Welcome back, everyone, to ABG Investor Days. My name is Henric Hintze, I'm an equity research analyst here at ABG. With me now, I have a company that I cover, SinterCast, and the company's CEO, Steve Dawson, here to present. Please, go ahead.
Thank you, Henric. So this is an annual event for SinterCast. I think we've been here each of the last five years. I thought I would begin with a recap of our progress since we were here last year. So this is a summary of the key metrics. Our total revenue is up 15%, and this is all based on the first three quarters of the year, because that was our last published data. Our recurring revenue is up 12.5%, and you can see from this that our recurring revenue makes up more than 90% of our total revenue. Our operating result is up 20%, our dividend was up 10% year-on-year, and our year-to-date series production for January through September was up 6.7%.
But we've been really strong since the midway point of the year, and our year-on-year production for the third quarter was up 16%. I'll explain a little bit later in the presentation about our contribution to CO2 reduction, but we have increased our cumulative saving from 48 million tons at September of 2022 to 57 million tons currently. So that's a 19% increase in our climate contribution. Let's back up a little bit and introduce SinterCast. I think that most people know us as the Compacted Graphite Iron company, and CGI is a stronger type of cast iron. It's stronger and stiffer, and that allows us to produce engines that are smaller and lighter, and we can push the engines harder, so higher pressure, higher temperature, to make them burn more efficiently and cleaner.
Most of our production is for large vehicles, so in fact, more than 95% of our production is for commercial vehicles, pickup trucks, and off-road equipment. These are the vehicles that traditionally use a lot of fuel, and if we can make a contribution to make them more efficient, then we can also make very large CO2 savings. We are only 29 people, so we don't actually manufacture the castings. We provide the technology, and the software, and the service to enable the foundries to produce this difficult new material in a reliable way. Our current production is used for approximately 1.5 million engines per year. So it's high volume, it's a mature technology, it's a proven technology.
As I mentioned in the previous slide, the main part of our revenue, more than 90%, comes from recurring sources. When the foundry ships a casting, they make a payment to SinterCast. That's about two-thirds of our recurring revenue, and we also sell the exclusive sale of the sampling consumables. Current volume on that is 200,000. So again, super high volume, mature and proven technology. The sampling consumables account for about one-third of our recurring revenue. Let me start by giving an example of our contribution. This is the Ford F-150. It's the most popular vehicle in America, and we, since 2014, have been the base engine for the mid-level trim. Since September of this year, Ford announced that we would also be the base engine on the entry-level vehicles.
So I went to the EPA website, and for any vehicle that's sold in America, you can call it up and see the fuel economy comparison. You can see that on the left, our 2.7-liter V6 has replaced the previous base engine for entry level, the 3.3-liter V6. Our fuel economy is 0.5 liters per 100 kilometers better. I can animate in, and we can go through the math. That's 0.5 liters per 100 kilometers. The F-150, on average, drives 20,000 kilometers per year, so that's a saving of 100 liters of fuel every year for every vehicle. When you burn a liter of fuel, you produce 2.5 kilograms of CO2, so it's really important to burn less fuel.
That means that 250 kilograms less CO2 per year. On average, an F-150 stays on the road for 14 years, so each vehicle will save 3.5 tons of CO2 over the life of the vehicle. Our current production for F-150, I've used 300,000, but we're above that now. We're closer to 400,000. But at 300,000 vehicles per year, that means that over the life of the vehicles, the vehicles that we produce this year will save more than 1 million tons of CO2. So really significant savings. And it's for savings like that, that we were recognized just last week, by Nasdaq as an ESG Transparency Partner. Not only because of the contribution, but in the way that we show our data.
We're engineers, we always show the math, and it's always available on our website. And in the bottom here, I've made a short comparison of the engines. So again, our 2.7-liter V6, it's 18% smaller than the previous base engine, and there's 12% more horsepower... and 51% more torque. Yeah, so torque, drivability, acceleration, pulling power, it's the thing that you drive. And so this is really the example of our engines being smaller and more efficient and cleaner. And all of our engines are smaller and more efficient and cleaner, and we've just seen the example on the left for the F-150. We also make the larger Super Duty pickup trucks in the U.S., the average Super Duty driver saves 1,000 liters of fuel per year when he uses our technology.
Just over 50% of our production is for heavy-duty commercial vehicles, and there also, our engines are 5%-7% more fuel efficient than the previous generation, and therefore, a CO2 saving. So we calculate that for full year this year, we will save approximately 9 million tons of CO2. That will bring our cumulative total since we started high-volume production back in 2003 to 59 million tons, and our goal is to reach 100 million tons of CO2 saving before 2028. I'd like to put that into perspective, and on the bottom now, we see the the performance statistic from Tesla. So Tesla said in their 2022 annual report that their vehicles saved 13.4 million tons of CO2.
I've taken from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, from their website, and they state that the total CO2 emitted from all transportation in Sweden, from mopeds through on-road vehicles, including tractors and construction equipment, is 13.6 million tons of CO2 per year. You see that SinterCast makes a really significant contribution to the environment, and we're very proud of that. Let's look at our production in more detail. I always like to show the production over a longer period of time, so this is 15 years, from 2008 through 2022, and you see that it's never a straight road. There was a dip in 2008/9 with the environmental crisis, another one in 2020 for COVID, of course. In 2013, we had a program that came to end of life, and a dip there.
Even you can see this period between 2016 and 2018, where it was rather flat. Simply, we didn't have any new programs coming on stream in that time. But overall, the growth is linear, and if you do the math, we've had 13% compounded annual growth rate over the last 15 years. And in fact, last year, we were also 13% year-on-year growth. And I'll come back to it later in the presentation, and we'll talk about this year in a bit more detail. I've explained that we have this recurring revenue business model, so every time we make a casting, we receive a payment, so we also have double-digit growth in our revenue. And you can see that revenue over the last 11 years, and sometimes it's up a little bit, sometimes down.
That depends on how much revenue we get from installations, which is not recurring. But still, we have this strong growth rate. And what I've done for the first nine months of 2023, I've extrapolated to the full year. You saw earlier that our total revenues until September was SEK 98.5 million. So I extrapolate that for 12 months. I divide by our 29 employees, and we have revenue of SEK 4.4 million per employee. And with our strong operating margin, we have a profit of SEK 1.2 million per employee. And we will beat these numbers because surely the fourth quarter will be much stronger than the first quarter. So, it'll be interesting to see how we finish the year, but those numbers will be higher.
One of my favorite quotes comes from our hosts here at ABG. They said a couple of years ago that SinterCast was possibly the most profitable company in the Nordic region, and that's our goal: to stay in that handful of top profitable companies. We are a dividend company, and we have a commitment to our shareholders that we transfer the bulk of the operating capital back to them, and so we also have double-digit growth in our dividend. We gave our first dividend in 2011, and since then, we've had 22% compounded annual growth in our dividend. As the business became more mature and stronger, we reduced the liquidity low point, and four years ago, we also changed to two dividends per year so that we could be more aggressive.
We have returned 111% of our operating result to the shareholders, and so far, SEK 282 million cumulative dividend returned to the shareholders. I said that we would look at 2023 in more detail, so here's a breakdown. This is showing every month so far this year, and we finished last year with a run rate of 3.5 million. When we came into this year, we had a couple of our high-volume programs that were undergoing a model year changeover, so their volume was down. Still, it was lower than we expected, and we averaged 3.25 million engine equivalents of production for the first four months. Since then, as I said, it's picked up very nicely, 27% increase, and our recent run rate is 4.12 million engine equivalents.
Year to date, that puts us at 3.73. As I mentioned earlier, full year 2022 was 3.5, and also the first three quarters were 3.5, and so we're up 6.7%. The fourth quarter of last year finished at 3.5. We're running at around 4.1 now, so we're gonna be much stronger than we were in fourth quarter last year, and I think we still have a real fighting chance to get to double digit before the end of the year. If we don't make it, we'll be close, and it'll be a really good marker to continue our track record of compounded annual double-digit growth.
On this slide, I'm gonna begin by apologizing that it's really busy, but I wanted it to be busy. This shows our share price development over the last four months, from July through October. During that period, along the bottom, you can see that we had eight press releases. Four of them were about record series production and record revenue. We had two presentations similar to this, one at Aktiespararna, one at ProHearings. We had an investor open house at our technical center in Katrineholm. More than 35% of our shareholding passed through the building on that day. And we had an article in Affärsvärlden. So we were really busy, but unfortunately, the share price didn't keep pace, and the share price declined. And so we thought: What more can we do?
What can we do more than record revenue, record production, record result? So the board decided to activate a share buyback program. We issued that press release yesterday, and the program allocates up to SEK 5 million to buy shares in open trading on Nasdaq Stockholm. The program will be managed by ABG. We'll pay for the shares in cash. It's our intention to cancel repurchased shares by resolution at the next AGM. Even with this SEK 5 million commitment, or up to SEK 5 million commitment, we are still confident that we'll be able to propose an increased dividend at the AGM in May. Yeah, we've got 13 years of consecutively increasing dividend, and we're committed to making it 14. We're committed to making it 25. And that also leads me to the next one.
So at this point in the presentation, a little summary. So we've had 10 consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth, and clearly, that will become 11 in the fourth quarter. Again, we showed that the first quarter of this year was lower than we expected, so it will go to 12. We've got a really strong track record there, and that will continue. We have good visibility in the auto industry because the planning is always three or four years ahead, so we know what's coming in the pipe. We're confident that we'll maintain our compounded annual growth rate through 2030. We're also confident that we'll have high volume production well beyond 2035. I'll come to that in the next phase of the presentation. Our operating margin is currently just under 30%.
We've made some adjustments on the inside of the company. It's a mature technology, and we're able to be more efficient. We think that unless inflation is silly, that our operating cost in 2028 will not be less, will not be more rather, than it was this year in 2023. So the cost will remain very stable. The revenue will increase. We target to have a operating margin of 40% in 2028. As I said, we want to maintain our dividend and continue to increase this increase in the ordinary dividend from 13 years to 25. And we want to target, as I said earlier, 100 million tons of cumulative CO2 saving by 2028, and we're totally on track to do that.
One of the things that people frequently talk about when they talk about SinterCast, because we're aligned with the internal combustion engine, is electrification. The narrative has certainly been that electrification will come, and electrification will come quickly. I don't agree with that. We don't agree with that. I wanted to share some recent press clippings, and this first one is from Svenska Dagbladet just last month. In fact, all of these press clippings are one month old. Here we have the CEO of Scania and TRATON Group, and he says: "Our new factory is ready, but the customers don't come." The subheading says that it's a warning that electrification will not be as fast as expected, and I think that will be the case. Now some clippings from America.
So this one from Automotive News, it's the leading trade journal in North America for the auto industry. The Ford Lightning was introduced last year. It's the electric version of the F-150. And again, F-150 is the best-selling vehicle in America, has been for the last 40 years. They said that they had 100,000 reservations for it when they launched it. They said that 70% of those reservations were new to pickup and 50% were new to Ford, and the launch has not gone well. The vehicle has not been well-received, and they've now reduced their production from three shifts to two. F-150 normally sells around 900,000 vehicles per year. As I said, they had 100,000 reservations. This year, they won't sell 20,000. The take rate is less than 2%.
Another quote also just from October that Ford and GM start to push back their spending on EVs. General Motors was scheduled to launch their electric pickup before the end of this year. They've now delayed it to the end of next year, and as you can read in the text, Ford has delayed a $12 billion expense in a new battery plant. And the market just isn't coming as fast as they previously thought it would. And this is another quote again from Automotive News that the EV transition is slowing. The number of EVs on dealer lots is increasing because they're not being sold as quickly as normal vehicles, and it's becoming difficult. We have to align the production of the vehicles with the demand for the vehicles.
Closer to home here in Sweden, unfortunately, Volta Trucks, the electric, commercial vehicle company, went into administration on October eighteenth. All of this reminds me of a very powerful quote from an American journalist from the 1930s. His name was Mencken, and Mencken said, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." I'm not at all saying that electric vehicles are wrong. What I'm saying is that the problem is complex. There's a complexity with the technology and the cost. There's a complexity with the battery materials. There's a complexity with the recharging infrastructure, and also with the customer willingness. This is... It is not clear and simple, and it won't be one size fits all.
That brings me to my last slide, which is from the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, and they have published a roadmap. They published it earlier this year, for how to get the transport sector in the U.S. to net zero by 2050. You can see on the left the different types of transportation. In brackets, it's the amount of CO2 from the total from that individual sector, and you can see whether it is destined for battery, hydrogen, either by fuel cell or internal combustion engine, or by net zero liquid fuels, e-fuels, synthetic fuels, recycled fuels. It's logical that passenger vehicles will use a lot of battery, and smaller vehicles can have smaller batteries. They drive smaller distances. But as we move toward larger vehicles, we still need the energy density of liquid fuels.
And I'm not sure that we can do it, but if you add them up in a vector analysis, there are 12 icons for battery electric, 10 for hydrogen, and 12 for net fuels. It will be a mix. Internal combustion engine will be around for a long time. There are 100 million internal combustion engines produced every year in the world, and SinterCast makes 1.5 million. So the bulk of the market can go where it wants. What we have to do is get from 1.5 million - 2 million, and from 2 million - 3 million, and I'm sure that we'll do that, and I'm sure that we'll do that for the long term. Thank you.
Thanks a lot for that, Steve. Very interesting. Let's move on to some questions.
Yeah.
So, beginning with the most recent interesting news, the buyback program that you announced, could you just talk a bit more about how you think of that? What made you, you've been a dividend company for a very long time, but what exactly made you make that decision now, and how do you think about this going forward? Will this be a tool in your toolbox for returning capital to shareholders in the future?
It may well be. It's certainly a good test. For the last 10 or more years, we've had authorization from the AGM to do a buyback. We never have. We have tried hard to promote our good progress, and we have had good progress, and we simply think, "What else can we do?" We feel that the share is undervalued. We feel that the share is unreasonably undervalued, and this is our attempt to support that for our shareholders. We think that it should be in a different place, and hopefully, the buyback combined with continued growth and profitability, will lift the price.
Mm.
The volume.
Yep, of course. Going back, a few more months in time, you released some financial targets.
Yeah.
T hat were a very interesting read. I was particularly interested in the section about not increasing costs.
Yeah.
... for the coming five years, adjusted for inflation. Could you just tell us a bit, what makes you confident that you'll be able to keep up growth while not increasing your costs?
Well, increasing the costs, you know, we were 32 people. We had two retirements in the first half of the year. We already had people in to transition for them, so we had double cost at the beginning of this year. We've withdrawn from the active development of our tracking technologies, so there was some reduction in headcount associated with that. We also have a few retirements coming up, including me, and not all of them will be replaced, so that will be a net saving. So I do think that we get to 2028 more or less where we are today on the cost side.
We have about 24 production lines that we support, and we have about 20 engineers, and I think it's perfectly reasonable that the engineers can support that number of production facilities, really give them focused attention. There are only about 40 or so foundries in the world that make cylinder blocks and cylinder heads, so it's not that we have to man up to support a really large industry. I think that as we went from 1 million engine equivalents to 4.5 million engine equivalents in SinterCast, we didn't increase the manning, so we don't need to do it going forward. Indeed, if you go back in the history of SinterCast, 2002, when I became CEO, we had 52 people, and now we have 29, and in 2002, we had no revenue.
Mm. Yeah.
We don't need more people.
All right, I see where your confidence come from. Since you mentioned it, you are starting to maybe think about retirement?
Yeah.
Could you briefly tell us about what the plan is there?
So we recruited the intended successor, and we announced that in September. He will join on January 1, the intent is to make the transition at the AGM in 2026, so May of 2026. So it's a 2.5-year plan. It's really well controlled. In the first year, the new candidate will focus on our technology and learning everything about the company. The second year will be more of a shadow role with me. So I think that it, it's a really well-planned succession. He comes from our field. He has a PhD in thermal analysis, which is our... in cast iron solidification, which is our core technology.
After he worked in that area and did his research in that area, he went to an operating foundry, so he's worked on the customer side, the customer of that foundry was automotive OEM, so he's worked with the automotive OEMs. It's a really, really good fit. He's Portuguese, living in Portugal, but will live both in Portugal and Sweden from January. He just got an apartment here last week. But our biggest customer is Portuguese in Brazil, so it will also really help for the communication. I think it's a great fit, and I look forward to the transition.
Mm. Thank you very much for that. That's all we have time for today. Thank you all for listening.