Note AB (publ)

STO:NOTE

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to NOTE Q3 Presentation of the Results.

How do I summarize this quarter? When we published our Q2 report 3 months ago and when we had that call, we were anticipating a quite turbulent quarter. We saw a quite drastic swings in demand. Some customers were going very well, increasing demand. Some customers were asking for a very low production pace. They had overstock and so on. So I think the Q3 is one of the more, how should I say, turbulent quarters that I've seen in our industry. And I've also been through the pandemic and also the Ukraine war, so I've seen some difficult quarters. But I think Q3 was probably the more -- the one quarter that we expected more swings among the customers and more difficulties to run.

We were quite open about that when we announced Q2 that the third quarter was going to be our most turbulent quarter. And we think that, that statement is still valid. We see some -- we see more stability in the fourth quarter. We were not expecting the same swings between the customers. We're guiding for some 10-plus percent growth in the fourth quarter. And we are expecting that 2024 is, yes, normalizing in what I would refer to NOTE standard, meaning more growth than the 10%, 12%.

Also, what is important is that I have very close dialogue with many of our CEOs of our customers. And what we see is that the sales from our customers to their customers is higher than our sales to them. So we see that our destocking activities that we are doing together with the customers are having an effect. So the stock levels that many of our customers are lower today than they were 3 months ago. So we are anticipating that this destocking activities will continue in the fourth quarter, but not with the same size or strength or however you call it. So we are seeing a more stable quarter.

We are -- just as an example, we're following our top 25 customers in size. And in the quarter, we saw that less than 10 of them had a deviation from the third quarter last year, within the plus/minus 30%. So 15 of the customers were either growing more than 30% or declining more than 30%. That is a really big swings and I've never seen anything like that in basically in any business I've been in. So really, really problematic quarter if I put it like that.

And I would say that our margin came in at 9.1% on EBIT. And these swings is what has eaten some of our margin to go from one customer to another. It sounds very easy. But if you have big swings you have to refurbish the sites, you have to move a lot of things around, you have to set up new lines to facility, take growth and so on. And that has caused some efficiency or some resource utilization is a better word in the quarter. So we are expecting that this quarter was the lower quarter in margin that we have seen.

So I got some questions earlier this morning that are we seeing reduction of margins. I would say, no, we don't see that on the individual customers. We don't see that on the material margin when I look at the customers. So -- and we don't see that the mix is unfavorable going forward either. So I would say that the margins are expected to increase in the fourth quarter and onwards. So the reduction in Q3 down to 9.1% is what I would say it has some reasons and they are not one-off, that would be wrong to say, because we can still see swings between the customers. But the level and the size of these swings were more severe than we expected. So we are expecting that slightly more normalized fourth quarter, if I put it like that.

On the other hand, you can say that if this is one of the more problematic quarters that we have seen, that still have this growth, still have the size of earnings and still moving forward, as I call it. So I think it's one of these quarters that you are happy that it's over, but I think it went fairly well given all the circumstances that we had. So we're quite pleased with the quarter as it turned out. And to be honest, it was fairly much in line with what we saw because we saw this when we entered this quarter. That was why we're a bit, how should I say, not so bold or what you call it when we guided for the third quarter, when we went into it. So that is how I see it.

If I look at the demand side, everyone talks about that we are entering a lower economy or a slower economy. And we see that in -- especially in some segments, we still see that the EV segment in especially U.K. is rather weak. We expected that to recover in the third quarter. It has not really done that. We are -- that part of the market is still doing fairly low. You see that in the segment reporting, I have a slide on that later. We also see that everything that is related to new constructions and equipment on buildings, that's also quite low when it comes to sales. So those 2, I would call it subsegments, but those 2 are still doing fairly low.

We're also seeing that the sales of the EV charging side of Sweden is not growing much this year. I don't have any numbers of it, but my expectation is that it will, in best case, be flat for the industry. So all of that combined is putting pressure on this. If you are heavily dependent on the electrification and EV side, I think it's going to be a bit a few low quarters on that side coming. More negative things has popped up. I read yesterday that, for example, Audi is closing in one of their e-tron factories in Belgium. So the sales of EV cars is expected to go down a little bit in the while. So we still see that, that segment can be affected.

What is very pleasing to say is then that we have other segments and other parts of our Greentech segment that is still doing good. So when we look at the overall demand side, I would say that 2024 looks fairly good, that we are expecting double digit growth organically and expecting to see some kind of acquired growth in that. We still have half a year or so with DVR, our latest U.K. acquisition. And you never know if there's going to be more, but demand side looks, yes, looks okay. We have spoiled everyone here with 20-plus percent growth over the last couple of years. We don't see 20-plus percent for next year, but we see strong double-digit growth. That is what I would expect when I look into next year.

So I would say that from NOTE's perspective, demand is, yes, fairly okay. Maybe that's an understatement. If you're looking at plus 10% organically, I think that is very strong in the market we are in, but that's how we see it. I will come back to guidance.

But again, if I look Q4 and onwards, Q4 still affected of some stock or inventory reductions at the customer side, lower level than we saw in Q3 definitely, but still some effects of that. We are expecting that to be over when we enter next year. We should also remember that we are quite, how should I say, we are very flexible towards the customers. Even if they have fixed orders for fourth quarter and they see that their demand is dropping, we are working together with the customers to find a new level of production to more support their business.

We know that if we push out very high sales from our side to our customer and nothing in the coming quarter, we would see these drastic reductions and so on, and that would affect our efficiency. So it's -- we need to be smarter. And I know that all of our peers are not thinking the same way, but that's how we think about it. We are expecting customers to be long term. We are expecting partners more than this quarter or the coming quarters. So we are trying to do our utmost to help them to run their business in the best way possible. So that's a bit how we think about this.

Okay. Let's move on into some numbers. Okay. I will change into this, I'm not very good at standing still so we'll see how this works. But if I look at numbers. Sales, plus 11%; operating profit 9.1%, up from 6.2%. Underlying, it's actually a reduction. We were at 9.4% last Q3. And this is -- as I said, it comes from some of these big swings with the customers. We also have an effect of some acquisition costs related to DVR that are affecting this number. And for those that follow us, you know that if this is not significant, we will not report it as a one-off. But I would say it's a few million Swedish that are burdening our quarter.

Cash flow. I had some questions about that also. We are SEK 34 million positive. For the year, SEK 135 million if we exclude the acquisitions. So basically, we are financing our acquisitions with our operating cash flow, even though we're not 100% satisfied with the cash flow. But I can say that our inventory levels were going down quarter-by-quarter from Q2 to Q3. And we also know that it's a kind of a lagging effect on the cash flow. We have long payment terms from suppliers, and therefore, we will see the bigger effect coming in the coming months. So Q4 is -- we have higher expectations than SEK 34 million in cash flow, if I put it like that. I promised that the cash flow will come. So I have to stick by that some quarter. Maybe Q4 is the quarter where that will happen. Now I'm quite confident that we will see that cash flow in fourth quarter than in the third quarter.

If I look at the year-to-date numbers, 19% growth. Operating profit, 9.9%. We were at 10.1%, I think, after Q2. We are still aiming at hitting the 10%, the magic double digit for the year, and we are hoping that we'll reach that level. 9.9% is still a very good level in a year like this. And it's an uplift from 1.7 percentage points. If I would add in the customer loss that we -- or the write-off that we did in third quarter last year I would say that we are maybe up from, what was it, yes, 9.3%. So still a good level.

Moving on into segments. What we can say is that this year, we see that rest of the world is doing very well, 8.9%. That is, I would say that, absolutely the highest level we have seen. I've said that we will never have the same profit level in the rest of the world as we have in the Western Europe. I might be wrong there because these companies are still surprising me with very strong numbers.

Western Europe, 9.9%. It's an increase of -- from [ 0.6%. ] I would say it's fairly the same as last year if we exclude the write-off that we did. But overall, a very good level. For those that are quick in their heads, 8.9% plus 9.9% is not adding up to 9.9%, but here we are measuring toward sales, not only the external. And then we deduct the internal sales when we do the group accounting. But still solid growth in Western Europe. Especially Sweden, still doing very, very well. 21% growth if we exclude the acquisition of Herrljunga.

Still, I mentioned before, U.K. EV market still at a very low level. I read some reports that they are expecting that it's still going to be half of 2022 and 2022 is still a year that were affected by the governmental subsidies. I think today that it's more of a -- it's a market -- the market is not really buying the EV charger as they were 2 years ago in U.K. for some reason. It's -- my guess is that many that are buying the low-end EV cars are charging them with the charger that is sold with the car. That is my only take of the information that we see. We see that the commercial side of the EV chargers are keeping better demand, but the residential side is where I see the deductions.

Looking at the rest of the world, yes, 6% plus. Estonia doing fine, 8% up; China, 4%. And then you should remember that one of our biggest customers in China have been moved into Sweden. So Sweden's growth is a bit boosted by negative growth in China. And that is due to tariffs that we have moved that -- those productions into Norrtälje and Estonia, but the majority has went to Norrtälje. But overall, pleasing to see that we are doing fine in all these regions.

Bulgaria is still too low to earn its right to be measured here in growth. But we have -- for those that were here in the last presentation, we were talking about how we do -- converted Bulgarian site into a full EMS site where we are buying the material. We have started with one customer. We are -- we have maybe 2, 3 large customers to go, and we are expecting those to be converted during Q4. So Bulgaria share of sales will increase just because we're adding the material. And that's quite significant. I would say that the growth will be -- we will triple the sales, give or take, when we have the material in this. And we are expecting to have fairly okay margins on that, in line with what we do for the group. So that is one part that will add on to the sales going into next year.

Segments. I promised last time that we were going to see growth in the Greentech segment. I were wrong, I have to admit that. We were seeing better demand. That has not materialized in the same way that we expected. We have seen pushouts from customers in this segment still. We are now saying that Greentech in the fourth quarter is expected to hit fairly the same level as Q4 last year. Q4 last year were quite low, I would have to say. So we are measured against a low quarter, and therefore, I expect us to be at the same level. This segment is still affected heavily by the lower activity in the EV sector.

On the positive side, we have Medtech, more than double this year, 105%. I would say that in the fourth quarter, we already saw the increase of Medtech. We will not see the triple-digit growth in the fourth quarter. We will probably see growth in maybe 20% to 40%. Still very good, but not at the same level that we have seen.

Communication, I'm expecting that Q4 will be our strongest quarter in the Communication, ever since I started at least. Maybe we have done more in the past, but -- so that's going to be a very, very big quarter for us.

Industrial, we have talked about some large accounts that are now coming into play. And those are ramping up and they are ramping up a bit slower than I have hoped, but they are -- yes, Industrial will continue to grow even though it is in this segment that we see a lot of the big swings since we have big customers in this segment.

So if I would summarize this, I would expect Greentech to be flat quarter-over-quarter in Q4. Medtech, yes, 20% to 40% growth. Communication, very strong quarter. I think we had a good Q4 last year. So I don't have a percentage number there. Industrial, solid growth, maybe in the same region as we have seen for the year. So we are -- I think, demand side are, as I said, very, very solid, even though the swings are bigger than ever. So that's what I expect.

Some highlights for the third quarter. We talked a lot about component crisis and shortages on components. I would say that for this time, the crisis is over, if you put it like that. We still see longer lead times on quite a majority of the semiconductors. But at least we have lead times, and the lead times are within, let's say, not more than 30, 40 weeks. So they are, in some way, plannable. A lot of the semiconductors has came back to, say, 20 weeks lead time and so on. So that is more or less normalized. It's longer, but it's manageable. And you get allocation for what you order and so on. So it's -- the market is -- yes, it's not in crisis any longer. It's a bit more strict than normal but it's coming along very well.

Quality and delivery performance. Quality, we're still hitting [ PPM ] levels that are around the 500, which is, in my opinion, it's world class. I met some of the car manufacturers. And if they have an electronic board suppliers that are hitting those levels, they are green. So for that, I think that is aligned with what we are expecting. The majority of our errors that we do is actually labeling errors, and that we are having projects in place to get away from. It sounds very simple, but if you label wrong, it's a big problem. So we have invested also in software that will mitigate a lot of those quality deviations.

Delivery performance. Q3, best quarter in several years. So we are moving back into where we should be. This is also a lot dependent, of course, of the better availability of components. So I think that, that's -- we are recovering in the way that we are expecting.

Order position. I've not talked about that. We have a 2 years where our order intake has been extremely high, meaning that it has been significantly higher than our expectations of sales in the coming quarters. What we're seeing now is that the order book is normalizing, meaning that we will see the orders for, say, the 2, 3 coming quarters are more important than seeing the length of it. In '22, we were asking our customers to place order for at least 12 months with firm orders because that would help them to get availability of components from the suppliers.

Today, that is not a demand any longer. So we are not enforcing this to the customer side. It looks very good on the order backlog number, but that's about it. We're not seeing any advantage of knowing what the customers are planning to do 1 year ahead because we know that, that number is always going to be wrong.

So our industry is normally working with the forecast period, with flexibility around it, with material liabilities from the customers. And then the call-offs are normally, it could be down to 1 week and it could be up to 6 months. It depends about -- a little bit about how you set up the order book. So my view is that the order book will continue to decline also in the fourth quarter. That is my expectation when the order lead times are normalizing.

And this is a very important to remember that, that does not necessarily mean that we are expecting lower sales or it does not mean that we're expecting lower sales. Because the -- if you're selling, I don't know, cars, it's a firm order. You have a car that you are equipping into one specification. Our industry does not work that way. We are selling more and more standard products for the customers. And therefore, it doesn't really help us in the long run. So we are normalized in this situation, and I think that is what the customers are expecting. And that will have an effect of that our order position will decline a bit over time.

Minus [ 7% ] still very, very good. The order backlog that we see is supporting the guidance for Q4 and supporting a stronger sale in the first half year than in the fourth quarter. So that's the important thing that we read out of it. And as always, we don't see any signs that the second half of next year is softer than the first half, just to have that sense. So that's what we mean with order book.

CapEx. Again, 2023 will be our highest year in investments. I think that is the one underlying factor that will -- that are increasing or improving our margins. So we will not stop with this. You should also know that if we hit our guidance, we will hit -- we will grow with SEK 600 million or so. And if we deduct the extraordinary material sales, we will grow with SEK 800 million. That corresponds the size of our largest factory, just to give you some content of the size of the growth. So that we invest -- it's also that we have to have machines to produce the growth.

So it's 2 sides of it: one is efficiency; one is also to facilitate growth. So the bigger we become, the higher the number of investment will be, not necessarily higher in relation to sales but higher in the size of the capital. So I think that's also important to remember. But for us, this has been the key. I've shown you in our CMD days that how the different cost elements are developing and the reason why we are so keen on continuing doing this. So for me, that is very important.

Return on operating capital, 25%. And that is -- many companies would be satisfied with that. We see that we are overstocked internally. So when we get that number down to where we want it to be, we will see higher level here, definitely. But still strong balance sheet. Equity, 39%. Solid liquidity situation. So we think that the balance sheet is very, very strong. We are open for more activities in that area.

Outlook. Yes. I've said it before. We're sticking to our guidance for the full year, SEK 4.3 billion at least. We are expecting to continue our positive earnings trend. It could be -- I could get some questions around that since we did not increase it in the third quarter. I think that's the first quarter where we have not improved the margin in, I think, 3 years or so.

So it had to come, but it's not going to be a trend as I see it. And we are well positioned to achieve the sales target of SEK 5 billion latest in 2025. Given what we see, we will hit it before that, and we will come back to new targets on our Capital Markets Day that we will -- that will run in December, as always, I was about to say, but in the -- for the third year in a row. So don't miss that opportunity to learn more about NOTE.

And if you look at the trend curves that we are in the last 5 years, we have seen solid growth. We have seen solid margin improvement. We also know that -- I've said it before, this is not the business where you can just put up a new mark on the next quarter because every quarter is different. You should see the trend. And maybe we should write this in a more trended line than on this, how should I say, dotted line. But we are expecting that we will continue to improve margins. There is nothing in our business that are stating anything that are against that. So we still believe that there is more to take out of this, and I still believe that there is a lot more growth to come.

If I look at programs that we have been awarded that is not implemented into our books, that is corresponding to very good growth numbers. And we're still expecting that this year will be our highest year of new awarded business. So all these KPIs that we are following are indicating in the same direction. So it's -- for me, it's -- I would say '23 will be another good year and '24 is looking very solid.

So I think I will end here and open the floor for discussion.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

I see that I have plenty of those on the web here. So should I start with them or should I start with the ones in the room? I decided I'll start with some of the -- from the web here.

I'll start with the first. It comes from [ Marcus Ransom. ] I will translate this. You are suggesting the third quarter report that the growth in 2024 should increase and the margin should increase. Is that related to the presentation in Q3 or for the full year? We are relating that -- the growth to be from the second half of this year. So we're not guiding for 17% or more, to be clear. It will be good double digits. If it's going to be up to 20%, we will come back to that in the Capital Markets Day.

From [ Karl Norian. ] On the margin development, you had 11% in Q4 in '22 adjusted EBIT. Do you think we'll be able to improve the margin in Q4? Very good question, [ Karl. ] It's hard to say. Q4 last year, where a lot of things that were coming very well aligned, very solid growth on the customers we expected growth on. So everything was streamlined for that. We might be there, but I will not promise that. Our expectation is that we will be in the margin strengthening trend. If that's going to be quarter-over-quarter all the time or not, we will come back on that. But we are expecting a good fourth quarter.

Second question from [ Karl ]. Cash flow. Do you see improvement in working capital already in Q4 or when? I would say, yes, Karl. We saw that the overall inventory level in September were lower than in June if we add on the acquired. So yes, we are expecting that the working capital side will start to improve already during Q4.

Then from Thomas Tang. What is your view on factoring for improving net working capital and how much do you use it? We use it. To what extent I would, I don't have the exact number. But factoring is one part of our financing our business. It's significant, meaning that it's SEK 250 million -- SEK 300 million is what my support staff here is saying. Frida has this under control. Yes. Very good. Thank you, Frida. So about SEK 300 million is support from factoring.

Then we have from [ Ramil Koria ], what makes you so confident in communication for Q4? Any customer specifics driving it or just technicalities? It's customer-specific that is driving this but I cannot comment on that because it's listed companies.

How do you see the demand for the general EMS market compared to NOTE's demand at the moment? Very good question. The latest update is if we look at the European side, very solid growth outlook. I would say that the growth for 2023 will be slightly lower than the expectations, and I would expect '24 to be the same. But still, I expect it to be 5% or more. But -- so growth for the EMS industry still looks very, very solid in Europe. The only thing that I see that can reduce this is how much the EV car sales will drop in '24. That will have an effect for those that are heavily involved in that segment. We are not, but that is where I see big swings. The lead times on EV cars has been reduced to a level of lower than before the component crisis. So that's where I would see demand drops, if I would guess.

Okay. Then we have the next one. In the report, you wrote in '24, we expect our growth rate to increase. But now in the beginning of your presentation, you mentioned that you are not expecting plus 20%, but growth will still be double digit. How should we understand these comments? I would say that our expectation is between those numbers, 10% to 20%. And we will come back more of where we are expecting that when we are closer to next year. We wanted to give you a hint of where we are aiming for '24 since I know that there is a lot of questions about where the market is heading. So therefore, we wanted to give you some guidance also for the first half of next year, and that's how we thought we did it. We thought we were clear. But to underline that, we are expecting stronger growth in first half year next year than in the second half of this year.

Okay. from [ Karl Norian ] again. Looking into '24 on a segment basis, where do you see growth? And where do you see weaker development? I think that we will see growth on especially, Industrial. I think Medtech will grow. I think that Communication will grow with less percentage than this year. And I think -- EV, I was about to say, but Greentech is on a very low level this year. So I expect that to come back. I will not put a percentage on that. But at least Industrial, I expect solid growth, meaning 10-plus percent, probably more, and then we will see about the other segments.

And to be clear, we have looked at the segment. If we see any margin deviations between segments, and we don't. It's more customer-specific. It's more how much direct labor that is included in the work and so on. So we have really good margins on semantic customers and were really low margin on semantic customers. And that goes between all the segments. So it's very much dependent on how the mix of the products. If you run big series of lower manual work, of course, low margins. If you have small series, big, big -- many different variations, you have higher margins. But still it also takes some more administrative time on those. So -- and that goes across all segments.

Then we have from [ Rasmus ]. A few questions on acquisition. Is it easier to find suitable prospects and are more sellers willing to sell at a reasonable price? I think it's -- as always, it's a big -- it's a lot of businesses out there that are for sale. I said it before. And if we continue with the one site acquisition strategy, meaning that we buy site or companies with one single site, privately held, there's plenty out there. And we get more than 5 different prospects per month that we can look at. And then you have to select which one are looking good at the moment -- at the first glance and then you work through them.

So there's a lot of acquisitions that are out there. Prices has not changed that much. If you look at the multiples, the expectations are fairly the same today as they were 1 year ago and as it were 3 years ago. So they were not pushed up when the valuations of us and other peers went up, and they have not went down when our valuation has come down. So very stable price expectations from the sellers.

Second part, are you seeing any trends on overcapacity in the production side, some competitors that are using price to win orders, et cetera? Still not. We have not seen that any different price challenges than we see normally. Of course, customers are pushing as hard as they can. But as I said before, if we keep high quality, if we have high delivery performance, if we keep on reducing our internal cost side of the business, we will be able to increase margins but still meet the market price on the business that we produce. So I'm not concerned on this.

And I don't see -- it's a lot -- going back to like in the 2005 to 2010, big overcapacities after Flextronics and others went out. There were big production halls that were standing more or less empty. And the one that own these sites, they wanted to fill them up rather than close them. And we had a big push on margins at that time. I don't see that at all. So it's a completely different environment to be. So this is not a question at the moment. But it might come. We have not seen it yet.

From [indiscernible]. This is in Norwegian. I have to translate here. I see that the sales per employee is a little bit down year-over-year and a lot quarter-by-quarter. Yes, I guess there is some acquisition that are burning this. It's 2 factors. It's always in third quarter, we have like July is only half month in Sweden or less than that. So -- but we still have the same number of employees. So sales are seasonally maybe 10% lower than a normal run rate. So that's one effect. And then we also count the staff at DVR, and I think they are like 90 or so in this. So those 2 factors are going to deduct or reduce the sales per employee quite significantly.

Then we have from [ Christopher ]. Do you see any difference in behavior, a blue ship customer compared to smaller customers, more inventory reductions in the first? I would say no. It's -- I think everyone is struggling with the same factors. It depends how well the customers' products are behaving on their markets. So I think the destocking is as much in effect also for small and for larger customers. What I would say is that it's, in many ways, easier to make -- to strike a deal with the smaller customers than the larger customers because you get much closer to the decision makers. So for me, it's easier to deal with them with the smaller than the, say, the Fortune 500 companies. They are a bit trickier to get access to someone that would sign an excess inventory build, so to say. But in general terms, it's fairly the same.

From Ludwig. How my customers approximately does your Communications segment consist of? It's -- I would say, all our segments, if you exclude the Industrial, the top 10 ones are majority of the sales. So say that it's 10 that are -- 10 or less that are large, and then we have some small that are building up the last, say, 10% of it.

I'm looking at Frida, and she's nodding. So I guess that's her guess is as good as mine in this case. But that's normally how our -- all our customers are looking. As I said before, 25% -- or 25 largest customers were 48% or 49% in the quarter. I think that's the lowest number we have seen on the top 25 customers, which is natural when we grow, of course. I don't know if that was the answer you were after Ludwig, but that's the only one I have.

On what macroeconomic scenario do you base your 2024 outlook? That's a very good question. I would say that it's not the recovered '24 compared to now. It's more we are looking at how we are looking at the landscape today. And then we are, yes, looking at what the customers are expecting from us and then we try to make our best guess. This is more what the customers have told us that they want, not what they have ordered, nor what they are asking us to set or to drive material for. And then we make some adjustments to that if we think that they are over optimistic and so on.

So this is -- so our outlook is based on the current surroundings, if I put it like that. So if it gets worse, that will -- could have an effect. If it gets better, we will have a benefit. But it's not a dream scenario. It's the scenario that we look at today. That's how we base it.

And that was the last question I had on the -- from the web. Anyone in the room? Yes, you'll get the microphone.

[Lucas Mattsson, analyst]

Yes. Thank you for the presentation. My name is Lucas Mattsson, and I'm an analyst at Inderes. So I have 3 questions. And for my first one, you informed about a significant expansion in an existing Medtech customer in August, I think. Congratulations, by the way. How is your sales pipeline looking? And do you expect future growth to lean more on expansion of existing customers or new customers?

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

If I look 5 years back, we have been trending around half of our sales -- or half of our new sales is coming from existing customers and half from new customers. And that is going a little bit -- some years, it's more from new, some years it's more from existing. It's more -- but I would say that it will be in that range. 50-50 or 40-60 in some direction. But a very good balance and mix between those 2.

[Lucas Mattsson, analyst]

You stated in the report and also here that you expect growth to increase in 2024. You mentioned it a bit before, but which assumptions are included in this statement? I mean, the outlook is pretty positive given there, macroeconomic outlook in Europe and also the high interest rate levels.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

We never build in new customers that are not implemented. So anything new that we have won but are still yet to be implemented, that is excluded because we think that all those takes more time than we expect. So this is based on our current production portfolio that we do, and it's based on the orders forecast that we have from the customers or the discussions that we have had. And then we take -- on the top 25 or more, we take what I would call a management look at what they're saying and then we summarize that in a good way. And then we base this -- the growth scenarios on those. So it's a lot driven by the customers' view of their sales. And also if we know it, some customers are over optimistic always, and then we reduce that when we do our outlook.

[Lucas Mattsson, analyst]

Okay. And for my last question, how do you see that the outlook of the Greentech segment has changed after your DVR acquisition and also the acquisition of the large Greentech customer Charge Amps by NOTE.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

If I start with DVR, DVR has the majority of the sales in the Industrial segment, some in Medtech and some in the Greentech. But the majority is in Industrial. So I think that the outlook for Greentech has not really changed based on that. If we look at NOTE's acquisition of Charge Amps, I met, I think, 2/3 of the top management of NOTE and I think they are a very professional charging company. And I think that Charge Amps is going to benefit from having an owner that are knowledgeable in the global charging environment and also that they have a solid bank finances and so on. So my view of the acquisition is very positive from a Charge Amps' perspective.

I think that they are eager to get started. I know that this deal has not closed yet. But I hope that it will be done fairly soon. I don't have any insight of that. But the guys running NOTE seems to be very, very sharp. And I like the guys that are on Charge Amps. They have been really doing it very well based on where they have been. So for me, it's a positive thing. I know that NOTE has high market expansion plans. So they want to take the current portfolio more broader than what Charge Amps has managed to do internally. And we see, of course, very positive upon that.

Any other question?

If not, I will say thank you for listening and see you next time. Or see you at the CMD, for those that are interested in to learn more. Thank you.