Welcome to Sandvik's Virtual Capital Markets Day 2020. Thank you all for joining us today. We're looking forward to spending the next few hours with you. I'm standing here on stage with our President and CEO, Stefan Widing. Welcome, Stefan.
Thank you.
The overall strategy and targets will remain the same, but we are now shifting to growth. We are excited to hear you talk about it, but before we do, I would like to cover some practicalities. At Sandvik, we always put safety first. We always strive to make sure that all environments are safe for our employees and our partners. I trust that you are safe now and that you know the safety routines of where you are located. We for sure know what we would do if something happens here. With that, let's move on to today's agenda. We have a full schedule today, and you will hear our CEO, our CFO, and all the business area presidents talking about how we are positioned as a company and how we will now shift to growth.
If you'd like to ask a question live, please dial in using the telephone number in the invite, and you can also write your questions in the field below the webcast. We will address them if time allows, and if not, we will get back to you offline. That's it from me. Over to you now, Stefan, to start.
Thank you, Emelie. I would like to welcome you to Sandvik's Capital Markets Day here in 2020, a virtual event. My name is Stefan Widing, and I joined the company as CEO February 1st of this year. Sandvik today has world-leading positions in a number of different businesses, and we will spend today going through each of them and how for each of them, we are shifting focus to growth. Henrik Ager will take us through Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions, a business that you will see today is a true world leader when it comes to financial performance in its industry. We will, of course, continue to develop this business in the same way as it has been done in a great way in the past couple of years, and Henrik will talk more about that.
We have Anders Svensson that will talk about our Rock Processing Solutions business, a business that starting January 1st of this year, will become a new business area. We will have Nadine Crauwels coming up on stage as well, presenting the new segment, Sandvik Machining Solutions. Sandvik took on this position as of October 1st of this year, and this is a business where we will even more so focus on ensuring that we will grow the business going forward, and Nadine will talk about how we will do that. Lars Bergström will present Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions. Manufacturing Solutions being still a small part of our business, but an exciting area where we see good potential for growth going forward, and Lars will explain more about that.
Finally, Göran Björkman will come on stage and present Sandvik Materials Technology and the exciting journey that they have in front of them in the next couple of years. Sandvik has had a successful strategy in the past couple of years. This strategy has led to a company with strong and leading businesses being number one or number two in basically all areas where we are operating. There are still a few areas where we are not meeting this, but it is for good reasons, typically because we are investing to reach that position. We have also been on a successful decentralization journey, where step by step we have decentralized the company, and although we still have a way to go to be fully ingrained into our culture, we have come a very long way on this journey. This has led to increased performance.
You can see it in our margins. It has also allowed us in this downturn to prove a very different kind of resiliency than we have seen in the past. We have also continued to work on sustainability, safety, and compliance, areas that have been an important part of the Sandvik culture for quite some time. Now going forward, we will keep all of these things with us, but we will increase the focus on a number of new areas. We will increase the focus on growth first and foremost, both organic and through M&A. We will increase a focus on digitalization and how that will impact our company, both how we run our internal operations, but also how we go to market and the products and solutions that we are offering our customers.
We will also shift even more towards sustainability, both again how we do this internally in our own operations, but even more importantly, the solutions that we can provide to our customers to help them become even more sustainable. Then we will focus also on agility also going forward. While we have shown very good resilience in the past quarters, there is more to do, and now is the time to start to work on ensuring that we are even better prepared for the next downturn, whenever that may come. We launched one and a half years ago on the Capital Markets Day in May last year, new financial targets for the group. These will remain the same. We launched a growth target of at least 5% through the cycle.
If we look at how we have performed over the past cycle, roughly from the beginning of 2016 to the beginning of 2020, we have had a CAGR of around 3%. Clearly we have not met this target in the past. Clearly, we have more to do in order to achieve this. You might ask, how can we say that we are shifting to growth when we keep the growth target the same? Well, again, we haven't met this target in the past, we launched it one and a half years ago. It's fair to say that since then, we have mainly been playing defense, with an industrial cycle starting to decline mid last year, the corona situation on top of that. We believe that this is now what we need to focus on to achieve this target.
If we can prove to you that we meet this target, we're happy to come back here and revise it in the future. For now, this is the target we are working against. We have a trough margin target of at least 16% on a rolling 12 months basis. This target we are delivering upon. We are currently after Q3, despite the crisis we have been through, sitting at a rolling 12 months EBIT of 16.8%. This is a target that we believe we are meeting. We will have about one quarter in front of us with tough comparables, and then we will come into a period with easier comparables again. We are confident that this is a target that we will continue to meet also going forward. We have a net debt to equity ratio target of less than 0.5.
We have a very strong balance sheet today. We are nearly or essentially debt-free, which means that currently we are here at 0.05. Well within this target. This, of course, also means that we have significant firepower when it comes to meeting and delivering on our growth target from an acquisitive point of view. Tomas will come back to that later in this presentation, what we see there in terms of our financial firepower. We have a dividend target of 50% to earnings. Up until, and including 2019, we were at 44%, so basically at target there. Provided that there will be no dividend this year, of course, the achievement here will go down. It is important then to say that the target over a cycle of 50% remains.
If we look at this overall, and we know also that we have done the announcement related to SMT, we also said when we launched these targets that if we separate SMT, we will have to review these targets again, and that is of course true. We could today do a mathematical calculation of what it would mean, but we prefer to come back to you when we are closer to a spin and then revise the target based on where we are at that point in time. We will come back to that in that situation. I want to continue to talk a little bit about our resilience. It's important to not diminish the performance of the organization and the achievement of the organization here in the past couple of quarters.
We have been in a situation where our top line dropped at the same level as during the global financial crisis. At that time in our history, we went into a loss. This year, we have continued to deliver above our trough margin target. We dropped below 16% in one quarter. On a rolling 12 months basis, we are continuing to stay above. As late as April of this year, I got a lot of questions regarding how will you deliver on this target? I'm not getting those questions anymore. I think you agree with me that we are delivering on this target now. I hope also that when we are through this COVID-19 situation, we will have shown to you that we can once and for all leave the ghost of the financial crisis behind us. This is a different company than it was back then.
There are many reasons for why we have achieved this now. Of course, we have improved the business overall in a structural way in many areas. We have divested some underperforming businesses that typically tend to underperform even more in a downturn. The most important reason is that we have been agile and quick and determined with our decision-making. That in its turn is a consequence of our decentralized operating model with accountable divisions that take decisions quickly close to their customers. Already back in 2019, we launched the first savings program, announced the savings of SEK 1.7 billion, affecting quite a few people in the organization. Some of that were delivered in 2019, but most of it came into effect now in 2020. When corona hit, we added quickly a number of temporary savings to this. We communicated SEK 1.5 billion in total.
That we have overachieved upon, like many other companies, simply because the discretionary spend came down much more than we had anticipated. At the same time, we launched a new long-term savings target of SEK 1.3 billion that we are now executing on, that will start to come into effect in 2021. When you look at this, you will see that we are not only managing the short-term situation, but we are also preparing the company and setting up the business for profitable growth going forward when the market starts to come back. We also launched new sustainability targets last year, with additional focus on circularity and our CO2 impact. These targets are, of course, really important for the planet and for our people, but they are also good for our profits. We will ensure that we do our job internally to take care of our own operations.
The main impact we can have as a company is in the products and the solutions that we provide to our customers. In some of our businesses, it's an order of magnitude increase in the impact we can have at the customer versus what we can do ourselves. That is really important. We have here a couple of examples. We have, for example, in Kanthal, where as part of their offering, they are converting gas furnaces to electric furnaces. So far, this has saved 170,000 tonnes of CO2 for our customers. We have another example in Svedala, in our rock processing business, where we have over 90% of reused steel in our large crushers. This is benefiting both us and our customers, both from a cost as well as from a sustainability perspective.
As I said in the beginning, I joined the company in the beginning of the year. I'm happy that I got about six weeks of uninterrupted and intense travel before the COVID-19 situation started to cause lockdowns. I used this time to travel around in the company, meeting basically all of our divisions and visiting several of our key sites. Of course, this has continued virtually since then. What I have found is a company with a very strong culture, with passionate people that are proud to work for Sandvik. I've also seen a company that have done tremendous progress in the decentralization journey. We have come very far on that. I've also seen the portfolio cleanup that has been done has resulted in a company that are in leading positions in basically all the businesses that we are operating in.
If I conclude this, my conclusion is that we have a very solid platform to start from, and that platform we will now use when we shift to growth. When we look at this, of course, we need to ensure that all of our businesses are in an environment and have the best possible circumstances to maximize their potential. When we do that analysis, we have come to the conclusion that for SMT, the best thing for them in the future will be to be separately listed as their own company. SMT is a world leading company in its niches. It's a world leading materials technology company.
They have improved their performance significantly in the past couple of years, both through that and through the way they are now managing through this crisis that we are in, they are in the process of establishing a track record and proving that they can stand on their own two feet going forward. There are a number of reasons, strategic, operational, and financial, for why we believe this is the right thing to do. The one I think is the most important from my perspective is the capital allocation. No matter how well SMT performs, we will never be able to get away from the fact that their returns will be lower than the other Sandvik businesses that are operating in different industries with different conditions.
When we talk about capital allocation, there will always be a risk for SMT that they will not get the capital they need to develop and grow in the way that is good for them. That is why we believe it is the right thing for them to become their own company going forward. This is now the journey that we are on. You could say it started last year. Some would say it probably started a decade ago with countless analysis and discussions internally. We did announce last year that we are starting the internal separation. This was now concluded at the end of quarter three. We have taken the decision to proceed towards a separate listing.
We will spend the next 12 months building the organization and the systems that they need to be able to operate as a fully independent company, still within the Sandvik umbrella. They need to operate in that way for a while to be ready for a listing, which we are aiming to happen then in 2022. I know that basically all of you believe that this is the right thing to do. I also know that some of you think that it should happen faster. Let me then say this, that we are not dragging our feet here. We are doing this as quickly as we believe it's reasonable to do, given the complexities of carving out a 160-year-old relationship, given all the stakeholders that we need to be with us on this journey to make this a successful separation.
We believe that a successful separation is going to be the right thing for shareholders of both the new SMT company and the remaining part of the Sandvik Group going forward. We have a long-term perspective on this, and we're going to do the right thing. If you now take a step back and start with how is Sandvik looking today. We have our SMRT business, which again has performed extremely well in the past couple of years. It's in good shape, and we will continue to develop that in a positive way. We do see even more potential in the rock processing part of the business, which is in a separate part of the value chain compared to Mining and Rock Solutions. We also see Sandvik Machining Solutions with a very strong core in cutting tools, but also a business that needs to grow more.
We also see potential in the adjacent manufacturing parts of that business that need dedicated focus and specific skill sets to be successful. Of course, we have SMT that we have just talked about. This is why we are now evolving the structure of the group to position ourselves for growth. Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions, as I've said, they will continue on the successful journey that they have already been on for quite some time. Rock Processing Solutions, here we see additional potential for growth that Anders will talk about later. We have renamed then the business area SMS into Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions. Still at the top level, the same business area, but we are creating two segments in that structure, one focused on machining solutions and one focusing on manufacturing solutions.
Then we have SMT that is now starting its own journey. When we split SMRT, we are in effect creating two world leaders out of one. We believe we have the potential to release even more of the potential in these businesses through this change. These two businesses, again, are addressing different parts of this value chain, with SMR being in sort of the rock extraction phase or upstream in the mining value chain. Here they are a true world leader, and as you will see also from a financial as well as from an innovation perspective when Henrik presents. We have our Rock Processing Solutions business, which is today one of the world leaders in crushing and screening.
We believe there is more potential to grow in that specific part of the value chain, but we also see other potentially attractive niches downstream in this value chain that we want to grow into, either organically, through partnerships, through joint ventures, or through acquisitions. I want to be clear on that we are not aiming to become a full solutions provider in this space, but there are other niches that we feel are attractive for us and that we will explore in this space. We are essentially then doing the same thing with Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions. Here, I think it's even more important to have dedicated governance with specific models for governance and specific skill sets because of the different nature in these different business segments.
Machining Solutions will, of course, continue to focus primarily on its core of machining solutions. They will also add larger solution sets, especially into the product preparation part of their business, as we have seen, for example now with the acquisition of CGTech. Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions will address a wider part of this value chain, including additive manufacturing, which is, of course, a potential substitute for machining. Here, it's important to say that we have not fully defined at this point exactly what areas we will go into. We have come to the conclusion that there are areas we will not go into. For example, 3D CAD, or when it comes to metrology outside of industrial metrology. There are still areas that we could consider a gray zone that we will explore. We might consider acquisitions or we will not. That will develop as we go.
Sufficient to say that already with the things that we have defined as in scope, we see significant market potential to grow. We will come back to that later today. If we now look at what we will have once we have concluded on an SMT spin, we will have four different businesses, where you can see here the underlying market growth that we forecast in these businesses between 2019 and 2025. We should realize that in this period, we also have a period of the COVID declines that we expect to have recovered in 2025. For Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions, we expect an underlying market growth of 3%. For Sandvik Rock Processing Solutions with a higher mix of construction, slightly lower, 2.5%-3%. Sandvik Machining Solutions we expect to grow by about 2% CAGR during this period.
This includes then both tailwinds and the headwinds that will come in, for example, automotive, as we will explain later today as well. In Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions, again for us, a small base to start from, but with very good growth potential, a growth of the underlying market of at least 10% going forward. This then will lead to our target of growing by more or at least by 5% through a cycle. If you add this up, you will of course realize that we need also to add the acquisitive growth to meet this target. If we look at how we have fared here in the past, if we look between 2016 and 2020, we have added about SEK 2 billion in acquired growth.
We have announced another SEK 600 million of acquisitions that haven't closed yet, roughly SEK 2.5+ billion in acquired growth over this period. Going forward, our target is to grow by 2.5% per year through the cycle through acquired growth. If you translate this and you exclude an SMT, this would mean SEK 2 billion-SEK 2.5 billion per year added through acquisitions. Clearly, a significant step up from achieving that number over a four-year period in the past. Here we need to step up our game. We have already seen, and Tomas will show you that it's not really a matter of money. We have the resources to get this done. We also need to improve on our acquisition process, be even better on working with a pipeline, and eventually closing targets.
We will also work on our integration capabilities, ensuring that the companies that come into the group continue to perform at or above their historical performance. Most importantly here will be to ensure that this becomes ingrained into our daily work. It should be a normal part of doing business. Our divisional leads, our BA presidents should go to work every week driving acquisitions forward, realizing that this is a key part of achieving our growth targets in the future, and also the way we will measure how we perform. How will we make this happen? How will I make this happen? Well, I cannot do it alone, and neither can my management team. We will make this happen through our 23 divisions. This is how we truly leverage the power of the decentralized operating model.
When each of our 23 divisional presidents and our 23 divisional management teams wakes up every morning to deliver on our growth targets, on the acquisitions, on the shift to digitalization, on the shift to sustainability, and working to ensure that we are even more agile in the next downturn, we will make this happen. If I summarize this, before we go into the details in each of these areas going forward here, our overall targets and strategy remain the same, but we are shifting the focus to some specific areas where we need to step up our game. We have shown great resilience in the past couple of quarters, and we will continue to be agile, and we will continue to work on ensuring that we are even better prepared next time.
We have a very strong foundation that we have built, and we will use this strong foundation as we now shift to growth. This is one of the reasons for why the structure is evolving to increase the transparency and to increase the focus in capturing these growth opportunities. We will make this happen through our 23 divisions, leveraging the power of the whole Sandvik organization. I will pause here for now, and now we will dive into the numbers. I will welcome our CFO, Tomas Eliasson, onto the stage. Tomas.
Okay. Thank you, Stefan. What we will do now is to jump into the numbers. We are going to do a financial overview of the last five years, 2016 to 2020, and talk about what has happened, and not the least, how we have dealt with the COVID-19 situation and the impact on our business. We will also talk a bit about what is happening going forward. We will go a little bit into some more details than we normally do during a quarterly presentation. Let's start with the top line here. On the left-hand side, you see the revenues. We actually did peak at the end of 2018, early 2019. 2017 and 2018 were two really, really strong growth years.
It doesn't really show in the numbers here on the left-hand side because we had very strong positive currency effects in 2019, which sort of covered up the numbers a bit. If you look at the red line in the left-hand graph here, you see the organic rolling 12-month revenues, and you can see how it starts to sort of fade out and decline already from the first half of 2019. This is very clear on the organic growth chart on the right-hand side. You can see the very strong growth numbers in 2017 and 2018. You can see early 2019, growth started to come down, and we felt that in our short cycle business very clearly.
We kicked off a major cost mitigation program already then, which impacted 3,000 of our employees, around 7% of all the employees in the company. In 2019, we had really big negative numbers in some divisions, and the whole group was flat, and then it started to go negative. The second quarter 2020, we had the big impact from the COVID-19. It was kind of a double dip in the business cycle, - 20%. From April, May, then we've had a gradual recovery, but still year-over-year, - 11% for the third quarter. How have we dealt with this? How have we mitigated this downturn, this impact on the top line, which is actually the same magnitude as during the financial crisis in 2009?
Let's go back to the three cost mitigation programs that Stefan mentioned in his presentation here, and talk a little bit more about the details one by one here. Starting with the program we kicked off in 2019, SEK 1.7 billion, 3,000 employees. We had SEK 400 million in the income statement in 2019. We had SEK 1.2 billion. We will have SEK 1.2 billion in 2020. We've had SEK 1 billion so far. There will be a little residual year-over-year for the first quarter in 2021. The next mitigation program was launched as we were hit by COVID-19. We communicated SEK 1.5 billion in work time reductions, short-term weeks, temporary savings, and that is still valid. It still holds. We have done SEK 1.1 billion so far. On top of that, we have reduced discretionary spend of the same amount, SEK 1.1 billion. This is very much travel.
Everybody is working from home who can work from home. We don't see customers. We don't have exhibitions. We don't go to trade fairs, et cetera. We don't have conferences, and so on. The spend level has gone down quite dramatically. Of course, going into 2021, both these activities, work time reduction and reduced discretionary spend, will be reduced, of course, and fade off as volumes come back. Some will continue for a while into 2021, some of these activities will have to be at least partially replaced by permanent savings. That you see in the third program, which will start to kick in in 2021. SEK 1.3 billion in savings, the majority hitting the income statement in 2021 and a little bit in 2022. There might be more to come as well, depending on how the business cycle develops.
In the lower left-hand corner, you see the number of employees in the group. You see in 2019 the big effect from the first cost mitigation program. You see in 2020 the big effect from the short-term working weeks. Also a little bit effect of the 2019 program and some organic reductions as well. If you look at the permanent reductions here now, the 2019 program and what will come in the 2021 program here, it's around 5,000 employees. That's more than 10% of all the employees in the company. This has helped us both in cost of goods sold and in SG&A in the group. Let's jump into the income statement and talk a bit about the details here. Starting with gross contribution, which is the part of cost of goods sold, which is direct costs.
Of course, pricing is important here as well, and pricing has been positive in Sandvik all through this top-line decline. It's been around 1.5%-2%. A big part of the direct costs are variable, of course, like material and processing cost and so on. That helps, of course. Footprint consolidation has helped as well. We've been fairly resilient here in the gross contribution. If we move to the gross margin, you add the fixed cost as well in cost of goods sold, which is all the production units, the factories, and what have you. It is a little bit of longer lead time to deal with those costs. We will deal with it, but these are larger projects. It's not something that you can do overnight, like from March to April. These are longer projects. We will deal with that as well.
We're fairly happy still with how this looks. Further down in the income statement, SG&A. The ratio, if we go back a little bit in time here, the SG&A ratio at the previous peak was 23%, and then it jumped up to 26% in the trough 2016. We were not happy with that. We promised that we should reduce it to 23%, which we did in 2018. As the business cycle cooled off in 2019, and then as COVID hit us, we were a little bit afraid that this would jump up. We've had a lot of focus on this one, and we're happy to see now that we're actually down on 22% now. In individual months, we've been as low as 20%. Now, having said that, of course, short term savings, temporary savings, does help of course.
Short term working weeks, lower discretionary spend, et cetera. Some of this will come back when we have to start to travel again, when we would start to meet customers again, which we will do. Our ambition is to keep this on a healthy level by replacing part of the temporary savings with the permanent savings for 2021 and onwards. This, of course, then adds up to the EBIT margin. This has been mentioned by Stefan today as well in the introduction here. The 16% trough margin is a margin for a tough or normal, let's say, heavy business cycle downturn. This has been worse. Still, we've been able to keep it up. It's on 16.8% now, so we have delivered on the trough margin target. The reported 12-month number is 16.7%. A sharp drop in demand. One step ahead with the savings programs.
Decentralized organization drives agility. It is working. Let's go a little bit further down than in the income statement. Interest net and taxes. On the left-hand side, you see the interest net, the interest net is now approaching a level of SEK 400 million rolling 12 months. We are coming from SEK 1.5 billion five years ago. The debt has, of course, been reduced quite heavily. We'll have a look at the balance sheet in a second. We have also gone through a major recapitalization project with our subsidiaries, replaced very expensive local borrowing with equity injections. This has improved the interest net with SEK 1.1 billion on an annual basis. That is like SEK 0.70 per share after taxes. It has a profound impact, a significant impact on the earnings per share. On the right-hand side, you see the tax rate. It's coming down as well.
We have a guidance of 23%-25%. It continues to come down, there's no magic to this really. This is just good tax control, efficient processes, and also the fact that in many of the markets where we are big, like in India, Czechia, Finland, Sweden, United States, the income tax rate for corporates have come down to around 20%. Of course, the tax rate comes down. If we then leave the income statement and then go to the balance sheet and the cash flow, you have the quarterly cash flow on the left-hand side. It's interesting to see here the rolling 12-month numbers. You have the cash flow in the blue line. You have the rolling 12-month earnings in the red line. The way this works is that when business is up, you have to produce a little bit more than you actually sell.
Earnings is ahead of the cash flow. When business is down, you actually produce less than what you sell. You get a release from working capital. You can see how we had a release from working capital both in 2016 in a previous trough and also now in 2020 when the top line is down. It's behaving according to expectations. On the right-hand side, you can see working capital well under control, and we're especially happy with the inventories. The inventories are well managed. We have not seen, let's say, any major buildups like we did in 2018 and 2019, so very well managed. We're also happy with the receivables. We don't have any increases in overdues, and we don't have any increases in credit losses. That takes us to the debt.
The five years development of the debt, you can see how the gearing now has come down to 0.05. The financial target is 0.5. Very strong and solid balance sheet position. On the right-hand side, we have added one of the rating KPIs, net debt over EBITDA, Standard & Poor's definitions. There are no official targets as such for that. There's no financial targets for it, but 1.5x net debt over EBITDA is a kind of a threshold. If we would go beyond that line, then the rating institutes would start to ask questions for us given the current rating we have, which is A - with a stable outlook. It looks good, really good. What will we do with the balance sheet? There's a lot of firepower in the balance sheet for acquisitions and investments.
If we talk just briefly about capital allocation, on the left-hand side you have the, let's say, the schematic or abbreviated capital allocation that we have used for these five years. We said basically we'll use 1/3 for debt reduction, 1/3 for dividends, and 1/3 for M&A. We don't really have any debt left, so it will move over to more leverage our growth opportunities. If we talk about growth opportunities and cash flow and balance sheet, we do have an annual cash flow after dividend, which will give us like SEK 5 billion annually to use for acquisitions. This could, depending on what you buy, of course, be equivalent to like 2% acquired growth, maybe 2%, 2.5%. Also put that aside.
If you just look at the balance sheet the way it is right now, how much can we leverage the balance sheet? Let's say that we would go to 0.5, which is our gearing target. That would give us more than SEK 30 billion in firepower because the equity is SEK 66 billion. Quite some firepower. We must also remind you that the gearing target that we have does not include transformational M&A if any of that would arise. Final slide, just a bit on the balance sheet after a possible, or not a possible, after an SMT spin. This is just a simulation because we get a lot of question around what will it look like, what will SMT look like, what will Sandvik look like after an SMT spin? We've just taken the balance sheet as per September 30 and just simulated the spin, what would happen.
Group is the Group today, SEK 23 billion in cash, SEK 3 billion in net debt, SEK 66 billion in equity, and a gearing of 0.05. After a spin, we would give SEK 1 billion in cash to SMT. The net debt would be SEK 0.5 billion because you have pension liabilities, capitalized leases, which is a little bit more than SEK 1 billion. Equity would be SEK 11.6 billion.
The gearing then 0.05. A very strong balance sheet for SMT as it spins off as an independent company, and a strong balance sheet for Sandvik as well going forward. Referring back to the previous slide here, we talked about firepower in the balance sheet. Of course, if the equity goes from SEK 66 billion to SEK 54 billion, the firepower goes down with SEK 5 billion. That still leaves SEK 25 billion firepower or headroom in the balance sheet for M&A on top of the annual cash flow of SEK 5 billion. With that, I'll hand over to you again, Emelie.
Thank you, Tomas, and thank you, Stefan. We are now ready to start the first Q&A session. Please note that we have a new telephone number. You should see it on the screen now. Due to time restraints, please keep your questions to two, and please keep them as short as possible. Thank you. I will actually start with one question from the webcast. This one is from Daniela Costa at Goldman Sachs: "Given the good work on margins this year, why not be more ambitious on the trough cycle margin target? Maybe introduce a peak trough range instead?
Yeah, no, it's a fair question. First of all, I think we should say that we're not fully through this crisis yet, even though we are confident that we will continue to deliver on this target. I think it would maybe be a little bit too bullish to, at this point, increase the trough margin target. It is also the case, as we said, that when we have the SMT spin, and when we get closer to that, we're going to review these targets as well. Rather than shifting them around every year, we prefer now to focus on delivering, continue to delivering on the trough margin target, and then we'll come back with an updated target when we look at the group excluding SMT, not too far away.
Thank you. Operator, if we have any questions from the conference call, please go ahead and start.
Our first question comes from Magnus Gruber from UBS. Please go ahead with your question.
Hi, Stefan, Tomas. Magnus from UBS. Just a couple from me. First, what cumulative impact on SMS top line do you expect from electric vehicles until 2025? Do you have a sort of a nominal number for us there as an annual headwind, or how do you look at that?
Yeah, we will actually, in a few minutes, we will come into more details around that. Until 2025, we expect automotive to grow for SMS by about 1% CAGR. We'll come back to more details shortly.
Got it. Thank you so much. On the top line synergies you expect to gain between Machining Solutions from the growth in Manufacturing Solutions, do you have any comments on that?
We don't have any specific numbers for that. Of course, we have it as part of our various acquisition cases, for example. There are synergies related to that. It's not specific numbers that we are breaking out and mentioning here. There are those synergies definitely. It's a big part for motivating these type of deals.
Yeah. It would be up and above the 5x growth on adjacent and digital that you have commented?
There are synergies. If you take the CGTech acquisition, for example, there are synergies that will be in the pure cutting tools part of the business, meaning driving additional cutting tools. Those are not counted in the adjacencies or the five times. Those are part of the growth ambitions for the core SMS business.
Exactly. Perfect. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Gaël de-Bray from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question.
Oh, thanks very much. Good afternoon, everybody. My question relates to the group's growth ambitions. At the group level, the financial growth target is unchanged at more than 5%. As far as I can understand, there's going to be about half of that growth coming from acquisitions. You expect each division to grow at least twice as fast as their respective estimated market growth. How do I reconcile all of that? I mean, do you really expect the market growth of your businesses to be only between 1% and 2% which would be well below global GDP? If you could just talk about it.
No, yeah, sure. No, you cannot add it in that way. As each of the businesses will soon go into more detail on, each of them have the ambition and the target to grow at least twice the pace of their underlying market, including acquisitions. Some of them will have the target to grow faster than the market organically, you need to add the acquisitions into the mix to get to the 2x or faster growth targets. Does that answer?
Okay. Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
Generally speaking, how do you see the market outlook of your respective end markets? Will it be better than GDP growth or slightly below?
That is what I just showed you in one of the slides. For Mining and Rock Solutions, 3%, for Rock Processing Solutions, 2.5%-3%, for Machining Solutions, 2%, and for Manufacturing Solutions, more than 10%. I guess, I don't know what assumptions you would have on GDP growth, but I guess it's roughly in line with GDP growth, with the exception of Manufacturing Solutions that will grow faster than that. We double that up in terms of our own targets. Of that, about 2.5% CAGR will come from acquisitions.
Okay. Thanks very much. Can I have a second question on SMS?
Yes.
Thanks. Look, I think there's clearly a greater focus now on growth, so I guess you're ready to make a bit more acquisitions in SMS, perhaps in the design or in the analysis part of the business. Historically, design, machining, and analysis, all of that have been pretty clearly separate and defined phases in metal cutting. The question I have is, as you prepare to embark on a more aggressive M&A strategy there, do you have any concrete examples where customers have actually been asking you for an integration of these three stages of design, machining, and analytics to create a more seamless manufacturing process?
Yes, we will actually present some slides on a few of these value propositions when we present Manufacturing Solutions. I'll pass now, and we'll come back to that later today.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Klas Bergelind from Citi. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, Stefan and Tomas. Klas from Citi.
Hello.
The first one is on the sub SEK 1 billion of sales in 2019 from high growth areas in SMS. Can we get some color on what Metrologic represents out of that 2019 number versus the SEK 400 million-SEK 500 million of sales when you acquired it? I appreciate that Metrologic has been operating a bit standalone until now, but still interesting to get some color there. I will start here.
Yeah, no, I'm not breaking out individual businesses in this. We can just say that they were growing until COVID. They have an exposure into automotive, especially in Europe, they have been hit by that. They were growing up until then. From here on, we expect them to come back to growth again. That's where they are. We should also realize, just a final comment, that the Metrologic acquisition was actually two companies, Metrologic and a company called ATT, which is in the U.S. It's two different companies that we are running there now.
Yeah. Okay. No, thank you. My second one is on your growth ambition and sticking to SMS, but focusing a bit on round tools. I think you have said, Stefan, when I spoke to you in September, that your ambition is to grow market shares in round tools over time, similar to those in SMS. I think round tools market share today is around 10%, versus inserts at 30%, roughly. Is that still the ambition? Because that obviously comes on top of that 5x ambition you have in the high growth areas.
Yeah, the 5x has nothing to do with the core cutting tool business. This will shortly be more clear. We will explain this in more detail shortly, but this is obviously in the core Machining Solutions business. Yes, the ambition is to grow that. Nadine will explain in more detail how and where. We'll come back to that, and you can repeat the question at the end if you don't get the answer during the presentation.
Sure. Just one final one, promise to be quick.
That's okay.
It's on the conventional business again, and I know this is sensitive to macro, of course, and we're faced with further shutdowns. If you could share with us, Stefan, any sensitivities that you have done outside of automotive. You said 1% growth in autos until 2025. What is the base case for aerospace? What is the base case oil and gas, general engineering? Just so we get a sense for the conventional business in terms of how you look at the potential scenario.
I will shortly come back to that as well, because, yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about the market development shortly.
Okay.
I'll come back.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Maddy Singh from Bank of America. Please go ahead with your question.
Yes, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. Just clarifying on the growth target, the 5% target for the group, whether that includes the M&A ambitions as well of 2.5% CAGR contribution from that?
Yes.
That's the first question.
Yes. If you do the math, and you look at the underlying market growth that I explained the breakdown of, and you would then add to that that you will see later today that we have the ambition to also organically grow faster than the market in some specific areas. You do the math on what that means, and then you add our ambition of 2.5% organic growth through the cycle, you will probably arrive at a number that is slightly higher than 5%. We have a target of growing at least 5%, so that's where we are.
Can you please remind what was the growth targets previously? Was the 5% growth target previously, did that include M&A as well in that?
You mean prior to last year?
Today. Yeah.
Tomas.
Well, in the period 2016 up until 2019, we did not have a growth target. In 2015 and 2016, the company was clearly underperforming. We were at a trough, the focus we had at that point in time was to restore profitability and returns in the company on a flat market. We didn't have a financial target which was based on growth at all. The market did come back, and of course, we did better because of that as well. Before that, we had a much higher growth target, which we basically never reached.
Okay. The second question is on SMRT. With the creation of the two new divisions within that, I'm just wondering, when you compare the valuations of Epiroc, trading closer to 20x EBITA, and whether that has been, let's say, one of the factors being considered into giving out more details around this SMRS division to give more like for like comparison to the market. Is that the first step you have taken to kind of bring market attention towards the valuation gap here? If that doesn't work, would you be open to take further actions, and what kind of actions would you have in mind?
We would not reorganize the company to be able to show numbers to try to increase the valuation. What we can say is that if we wouldn't have done this reorganization, which are done for the reasons of accelerating focus and growth in these areas, we would most likely have broken out some numbers to show you some of these things as well. Less details probably, but to give you more of a sense for how these two different businesses have been performing. Quite frankly, we do that ourselves internally, and I think it's a relevant metric to show. No, we did not do this change because of that reason, but I think it's a good consequence that we can now show some of these numbers as well.
Would you be open to take further actions around that if the valuation gap doesn't close in, let's say, next one year?
I'm not sure what you mean by further actions in that.
Thank you, Maddy.
Something similar to what.
Thank you, Maddy. I think we need to move on to next question, but please line up again if you have further questions. Thank you.
Thank you. Just as a quick reminder, if you do wish to ask an audio question, you may do so by pressing zero one on your telephone keypad. Once again, it's the zero one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. Our next question comes from Ben Uglow from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead with your question.
Good afternoon, Stefan and Tomas, and thank you for taking my questions. I guess two, the first was really just about the approach to M&A and the kind of internal processes. Since you've been at Sandvik, Stefan, what are you doing differently in terms of the way that Sandvik thinks about M&A? I'm just curious, in terms of the sort of decentralized divisional structure, 23 businesses, how do you go around, or how do you go about identifying your list of targets? How do we get the right list? Is it sort of coming from bottom up? Is it coming from top down? Just a sense on that. That was the first question. Second question, I guess this may be a little bit more for Tomas.
You kindly gave us the figure around sort of SEK 5 billion organic cash flow in terms of firepower and acquired sales, presumably something like SEK 2.5 billion. Some of the targets out there, particularly in software, are going to be at multiples that are well beyond those kind of organic levels. Can I just ask, how are you thinking about software multiples at the moment? In terms of what you're seeing in the market right now, how does Sandvik get its head around paying those elevated multiples? Thank you.
Thank you. I'll start. Regarding acquisitions then and the approach to that, I think the first thing, and this was my last bullet point on one of the slides, is to make it a normal, a standard part of driving your business. A concrete thing, have acquired growth as part of your growth targets. Don't just have organic growth and then maybe we'll do some acquisitions. The acquired growth should be part of your overall growth target on a three, five-year perspective. You actively need to drive acquisitions, and each division takes ownership for driving acquisitions. Driving acquisitions by pushing it constantly from the top, that does not give the scale and the agility that we need to make this happen.
My experience is you unleash the power, and you can create a company with an embedded acquired growth strategy when you have each of the entities, in this case, our divisions, all focusing on acquisitions. That also answers one of your other questions there. That is where we need to identify these targets. It shouldn't be me or Tomas sitting with a bank to get a list of acquisition targets. That's too late.
The division should come to us with so many targets that we can only select half of them. That's when we will execute on this, reach our targets, and get good quality acquisitions in. The other thing that we are in the process of doing, is removing red tape. We are still not a company that are used to doing acquisitions, so we get bogged down in details or get too risk-averse. It's going to be a journey. I get frustrated still too often, but there's too much red tape in the organization and too much risk aversion, quite frankly. That is also something we're working on. I don't think this is strange at all. This is something, like everything else, you need to do it a lot. You need to practice to get good at it.
Mm-hmm. On the software question.
Yeah, sure. I can talk a little bit about that. Yes, of course, we know that software companies, digital, et cetera, comes with different multiples. It's not like bolt-on acquisitions. Bolt-ons where you maybe pay 1x to 1.5 x sales, and you pay maybe 7x to 10 x EBITDA. You have a return on the investment after normally five years or something. Software acquisitions, of course, comes with multiples, 15 x EBITDA, 20x, 25x. I mean, in that neighborhood. That means that from a pure return point of view, it will double the time at least. It's like 10 years. We know that, of course, we have a strong balance sheet. We have a strong operational annual cash flow, housekeeping come in here as well.
Even though the firepower is good and strong, there's a limit to what we can do. We just have to be wise and pick and choose what we do. This is what software businesses comes with.
Understood. That's very helpful. Thank you both.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andreas Koski from Nordea. Please go ahead with your question.
Thank you very much. There were questions on growth today, but I would like to ask one as well. You expect market growth of 2% to 3% for your businesses, and you aim to grow by at least twice that pace, including acquisitions, which gets me to around 5%. That implies to me that your growth target is not really dependent on SMT being or not being part of the Sandvik group. Is that correct? What kind of market growth do you expect for SMT?
I'll leave the second half of that question to Göran when it comes to the stage because of the process we are in, I think he should talk to that. No, it's true. We have not included SMT, going forward in our long-term growth target, so to say.
That wouldn't change if SMT was spun out today?
Let us come back to that when we do the revision of the targets, when we are closer to the spin. SMT today is, let's say, 15% of the business. It has to be a pretty big deviation for that to move the needle for a percentage point for the group. I think the assumption, if we round things to whole percentages, it's most likely that it will not change. Let us come back on that.
Understood.
Thank you. We need to close the Q&A session now, Andreas, we will have another Q&A session at the end of the day which is longer. Let's move on.
No worries. Thank you very much.
schedule. Thank you. Thank you. Stefan will now do an introduction to our business area, Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions. Stefan, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Emelie. I was just waiting for the slides to pop up. There we go. Yes, I will do this introduction of Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions, we will have the respective presidents come up and present each of the two segments in more detail. If we look at the numbers for SMM in brief, you will recognize these numbers because they are the same as they have been for SMS in the past, obviously. You know the story. We were in the growth cycle for about three years, from mid 2016 till mid 2019. We came into a down cycle from an industrial point of view, on top of that, we have the COVID-19 situation.
Despite this, good margin resilience, especially in relation to historic performance from this business, well done there by the team. You also know the split in segments, automotive around 26%, energy 10%, aerospace 14%, general engineering 47%. You also know that we usually say that some of general engineering is actually going into tier two or tier three suppliers, especially in automotive and aerospace. Automotive is more likely around 30% overall, aerospace add 3%, maybe 4% to that number as well. From a geographical point of view, about half the business in Europe and the other half split roughly equally between North America and Asia. If we look at the overall demand drivers in this part of the business, there are both headwinds and tailwinds.
If we look at the positive sides, we continue to see a trend towards more complex shapes and also more advanced machining using more and more multi-axis CNC machines, for example. Both of these are driving the need for more advanced tools. We also have additive manufacturing, which we consider be a tailwind. From a machining perspective, additive manufacturing is basically a near net shape technology. When you have done the printing, you still need to post-process and do machining on the parts. Because of the complex shapes and typically advanced material, so used in additive, also that is driving development for more advanced tooling, which is offsetting then some of the substitution that additive otherwise would give. On top of that, we have our own additive division that is addressing a wider part of the value chain than we do in pure machining.
If you add that on top, we really see additive as a growth opportunity for this business as a whole. If we look at the market development, we also see this trend toward more process automation, which is driving a need for more complete solution sets, as well as the utilization of more digital tools and solutions. This we also consider to be an opportunity for us if we play our cards right. Aerospace, obviously a headwind for the next couple of years, although, of course, from the level we are now, it will be growth going forward. If we take a 2019 base, it's going to be a tough couple of years. Current projection is that they will be back at 2019 level around 2024. You could always debate plus or minus a year, I don't think anyone really knows.
We and basically all of the experts or the other players in the industry that are trying to forecast long-term demand believes that ultimately, aerospace will come back on its long-term demand trend. We believe that aerospace mid to long term will come back and become, again, a growth engine for us. Here we have to separate the time perspectives in an important way. We have automotive, which is more of a challenge long term, and we have even a separate slide on that here. Here, obviously, there are different scenarios. This is a mix of the most likely scenarios that we see in our own analysis and what we believe will happen. Here you have the vehicle production of light vehicles, so this does not include trucks and things like that, which I think would make this picture even looking a little bit better.
Only the light vehicles. You have on the line graph there, the development of the cutting tool potential that this is driving. You obviously are seeing a gradual growth of the overall market because of economic development and GDP in the world. We are seeing a shift towards battery electric vehicles and a decline then in combustion engine vehicles. Overall, if we look at this mix between 19 and 25, the cutting tool potential will grow by about 1% CAGR in this period. We start to see an acceleration towards BEVs, but also offset by an acceleration of the need for hybrids. If we then take the second half of this decade, where BEVs continue to accelerate, while hybrids will maybe keep their share but not grow further. BEVs will then grow at the expense of combustion engines even more.
We expect flattish growth in automotive cutting tool potential throughout the latter part of this decade then. If we would take this to the ultimate scenario, let's say 2040, obviously a lot of speculation comes into play here and policy decisions and so on. In an end game scenario where there is basically very few combustion engine cars left, there will still be a portion of hybrids and the large majority is battery electric vehicles. We would then in the 2030s, in that decade, see about - 1% CAGR to reach that sort of end game. Again, a lot of speculation in that, but that's the scenario we are working with.
Clearly a long-term headwind, maybe not as material as some would believe, but still a headwind that we are working with and of course, also working to offset. This is one of the reasons why we are focusing now on the broader part of the value chain around machining. We will, as you will see, grow machining in itself as well, but we are also working with a wider part of the solution set here. We are now taking what used to be SMS and these seven divisions, splitting them into two segments, one focusing on Sandvik Machining Solutions, essentially with three divisions, three brands focusing on premium, one brand, one division currently focusing on the mid-market.
They are addressing a market of, in total, SEK 180 billion , 2/3 in premium, 1/3 in the mid-market, and we expect this market to grow at about 2% during this period, CAGR, including then the lower growth in automotive. We have the other segment, Manufacturing Solutions. This, we will now have three divisions in: Design and Planning Automation, Additive Manufacturing, and Metrology. They have an addressable market of SEK 120 billion, the businesses we have today can only serve about SEK 50 billion of that market. If we want to address the gap there, we typically have to make more or specific acquisitions to fill that gap. In that gap you will find, for example, a broader definition of the industrial metrology space that we are not addressing today. This is what I mentioned in the beginning.
Whether we will address it or not remains to be seen. We believe the SEK 50 billion that we can service is a substantial market to go after to begin with, especially since it's growing by more than 10% annually already today. With that, I think we should go into these businesses in more detail. I will hand over to the President of SMS, Nadine Crauwels, to take us through SMS. Welcome.
Thank you, Stefan. Also welcome from my end. My name is Nadine Crauwels and I'm President of Sandvik Machining Solutions since the October 1st. Before that, I have been President for Sandvik Coromant, one of the core divisions, for the last three and a half years. I'm going to guide you through the plans ahead for this business area segment. Sandvik Machining Solutions is built on five divisions in a decentralized manner, very close to our customers. We are covering both premium and mid-market. The fifth division, Wolfram, is the one who is delivering the powder, internal and external, for the cemented carbide. These five divisions are having an extremely strong brand and also a very high brand awareness, which is really, truly market leading and industry leading around 93%. Our ambition with this Sandvik Machining Solutions business area segment is to focus even stronger on growth.
That's not the only thing. We also want to evolve from being a tooling and a tooling system supplier to become a true machining solution provider. What does it mean then from a market development point of view for us moving ahead? We have some challenges, as we heard from Stefan before, but at the same time, we also have some great opportunities. We can see that the challenges that have been mentioned before are very much related to the slow recovery in aerospace and automotive. On the other hand, we also see light headwind from the electrification in automotive, even though we need to say that until the end of this decade, 2030, it's not going to have an impact on our tooling potential. The last challenge we see is the increased data transparency.
The digitalization has been driving much more availability of data and a much bigger transparency. Also means that we can also create opportunities through it, but at the same time, new competitors come to the scene beyond the traditional ones that we have had on our radar before. Moving into the great opportunities we have, we would like to start highlighting the lightweight materials. This is mainly driven from the focus on sustainability. We also have more complex components, more products that are near net shape, so those who need finishing touch in machining. Herefore, we also need to provide and can provide a growth in our round tools business. At the same time, we also see a higher growth rate in Asia as well as in the mid-market. Last but not least, we see increased demand for truly integrated manufacturing solutions.
Our customers are not any more satisfied with sub-optimized efficiency in one or different steps of the value chain. They want to see an end-to-end optimal solution, and at the same time, they also want to see a solution to close the knowledge gap. What is our strategic direction ahead with this market development that is going to be around 2% CAGR in the next coming years? Our direction ahead is built on three cornerstones. The first, growth above and beyond, driven by an agile business, resulting in a leading position today and even broader one tomorrow. Growth above and beyond really means that we are going to grow above the market. We are going to gain market share in certain specific pockets and also regions. On top of that, we are going to expand our offer. We are going to grow beyond the hardware, also in software businesses.
All that together will lead us through this machining solutions setup. We are going to drive an agile business, this is truly lean and flexible operations throughout the full business cycle. We have learned from history in the last downturn that we were way too reactive. Since then, we have been gearing up and working on a culture of continuous improvement. We have consolidated our footprint, we have been using the data analytics as well as business intelligence to be more proactive. Our current resilience has been shown during this downturn, we also want to secure that we have the right strong financial performance also in the recovery and the upturn. This all is going to result in a leading position today and even strengthen and broaden for the future. That means that we are going to focus on customer value through the full value chain.
At the same time, we are going to lead a sustainable industry. If we think about this leading position, how is that going to be broader in the future? It's a leading position in sustainability, in attracting the right people within innovation and technology, but also in being the central point of contact when we talk about digital machining, truly resulting in an end-to-end solution for our customers. In the next slides, I would like to dive a little bit more into this growth aspect. Growth above and beyond. How are we going to realize that? We are going to focus on four areas. First one is related to our assortment, application, and technology leadership. The second one is built on market expansion. Digitalization is going to be giving the opportunity to expand our offer, but also our reach in our customer base.
Last but not least, we are going to accelerate our acquisition and partnership approach. Starting with the first one, assortment. Application and technology leadership is really showing our strong history. We are market leader in our industry. That means we are introducing more or less eight new products every day and having around 740 active patents. This position we want to strengthen. We want to even take a market share in certain specific areas, as, for instance, in the lightweight materials. Through the push of sustainability, these will grow faster than average and also will demand stronger tool performances. The materials we think about in this case are aluminum, composites, and titanium. All three of them are used in aerospace, automotive, medical, but also other segments. In this case, these materials are all going to grow above, but the highest growth is within the composites.
Here we can see a high number of the single-digit percentage every year moving ahead. Second area in the assortment that we are going to focus on is the round tools. We want to take a leading position in round tools through partly organic growth, also added on with the right acquisitions. This is a journey that we want to do because the round tool business is growing faster than average, it also has still an extremely fragmented situation in the market. Two good reasons why to push it even further. This journey is not a new journey. We started that already around 18 months ago. We have been adding different acquisitions on our portfolio like OSK or Wetmore or Melin, Dura-Mill, that are a few of the companies we acquired in the past period.
This is also something that we will continue doing both in premium and mid-market. Last but not least, we are going to strengthen our leadership in inserts. Inserts is truly our home turf. Inserts is the place where our market share is the biggest. That is also then where we are going to focus our investments in R&D. The best examples we can give is, for instance, the steel turning grades that are the highest volumes in the industry have been created a new insert for Sandvik Coromant introduced only four weeks ago. These inserts have a performance that is outperforming most of the competitors available on the market today. It's not only Sandvik Coromant introducing new steel turning grades, but also Seco brought on a new milling cutter, creating productivity for our customers, but also cutting power consumption in half.
On top of that, Walter is also introducing a parting-off tool that is having a smaller width insert. That is adding on to the current assortment. This is what we are going to do on assortment-wise. Moving to market expansion. Here we can identify two different areas. We want to grow in a certain geography. Then we talk about Asia. The growth in Asia versus the western part of the world is double. On top of it, our market share today in Asia is lower than the rest of the world. That gives us a double opportunity to really gain momentum. That will be valid for both premium and mid-market. This will not happen only with organic growth, but also again through acquisitions. The second part of the market expansion is going to be on the mid-market.
Here we have the ambition to be on the podium of the mid-market suppliers. That means in concrete terms that we will double our market share by 2025. On top of that, we also know that the mid-market is going to grow 50% higher than average. Also in this area, we have been taking really good steps in the last years. Dormer Pramet, our mid-market division, has been growing, and not only growing from a top-line perspective, but also securing a really strong financial performance as industry standard. We also are adding acquisitions in this area. We signed an agreement to acquire, for instance, Miranda Tools, and that is kind of answering on both of the market expansion because it is mid-market, but at the same time, also supporting because it is in India, our geography growth. The third area I want to talk about is digitalization.
In digitalization, we are going to expand our offer, also our reach. We are all affected by digitalization in our private life, also our customers are seeking new ways of interacting with us. They want to search, find, and use tools and tooling systems in a remote way. That gives us the advantage to reach more customers than we have done before when we needed to meet them face-to-face. On the other hand, digitalization is driving also our customer needs to have efficiency through their whole shop floor. You see here on the slide a picture of the shop floor of any customer, independent size, with main four areas. In the bottom, we see the design. On the left top, we see the preparation. The biggest area on the top, you see machining, the blue highlighted one, on the right, you see the verification.
Those four elements every single customer has to go through. Today, they are not interested in optimizing one area, but they would like to see the end-to-end efficiency from all of them. Machining, the blue one, that is our home turf. That is where we have been successfully delivering and be a market leader in tooling and tooling systems. We need to understand that the key ingredient in the machining area is the knowledge. Knowledge is going to be able to be digitalized, and through that, we can add services and softwares that create added value towards our customers. A few examples are, for instance, sensor-embedded tools. Those are the ears and eyes for our workforce in the shop floor when you can't see anything deep on the inside of a workpiece. Machine monitoring is another example, and process control.
One of the big issues we solve for customers in this case as well is tool breakage. Through process monitoring, we can detect and avoid a tool to break, what is cost avoidance, but at the same time, also a lot of time saving. We don't have the ambition to stop in the machining area. We are going to expand into also the design and the preparation. The reason for that is that a lot of the decisions are taken earlier. The earlier decisions they can take, the more reduced waste you can have in time and lost machine utilization. The decisions we can take in the design and the preparation are related to selection of tool enhancement, machining strategy optimization, and then last but not least, a virtual way of simulating verification and also optimization of the process planning.
This last area is an area that we have not been developing ourselves. This is an area where we signed an agreement to acquire the company CGTech. I will come back to that soon. This total digitalization and expanding offer is going to deliver an additional SEK 1 billion by 2025. We need to remember that that is not the only advantage, because through this, we can, of course, increase our cross-selling activity towards our toolings and tooling systems. Moving a bit into CGTech. CGTech is a U.S.-based company with a full global footprint, 12 countries. Also active in all segments. It has a revenue of around $49 million. The main important thing to remember here is that CGTech is within this field of simulation, verification, and optimization, far the market leader. They also have a very strong relationship already with Sandvik Coromant.
They have been working together more than 15 years, and their main product, VERICUT, is used in the production units at Sandvik Coromant. One other thing that is extremely important in the collaboration with the tool supply is the fact that CGTech is truly CAM and machine tool maker independent, but also enlarges our ability to reach the market. The growth journey ahead together with CGTech is planned to stand on the different legs. One, of course, is the standalone growth. As manufacturing is advancing, more demand on simulation and verification is needed. On the other hand, their optimization model has not reached full penetration yet, and they are market leading. That means there is more price power into the ability to push the pricing analysis above. There is the synergies.
Both Sandvik Coromant and CGTech have around 65% of common customers, meaning there is a lot of leads that can be generated from both ends in two directions. The third aspect that we should think about is about knowledge synergies, feedback loops. If we talk about end-to-end, we start with some feedback loops. Here we can learn and see the effect on the machining and feed back that information into CGTech so they can optimize their way forward. CGTech on their end, with their experience, can give feedback to the tool supplier to even enhance their tooling guide and parameter recommendations. A true win-win situation and steps to the end-to-end connection. The last area in the growth journey is related to acquisitions and partnerships. When you look to the three previous mentioned, assortment, market expansion, but also digitalization, it's clear that we cannot do that organic.
We need acquisitions for the round tools, the mid-market leading position, and our services and digital solutions. At the same time, we also want to use more partnerships. We want to work with true ecosystems. As we said, we want to be the central point for the digital machining. We also have great opportunities to collaborate with machine tool builders, with CAM suppliers, but definitely also with our own Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions to co-develop and also resell products in our arena. In total, to be able to do the growth we want, 50% of our growth is coming from acquisitions. I would like to make one point. We are part of the industry we serve. That means we have the best opportunity to show our customers what it means to become a digital company, what it means to be Industry 4.0.
I would like to highlight the Sandvik Coromant production unit in Gimo in Sweden. They received in January 2019 from the World Economic Forum, one out of the 16 nominated lighthouses. That means that they have a full digital thread, automated process from design until the full production. Not only a digital thread, but also a green factory. They have a full assessment that is done yearly to have the sustainability scope from people, planet, and profit. Rather me explaining it, let's take a look at a movie.
In January 2019, the World Economic Forum announced Sandvik Coromant in Gimo as one of 16 lighthouses for the fourth industrial revolution. The reason was what we like to call our digital thread. The digital thread is a concept for how we have optimized design, production preparation, and production itself, and how we can also feed back information from production. We collect a lot of data from our machines and processes, both from control systems and sensors in the machines. We are also implementing software for collision detection and machine learning, which will further help us to use the data. In this factory alone, we make almost 15,000 standard articles, and instead of making 3D models and drawings for each and every one of them, we use parametric design, which in turn lets us automate the whole chain all the way to production.
Because of the design automation, we can also offer what we call tailor-made products, which are products that are similar to standard articles. When the customer places an order, the same system will kick in again. This time it will create everything that we need for production, which includes drawings, machining programs. It will decide what materials are needed, and it will set the final delivery time. We also have an initiative called Green Factory, where we have developed a systematic way of working with annual assessments covering the three parts of sustainability: people, planet, and profits. On the people side, I would like to mention our own technical high school here in Gimo, the Wilhelm Haglund school, which is one way for us to secure the competence needs we will have in the future. This plant is our largest production unit, consuming a lot of energy.
To reduce CO2 emissions, we have converted to bioenergy-based heating combined with recycled heat. We both manufacture and use a lot of tools. Of the tools used in our production, we recycle 100%, and whenever possible, we also do our own regrinding.
Summarizing, we can say that we are set up for growth. We are going to add SEK 1 billion in digital business. We are going to grow with a pace double versus the market growth, and half of it is going to come from acquisitions. Summarizing, growth above and beyond, driving an agile business resulting in a leading position today and even in a broader way tomorrow. Thank you.
Thank you, Nadine. It's time for a short break, so see you again at 2:45 P.M. CET .
[Break]
Hello, welcome back. We now have Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions President Lars Bergström on stage. Lars, please go ahead.
Thank you, Emelie, and also from me, warm welcome. I'm Lars Bergström, right now in the process of setting up this new segment of Sandvik called Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions. Stefan described it as the segment where we have a total addressable market of SEK 120 billion, SEK 50 billion in serviceable market with the present offer that we have, and a growth rate of more than 10% per year. This is an area where we will develop as we go. If I start to look at how this is being set up, we have basically three divisions. We have the design and planning division, where we are focusing on transferring the physical world to the virtual digital world, through the manufacturing process, basically from the ready design of the product through the process until the part is being then machined.
We have additive manufacturing, this green technology that helps our customers and our end users to save both natural resources and energy by creating more optimized products than you can do with more traditional technology. We also have the metrologic area, or the metrology area, which basically today is consisting of two divisions, Metrologic, the software company out of France, and then, as also Stefan said, the ATT company, which is a software service company out of the U.S. What we are then addressing with this, and there was quite a lot of questions coming from you during the Q&A session. I will try to shed some light on how we look at this versus then the Sandvik Machining Solutions segment. Nadine showed before this total workshop picture that actually shows how a traditional workshop looks like.
In this workshop, after the customers has designed the product, they are taking it into the CAM area or the production preparation area. This is really where customers are transferring the product data from the CAD files over to something that the machine tool can understand and perform its task. In that process, when they are defining the CAM, they are also at the same time defining what tools are we going to use for this. From that, then they are then transferring that data down into the machines. What we then can do in this initial stage here is to be part of this transfer of the data down to the machines, but also part of the quite substantial information flow that needs to go around the tooling in itself.
Additive manufacturing, where we have a fairly long experience through our acquisitions of BEAMIT, which is one of the largest service companies, and also our own powder manufacturing company called Osprey. We can combine that into also substantial knowhow space for customers in terms of how to run additive manufacturing. These machines will gradually be more commonplace in the machine shop, even though today they are fairly much located in separate parts, often at the customers or also that customers are then producing their parts at service bureaus like BEAMIT. If we look at the addressable market here, in design and planning division, actually, we define where we take away the CAD part, and we kind of focus on where we can be active. We define that market to be SEK 25 billion, and we can actually service that with the type of strategy we have today going forward.
Within additive manufacturing, the total market is some SEK 30 billion, and we say we can address or service SEK 20 billion of that as we are not part of the production of the machines in themselves. The growth rate here is quite substantial on additive manufacturing. If we move over to the metrology side, that business, if we define it as the industrial metrology, some SEK 65 billion. Today, we are active then in an area there which we can kind of service with our software, which is like SEK 5 billion. All in all, as also we said before, the growth rate, if we add all of that together, is more than 10% per year. Our part of that business today is, as also Stefan said, small in relation to the opportunity, somewhere between SEK 700 million and SEK 800 million.
Now when we are moving into this, how are we then going to be or go about to be able to address it? First of all, we are very much part of the industry we serve. If you look at Sandvik Machining Solutions and SMM, Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions today, all in all, we have a huge number of plants around the world where we actually are doing all these different steps that you can see in a workshop. We are living in this environment every day. We are part of the industry we service, we say, and we also speak the language of our customers. We can actually relate to the challenges they have because we basically have the same in our own operation.
Nadine also talked about the lighthouse status of Gimo, where you actually can see also in real life how this digitalization of a workshop really materialize in all the different steps that we are doing there today. How we are building it going forward? Well, actually, we are continuously building our capabilities. If we start with the design and planning area, we are today a very active player in tool management. That is to be able to address all these thousands of tools that a normal mid-size company have or workshop has in their production. We can actually then support them in ensuring that they know exactly where the tools are in the process.
With, again, 2,000, 3,000 tools in the workshop, it's also a matter of all the time knowing exactly where they are, in what shape they are, and how that can then be facilitated in the process of optimizing the workflow in the workshop. We are also doing a lot of things in terms of bringing this, as I said, initially from the physical world over to the virtual world. We have, for instance, a new software now for vending solutions called CRIBWISE. We have a new development in our tool data management operation called Global Line, which basically is a software that is cloud-based and really are taking the tool data management to the next level.
We are from Metrologic Group, our software company, moving into an end-to-end solution in metrology software all the way from virtual programming of the measuring devices all the way through to data handling when the measurement is being done, and then how that can be integrated into production. Those are a couple of examples that we are doing within digitalization. Of course, we are also collaborating with quite a lot of different stakeholders. Sandvik Machining Solutions, of course, as one, because we can really be part of supporting each other in this business concept.
We are also collaborating a lot with everything from machine tool makers to CAM software providers to different universities, development areas in also the additive part, for instance, all the additive machine makers, and then ensuring that part of this ecosystem that we are active in, and then taking that all together as a combined offer. To be a bit more concrete then in this, we can take a look at some customer examples. Customers today, regardless if they are in aerospace, if they are in automotive, or if they are in medical, they are spending a lot of their time to create more sustainable offers. To be able to do that, they need to optimize the product even more. One very good way to do that is to use additive manufacturing, because in additive, you can create more complex forms.
You can actually also design things in ways that could not be done before. The most important thing is really also that you can do the part in what we call near-net shape. That means that you, instead of, as is commonplace today for a thing like on the screen here, a blisk, which is a part in a jet engine on the cold side in the jet engine, where you basically are machining a fairly big part of titanium to this component here. From a block of titanium to this type of part. You're taking away something like 70%, 80% of the material. Instead, what you can do is that you print it. Once you have printed it, you also have to finish it to get the final touch.
We today can, through our competence in Osprey, which is then a part of Sandvik since many years back, one of the leading suppliers in powder. Through our new inaugurated titanium plant in Sandviken, provide high-quality powder to our customers and also ensure that we give them the traceability and the quality requirement needed. We can get the prototypes printed in our service shop in BEAMIT, where we own a minority stake today. We can, of course, also at the end ensure that our colleagues in Sandvik Machining Solutions take on and define exactly the right tools to be able to cut this part or machine this part. We can actually serve the customer all the way through the chain of going from a powder all the way through until they have a completed part. Another example is a landing gear.
A landing gear is produced out of an often forged piece, which is then machined into the final shape and then combined with other different parts into the complete landing gear. A complete set of landing gear can cost anywhere between $2 million up until $7 million for the bigger airplanes like the Boeing 777. Of course, when you're producing these parts, it's extremely important that you don't do any mistake during the production process because they are very costly, and they can be very costly if you not really manage to handle the quality in the right way. There are quite a lot of steps in this.
You have to go from the design through the CAM, defining then exactly what type of tools you need, ensure that the right tools are available, move it over, ensuring that you select the exactly right insert for that particular component to be produced, and then machine the part. What we have developed quite recently and what we are in the process now of taking to the market is a way to ensure that the customer actually can use and control exactly the right tool for that particular component in the way that in the final stage, before we start to machine the part, we can actually read the tool through having a QR code on each individual insert. You have to realize that we are producing over 100 million inserts or hundreds of millions of inserts every year. Each of them is actually an individual.
We can on one hand side provide full traceability of what tools they have used for a particular component, and they can themself in the last stage before they start to run the machine ensure that they have the right tool in the machine. If I then take another area and look a bit more into the future, metrology, what can we do there? Well, the traditional metrology setup is that you have a coordinate measuring machine. In the final stage, you kind of measure the part that you have produced, often in a temperature-controlled room, and you get it good or bad type of decision on that particular component that you have been manufacturing. Of course, you can feed that back into the production and tell them that this did not go very well, but it's a kind of offline way of doing this measurement.
What of course is something that everybody wants to do today is to have a more inline measurement so that you actually are measuring as you are producing, continuously as you are producing. Those of you that were part of the Capital Markets Day in Tampere about one and a half year back might remember that we had a demonstration there with a measuring device that was standing side line, as we say, to the machine and actually was able to measure every component that was coming out. This is something now that is becoming more and more commonplace, even though the previous picture I showed is very much more commonplace in the market today. It's gradually getting in there, and of course, we can utilize the software that we are developing at Metrologic to address this market and be part of this journey towards more inline measurement.
What is the future in this is that you will then be able to use the machine tool in itself as the measuring device. That means that you will be able to basically measure as you are machining. It's not like that will be done by itself because you still need to have the software to be able to control the measurement that is being done. This is also something that we are working on and which is then the trend that we are going for or towards in the future. As part of that, which is a bit of an intermediate solution, is that when you are taking a part out of a machine, you can basically use the robot by scanning the part also as a measuring device.
This is also something that we are developing at Metrologic in a solution that we call i-Robot. All in all, this suite of measurement technology that we are now combining together is then bringing us into the future of the Metrologic or metrology solutions in the workshop. With that, what we then are targeting from the SEK 700 million-SEK 800 million where we are today, we are targeting to lift that up to SEK 4 billion during this period of time, up until 2025 by combining these different solutions that we have today, adding acquisitions to it and also different types of partnerships.
This is going to be an exciting journey and we will have to evolve our solutions and our strategy as we go. If I then wrap that all up, and with that, looking at the total Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions, how will we then go about this going forward? Nadine, we need to do this together, right?
Yeah. Perfect.
Yep. We need to do this together, and we have our part then from Sandvik Manufacturing Solutions, bringing it up to SEK 4 billion. If we summarize it, we have this picture.
Yeah. We are in the digital business. On your SEK 4 billion, we are going to add SEK 1 billion from Sandvik Machining Solutions. In the total Sandvik Manufacturing and Machining Solutions, we are going to talk about a growth that is having a double pace for market growth and from which 50% is going to come from acquisitions. We are truly set up for growth for the coming years, but not only that, also of course securing a resilient business and a truly expanded offer. Thank you very much for your attention.
Yep, thank you very much.
Thank you for that, Lars and Nadine. It's time for the President of Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions, Henrik Ager, to enter the stage. Henrik, please go ahead.
Thank you, welcome from the exciting world of machining into the world of mining and rock extraction. I'm responsible for Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology, starting January 1, we changed the name to Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions, as we separate out the crushing and screening division and make that into its own BA. Today is going to be focused on Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions, the profile of our BA and our strategy going forward, and importantly, the areas we focus on when we intensify our efforts to grow the business. If I start with Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions as an overview, or SMR as we will call it. You have top left, you have our revenue profile. You can see similar profile as for SMRT, strong growth in year 2017, 2018, 2019, and now impacted this year by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We have been impacted more on the aftermarket. Our equipment sales have held up surprisingly well, our aftermarket has seen more of an impact and then more on the maintenance side than on our rock tools side. If we switch over to EBIT, we have the same steady development of a continuously increasing EBIT margin over the past few years. Those of you who are focused on more exact numbers, I know most of you are, you will see that we end up at a slightly higher margin, without crushing and screening in the portfolio. We ended Q3 with a 22.1% EBIT margin in what will become SMR. If you look at the sales distribution geographically, you see that we shift slightly towards the east.
Without crushing and screening, we have less presence in the Americas and a stronger weight towards Asia-Pacific, primarily driven by our very strong position in Australia. If you go bottom left, you see then our segment exposure and application exposure. Similar to before, the split between equipment and aftermarket is about 40% equipment, 60% aftermarket. If you then look at mining and construction, the split is quite different, and we're much more exposed to mining going forward, with more than 90% going into the mining industry. When you look into mining, you can see that about 60% is going into underground hard rock, and then the remaining 40%, or thereabouts, is split between underground soft rock, which is mostly coal and some potash and phosphate, and surface mining, which is for us, is surface drilling with the associated aftermarket.
Now given our strong focus on mining, I'll take you through what we see as the most important trends shaping the mining industry now and going forward. If we start on the top left, we see different development for different commodities going forward. If you look back the last 100 years, you would see that most commodities have developed in sync over time, primarily driven by GDP. Going forward, we do see a different development with electrification-driven minerals growing faster, while other minerals, and especially coal, growing slower. Second is the drive for productivity. This is a continued drive for productivity of our customers. This might seem like an obvious one. It wasn't back at the start of this century, so 2000 to 2011, 2012 or thereabouts. The focus was more on volume and less on productivity of the equipment.
Since then, it's been more on the productivity equipment, and we like that. We pride ourselves on making some of the most productive equipment and service solutions for the mining industry. We like this trend going forward, and I'll come back to that as well. Now, part of that productivity focus comes from new technology, and automation and digitalization is a big part of that. Automating the production process in mining, digitalizing it, connecting the equipment, collecting data, analyzing it, and driving more insight to be able to maintain it and run it better. Number four is the focus on energy efficiency and electrification. Again, this can help make mines more productive. Mining is a very energy-intense process, and if you can make it more energy efficient, you make it more productive. By switching to electric equipment, we take diesel out of the mines.
We take heat out, and we take the need for ventilation out. We can also, if we have the right source of power, improve the CO2 footprint of the industry. I'll get back to both of these technology trends shortly. We do see a geopolitical rebalancing with the center of gravity or the center of GDP gravity shifting east. If you were to go back 2,000 years, you would see the center of gravity for GDP was west to east, somewhere around Afghanistan. 1,500 years later, it was in the same place. It started to move west, and by 1960, it was around Iceland. Since then, it's moved back with the emergence of first Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and China. It's moving east.
It's now well east of Moscow, and by 2025, it's projected to be back in Afghanistan, and that affects us, of course. Secondly is a trend of more nationalism, less free trade than what we've seen in the past, and we need to adapt to this development. We adjust our supply chains to allow us to produce more locally where that's required, where trade barriers are being built to necessitate us to do that. Last is our customers need for sharing operational risk and have us take on more of the operational risk. That can be in terms of spare parts consumption, where our customers see that that goes up and down a lot for them, and it impacts their numbers, and they appreciate when we take on some of that risk.
There are other solutions, be it financing or others, where our customers are looking for us to take on more risk. We're happy to do that. Obviously, this should be calculated risk and well-managed risk exposure for us, but we need to find more and more of those solutions. Now, with this as a foundation or a backdrop, likely to take you through the five focus areas we have in our strategy. If we start with our vision, it is to be the partner for our customers to make them more productive, to make them perform better. We see five key areas for doing that. The first is to be safe and sustainable. That's for both our own operations and for the products and the operations with our customers. For them to be more sustainable. Now, a lot of that comes from productivity.
If we can help our customers be more productive, that will reduce their energy consumption, and it will make them more sustainable, reducing their CO2 footprint. Second, delivering customer value. First of all, we have to understand where that value is and work with our customers to jointly have a joint view of where that value is and then make sure we go after and capture it. A lot of that sits with our aftermarket. Having the right people, the right technicians at customer site or close to customer site, being able to go there or being remotely supporting them to make sure that we maintain our equipment as well as possible, make sure it runs. We sell production-critical equipment to our customers. It has to run all the time.
Being there and being close is a prerequisite for that, and we'll keep investing in local infrastructure to make that happen. Third is shaping the industry ecosystem, this comes back to automation, digitalization, and electrification. I'll get back to those in a second. Fourth is having an agile organization, being able to swing up and down with the market and adjust our cost base as the market goes up and down. We're very proud of the results that we've achieved this year when the market has been swinging a bit and a lot more than we expected. We will continue to focus and invest in solutions to make that happen, be that through outsourcing or other means. Finally, Stefan mentioned we need to step up the pace when it comes to acquisitions and partnerships.
What you see here on the picture is a drone. This is a partnership that we recently signed with a company that delivers technology for having drones underground, mapping underground mines, and making 3D maps of mines underground. It's a lot faster, easier, and safer than doing it with vehicles and people. Now, from the strategy, we want to drive growth. I want to then zero in on the key sources of growth for us. There are five of them. I'll talk you through each of them and give you an example. First is to focus on faster-growing commodities. Second is grow our share, our market share in our core business. Third, expanding our aftermarket offering. Fourth is leading the automation, digitalization, and electrification. Fifth is then accelerate M&A. Let's take them one by one.
I start with the world of commodities and trying to simplify it from our standpoint as equipment supplier, what's important is how much material is being drilled, blasted, and moved, loaded, and hauled. It doesn't matter if it's for iron ore, gold, or platinum. If we then look at the global market, we move about 19 billion tonnes of material in the mining industry. When we divide that, we find it most helpful to divide it into four categories. First, we have the electrification-driven minerals. These are the minerals that get a higher demand growth from the electrification of societies. That's primarily copper, nickel, zinc, and lead. It's obviously also cobalt and lithium, although they will see strong growth, they're quite small in the context of 19 billion tonnes of material.
We have gold in a separate category because it's so big, driving a lot. Gold is actually the one mineral that gets help from uncertainty in the world. We have, we call them the bulks. This is iron ore and coal. This is the biggest volume. You can see it accounts for about 60% of the industry as a whole. We have the others, which is platinum group metals, potash, uranium, silver, et cetera. If you see, our exposure is very different to the industry as a whole. We're much more exposed to the electrification minerals and to gold than we are to the bulks of the industry as a whole. If we look at the expected growth rates, they are higher for electrification and for gold than it is for the bulks. It's also higher for underground applications.
If we put all of that together, we see that our underlying market is expected to grow about 3%, whereas the industry is expected to grow at about 2%. Second, if we shift to growing our core business or growing our market share in our core business, our biggest opportunity is in surface drilling. This is valid for all of our business, but the biggest opportunity for us is in surface drilling. We have a new offering in rotary and down-the-hole drilling, DTH, that we haven't had before that's competing head-on with the strongest competition out there and doing very well in performance-wise. We're launching an extra large top hammer drill that is also going in competing with those down-the-hole drills. Performance rock tools and so on to deliver the best productivity and total cost of ownership.
With this comes, of course, automation solution for the surface drilling and the local support, the local expertise on site. Second, expanding the aftermarket, or sorry, this is third, expanding the aftermarket. This, of course, starts like equipment with the products. We got to have the best products and solutions. Second is the expertise close to or at customer. Third is connecting our equipment and collecting the data and adding more and more analytics and artificial intelligence into those analytics to allow us to maintain it better than everybody else, securing our aftermarket. Last is having new business model for the aftermarket. The example here is a battery pack. A battery pack for one of our battery electric vehicles. We sell that battery as a service. Instead of having a big CapEx up front, you pay for it like you pay for fuel, as a service.
Moving forward, I'd like you to go a little bit deeper into electrification and automation. What you see on the left-hand side here is our 50-ton battery electric truck. What you see is that this truck is able to swap its own battery. That is important because in the mining environment, the production facility moves. It doesn't stay in the same place like any other factory. It moves as we mine out the ore body. It's important to be able to move charging stations and battery packs around. Just out of curiosity, for those interested, that battery pack is about 9 metric tons. It's a 9-ton battery that's being loaded and unloaded. This is now running at faster, but you can see it takes a little bit more than six minutes to change the battery.
It takes two to three times more than fueling an equivalent truck with diesel. Doing it this way allows our customer to run with electric equipment and start with that much easier. We just signed a cooperation partnership with Barrick, the biggest gold producer in the world, to have four of these trucks in their operations in Nevada operating. We have one operating already. We got three more coming. We're very excited about that. Next is our automation solution. What I'll show you here is a glimpse of the next generation automation solution. Those of you who were in Tampere 18 months ago might remember that we said, well, in 2016, we had automation solutions installed in 19 sites. 18 months ago, we had it at 43 sites. Now that number is 59. That's the current generation.
The next generation, as you see here, you see it's a loader without a cabin. The most exciting thing about this next generation automation solution is that it can exist with other equipment and with people in the same place, and it can determine by itself through AI how to get from point A to point B and identifying objects along the way. Very excited about this concept. Obviously, it's an electrified loader. We're very excited about testing this next generation of automation and collision avoidance, which is critical for safety of course. Last but not least, is stepping up the pace for M&A. We made some M&A over the past few years. You see the three on the left-hand side here with Artisan, Inrock and Newtrax. We've also formed more and more partnerships, especially in the automation and digitalization arena.
We're going to step up the pace of doing this. We are adding a couple of resources, we're moving faster to make additional acquisition, be that as complementary technologies or bigger businesses. We're of course, looking at both. If we take this all together, we have the five key sources of growth for SMR going forward. Our expectation and our ambition is to grow by more than two times the market growth of 3% per year. Thank you very much for listening and looking forward to your questions later.
Thank you very much, Henrik. Next up is Anders Svensson, President of our newest business area, Sandvik Rock Processing Solutions. Hello, Anders. You are joining us virtually today.
Hello, Emelie.
Hi. We're looking forward to your presentation. Please go ahead.
Very good. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is Anders Svensson, and I'm currently heading up the Crushing and Screening Division within SMRT, and I've done so for the last five years. From the January 1st next year, I will be the new business area President for the new BA Sandvik Rock Processing Solutions. I will start by giving you a brief of this new area. We consist of four divisions, Stationary Crushing and Screening, Mobile Crushing and Screening, Attachment Tools, which is our hydraulic breakers division, and then a joint venture in China called Shanbao. During the last five years, we have been running a turnaround focused on improving stability and profitability within crushing and screening. We have, despite that turnaround, managed to deliver an underlying compound annual growth rate of 6.5%.
COVID-19 hit us, of course, in 2020 like everyone else. Some of the key effects we've had is that it's difficult to come to customers' sites. Customers also delay or postpone CapEx investment and projects. Customers only do the critical services and critical maintenance. We saw a recovery in Q3 price volume-wise. We had significant negative effects from currency in the quarter. Our EBIT journey was from breakeven in 2015 up to 15.9% in 2019. Through permanent and temporary measures, we will deliver a similar EBIT level for 2020 despite the COVID-19 situation. By that, we believe that we are in the top tier in the industry. Our reported return on capital employed for 2019 was 25%. On the slide, you can also see our sales exposures by segment. We are 55% construction and 45% mining.
We are fairly even between equipment and aftermarket 52%. On the right-hand side, you can see our geographical exposure where we are largest in EMEA, then similar-sized between APAC and Americas. Here we look at our market growth outlook. Henrik went through growth rates in a good way in his presentation, so I will be quite brief. The mining industry average growth is projected to be around 2% up till 2025 and the construction industry average growth rate is also expected to be around 2%. As we also have a high exposure towards faster-growing commodities such as electrification minerals and gold, but also within construction for aggregates and to some extent tunneling. We have a weighted market growth outlook of 2.5%-3%, as Stefan mentioned in his presentation. Next, we will look at the industry demand drivers.
Our customers want a sustainable rock processing solution that is eco-efficient, cost competitive, and that through digital services provides operational insights for better planning, forecasting, and in the end, better productivity. In mining, eco-efficient comminution technologies are getting traction as customers focus on waste, energy, and water consumption. In quarrying, we see similar trends and due to productivity targets, EHS regulations, and sustainability demands, there is a consolidation into larger operations. To support these changes in the market, there's an increased demand for digital services for operational insights and productivity gains. From the demand drivers, we have developed our strategic focus areas. Creating safe and sustainable operations is always number one, both for us and our customers. We have a life cycle perspective in everything we do. This means that we aim to support our equipment with the best services and solutions throughout the life cycle of the equipment.
We target to drive eco-efficient solutions through our own operations, our offerings performance at our customers' operations, and our products at end of life. A cradle to grave perspective, you can say. To do this, we of course need exceptional people that are agile in executing everything we set out to do. The last one, we target to evolve our offering portfolio both organically but also through acquisitions or partnerships. Our strategic focus areas, we are set up for accelerated profitable growth. In the next few slides, I will elaborate a bit on a few of those key growth initiatives. The first one is to expand our aftermarket offering. We aim to deliver, as I said, the best solutions and services through the life cycle of our equipment, and by this we mean in terms of eco-efficiency, operational insights, productivity, and total cost of ownership for our customers.
There are, of course, many initiatives that we are working on in our offering of aftermarket products, both within hardware and software. One example that you see here on the screen is our Reborn offering. Here we can take a worn-out unit. We replace the worn-out and critical parts, keep parts that we can reuse. We add the latest technologies, features, and services. The customer can get improved productivity with the new equipment, and we can also have an environmental-friendly solution. When completed, the customer will have also a new warranty. As we offer the best solutions for aftermarket for our products through the life cycle, we target to increase our aftermarket penetration rates by roughly 30% up to 2025. Acquisitions and partnerships. We are looking to go for complementary acquisitions or strategic partnerships in core and in adjacent technologies and/or markets.
This will enable us to provide better solutions for our customers within our existing offering range, it can also enable us to target a larger part of our customer's value chain within rock processing. On the slide we can see the two latest examples. The acquisition of Allied Construction Products, which was closed this year on the October 1st within our Attachment Tools division. It's providing us with a good U.S. footprint enabling us to service our customers in a better way, also with a larger product portfolio. Hitachi is one of our selected strategic partners within developing our digital service offerings, especially within artificial intelligence functionality for operational insights. This will allow us to service our customers that will improve their forecasting and planning processes, in the end yield productivity and cost advantage, of course.
We will continue to acquire selected companies and partner with others to support our strategic growth ambitions. Sales channel optimization is key for us. We have three sales channels to market. It's our own direct sales channel through our own people. We have a distributor channel where we partner up with companies, and we have our OEM channel where we manufacture equipment, aftermarket parts, and service packages that our OEM customers sell under their own brand. The indirect channel give us, of course, an extended reach into markets. We need however to enable our indirect channels to sell also life cycle services and solutions by working close with them, providing trainings, do planning together, and follow-ups together. That this works is of course key for the end customer. Otherwise, they won't get the right experience from having Sandvik products.
Of course also they won't be able to enjoy the full basket of benefits that we can offer. This is really critical. The importance of this is further growing as we develop more complex offerings within digital services and even new business models. It will require an investment from both our side and our partner side, but the growth potential is significant. Automation and digitalization. It's enabling our hardware to deliver the maximum customer value over the life cycle. On the slide, you can see our 800i cone crusher range. It is a fully automatic and connected range, and we can launch all of our digital services on this platform going forward to enable optimization of our customers' operations.
When we talk about automation features, we mean, for example, that you can set an end product size and during operations, of course, the crushing chamber will wear, and the crusher will then automatically adjust to produce the same end product size continuously. Another service is eDump. When you get an uncrushable object into the crushing chamber, the crusher will not beat itself to death. It will feel that there's an uncrushable object. It will open up, let that object through, and then close again and continue to produce the set end product size that you have decided on. With digitalization, we develop a range of different services. It can be a simpler one like chat functions, digital logbooks between shifts, condition monitoring, et cetera. It can also be artificial intelligence-based ones such as predictive maintenance, remaining useful life, failure predictions, and remote support.
Today, 10% of our customers are using digital services, but we target to have over 60% of our customers using our digital services by 2025. Last but definitely not least, we want to establish ourself as the market leader within eco-efficient rock processing. Not only because we are nice people, but doing this right is very good business. We look at eco-efficient rock processing in several dimensions. Some of those are material technologies. We want to have the best-suited materials to produce products with increased life and improved performance. We have fine crushing within mining. If we can do more fine crushing, we will reduce the need for higher energy and water-consuming technologies further downstream. We have automation and digitalization. I already spoke a bit about that, but it's to improve planning and optimize customers' operation and to increase productivity and hence reduce downtime and waste in the process.
We have our cradle-to-grave approach, starting with the birth of our products. We want to reuse or remanufacture or use recycled raw materials as the example that Stefan mentioned in Svedala Foundry, where we use 91% recycled material. During the life of our products in our customers' operations, it's key that our solutions perform according to their expectations in terms of performance, et cetera, but also that we minimize waste and energy and water consumption. At the end of life, our product should be refurbished, remanufactured, or recycled to the greatest extent possible. As a summary, we believe that we are set up for an accelerated profitable growth journey going forward, and our ambition is to grow more than double of our market growth. With that, I want to thank you for listening. Thank you very much.
Welcome back. Hope you had a chance to get some coffee. Now it's time for our last business area presentation. Göran Björkman, President of Sandvik Materials Technology. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Emelie. Welcome to the Sandvik Materials Technology part of today's Capital Markets Day. My name is Göran Björkman, and I am the President of SMT. The picture on the slide you see here is from our production unit in Palm Coast, Florida, where we make medical wire, also known as Exera Medical Wire. Medical segment is one of the interesting growth segments for SMT that I will address further in this presentation, together with industrial heating, renewable energy, and also our move into more high nickel and superalloys. These are examples of the tiny wires we make in Palm Coast. They are for different kind of applications such as vascular therapy, sensing, and also neurostimulation, a fast-growing segment. Now you see images from our largest production unit. It is in Sandviken here in Sweden. We are a true niche player.
We make less volume than most other steel makers, but on the other hand, much more high added value products. More than 80% of our raw material is recycled steel. That is a high number considering our product portfolio. This is also something we certify for our customers. The high amount of recycled steel, fossil-free electricity makes our metallurgy process highly sustainable. To conclude, we are a true niche player with a sustainable metallurgy delivering high premium products. Let's dig into some numbers. I think we have, since the end of 2017, shown that we really can drive profitability. Through an improved culture of commitment and execution, we have significantly improved the performance of our divisions. We're driving a footprint program, and we're constantly improving our commercial and operation excellence.
This made us reach the 10% target for 2019, a target that was announced at the Capital Markets Day in Germany three years ago. Let's look into 2020. 2020 started in a good way in the first quarter. In the second quarter, we were badly hit by the coronavirus pandemic downturn. We have now had two quarters with an order intake below -30% price volume. From the beginning, all segments and all markets, excluding medical, were affected. Now we can see in the end of the third quarter that the more short-cycle businesses within Strip and Kanthal, there we start to see recovery and [audio distortion] continue to be very weak. We entered into 2020 with a strong order backlog. That has made us not drop as much in revenue. The revenue drop is only around 13%.
We have, however, mitigated and defended our EBIT margins, I think, in a good way. We started with mitigating actions before we knew the full impact of this downturn. These are actions like work time reductions, reduction of temporary employees, layoffs, structure measures, and of course, also spend reductions. In quarter three, we managed to almost have the same margin as we had quarter three last year, despite negative effects. I think that is an impressive leverage from SMT. At the same time, we have reduced net working capital and CapEx spend, delivering a strong cash flow. With a negative book-to-bill within Tube and the continued poor projections for oil and gas, we believe that 2021 also will be a challenging year for SMT. We will continue with the mitigation and actually on a higher pace in 2021 than it has been in 2020.
Looking at some important demand drivers for SMT, the energy demand in the world is constantly increasing, also the shift towards fossil-free sources and energy efficiency puts requirement on new technologies. With a growing and aging population, the demand of new technologies for healthcare and medical devices are increasing. The customers will need lighter and stronger materials with higher corrosion resistance, and that can withstand higher temperatures and higher pressures. I think that's where we come in. We are a materials [audio distortion] these trends over time will be to the benefit of SMT, where we will be able to advance customers to become more sustainable. Which brings me to our strategic direction. We are and we intend to continue to be the materials technology leader in our industry. We will defend and strengthen that position by investments in R&D and new technologies.
We have strong internal expertise in materials, and we have long-term relations with customers and good positions in many growing segments. The important part of the SMT strategy going forward is to start generating growth at another level that we have done before. We are, I think, already now, when it comes to profit levels, financial leaders in our industry. However, as I already mentioned, growth needs to be strengthened. This downturn has also shown the importance of cost flexibility. We are in a volatile business, and we need to embrace that. We cannot change that industry, but we can change ourselves, and we need to even more focus cost flexibility going forward. I would also like to comment on the decision that the board took a few weeks ago to continue with the listing of SMT. As already said, I think we are well-performing in our industry.
We are an industry with, in average, lower margins, and also it's more capital-intense than the rest of Sandvik Group. This means that even when we are performing well, we are perceived to be low performers. That is, in the long run, not good for a company. It's not good for its organization. I welcome the decision to go for a separate list of SMT. It removes many years of uncertainty that has surrounded SMT and gives us a clear direction going forward. Before moving into what I would say our growth bets, I need to comment on oil and gas. Oil and gas is today maybe the most important segment for SMT. No doubt, short term, we have challenges with oil and gas. It's easy to see that. It will recover. I don't think it will recover next year, probably in 2022 or in 2023.
If you look at this segment on a more mid-term or long-term, I believe you need to look at the oil and gas separately, since there are different demand drivers for oil and gas. Oil is very dependent on the transport sector, while gas is mainly used for electrical power generation and industrial heating. Oil will eventually suffer from the electrification in the transport sector, while gas will grow with the increased need of electricity. Gas can also play a role bridging from worse fossil sources like coal or oil into the fossil-free sources. Eventually, the gas growth will decline due to the growth of wind and solar. We believe that after the recovery, we will have a growth in oil and gas up until 2030, and maybe a decline between 2030 and 2040. Over this time period, gas will be an increasing part of our portfolio.
SMT, we will continue to focus on the oil and gas segment. We will defend and also strengthen our position in umbilicals, including the development of a new super duplex grade. We will also increase our market share for production tubing, mainly by increasing our materials portfolio and also increase our manufacturing capabilities. I will now go through three growth segments: industrial heating, medical, and renewable energy, starting with industrial heating. Industries are moving towards more electrification, and in this case, electrification of their heating processes. This is an area where we will focus growth. We will continue to develop new products. It's also an area where this gas-to-electric transformation will be of interest. Today, it's smaller furnaces, we will go from, I would say, kilowatt to megawatt applications. Industrial heating is also an area where we will not only grow organically, but also inorganically.
Our M&A focus is to continue with our forward integration, acquiring regional heating element suppliers, and also strengthen our market position, mainly in Asia and in North America. Medical, as already mentioned, medical is a fast and stable growth segment with high margins. We intend to increase our market share within the medical segment, both by organically through increase our wire forming and coating capabilities, but also here, a strong M&A focus. The M&A part will mostly be about adding capabilities that we don't have today to move in the value chain, also increasing our product portfolio. Renewable energy, that's a fast-growing segment. To a large extent, it is supported by governmental policies. For a full transition into fossil-free sources, system enablers like distribution and storage needs to be developed. We will, of course, focus on some of the energy sources where we can play a role.
I'm thinking about solar power, biomass, geothermal. We also have the intention to take a leading position within materials technology for the system enablers, and where we mainly will focus, hydrogen and batteries. To share with you here a interesting customer example when it comes to renewable energy. We have worked together with a Dutch customer, and they have designed and built the first supercritical water gasification. What is that? That is a industry where you produce syngas from wet biomass. Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen used in many chemical applications. This is a very demanding environment, and we've been able to find a solution together with a customer using our Sanicro 25 grade. I think this is a good example where materials technology can play an active role enabling technology development.
Last but not least, maybe the most important part of our organic growth. Traditionally, we are a stainless producer, mainly with austenitic and duplex grades, but we are now moving into the area of high nickel and superalloys. This has become possible through a lot of process development within our metallurgy and hot working processes, and excellent work done by our R&D and process experts. On top of that, we have just recently launched a Sandvik invented new grade. It's called Sanicro 35. It's a grade that is a bridge between stainless and high nickel. It has excellent both corrosion and mechanical properties at high temperatures. For the customer, it makes it possible for the customer to use a more, or say, less costly solution due to its lower nickel content, where they before had to go for high nickel solutions.
This, as I said, important part of our organic journey. Thank you, and if you are hungry for more, in this picture, you see the world's fastest pizza oven. It's designed by technicians in the division Kanthal, and it can bake a pizza in 37 seconds. If you're interested in this or other stories about SMT, please look at our website. Thank you.
I'm joined by the full force on stage for a concluding Q&A session. Please dial in on the conference call to ask a question, and please keep your questions to two. Operator, please go ahead with the first question.
Thank you. Just as a reminder, if you wish to ask an audio question, it's zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, it's zero two to cancel. Our first question comes from Magnus Gruber from UBS. Please go ahead with your question.
Hi, Magnus here again. I wanted to return to the SMS growth outlook. I think you commented about 1% growth headwind in the automotive business between 2030 and 2040. Admittedly, nobody really knows how this is going to look. What kind of underlying growth production forecast for the total industry do you expect until then, or between those years? Still 1.4%? How do you look at that? It's just important for us to sort of gain an understanding on how you see the growth differential between the cutting tool market and the actual underlying automotive market.
Yeah. Our assumption is that it will continue to grow at that pace. I think slightly higher, actually, with a couple of tenths of percent, was the assumption in that scenario. Yeah, that was the assumption that was made.
Okay, brilliant. Thanks so much. That's very useful. Switching gears to Sandvik Rock Processing, I think you mentioned you look for growth opportunities downstream from your crushers in the rock processing business. What products specifically are you thinking about then, and how far down the flow sheets would you consider to expand? Is that sort of limited by the margins that you see in those businesses, or how do you think about that?
I'll answer a little bit first, and then I'll see if Anders wants to complement that. Yeah, we believe there is potentially an opportunity to go a little bit further downstreams. But yes, we want to ensure that if we go into some additional niches there, it needs to be high-quality niches, so to say. There are aspects of downstreams where the margins are not attractive, and we don't believe that that is the right place for us to be. Anders, I don't know if you want to comment as well.
No, I think primarily we're looking within the crushing and screening range. Also, we can look a bit further downstream in eco-efficient solutions, not all traditional technology would be my approach.
Can you expand on that a bit more, what it is eco-efficient specifically? Is the same but more efficient or?
No, I mean low energy and low water consumption compared to traditional technologies.
Okay. Got it.
Thank you. While we have you, Anders, we have another question from the webcast. It's actually from Danske Bank, Johan Sjöberg. Apart from an improving market, what's the main driver for the strong upturn in margins for SRP? What impact has decentralization had?
I think decentralization has had a tremendous impact for us to be able to do the changes that was necessary. There are so many changes in a turnaround program that you do, but cost-cutting, streamlining the organization, portfolio pruning, accelerate after-market growth, et cetera. There are many different initiatives that's behind the growth, but it's not any rocket science. It's hard work by the whole team, the global team, and they've all done a fantastic job, I think.
Okay. Thank you. Operator, we can go for the next question from the conference call.
Thank you. The next question comes from Lars Brorson from Barclays. Please go ahead with your question.
Everybody, thanks for taking my question, thanks for the presentations to the whole team. Very informative. I limit myself to two questions, I guess, per Emelie's instructions. Maybe first to you, Stefan. You talk about metal additive manufacturing as a tailwind. I wonder what you mean by that and whether you can elaborate a bit on that. I appreciate there's obviously an expanded addressable market opportunity that comes with additive, particularly, of course, for your powder business, but more broadly across the business. There's also a contracting market, I guess, around subtractive manufacturing. Certainly, if we look out into the future around mass production applications in some of the key big tooling industries like automotive.
Can you help us a little bit with how to think about what it is that you mean with a tailwind, and particularly going forward, if you can break it down into its constituent parts, what's a tailwind, what's a headwind, and what's the net of that?
Yeah. Let me start, and we will see if some of my colleagues here wants to add anything. First of all, some of the headwinds that we would see from additive manufacturing, in a way, we have already managed because of the near net shape trend that we have been working through in the past decade, because that is how additive ends up, with the components that near its ultimate or desired state. Then we need to do machining on that component, also in the additive, if it is produced through additive methodologies. Often you do additive because you need a complex shape, or it is more advanced materials, which also drives then the need for advanced tooling. I guess that is number one.
That's obviously still, in a way, a headwind, but fairly limited in the sense that we could have had the same headwind from other things like near net shape in the past. Overall, our forecast is this will impact about 1% of the machining potential. Then again, we still have machining also on those components. I believe there were more aggressive forecasts a number of years ago, and I think the industry has sort of come a little bit more to senses now with where this will be used going forward. Very long term, of course, there can be disruptive aspects of this, but then I think we come a little bit into speculation.
We have the tailwinds, which is exactly the fact that in additive, we are addressing a much broader set of this value chain. Powder, our service operations, and ultimately also will come through software solutions that are addressing machining and additive in a more agnostic way. If we look at the business we have there and the growth of that business, if we do this right, it will more than offset the substitution on the machining side of the business. I don't know, Nadine, if you want to add anything?
Yeah, I can absolutely add on that. I fully support your view, Stefan, that there is partly a headwind, but that headwind is very limited, as you say. It is limited to this one. That is because of the components that is limited and really be replaced with additive. On the other hand, we have all the finishing operations that still need to be done and is very much related to the round tool opportunity we talked about earlier. At the same time, additive will also be an opportunity for ourselves when we think about manufacturing technique to use in our own production units for certain complex tools.
Can I press with one example? I don't know where the 1% comes from, but it's just interesting to look at a specific example, say, a fuel nozzle. A well-known example, I guess, which in the past was machined and assembled in 20 different parts. Today, it's printed in one. Can you give me some sense of how many cutting tools do you use now versus earlier? What's the incremental revenue opportunity around that on powder, post-processing, et cetera, just to get some sense around the numbers for a specific example?
I will have to pass on those details. I don't know if my more experienced colleagues have any input to that.
I don't think we can give an answer like this. Maybe we can come back to that later on if there are examples of what you're asking for, so we can come back to that.
Thank you. My second question was perhaps more to Tomas. I just want to make sure I understood correctly, Tomas. I guess you're generating SEK 5 billion, SEK 6 billion of free cash flow annually every year, assuming a dividend, a return to a dividend payout of 50%, presumably all of that available for M&A. I guess with the types of deals you're looking to do, CGTech, Metrologic, et cetera, done at 7x, 8x sales. Call that a sales contribution from your annual free cash flow of around SEK 700 million-SEK 800 million. That's a percent or so to group if I exclude SMT versus your targeted 2.5. I appreciate there's a bit of releveraging potential on the balance sheet today. I just want to understand, is that the right math? I think you talked about transformational deals not being part of that targeted M&A.
What is a transformational deal in number terms? Am I thinking around the contribution in the right sort of way?
Let's see if I understood the question correctly here now. Let's say we see this in three steps. If you just look at the annual operational cash flow or the annual net cash flow that we have, if we just assume that we do SEK 6 billion in dividends, which is basically the level we are on right now, then you have SEK 5 billion-SEK 6 billion left, something like that you can maintain within the annual cash flow without changing the leverage, so to say, of the company. Depending on what you buy, well, you don't know. If it's all software companies, it's less than 2% growth, of course. If it's more a combination of bolt-ons and the odd software, it's maybe 2%.
The next step is to use the leverage in the balance sheet. That's the SEK 30 billion I was talking about, or SEK 25 billion, excluding SMT after the spin. That's using the leverage within the current rating, within the financial target. It goes by itself, a transformational deal. It would be something bigger than SEK 25 billion.
No, I just want to repeat what Tomas said. I think you're absolutely right. If our ambition was to only acquire software companies going forward, but that's not the case.
No.
It will be a mix, of course. With that mix, we have come to the conclusion that what we have presented is fully achievable. If you think a round tools company, just as an example, have a very different multiple than a software company. From that perspective, I think it can pretty much work only with the cash flow. If we do more tech acquisitions, we will need to tap into the balance sheet, but that's why we have the room we have there. I'm not worried. This is what I said. When it comes to our acquired growth targets, we are in the fortunate position of money not being the problem, so to say. What we will have to do is rather step up our own activities in this area.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Sean McLoughlin from HSBC. Please go ahead with your question.
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. My first is just looking at organic growth versus M&A. Just wondering, how is your new product pipeline and how would you compare that versus historical levels? Will you be lowering R&D overall as a percentage of sales, or is there an organic push on new product in order to grow market share organically pre-M&A? My second question is around digital services. I think in rock processing, you'd mentioned a 2025 target of about 60% of customers using digital services. I was just wondering how much that is today, and what kind of targets do you have across other divisions? Thank you.
I will leave the second one to you, Anders, first, but I'll start with the first one. When it comes to R&D as percent of sales, I think it will stay pretty much where it is. If anything, I would say we are ready to invest more into that area, provided that we feel that that investment will give a return in terms of either better price position or increased growth and market share. There is no specific ambition to increase it by 50 basis points or anything like that. If anything, it will not go down. Let's phrase it like that. That's not the ambition at all. If I understood your first question correctly as well, you talked about M&A pipeline. Was that correct?
It was about new product pipeline. Yeah. I'd be delighted if you can talk about M&A pipeline.
Okay. Sorry. I don't know. On the new product pipeline, I should refer to maybe, I don't know, Henrik, if you want to say something about SMR.
Sure. The question is also, do we keep investing in R&D, which we do, at similar rates slightly higher than we have in the past. There is more R&D going into both the digital solutions for both automation and digitalization, also into electrification areas that are g rowing in importance. We obviously have to maintain R&D efforts in our core technologies. They have to evolve and continuously get better so that our equipment remains the most productive. Slightly higher than in the past, that's how we intend to maintain them. The pipeline is good across our eight divisions. I'm very excited about what we have released recently and what's coming.
Maybe, Anders, you want to answer the one on digital services?
Yes. Today in SRP, we have roughly 10% of our customers using our digital services. As I said, we target them to above 60% in 2025. I heard there was a question, how do we do in the other divisions? I guess you mean business areas then, as a comparison.
Yeah.
That's maybe a question more for the other business area presidents.
Maybe, Henrik, you can comment there also on SMR.
We haven't arrived at a definition of what's digital services. I think it's almost like, do you have electronics in your home? You've had electronics in your home for the last 50 years. You have a lot more now than you had 50 years ago. It'll be the same with digital services. We have some kind of digital services to most of our customers. It's growing. We expect them to grow quickly over the next period of time or over the next 5 - 10 years. A lot more connected equipment, a lot more analytics, a lot more performance analysis of our customers, and help to make them better.
Thank you. I think we can have the next question, please.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Rizk Maidi from Jefferies. Please go ahead with your question.
Yes. Hi, thank you for taking my questions and thanks for the presentation. I have two. The first one is really to go back to your growth target, the 5%+ growth over the cycle, which includes M&A. My understanding here is you are planning to grow organically in line with the market and add 2.5%+ in M&A. If my understanding here is correct, why not have a more ambitious target in terms of organic growth, given you have number one or number two position across most of your product portfolio? Secondly, just a question on Manufacturing Solutions. You talked about the SEK 4 billion target by 2025. Just to put things into perspective, is the plan here to make this business area accounting for roughly 10% of the overall Manufacturing and Machining Solutions division?
Yeah. Let me first answer the first question. I think we are not saying that we only expect to grow organically in line with the market. We have presented how much we expect our underlying markets to grow. We have heard throughout the day here a number of areas where we want to outperform the market also organically. Henrik mentioned surface drilling. Nadine mentioned some of these new materials, such as composites and so on. We expect to, in certain areas, definitely outgrow the market also organically. On top of that, you should add the 2.5% acquired growth. As I said earlier today, if you do the math, I understand that either you end up with a number higher than 5%, or you wonder why we have such a low ambition organically.
We also end up higher than 5% when we do the math, that is we have a target of 5% or more. Of course, the underlying market can fluctuate a little bit and so on. That's why we believe right now this is a good target for us. The reason why I would not stand here and upgrade the target, as I said in the beginning, is because historically, we have achieved 3%. If it go further back, even less so. First, we want to deliver on this target that we launched last year, and then we'll see if it's appropriate at some point in the future to be more ambitious. Let's deliver on this one first. You had the second question.
Yes. That was on Manufacturing Solutions and your ambition there to grow the business in percentage also of the overall division.
Yeah, no, it's a reasonable, as you say, conclusion to, in a first step, make it around 10% of the total Manufacturing and Machining Solutions business.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andreas Koski from Nordea. Please go ahead. Andreas, please go ahead.
Sorry, I was on mute. Now you can hear me, I guess?
Yes.
Perfect, thanks. I'm coming back to the question I was about to ask earlier today, and that was on your SEK 5 billion sales target from adjacent and these digital businesses. How much of that should we expect to come from acquisitions?
I don't want to give an exact number, because it will of course depend a little bit on the organic growth that we will see and so on. I would say roughly half. That's a good assumption.
Okay. Yeah. Maybe a question for Nadine and Henrik. It is the same kind of question, 2% expected market growth for Sandvik Machining Solutions. I think historically, you and the industry have had good pricing power, I think price increases have been up by maybe 1%-2% per annum in the past. Do you think you and the industry will have equally good pricing power in the coming five years? Does that mean that you'd expect limited volume growth?
Price leadership has been, as you mentioned, part of our strategy, and it will continue to be. How high that will be in the coming years, I will not make a statement or a number, but of course it is our aim to stay price leadership in our area as well.
Yeah. A similar question for Henrik. 3% market growth. I am a bit surprised about that. I think it sounds a bit low because we are now seeing a lot of automation and digitalization, which should mean that the industry will have both strong pricing power and benefit from the mix. What have you assumed in terms of pure volume growth in that market growth assumption?
The underlying volume growth of 3% for our underlying market is an output from the mining industry. That translates sometimes directly to exactly 3% volume growth for us. A lot of the time it translates into more, either because there is a technology shift, which we gradually see with automation and digitalization, or because there is a need to expand more mines during a period of time with brownfield and greenfield. We don't see major such expansions in volume. We do see that shift underground that's built into the underlying volume assumption. The technology shift that you mentioned is there, so the market for us can grow more than 3%.
Okay, great. Just lastly, if I could ask Stefan. On the slide when you talked about automotive headwind, and you said that you expect a CAGR in cutting tool over the next five years and then flat the five years after that. Can I just ask what you have used for your calculation? If you're saying that ICE is a baseline of one, have you given the hybrids 1.1 and battery electric 0.3 to calculate this? Just for us to be able to elaborate about the car production numbers ourselves.
Yeah. I'll wing this a little bit, and then I'll ask IR to come back to you with exactly what factors we have used here. Typically, we use more like 1.2 for hybrids and 0.35-ish for battery.
Okay.
We can come back-
Thank you very much.
with the assumption we have used in that model.
Yes.
Yep. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Anders Roslund from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. I just wonder, you had some comments this morning when you talked to journalists. Was there something else, talking about market demand, et cetera, that had an impact on the share price today?
I don't know. We have basically only talked about what's in the press release.
Okay. Thanks.
No different questions compared to what we have discussed here during the day. Not at all.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Klas Bergelind from Citi. Please go ahead.
Yes. It's Klas from Citi again. Thanks for taking a couple of more. First, a question for you, Henrik, on mixed fleet automation. I think when we have talked about this before, Henrik, you said that mixed fleet automation, total open source is a bit tricky underground. You often have different OEMs in different parts of the mine. One of your competitors, and I think you can guess who I'm referring to, has started winning contracts underground on mixed fleet now as well, not only surface. What are you doing in this field in terms of being able to automate other OEMs, and do you think the wallet here is interesting? I will start there.
Yeah. Having an open architecture is something our customers demand and something we went out with as a strategy a few years back. We're sticking with that. We also have projects with mixed fleets. We acquired a company called Newtrax a couple of years ago, and they are our enabler for automating other vendors' equipment or other suppliers' equipment. Now, there are no automated fleets of mixed equipment in the world anyplace yet. What we've done for our own equipment is we've defined an API, so it's possible for others to automate our equipment. Nobody has done that yet, but it is a way forward. I still think that different parts of a mine will have different equipment when it's fleet automated, and that will be the case for some time. Nobody wants to get locked in, and we understand that.
We develop open architecture for our customers so we can help them have a mixed fleet. When it comes to a mixed fleet in a section and also with people, then that requires a completely different level of collision avoidance systems, which we are busy trialing. We're trialing it in our own test mine, and we're trialing it with one of our customers in Australia. That's also a very important component that is not quite there yet from any supplier. We have what we feel is a very good system that we're trialing at the moment.
Thank you very much. The second one I have is to come back on SMS and growth. Just to clarify with Nadine, we obviously have M&A opportunities on top of software. That is clear from this call. I guess the M&A contribution in manufacturing solutions, it's within the SEK 4 billion incremental sales that Lars referred to from current SEK 800 million. On the machining side, and for you, Nadine, 2% market growth, and you want to grow twice that pace. On digital, you have done half of the SEK 1 billion already through CGTech, so I guess that would leave the rest to round tools. I just want to confirm that, and over time, is the ambition to reach a similar market share for round tools as in inserts, are you going from 10% today to 30%?
Yeah. Some different topics. First of all, regarding the digital business and the CGTech, there is still no closing, so the closing still needs to happen. That's also why we need to consider that when we look to the numbers with the SEK 1 billion. On the other questions regarding M&As, as we said previously, we do a lot of acquisitions in round tools supporting mid-market. There are different areas that we will acquire companies moving ahead.
When you say, you have to follow up there on round tools, when you say that you want to expand both mid-market, Asia, developed markets, and so on, and obviously, in the past, not buying in round tools has been owing to sort of a lower margin. Really to understand, are your ambition to be global number one in round tools as well? Or is that something that you don't want to commit to here?
On the solid round tools, it's more to be on the podium, if we think along in those lines. A few years ago, we are close to the 10% market share. Now we are above the 10%. Of course, we try to increase and be on the top two as we are, or the top three as we are for a lot of other areas.
That's great. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Sebastian Kuenne from RBC. Please go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Hi, gentlemen. Two questions from my side. The growth areas, the organic growth areas that you identified, to me, that's in SMR, it would be surface drilling. In SMM, it would be round tools, as you explained just a minute ago again. Wouldn't there be more competitive fears with potentially lower margin potential? Because it seems to be that you're moving out of your core high return businesses. That would be question number one. Question number two, on the additive manufacturing business, I think there are some lessons to be learned from companies like Oerlikon, who tried three to four years ago to push very aggressively into additive because of the boom in aerospace, and the need from the engine manufacturers, but that has completely faltered. All the growth expectations have not materialized, and now aerospace is in a structurally difficult situation.
The question is, why do you think now is the time to push into additive, and where is the market growth coming from in additive? Thank you.
I can start. Maybe Lars, you can comment on additive. When it comes to the organic growth and all the new areas, will they have lower margin than our, let's call it original core businesses? That will sometimes be the case, definitely. Henrik and Nadine have businesses with typically over 20% margin. If we don't allow ourselves to look at growth at healthy levels, but sometimes below 20%, then we're going to be very limited in our growth opportunities because those are very attractive markets that we are in already. I think that the value creation we can give going forward is not going to be by trying to increase margins by another 50 basis points. It's going to be to achieve now our growth target and eventually, hopefully, be able to increase it, because what ultimately we want to drive is earnings per share growth.
If you look at round type.
Which implies margin dilution, basically.
Some margin dilution can always happen when we grow, absolutely. I don't think it will be material.
Uh-huh. Yep.
Yeah, additive for you.
Yeah. On the additive side, well Oerlikon, GE, and others have been pushing very hard on growth, and I think we see nice growth today in the additive business that we have through the service bureau of BEAMIT, where we have a minority stake, and also in our powder business. We are targeting a balanced growth. I think there were players, and it's not up to me to talk about them, but there were players that were pushing extremely hard and believing that they could grow the market in a very steep way. We are not targeting that type of growth rates. I think at present, the market is growing with some double digit per year, which we basically then also are working on accomplishing, but not to push so that we kind of stall the growth in the additive arena.
We can see a very nice link also between our business that we have today with medical and aerospace and automotive, where we have the link into the market. All in all, it is our belief that we can find a nice growth, but balance it in a reasonable way and not push too hard.
I must put. Do you have cooperations with the machine makers like the GE or Hewlett Packard that are kind of the leaders-
Absolutely
... or the [Toam] from Germany?
Absolutely. We have growth with all the major machine makers today.
Thank you.
Thank you. I think that was today's final question. Everyone on stage, thank you so much for sharing your presentations, and thank you for today. I will hand the word over to Stefan again for some final words.
Thank you, Emelie. Just waiting for the slide. This is the final slide of today. What we have wanted to show you is the evolved structure of our business going forward and the underlying market growth that those businesses are representing. We have the ambition to grow at least in line with the market, in some areas above market organically in these different businesses. On top of that, we will add around 2.5% of acquired growth, on average per year. This means that overall, our aim is for each of our businesses to grow at least twice as fast as the market, in some of the businesses with higher ambitions than that. This in turn means that we aim to deliver on our growth target going forward of growing at least 5% CAGR through a cycle.
As I started with, this we will accomplish through our 23 divisions, leveraging our decentralized operating model and the full force of the entire Sandvik organization. Thank you for listening today. Thanks for some very good questions. I hope it has been informative. With that, I will leave over to Emelie to wrap things up.
Thank you, Stefan. To all participants, a big thank you for joining us today. We are looking forward to speaking again soon. Thank you and goodbye.