Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the nine months results 2021/ 2022 conference call and live webcast. I am Alice, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing by the relevant field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Frank Rehfeld, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for joining this webcast. We would like to introduce the LEM nine-month results for our financial year 2021/2022. My name is Frank Rehfeld. I'm the CEO of LEM, and I'm here together with Andrea Borla, our CFO. For those who are not yet familiar with LEM is providing sensors for measuring electrical parameters, namely current, voltage, and energy, and with those, help our customers and society to transition to a sustainable future. Here you can see the agenda for today. After my opening remarks, I will give you more detail on the business performance of our two segments. Andrea, our CFO, will then introduce our financial results, and I'm going to outline what we expect in the future afterwards.
Now, also the third quarter of our financial year, 2021/ 2022, we are happy to announce that the strong growth momentum with which we started in the year is continuing. That this growth is happening in a very challenging environment is needless to mention. On one hand, we have to cope with the effects of the pandemic that is now impacting us since more than two years. On the other hand, we are facing component shortages and logistics challenges. At the same time, the mega trends that are the base of LEM's growth story are further accelerating in the area of renewable power generation and distribution, in automation and digitization, and in the area of new energy vehicles. As indicated, the strong business rebound that we showed in Q1 and Q2 has been continuing also throughout Q3. This across all regions and all businesses.
We are therefore proud to report record sales and profit for those nine months of our financial year. Despite the overall top line growth of 26%, that I will explain in greater detail in the business section, we could have grown in the last nine months even more by about another 10%, if we could have had all components available in time. We were disappointed not to be able to satisfy our customer demands in the way that we were used to satisfy them before, despite enormous efforts. The investment confidence is remaining solid in all our industry businesses, driven by the acceleration towards a zero emission world. The electrification trend in the automotive industry is accelerating and confirming our strategic focus towards new energy vehicles.
This slide shows the GDP growth rate from 2019 to 2021, and the expected growth rate for 2022 and 2023. Despite the fact that the rebound level of 2021 after the corona dip is not sustainable long term, the World Bank assumes an average global growth of 4.1% in 2022, and a 3.2% growth in average in 2023. Not new, but still worthwhile to be mentioned in this connection with LEM, who has every second employee and around 38% of its sales in China, is that the growth rate of China is expected to be between 5%-6% in the years 2022 and 2023. Now, I've been mentioning already that we've been disappointed not being able to meet all our customers' demands.
An important part of our teams are working day and night in order to find solutions for our customers despite the ongoing supply chain crisis. The availability of semiconductors is and remains our biggest supply challenge. The strategic decisions three years ago to build our own fabless activities will help us to get more flexibility in the future. However, will not be a solution to the ultimate bottleneck of the semiconductor shortage, which is the wafer manufacturing capacity. The capacity built up in the semiconductor industry will not be fast enough to meet 2022 demands, and we therefore expect throughout the next 18 months still shortages. However, starting from middle 2022, we expect a gradual improvement. We are convinced that the ability to deliver is becoming an increasingly important USP and therefore invest in second sources as well as in additional production capacities.
Now with that, let's move into the business performance. LEM is delivering its sensors into the following core applications: motors and drives, power storage, renewable power generation and energy conversion, and energy metering for traction applications and fast charging stations for electric vehicles. We are organized into business segments, automotive and industry, where automotive has today a share of about 23% of the total LEM turnover. Both segments saw a nice double-digit growth in the first nine months. Automotive by 16% and industry even by 27% at constant currency. Looking at the geographic spread of our businesses, the picture has not been changing against what we reported in our half-year call. All regions were growing with a comparable double-digit speed. China is and remains with 38% our single biggest market, followed by Europe with 31%.
Both markets were also the growth engines in Q3. You will see the contribution of industry and auto segment to this picture in the following performance section. Let's move and start directly with the industry segment that does 77% of our total sales. All our industry business have been strongly recovering in the last nine months against 2021. Even the traction business picked up by 10% against 2021. The drive business that was weak throughout the last two years strongly rebounded with almost 40% since the delayed investments in the industrial and consumer sectors are now getting realized. Amongst those are also the investment in the semiconductor capacities. The renewable energy sector was mostly driven by solar in China and the investments into European vehicle charging infrastructure with our DC meter.
Nice growth also in high precision, mainly driven by test measurement equipment for the automotive market, as well as the medical equipment that recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Projecting this picture now from a regional perspective, this picture has not changed against our half-year call. You see that Europe has been seeing the fastest growth and all other markets grew slightly less, but still strongly. The growth in industry in Q3 was impressive across the board. However, we continue to see inventory fill effects after the stocks were depleted in the last years. With 35%, China remains the single biggest country for LEM industry sales. Obviously, all regions benefit from the return of investment confidence and reflect stronger customer demand. This is as well confirmed with the U.S., with 23% growth in Q3 and rest of the world, which includes Japan, Korea and India with 36%.
The ramp-up of our newly launched products goes very well. Just to mention a few here. Our HOB, a product with a high bandwidth up to 1 MHz that serves the trend towards faster switching frequencies. The LWSR, a closed loop current sensor for 300 kW solar inverters. The CDSR, a residual current measurement sensor as well for solar but also charging applications. HTRS for the track side market within traction and the ARH for our smart grid customers. Let us now look deeper into the second business segment, the automotive business. Also, in automotive, you see an overall nice growth. The main driver for that is the increase in customer acceptance of new energy vehicles. Consequently, EV and hybrid car sales where LEM is designed in are picking up, and we see this reflected here.
Unfortunately, even stronger than in industry, we were hit in our automotive business by the semiconductor shortages. This was in particular true for our charging system and our battery management businesses. While motor control was growing by 36%, the battery management application developed substantially lower. The reasons for that was the microcontroller shortage that I was already referring to, and also the further planned and foreseen reduction of our combustion engine business in the U.S. Q3 bookings are back to more realistic levels. Still, those strong bookings confirm the fundamental demand for new energy vehicles. Now also looking here at the global distribution of our automotive sales, you see the importance of China further growing.
With an enormous growth momentum of 40% in the first nine months of this financial year against the same period last year, admittedly from a rather low base last year. China is now responsible for 51% of our sales in the automotive segment. Also, our European business has shown growth driven by the CO2 fleet targets that the European manufacturers have to achieve if they don't want to get penalized. Unfortunately, the component shortages in Q3 have been reducing the growth speed within this nine-month period. The performance of our business in the U.S. is not satisfying since the transition to EVs was not sufficient to compensate the decline of our battery sensor sales in combustion engine vehicles.
The rest of the world market, namely Japan and Korea, however, we managed to slightly improve against the half year from -1% to +0.5% growth. Now, we also work for sure on our automotive product pipeline, and the products that you see here for battery management and motor control are prepared for the trends towards more compactness and lower cost. The CDT series responds to the need for the measurement of residual currents in our charging systems and to protect basically the user as well as the grid. Now, with this, I would like to hand over to Andrea, who will introduce the financial results.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning also from my side. As the group CFO, I'm very pleased to present attractive financial results for the first nine months, 2021/ 2022, slightly exceeding analysts' expectations. The strong sales have been the key driver in achieving record profitability, both on EBIT as well as on net profit levels. The gross margin in absolute value increased by CHF 30 million from CHF 100.6 to CHF 130.1. In respect of the gross margin in percentage, we have gained 1.1 percentage points. What are the main causes for this positive development? Both production efficiency improvements and scale effects helped to drive the gross margins upwards. Those improvements were somehow dampened by higher input costs.
We expect the material costs to further rise during 2022, and we will have to pass on those cost increases to our customers in order to defend LEM's profitability. Our two low cost locations situated in China and Bulgaria cover 80% of all sensors produced by LEM. The percentage of our two low cost locations is expected to increase in the future. The SG&As could be reduced from 17.6%-15.8% as LEM achieved the 26% sales growth with limited additional costs. The main causes of those cost increases are increasing consultant recruitment fees and as well higher bonus accruals as a consequence of the strong results. We are working on several automation and process improvements initiatives, which shall allow LEM to grow the SG&As underproportionally during the coming years.
The R&D expenses increased by close to CHF 3 million, confirming the willingness of not jeopardizing LEM's future growth by optimizing its short-term profits through R&D cost cuts. We focus not only on renewing our current product portfolio, but as well on developing new product families, addressing new markets and applications in the future. Some exciting new product families, such as the DC meter and LEM's very first integrated current sensors, have been very welcomed by our customers and are contributing to our sales growth in this year. Going forward, R&D expenses are expected to remain in the 8%-10% range. During Q3, LEM suffered from negative foreign currency effects, mainly coming from the recent Euro depreciation. Those losses were marginally compensated by gains in our Euro hedges.
LEM's policy remains to fully hedge the net exposure of the cash flows nominated in U.S. dollar, Euro, and Japanese yen. As LEM has only limited third party debts, the interest expenses remained modest. The main element of the financial expenses relate actually to expenses on lease liabilities. The effective tax rate is at 13.2%, close to 4 percentage points lower than last year. The main drivers are a favorable mix, meaning higher profit shares in low tax countries and some tax credits from our R&D center in France. We continue to benefit from the HNTE tax status in China, which results in a reduced tax rate of 16% instead of 25%. We are as well very pleased of LEM China having renewed its HNTE status for the years 2022 to 2024.
Here you'll find the full P&L for both the first nine months and Q3. LEM's momentum continued during Q3 with quarterly sales at CHF 92 million, while at the same time further improving our gross margin to 48.5%. EBIT and net profit of Q1 to Q3 are very much at the same level. When comparing the first nine months financial figures with our pre-COVID record year, 2018, 2019, LEM could increase its top line by 11% and its EBIT by 26%. On this positive note, I'm very happy to hand back to Frank.
Thank you, Andrea. For sure, the last slide is about the outlook as indicated. What do we expect for the full financial year 2021/2022, basically for the three remaining months? First of all, to make here again repeatedly the statement, the long-term trends on which LEM is basing its growth remain valid and even accelerate with the commitment of more and more countries towards a more sustainable way of running their economies, reflected also in the CO2 neutrality targets. This gives us the confidence to invest now into R&D, extend production capacities and floor space. Based on the nine months top line development and the strong order book, we have corrected our forecast upwards and foresee now sales of around CHF 360 million and an EBIT margin of around 22%.
Precondition for sure for that will be that the shortages in the supply chain will not get worse, but rather gradually improve. That there is no significant deterioration in today's conflicts, including trade conflicts. That the COVID situation will not get worse. With that, thank you again very much for your attention, and I would like to open now the Q&A section.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touchtone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered a queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to use only handsets and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing by the relevant field. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. Our first question comes from the line of Michael Foeth with Stifel. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, gentlemen. I have three questions. Actually, the two first questions are related. If I look at your EBIT margin guidance of around 22% for the full year and compared to the nine months margin, it indicates a significant drop in the fourth quarter in terms of profitability. Could you maybe explain what your projections are behind this? This links into the second question, which would be any further comments on input costs increases, wage inflation that you expect in the current quarter and how your pricing power also relates to that margin forecast. Those two questions are linked.
The third one would be if you could give us sort of an update or rundown on your semiconductor development roadmap. You indicated that you will continue to invest in developing that over the next three years. If you could give us a bit of an update on that. Thank you.
Yeah, Michael, I will take the first two questions. In respect of the Q4 EBIT margin, of course, it depends very much on the top line. We traditionally in the Q4 are hit by a slight slowdown in February with the Chinese New Year. As you have seen before, China having such an important exposure in LEM. We expect the total sales to be slightly lower than in the first three quarters. Then this paired with the costs, and especially the fixed costs, being at the same level or even slightly increasing, that is the consequence of this EBIT drop we foresee in the Q4.
In respect of your second question, we have already experienced input costs to increase, but still to, let's say, somehow still a limited level. We expect going forward that it's actually more than expect. We know that the input costs will increase quite a bit, be it on raw material, be it on salary costs. Our ambition, of course, is to pass it on to our customers in order to defend overall profitability. We believe that LEM is in a position to demand these price increases, and we see that as well in the first discussions we had late last year, that we can and ask for these price increases. Overall, we do not expect a significant drop of the profitability going forward.
Okay. Hi, Michael. If I take probably the third question, semiconductor roadmap. We started basically three years ago, based on an already, let's say, substantial know-how that we had in the development of some ASIC structures. We then further on built our competence towards packaging and testing. Already today we are delivering basically one-digit millions of pieces out of the production facilities. We have a very full and well-loaded roadmap for basically continuing on the roadmap for solar, automotive charging systems and motor control. We will double the team in the next basically 18 months. At the same time, we plan to also in-source the supply chain management activities that today are still done together with a partner.
There's a clear roadmap of steps that we are going to do in order to further grow this very important strategic business for LEM. Hope that answers your questions.
Yes. Thank you very much and well done on the quarter.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Miro Zuzak with JMS. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question. I hope you can hear me.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. I have a couple of questions. I take them one by one, if I may. The first one is in the industry business. I wanted to know whether you have seen any change in ordering behavior in the last couple of weeks.
Right. Probably I take this one. We have not really been seeing substantial changes there. Now, whether this is an indication for something or not an indication for something is probably difficult to say. Remember what we said about stock filling. We still see stock filling effects. And for sure, for quite some equipment, we are rather late in the supply chain. So, if there would be effects that you probably have in mind asking these questions, that would be probably not a signal that the effects are not happening. We are at the moment still seeing a very strong ordering behavior in industry.
Okay. Thank you. Can you tell us more? I mean, I see the book-to-bill ratio is probably going to be roughly 1.5 this year. I mean, that's huge, the order intake. Can you give us some more details about how the duration of the order book changed? Because in the past, you used to have quite limited visibility into, say, the period 6+ months .
Yes.
Has this changed today? Do you have more orders, for example, for calendar H2 2022 in the books?
Yes. Very clearly, I think, you remember we already referred to that in the previous call. Our order book became longer. Typically, we had before an order book that reached more three months than six months. Now our order book increased towards nine months. I think there are two effects. On the one hand, obviously we see a certain need to push orders because obviously of the supply chain shortages. On the other hand, we've been also asking our customers to give us longer term visibility, even commitments, because a lot of the components that are under shortage need to basically also be bought with the longer term horizons at typically even higher prices.
For sure, we would like them to also have commitments that they are then getting used.
Okay. One more further question regarding the business development, like in the automotive business. I mean, it looks great year to date, but let's be honest, Q3 in motor control and charging system was way below what you could report in your Q1 and Q2. Can you please comment on that? I mean, China EV sales have been strong in your Q3, still in calendar Q4. Can you please comment on that?
Sure. Now, you are completely right when you simply compare market numbers, look at our numbers, and even compare the different quarters against each other. I think the challenge that also we have is the dependency of certain components, in particular microprocessors from certain suppliers. Since you have no compensation measures in a reasonable timeframe to basically replace a processor takes two years, and we are really hit there by this dependency. One tends to overinterpret those numbers, but I would suggest not to do so. It's really the unfortunate situation that we are facing with the semiconductor situation.
Okay. I try to figure out a bit, basically your raw material input costs. I couldn't find them, frankly speaking in the annual report. Could you please give us an indication what materials that you are sourcing and what proportion of COGS this makes? I'm trying to find. The ultimate goal of this question is to find out by how much you have to increase your prices to compensate the raw material increase. If you wanna answer this, I mean that's also fine, but otherwise I would ask what are the input costs and in percentage of COGS and what is it basically?
Yeah. Without going now into details and providing you with the figures, but let's say the material cost is clearly a majority part of our COGS. We have lots of different components we source, so the price increases vary quite strongly between the components. Again, at the risk of repeating me, so far in the year it has been limited because we still had quite some stocks we could, you know, use. Let's say the negotiation with our suppliers went on and the real increases, they will only come. Overall, I think we are in a position that LEM can actually pass on these price increases to our customers. I think this year also our customers fully understand with the current environment that we ask for price increases.
Very often actually, you know, their worry is not so much about the price increases, it's really about getting our components. I think the situation and our ambition, and our commitment is to defend overall the profitability also going forward.
We are talking about increases of between 20% and 50% sometimes in these components and also the raw materials. Is that also the case in your situation?
Probably this would be rather at the higher end of the percentage, but for sure, looking at the complete BOM, the increases are probably not as severe. Again, just to stress what Andreas said, I think these times are the times where you get to know a lot of CEOs that typically would otherwise not have talked to you. They are really looking forward to get the components. Now, we don't play here power games. We really try to push this as fairly as possible. For sure. You know, the LEM success is a long-term success. The LEM success is not a success of creating short-term profits at the expense of our customers.
For sure, when we see and face those situations and, our customers not only get confronted by LEM, but that they also get confronted by a lot of other, component suppliers, those increases, we rather see open ears for that.
Okay. One last short quick one and I go back into the queue. The CHF 2 million of or the profits of the euro hedges which stand against your losses in the financial line. Are they booked in the COGS line or in which line are they booked?
No, they are booked in the same line, below the EBIT in the financial results.
Okay. The CHF -2 million is a net figure then?
Absolutely.
Thank you. Goodbye.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Daniel König with Mirabaud. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Can you hear me?
Loud and clear. Thank you.
Yes. Hi. Good morning. I had actually just one question because I looked at the renewable statement you made, and it is the fact that the solar industry is booming while the wind industry has some problems. You can see this in the Siemens Gamesa or in the Vestas statement. Is this something you are experiencing as well, that wind has problems? I was wondering how much wind is actually of your renewable segment sales.
Right. Maybe I take this question. I think,
When you look at our renewable sales, this is quite a wide range of applications. In there is smart grid, in there is our DC meter, in there is our wind and solar, and in there is also UPS. Clearly, also the share of solar in LEM is higher than the share of wind in this part. Yes, we see that wind is not reacting as quickly and agile as solar is. I think, yes, we see these sort of effects also in our sales.
I have maybe a stupid question. Because there is in solar the retail segment, and then there is also the commercial and industrial segment. To what segment within solar your products go? Does it go mostly to industrial solar parks, or is this also for retail?
Yeah. This is not at all a stupid question. We are basically, rather selling into bigger sort of investments into solar parks and this sort of order of magnitude. We start to move into the retail in the one or the other area, but the majority of our solar sales are still in the bigger sort of investments. That for sure, let's be honest, are probably also economically more important than the, let's say, solar panels that you have on your house.
Okay. Okay, thanks a lot.
With pleasure. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Reto Huber with Research Partners. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking my question, too. It's also related to the renewable energy segment. I'm wondering how much of a structural shift are we seeing there? I mean, the Q3 revenue growth, roughly 28%, what boosted the growth more there? Is it China solar power, or is it more boosted the growth by DC meters in Europe?
I mean, the reason why we put that all together is because we don't want to really talk here in details now, in figures by business. What I can probably say is that the DC metering business is enormously fast-growing, but still starting from a rather sort of low base. We see fast growing demand. The good thing is that we have a very wide customer portfolio, that we have a product that is already prepared also for the next generation steps. We will see in the future electric vehicles not only working as to be charged, but also as source of electricity. This will be accompanied with a bidirectional functionality that we can provide.
I think here, percentage-wise, for sure this is an enormous growth, but starting from a rather low base. Whereas, the growth in the solar business is probably, percentage-wise, substantially smaller, but for sure, starting from a substantially higher base. Now, when you see, China really almost doubling their, gigawatt investments in 2021, 2022, this is for sure reflected here in the growth rates. For sure, one should not forget that, one of the reasons, that China is, able to double gigawatts year-on-year, is that, cost downs in this area are also substantial. So basically, the amount of money we get per current transducer in this segment is also, under high pressure.
Okay, the-
Sorry, a little bit of complex answer but I wanted to give you all the aspects.
Yes, thank you very much. The outlook for the Chinese solar investments, you're saying they're planning to double those investments in 2022 versus 2021?
Yes, exactly.
Wow. Fantastic. Okay, many thanks.
With pleasure.
There are no more questions on the telephone.
If there are no more questions on the telephone, we'll take the questions in writing. The first question comes from Philippe Tadayon from Medium Invest. What is your order intake growth if time-adjusted, i.e. Customers placing orders further in the future than last year. Like for like order intake growth.
Yeah, it's a very valid question, but we unfortunately are not providing this level of details to the public. In order to repeat, it is clearly that you cannot just take the order book today and compare it to the past. There is a very clearly lengthening of the order backlog and this though, on the positive side, gives us some assurance about the volume also we can sell into the next years.
The next question comes from Tobias Schulte from UBS. EV charging companies are growing. LEM didn't participate at the growth. Are you losing market shares?
Yes. Tobias, sorry, when we've been creating this impression that we didn't grow in the EV charging. EV charging is part of our industry business since we differentiate between industry and auto in the way that we say what has a number plate is auto, what doesn't have a number plate is industry. So despite the fact that we are also delivering our DC meters to car companies who are also building infrastructures, you see that reported in our industry business. For sure, this is one of our fastest growing business. I think we have at the moment still substantial USPs, in particular due to the fact that we have a certified DC meter, and the certification process is a rather complex process.
For sure there is more competition to be expected. This is one of our short ROI and really fastest growing business and we rather win market share there than we are losing.
The next question comes from Jolanda Stadelmann from zCapital. On slide five, you present the World Bank's global economy outlook, which is quite defensive. How relevant is this outlook for LEM? Do you expect lower sales in China?
Now looking at the relevance, I think, for sure it is for us an indicator in general about investment optimism. Obviously, we don't take those numbers and use them as a forecast for our growth potential, but we take them as an indication about what we can expect in terms of investment trust, investment momentum. We do at the moment not expect lower sales in China, and if we would expect lower sales in China, then the main reason would be probably the way China handles COVID and basically the limits that we see there with respect to the midterm future. But not so much China here as, let's say with the 5%. We all know China came from 10% probably 10 years ago, and now we see 5%.
Looking already at the size of the Chinese economy, looking at the focus that China in particular has on renewable and sustainability and also the potential that it has, we rather expect China to further grow.
We have another question from Tobias Schulte from UBS. Gross margin, how sustainable are the improvements? Can LEM keep a gross margin of over 47% going forward?
The gross margin really depends on the one side of our future sales growth, 'cause higher sales will allow ourselves to, let's say, to absorb the fixed costs on more units. This is a positive trend going forward. On the other hand, as we mentioned before, this increasing input costs, and here it more or less depends on how well we are able to pass on these cost increases to our customers. The first two elements, I would say, tend to rather say, "Yes, we can defend the current margin." I think what will though risk to put our overall percentage margin down is the mix. Going forward, we believe that the auto part will take an even more important part of our total sales.
In auto, we expect that the gross margin will drop due to, of course, very intensive price pressure. This paired with higher volumes. In absolute terms, this will be a very attractive investment case for LEM.
The next question comes from Felix Remers from zCapital . Given your exposure to China, are you worried about a slowdown in China due to the zero COVID strategy and real estate troubles?
Right. Maybe I take this one. I mean, to be not worried or to be not concerned would be probably a mistake, not only for LEM, but for, I think, every business leader. Because we will not see only effects for LEM, but actually for the worldwide economy in case the Chinese growth is slowing down. Let me put it that way that we at the moment don't really plan for a contraction, but for sure we are also with our presence in China trying to read all signals in order to really be also agile and ready in case signs go in a different direction. We don't have any doubts in long-term growth of China.
Would we, because of that, basically not invest into headcount in R&D or in CapEx? The answer would be clearly no. Because, despite the fact that we might potentially see dips, we are convinced about the long-term growth potential.
The next question comes from Tobias Schulte from UBS. Strong growth in drives. Outlook for next year, main demand drivers.
Right. Maybe I also take this one. Yes, strong growth in drives. Now, we typically don't make no forecasts by business. To give you still a couple of bullet points, the most important reason for the strong growth is a catch-up from, in particular, the last two years, where the drives business was substantially weaker than even in the years before. I think when we would extrapolate our drives business in the future, we expect rather slower growth, in particular, looking at the sustainable growth rates in this overall machine tools and automation area, that is then not affected by catch-up anymore. I think at the moment, we rather think that this is not sustainable over longer term.
We have the next question from Andreas [inaudible] . How much of the projected sales growth this year comes from price increases due to higher material costs?
The price increases for end of December are pretty limited. Most price increases start to kick in now with the starting January, February. Overall, over the whole 12 months, if you're talking about the financial year 2021/ 2022, this still will be rather limited. If the real price increases kick in mostly into 2022/ 2023.
The next question comes from Felix Remmers, from zCapital AG.
It's already answered?
It's already answered. Very good.
Okay.
Next question is from Nicandro Barile from Helvetic Trust. Do you see any interesting M&A opportunity, smaller companies with strong technologies?
Right. LEM for sure looks rather into the longer-term future with respect to current sensing, looks into the megatrends towards more compact solutions, but at the same time, rather fast-increasing volumes. We are constantly screening the market for technology additions, and for sure are always trying to see there what could be next steps. As soon as there is something to be announced, we would do that. I think there are a couple of technologies on the horizon that are very, very interesting for us, but probably at the moment it's still a little bit too early to go into any details.
Yes, we are not looking for buying turnover, but when we are trying to use our strong balance sheets, then it would be into investment into new technologies.
We have another question from Nicandro Barile from Helvetic Trust. What about new client wins?
Yeah, maybe I also take this one. LEM has a long history with a lot of customers over the last 50 years. You probably know that we are going to celebrate our 50 years this year. Relationships are going on over a long time. These in particular refer to the industry business, which is for sure the oldest business we are in. Now in order to really restart growth and when you follow a bit LEM, we basically said with the new R&D investment is doubling our R&D of sales from about 5% towards this 8%-10% corridor. We for sure go for new clients, in particular, in areas where we also look for new applications.
Talking here about our automotive business, our smart grid business, our integrated current sensing business, the coils business, and also the DC metering activity. There clearly, yes, we are winning new clients, and this is a very exciting story because we see a high demand and sought after our products.
We have another question from Nicandro Barile from Helvetic Trust. What do you expect overall in labor costs increase for financial year 2022/ 2023?
You know, the range of the cost increases in respect of labor varies very much on the location. You know, our main sites are in Geneva, Bulgaria, China, and France. We probably have a range between low single digits to, let's say, high single digits salary increase assumptions. This is really reflecting the local labor market in the specific.
Okay.
Good. I would like to thank you very much for your attention again. Would like to invite you already today for our full year results call on May twenty-fourth. Wish you, yeah, all the best health and a lot of fun in the months to come. Thank you very much and have a great weekend, sorry.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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