Hello, and welcome to today's webcast with Sdiptech, where CEO Jakob Holm and CFO Bengt Lejdström will present the company's Q3 report. My name is Ludwig Sjöström, and I work for Finwire. With that said, I hand over the word to you, Jakob.
Thank you very much, and hello, everybody. Welcome to Sdiptech's report for the third quarter. My name is Jakob Holm, and as always, Bengt Lejdström, our CFO, is with me here on this presentation. The agenda, we will look into the third quarter, of course, dig into the financial development of the quarter, and then finally an outlook where we look at what we see in the future for Sdiptech in specific. As you know, we are an infrastructure technology group. We are focused in our acquisitions and how we develop our companies towards more sustainable, efficient, and safe societies. About SEK 3.2 billion in net sales last 12 months now. Increasing profitability margin at 19.4%% also the last 12 months.
Continuously growing at 38% over the last 12 months. Our compound annual growth is at 41% over the past year since 2017. Our business model is, as you know, associated to acquire companies with focus on infrastructure. We focus on high margin positions. We believe that is a key for our success and we focus on strong growth drivers. We focus on infrastructure but also, of course, as I said, more sustainable, efficient, and safe societies. Moving over to the quarter, it's been a strong quarter for the group. We're very pleased to present the results. Growth in net sales up 33%. Profits are growing even faster at 43% in the quarter.
Our profitability margin continues to increase, which is very positive to see, provided that we have an inflation surrounding us, 19.9%% in the quarter. Cash flow is okay. It's decent at 59%. We will get back to that we've had some inventory build-up. Strong quarter. We've also had some other important things happening in the group. One effect of that is that we've had lower results in our unit for EV charging. The reason behind that is a delay in the launch of new technology. We prepared a new technology to be launched this year. Unfortunately, we had some critical shortages in some of the components, and the launch was delayed.
As an effect, net sales and profits, of course, are lower than last year. Provided that it's quite a large business unit for us, it does have an effect. Anyhow, ramp-up is now underway. All components are in-house. We're ramping up volumes, and we're targeting to reach 100% production in the first quarter. We'll get back to some more details about that. Given the significance then of the happenings in one of our business units, we think it's justified to look at the development in the other 36 units. Then we could see that, you know, the overall, in general, the organic growth is really solid in the group. Sales up 2.8% and profits even more than at 9.3% in comparable units. Okay.
Just the important, most important aspects about the quarter. We can see that demand continues to be good. Net sales have a positive growth. On one hand, price revisions have, of course, had a positive effect on sales. On the other hand, we have had some hampering on our sales. We're not delivering according to the demand due to shortages. As before, there's lack of new vehicles in the market that does affect some of our business units. And that's really lack on the customer side. We have the orders, but we haven't yet delivered all the products. All in all, the net effect, if you say so, it's hard to say.
It's the price revisions affect on the positive side, the hampering or the shortages affect on the negative side. All in all, the net effect is positive, 2.8%. Forward-looking, our order book remains good. We see no clear signs that things are weakening. It's quite normal view on the future, when we look at all the details in our companies. The profitability continues to grow, as we said. Really pleased to present that the profitability is improved in our existing businesses. Organically then our profits have grown at 9.3% than excluding the EV charging unit.
Of course, if you grow profits at 9.3%, when the sales grow at 2.8%, of course the profitability margin is improving. That really shows that what we're doing with regards to inflation is working well. I'm really proud about all the key leaders in our organization. Our decentralized model is really having an effect, where we can make the right decisions at every single point of time with really skilled managers. We will of course. Deflation has not stopped. We all know that. We will continue to work with this. This is more and more coming as business as usual for us to work with these things.
Of course, acquisitions have also contributed positively to the margin, and that's really in line with our strategy to acquire high margin positions. Acquisitions add on a positive side, and also how we develop our companies add to the positive side. Cash flow has been affected to some extent by building up of extra safety stock in the quarter. Underlying, however, our cash flow last 12 months is at 80%, and that is what I would say representative also for the group. I think all of you that have followed us over the years know that sometimes we build up stock, but then eventually we will release the stock and so forth. On an average, 80% is representative. Our acquisition pipeline is as strong as before.
It's actually the highest level that we have ever had. That was the same situation in the second quarter. We are expecting to exceed our acquisitions target this year. We are finalizing some existing processes as we speak. The fourth quarter, most likely there will be some more closings. As before, I would just want to repeat it, we focus on high margin positions, really qualitative targets only. Well, it's worth mentioning, but that's how we always have focused as you know. Then just have a look at the important things going on in our EV charging unit. These are some investment highlights. Of course, we're not pleased with the reduced sales and the profits in the quarter, but the background is really positive.
We are launching a new technology platform. It's actually a total redesign of the controller unit. The controller unit really consists of the circuit board, the electronics, anything with semiconductors are really in, inside the controller unit. That's really, you know, the smartness that you can build into the hardware. And then on top of that, of course, we have our own software. That's the total new redesign of the hardware. We will be able to launch new functions not available on the market today. We're really, really excited about that. Of course, we cannot talk about them here and now. Eventually, they will be presented to the market.
The new technology is also then compliant to the new regulation for smart EV chargers in the United Kingdom that came into effect 1st of July. Really what happened there, the complication is when we launched the new controller unit, we did a new design with new components of course. But then due to shortages of components, we had to redesign, you exchange one component for another. And then we had to recertify for the authorities. A very delicate process to get this into place. It's actually a tremendous effort that has been done. That we now can say that everything is certified, approved, all components are in-house, production is ongoing. Really happy to see that.
Also, we've actually moved the production of hardware out of China and home to United Kingdom to Nottingham. Really firstly, really important is then that we are really taking out the risk exposure that we previously had in China. All our hardware was produced in China, which a lot of the majority of our peers actually still have. But we've taken, you know, the investment to move them to UK, which is really positive. By doing that, we simplify the supply chain. Transportation is really reduced and also our climate footprint as a result, of course. Thanks to the new design, the assembly is significantly easier to do, so lead times are shortened significantly, but also the capacity is doubled.
It's actually more than doubled in the plant that we have in the U.K. now compared to what we had in China before. Looking very positive. As you know, the future growth estimations are high, and that's really based on what the ambitions are in Europe, but also specifically in U.K. That the sale of new petrol and diesel cars are set to be banned in the U.K. from 2030. Even if that will not happen, it's still a significant growth that needs to be put into place. We all know that. In 2022, the growth in the market was 15%. It's really less due to lack of new electric vehicles.
We all had expected more, so there is a backlog being built up in the market in addition. For 2023, well, there'll be, you know, there will be a combination. The strong growth drivers are there, but then we all have these uncertainties in the prevailing economy, as we all know. The net effect short term is hard to say, but eventually, and in the long run, the growth is for sure significant. Now we are prepared, so we're really happy about that. To sum up about acquisitions, we've done four acquisitions so far, totaling SEK 125 million EBITDA, and actually we've stepped down from three processes also.
The reason for that is that the company have not really lived up to our quality expectations. These are processes where, you know, we've just had to put ink on the paper. We really stepped down, you know, in a very late stage. It's really important with our business model that we only add excellent companies into the group. Short term, you could add anything. It would build the profits, but in the long run, you would just create problems unless the companies are perfect. That's really the focus that we have. We have several ongoing projects, thanks to good work over many years to build up the pipeline.
We are expecting to exceed our acquisition targets for this year as we've already communicated, and we are comfortable to say that we can stick to that communication. By that, I hand over to Bengt for the financial development.
Thank you, Jakob. To start looking at our sales. As you can see on this picture that we have quite steadily been increasing our group sales with 26%, 25%-26% in total from 2017 all the way up till now. That's of course a mix of acquired volumes and organic growth. From quarter to quarter, that may, of course, be a different split between these two components. All in all, it's very steady sales growth over the years. Looking then on the right side of this picture, you see the split then between the different geographies where our customers reside.
This one perhaps look a bit similar to last quarter, but the segment other geographies, meaning other geographies than the geographies where we have our companies, then has been slowly increasing, meaning that we are exporting more and more since we have invested and acquired companies with product sales, which of course then is we believe a strong opportunity to increase sales over time, that you have a product that fits also in other geographies than in your own domestic. You will probably see that continue, that development, that this black slice of this pie will increase, and still U.K. is our most important geography all in all. Looking at the profit, also there you have a very steady increase over the years. Jakob already mentioned 41% since 2017 still holds.
Last 12 months, we have the 38%. Also there a mix year-on-year with acquired profit and organic profit growth. We had three very strong organic profit growth years, 2019-2021. That trend continues this quarter. Actually, if we, as Jacob mentioned, would exclude the EV charger business, then we are at the same level as the previous three years with a 9% organic profit growth, all in all. So this quarter has been really as we want and expect, and our targets, as you know, perhaps, is that to have a organic EBITDA profit growth of 5%-10% on a yearly basis. As profit have been growing more than sales, then of course, also our margins have been increasing.
As you can see here, it's roughly 2% increase per year since 2017. Not so much in the earliest two years, perhaps. We're now at 19.4% on a last 12 months basis, and we were at 19.9% in quarter three. Jakob said that we think we are a 20% margin company. We're there by the quarter, and we still have a little bit to go on the last 12 months. Let's see then how this year ends. If we look upon the quarter, we had a sales growth. It actually says 3%. There should be 33%, of which we had a negative profit growth organically if we look upon all the companies.
If we exclude the electric charger business, EV charger business, it was positive 3%. For the EBITDA, it increased 43%, and that was then almost 9% negative organically, but on the other hand, 9% positive if we would exclude that EV charging business. For the group as a whole, we think it's very healthy portfolio of companies delivering very well in this environment with the cost inflation, et cetera. This also proves that we have been catching up with the price increases towards customers. We have mentioned in previous reports that we have been. It's a time lag between being able to raise prices at the same pace as your cost inflation.
We also said that our companies will catch up sooner or later, and now we can see that they are more or less there. That's a very also then sound indicator of how our companies are performing. Very stable demand. All in all, we don't see any real downsides of that. Customers, as we expect from our type of businesses, that they are still there and the order books looks good. Yeah, I think we have discussed the other things that are mentioned on this slide already. I will then change and go into the business areas.
Looking at Resource Efficiency, here is the business area where we have the EV charger business, so that's also why you see the development is not as good as for the group as a whole, but still a 10% sales increase. Of course, partly driven by the acquired business unit in Italy, Microsistemi, which develops very well. Also a solid organic growth in all the other units then, except for this EV charging. We're happy to see that. We had the EBITDA was more or less flat. If we would add the decimals here, it would be a 1% increase. Also here, of course, a contribution from our newly acquired company in Italy, and that's offset by the EV charging business challenges here.
They're still making profit, but not as high and as good as we expected. Since that business is a quite high margin business, it means that overall the EBITDA margin for the business area has decreased down from 25%-23%. Today, there is 16 units in the business area and one acquisition during 2022 so far. Looking at the Special Infrastructure Solutions, there we have a bit more aggressive growth, you could say. We have sales increase of 48%. Of course, a lot of contribution there from the three acquired companies, TEL UK, RDM, and ELM, but also from the already comparable business units.
We see, for example, that our unit that deals with the road maintenance equipment, our Finnish company, they have a very good development during the year and with success with the exports into the U.S. and North American market, which is very good. On the other hand, we have some units that have some challenges when it comes to their customers having access to vehicles since we have two companies then selling equipment to minivans and that sort for last-mile transport and another one for forklift attachments. Both these types of vehicles, forklifts and minivans, have been a little bit long supply chains and delivery delays. They have been hampered a little bit, but still performing well with it, but could do even better, I think.
They will soon be on track since we see signs on that when it comes to our customers' possibility to get their vehicles, so we can then install our equipment into those vehicles. All in all, very good for this business area, and they also had the margin increase from 17% up to 20.4%. As you see on the chart, the development has been not that aggressive since 2020, but as you may remember, we included here a year ago the two remaining business units from our previous business area, Property Technical Services, which have pretty good large sales, but to a lower EBITDA margin than the average in this business area. That has sort of set the new level for this business area.
The 20% is very good. It's 19.8% on a last 12 months basis. Today, 19 business units, and as I said, three acquired during this year. Finally, when it comes to the financial details, we have some additional metrics. Jakob mentioned the cash conversion. 59% is not as good as we really want. It's typically around 80%-90%. We were 80% the last 12 months. Still during this quarter, we have some build-up in stock, but also some increase in accounts receivables, for example, for the increased sales in a number of units. Looking at the cash flow from the profits, so to say, before working capital cash flow, then it was very good, actually.
We think still it's a very good cash flow from the group as a whole, which is important since that cash flow then is invested in the new acquisitions of companies. Looking at the earnings per share, we had an increase from previous year, and we now at the last twelve-month basis have almost 10 SEK as a earnings per share. Looking at our debt ratios, that's always tricky KPIs. Always a lot of questions around that because we have. Now perhaps when it comes to the net financial debt, that's debt that we always need to pay back to our credit institutions or leasing providers, which currently is down at 1.8. As you may know, we have a target of
Stay at or below 2.5, so it's still plenty of headroom there. We have our total net debt, which is a higher ratio, as you see, 3.7, slowly increasing. That debt is including then our contingent considerations or conditional considerations based on future increased profits in our companies. Much of that debt is not payable unless the profit increase compared with today's profit levels. It's not really a number that could be interpreted very much since you would have to sort of say forecast how much profit is needed in order to pay out all that reserved debt, because we need to put a reservation for all that possible debt in the future on the earn-out structures we have in our acquired companies.
By being at the share of 40%, that conditional debt is of course a large part of our balance sheet on the debt side, but it's still a debt that if things would go worse or stay at current profit levels, that much of that debt will actually just disappear. That ratio will be lower. I think that's all of it.
Yes. All right. Finally, let's have a look at the future. We have a positive view on the future. We can see the demand is solid, the order books are good. Infrastructure is always needed, as we know. We have an unchanged view on that. We have no clear signs that we should have a different view. Everything seems look good and quite normal.
There are some lack of components and so forth. The demand is there, so we will build up a backlog as before, but then eventually we'll catch up on the delays as before. This is really becoming business as usual for us since the pandemic really, you know, building up backlog and then delivering upon the backlog. That's really what we're doing. That's also what perhaps you could see the effect in the cash flow that also means that we need to take some extra safety measures in the inventories and so forth. Anyway, we have really learned how to manage that. Profitability is, we will, we still stick.
We believe that normal profitability level for the group is 20%. In the quarter, we're really there, actually with some potential of quite higher profitability, given that the EV charging units really didn't perform as it can. Anyway, 20% is good expectations. I think we've really proven then that we can achieve full compensation for cost increases. You can see that the organic profitability improvement in the quarter is a good example of that. Of course, the inflation will continue, but our work will also continue. We have comfort in that.
For the EV charging unit, ramp-up is really underway, production is ongoing, and we can really see, you know, around the corner that the demand, the pent-up demand is really significant. We are really positioned ourselves in a good way with a very good product line. Production capacity is really doubled, and then we moved it home to our backyard. We are in a very comfortable position there to, you know, take on that increase volume and growth. Our acquisitions pipeline, that's business as usual, as well, I would say, but it's really strong position, and it's not something, you know, just happened. It's many, many years of systematic work. We're excited about that, of course.
As we've also said, we have really focused on only the best companies, and we acquired four. We've stepped out of three processes. That's really an evidence for that. We believe that we will close some additional before the fourth quarter has ended. All in all, a positive view on the future for Sdiptech. By that, we open up for questions.
Thanks very much for the presentations. As you mentioned, we'll now continue with the Q&A. The first question here is there's a lot of CapEx in the quarter. Is it driven by Rolec or what is the driver?
Yeah, as you mentioned, the CapEx spending in the cash flow this quarter was a bit higher than normal. When it comes to intangible assets, investment in that's the charging, the new charging chargers for Rolec, of that total of almost SEK 50 million spent in the quarter and the cash flow, about SEK 40 million of that comes from that investment. Then we also had some extra investment in facilities in some U.K. companies. Also, the tangible assets spending was a little bit higher than usual. As a rule of thumb, we typically have about 1.5%-2% of our turnover is our investment CapEx intangible assets, really.
You say that you have stepped down from three out of seven deals. Does this include the four deals you have made this year, or does it mean you still have four processes in advanced stages?
Okay. Sorry if that was confusing. We've closed four processes so far, and we stepped out of three processes. Total, let's say seven processes have been closed in one way or another already. In addition to that, we have ongoing processes as well.
Yes. Regarding acquisitions, have you seen any changes in the acquisition processes in terms of price and demands from seller? Has that been a factor in the processes you have ended?
No. I know that, well, okay, the way we pursue our acquisitions work is that we really put a lot of effort to find the targets ourselves. That means that we have exclusive dialogues with the owners. From that perspective, we have our view on pricing, and that's really based on, you know, what is our calculation on how we can get our returns. It's not a reflection of what's the price point in the marketplace. It's we price our companies based on our desired returns. If you talk to other companies that do acquisitions, they are more focused on entering bid auctions. There, of course, you can have a more up-to-date view on the price points.
We believe that's not the way for us to go because that's really competitive processes. We find our deals ourselves. From that perspective, we don't have, you know, the same insight on what is the actual price point in all those bid auctions because we don't really participate in them. The reason why we stepped out of three processes is not based on price, since when we sign a letter of intent, we already agree on price. Then we do a due diligence. We of course need to ascertain the quality of those earnings, but then other aspects in terms of legal due diligence, tax due diligence, commercial due diligence, and so forth. It is more those aspects that we come to the conclusion that these are great companies, but not good enough for us.
You have 10 operating businesses in the U.K. with around 36% of total sales. How is the challenging economic situation in the country impacting your business? What do you expect going forward?
Yes. So I think or as we all know, there's a lot of political turbulence going on there. It's really nothing new for our British businesses. As you know, we've had the Brexit. The Brexit was on, the Brexit was off. It was on, off, on, off. Really chaotic years from that perspective. We really had to prepare ourselves for the Brexit. That was something that really affected us. I think everyone is quite, you know, used to political turbulence. That is not something that is, you know, in focus at all, I would say. It's rather, you know, than ordinary things that we focus on, you know, also in the rest of Europe.
Of course, targeting a situation where we will have revisions of salaries, for instance. It's the same type of situation that we have in the U.K. that we have in other countries. It's not anything specific, I would say. I think it's rather, you know. No, I just won't develop any more about it. It's business as usual, I would say.
What is your cost of financing? How much refinancing is due in the next 18 months?
Well, as we mentioned in the report, we have a new credit arrangement since May this year, which is a three-year committed headroom with additional volumes as well to ask for in our financing when it comes on the debt side. We don't have any refinancing until the earliest then in the spring of 2025. Of course, when it comes to interest rate that we pay, I mean, you can see the numbers we present on how much interest rate we have compared to our debt. Of course, since the base rates from the central banks are increasing, so does our total interest rate spending, but our margins are still at the same level as before and at a quite decent low level as well.
We have done some hedging for part of our debt financing, so we have kind of locked in a certain interest rate when it comes to those base rates, meaning that we have a fixed rate all in all for part of our financing during two years. I can also perhaps say that when you look at that financial net and interest rates booked as costs, we have some, call it theoretical interest rates on our conditional debt that we need to put in the profit and loss, but that's nothing that hits the cash flow. It's just bookkeeping, you could say.
What is the gross margin impact from sourcing Rolec in U.K. now versus China?
We will not go into those details. Of course, it's information that our customers probably would believe is very interesting. That's confidential information. Of course, we are very happy with the profitability that our EV charging business has. It's really the highest in the marketplace. Of course, that's something that we value and we want to protect.
Moving on to the last question. Do you notice any sensitivity regarding prices towards customers given the current economic situation?
Not really. You're meaning that since we need to increase prices, we would lose volumes. I mean, typically, our companies have products that for one is a very necessary product or service for our customers. They need to buy this kind of product or service from us or of course, from one of our competitors, if there is one in that very specific business segment. It's typically a good or service that you cannot really be without. There we have a strong, of course, pricing power when it comes to that. Also, typically, our company's products are a small share of the total wallet for this customer. I mean, we have both the public institutions and companies and grid line operators in the electric networks, and we have container ports and whatnot.
All these are very big customers with good paying capacity. So no loss of customer payments, so to say, no bad debt or bad receivables, rather. Typically, it does not affect, at least not as we have seen so far.
Thank you so much for the presentation and for answering our questions. We wish you good luck in the future, and we wanna thank all the viewers for tuning in. Have a nice day.
Thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye-bye.