and say, we want to take the lead, and then they have to sort it, and then industry will follow. Or we can create the bridge as industries, which we've done also. We in MBDA could, for example, step forward and say, we can take the systems integration lead for the integrated air and missile defense system. We do not provide all the products. We involve other industries as well. Together, we can actually take the lead. It must work like that. Countries must accept that or not, so to say. This is a knot that must be sort of, yeah, managed that way, I think.
We have another question there from.
We are not the United States of Europe. I mean, it is obviously not.
Thank you. One question.
This, I guess, ties back to the questions previously on what level of profitability customers would allow and contract structures and so on. You had the slide where you showed 30% EBIT growth on, I think it was 22% sales growth, which is, you know, it's good, but it's quite limited margin expansion. You have scale initiatives, portfolio management, efficiency initiatives. If we think about all those factors and still relatively limited margin expansion, it would imply that pricing does not cover cost inflation fully. If that equation stays the same and we look ahead and we now have that figure where internally funded R&D will increase as a share of sales, so it will accelerate the margin headwind from internally funded R&D, will we see even less margin expansion on growth going forward compared to what we've seen?
You're talking about Saab level now.
Saab level. Yeah.
First of all, I think we have to look at the backlog sort of development and what that implies in terms of potential margins in those new contracts, which will balance out sort of legacy contracts that may not sort of be the highest margin contracts. That is one way of sort of continuously improving our margin. We still have to see, or we still have not seen the full scale effect of certain sort of investments that we have made. Görgen talked about sort of automation to a large extent. That will, of course, give a big push to scale effect on margin development going forward. We strongly believe that we can continue to invest in R&D and still continue to generate better margins than the sales growth going forward. We will not trade off sort of not being relevant, embracing new technologies.
We can do both. We must do both going forward. We have still efficiency measures, as we talked about to some extent, across the company, which we have not really come into play yet. What Mikael is doing on the software side, for example, will, of course, have a big effect when new systems are being developed. And to some legacy systems, when it comes to architecture, how we look at software development, creating the guardrails on how to do that. I have also recruited a Chief Operating Officer, Eva Karlsson, who will start in August. While I am saying that delegation is super important to run the business if you want to grow a company like this, yes, that is true. We have still a number of measures to do, sort of within which guardrails are you sort of allowed to sort of run your business.
We have too many versions of ERP system, of DevOps environments, of IT initiatives, which must be sort of aligned. Eva's sort of role is to sort of implement that across the company, which always also will make this company more efficient going forward. I'm optimistic on how we can continue from these different perspectives to continuously improve our margins. That's sort of the areas I would pick on, which is going to be important on. We haven't seen all of this come into play yet. Backlog, efficiency, software, scale from automation. I mean, there's potential.
Thank you. I think we're running out of time.
There's another one up there.
Let's have the last questions. And a fast.
You are running the show.
Thank you so much, Mikael Laséen DNB Carnegie again.
I just wanted to follow up on that last one from a different angle, maybe. I mean, you have presented plans for R&D and for CapEx. You have talked about working capital development. It seems relatively stable in the slide pack. I am just wondering how sort of confident you are in the cash conversion target of 60% and how that is sort of balancing the margin tracker, what is required in terms of margin improvement ahead to achieve 60% cash conversion.
You may be one of them.
Maybe I cannot. I mean, that is, we are confident that we are going to have our research cash conversion target. That is what we have communicated, and that is what we are working on.
With that said, as I mentioned, of course, it's important for us to make sure that we deliver according to our plans so we do not tie up too much capital in the working capital. There are lots of deliveries on our contract. I would say it's really main focus to make sure that we deliver on that as well.
The setup in the backlog of the contracts that we have received in terms of payments is, of course, an important part in sort of fulfilling the cash conversion target. Again, I mean, you see that we invest heavily, but we've said it must be about 60% now. That is, of course, our assessment, our investigations, our evaluations have been on all of these things. We have good contracts in the backlog. We're doing efficiency measure on the capital efficiency part.
That will generate still, while doing R&D investments, this type of cash conversion profile going forward. We feel confident about that, I must say.
Thank you very much, Micael, Anna, Carl-Johan, and Görgen.
Thank you.
I also thank you and our viewers online for listening in. We have by here ended the day session of our Capital Markets Day.