Hello, and welcome to the 30th Deutsche Bank Depositary Receipts Virtual Investor Conference, DBVIC. My name is Zafar Aziz from the DR Investor Relations Advisory Team at Deutsche Bank. I'm pleased to announce our next presentation will be from Heineken. Before handing over to our presenter, some points to note. Please submit your questions at any time throughout the presentation. Finally, all of today's presentations will be recorded and can be accessed via the Deutsche Bank website, adr.db.com. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome our speaker from Heineken.
Thank you, and thank you for having me today at your conference. My name is Lennart Scholtus. I'm with Heineken's Investor Relations team. I'm now over five years with Heineken. Before, I was in the M&A team and just now 1.5 years in the Investor Relations team. What I would like to do today is to give you a brief overview of Heineken company, but also our strategy going forward. I think why we are best positioned in a global beer market to capture more growth than our competitors, and how that eventually will lead to more value creation for you as an investor. Before we kick off, let's have a quick overview of Heineken.
We have a very clear mission statement, and our purpose is that we want to brew the joy of true togetherness to inspire a better world. A theme that I think is very much relevant today, where socializing gets less and less, especially for our younger generations. We wanna be the world's pioneering beer company with a winning aspiration that we want to craft legendary drinks, brands, and experiences to delight more consumers globally the right way, and consumers are our main focus, of course. If we look at our company today, and I have some facts and figures here for you, we have a very strong and focused brand portfolio, with Heineken being the number one beer brand globally in terms of sales value, but also on brand power.
We have a very strong portfolio of five global brands, and 25 local power brands that are more locally embedded in our global operations. We want to focus on four segments within the beer category, where we think we are best positioned to capture growth and have a leading position. We do almost over 300 million hectoliters of beer. We have over 85,000 employees globally. Now a bit more with the acquisition of FIFCO in Central America, we have a number one or two position in over 53 markets globally. You can enjoy our brands almost in 200 countries in the world, so a true global brewer. We do almost EUR 30 billion of net revenue.
In 2025, we have a EUR 4.4 billion operating profit, and eventually resulting into a cash flow of EUR 2.6 billion. Our net debt to EBITDA ratio in 2025 was 2.2x. That will increase a bit with our FIFCO acquisition, but we have a clear financial discipline capital allocation policy, which I will talk to later. We wanna be below the 2.5x at each times, but that will be a bit stretched with that acquisition that I just mentioned. On the right, you can see our global presence that we and where we are active through basically business, but also licensed operations, and joint ventures across the globe. We are a old, relatively old company. We have over 160 years of pioneering.
The brand of Heineken has been here since 1864. Over the last couple of years in the last century, we were very active acquiring new markets and planting our flags globally by acquiring a lot of operations and consolidating the global beer footprint. Whereas today, we are more focused on organic growth with the introduction of a new category, as you can see on the slide, in 0.0. Also still there are some acquisitions that are there to do. I will talk a bit later about Distell and FIFCO in this presentation.
I think the most worthwhile takeout of this slide is that the brand Heineken has seen a record growth in the last five years and has been around for 160 years, and we are always there to reinvent ourselves and to stay relevant for our consumers. Next up, let's dive a bit into the category and our footprint. We introduced our strategy, our EverGreen 2030 strategy, last October in our capital markets event in Seville. Before we crafted the strategy, we asked ourselves the question: Is beer still a growth market? Is it still relevant to consumers? Because that obviously determines how to go about it with our business.
We did a lot of research and a lot of work over a year to really pick and really deeply understand if beer is in growth, yes or no. Our conclusion it is that it is in growth, and it still has potential for growth globally. It's a very accessible category. If you look into alcohol, beer is more accessible than spirits and wine, and we are winning share of throat over the last couple of years from those categories as well. You can see that the share of disposable income which is spent on beer is relatively stable, so it's also structurally an attractive category.
There's still a lot of per capita consumptions to be achieved in our emerging markets footprint going forward, which helps us in the belief that there's still growth to be had in beer. It's not overall the same growth. It's very differentiated across markets, and every market therefore needs a different type of strategy and a different play, and has a different right to win where we can really add value. As you can see, the developed markets, you see that the U.S. beer market volume is down, which is also where you are based, and you hear a lot of narratives about declining alcohol consumption and beer consumption.
If you, if you look a bit further in, into the other parts of the markets, you see that there's actually very much growth potential, especially in the emerging markets where we are based a lot with our footprint. You see that the premium side of beer is also growing faster. By doing this analysis, we really confirmed that the overall beer market growth in the midterm, so from 2025 to 2029, as you can see on the slide, is in growth by 1% if you look at the beer market globally. We believe we can grow ahead of the 1% in terms of volume because of our advantage footprint is how we want to call it.
We are positioned in markets where we have a strong position that are more skewed towards growth and where we believe we can play the right role to capture that growth sustainably. Basically what we've done is really looked at our footprint and checked which markets do need a differentiated strategy, and that is on the scale of how much economic development we see going forward and how much is beer already penetrated into the market. Based on that, we identified the markets which needed to have a different strategy to basically grow our market share in those markets.
As you can see, we have a more balanced footprint if you compare us to peers with a more balanced exposure to developed markets, advancing markets, but also the value markets, if you look at the set of global brewers, and that is why we believe we can generate more volume growth going forward. If you look at the footprint, basically most of our profits, if you look at on a profit level, comes from Europe and the Americas. It combines almost 70% of our profits, which is, especially if you look at the U.S., it's mainly coming from Mexico, Brazil and the U.S. Europe, we have more strong market share positions with 20 markets with a number one or two position in Europe.
Some of these are on the slide in France, Italy, Spain, U.K., but it's much broader than that. In the Americas, it's more concentrated on Mexico, Brazil and the U.S., and now also adding the FIFCO platform. A lot of volume growth is also in a more volatile part of the business. It's in Africa and Middle East. 70% of our volumes is coming from there. The operating profit contribution is somewhat lower. Similar volume contribution in APAC, a high profit margin coming mostly from Vietnam, also markets that are not on this slide.
For example, in Myanmar, where we see a lot of potential going forward and especially looking ahead, the market is in growth, and we do see a lot of opportunities there going forward. If you look at our footprint involvement over time, as I said, we were growing fast inorganically. That we still have grown inorganically over the last couple of five years. There's another trend going on in Heineken, which is quite new, is that also we're exiting markets. Basically, we have looked at our footprint and identified markets where we don't see any sustainable path to value creation going forward.
We gave the local management the task or the brief, basically, "Fix your route to sustainable value creation to growth to a position that is either a number one or a two, or at least a sight on that position, or else we're going to partner with a local operator there or exit that market." That's something that's quite new to Heineken, and we have done already a lot with exiting the Philippines, for example, in Lebanon. More recently this year, we announced our exit in the DRC. But there's a bigger list of markets that we still want to see resolved as we call those operations. That has been a new thing that I want to address.
We've also added a lot of high growth markets and sustainable market positions to our footprint throughout, through M&A. A good example is China, India, South Africa, and more recently, FIFCO. I will touch a bit upon those markets a bit further in the next couple of slides to give you a flavor of what we're doing in those markets. First up is India. India is a very. We have a number one position in India with a leadership brand, Kingfisher, which is in terms of volume, the biggest brand in India. There's a lot of brewery operation side that we have.
This is the first time in the history of the Indian beer market that there are now three global brewers active in this market, which is still untapped because it's a very state-by-state regulated, highly regulated market. It's a dark market, so you cannot advertise. There's a lot of excise advantages to other categories. We do see a generation, Gen Z, here that is very eager to access the beer category. We see a lot of potential going forward and a lot of growth going forward in India. It's really our job as a leader to shape this beer market, to shape this category. It will take time and effort to get there because at this stage it's so fragmented and hard to operate.
We do believe in the potential of India, which we consolidated in our footprint as of 2021, I believe. Another example is of course South Africa. Southern Africa, as I have to say because we've also acquired Namibia breweries. We really acquired here a multi-beverage company where we are active in the beer category, which we know and is close to heart, and we know how to operate. Also a big position in cider and flavored beverages, flavored alcoholic beverages with the beer brands Savanna and Bernini, which are very much sourced after in South Africa, and are very good brands that really address the gender friendly occasions, basically, helping people to access the category in a much more easier and lighter way.
In wine, we also are the number one in spirits. It's not a core to our business, so we are still working to get that business right. We're very glad that at least after an integration period, which took longer than expected, we are now winning share again in the beer portfolio, in the beer market. We do have a lot of future potential and growth in this market where we see margin potential but also market share gains potential in South Africa.
A more recent acquisition is FIFCO in Central America, where we also acquired a multi-beverage platform, but also multi businesses because we've added retail outlets to our group, where we've learned a lot in Mexico from our six retail outlets, proximity retail outlets. There we really understand through these operations how consumers behave and how would they buy our products. It's a very profitable channel for us to have added in Mexico. If we believe we can generate returns on that as well in Central America. Costa Rica, we've added to a platform. It's where we have a big position in beer. We've added the brand Imperial to our portfolio, and we believe we have a lot of opportunities to further drive premiumization with our Heineken brands.
We've also acquired, through this acquisition, a beyond beer brand, which is quite still untapped in Central America. A hard seltzer brand called Adán & Eva in RTDs. We believe there's a lot of potential through wider Central America for growth in this category and really establishing that category. We also operate in soft drinks through a Pepsi license. The last market I wanted to address, it's China. We were a subscale player in China, and we didn't really see a path to getting that scale. We noticed that the consumers in China really wanted our brands. We have had strong brand power, but we simply lacked the system strength to distribute and sell those brands and bring them to the consumers.
Through a partnership with China Resources Beer, we have been able to really untap that potential. Heineken has been growing every quarter since we've done that in quite a significant way. More recently, we also added Amstel to that portfolio and to that, to the market, which is also growing fast, now up to a point that China is even a top three contributor to our earnings per shares through royalty fees, but also our associate income through our stake in China Resources Beer. From a dire position to a very attractive business, it's a great example of how we deal with the resolve OpCos, which I spoke about earlier.
Moving on to our strategy going forward, because we've introduced, like I said, the EverGreen 2030 strategy, which is all about growth. We believe we need to get the growth in order to generate eventually the returns that are required for our shareholders. Growth for us is the number one priority. We believe we have all the necessary brands and focus in place to really get that going. Our first quarter results were also in that sense positive, where we have seen a quarter of full year growth again. That really is our priority. The other strategic priorities are in service of growth in everything we do. Productivity is our second pillar.
We are becoming leaner and taking costs out every year. Every year we try to remove EUR 500 million of gross savings. We already have saved over EUR 3.5 billion over the last couple of years. There's still much to do in order to operate more efficiently, which in that turn can really help invest in our brands and accelerate our growth strategy. We are transforming our business and making it future fit by digitalization efforts in our global digital backbone system, making sure we harmonize our system and understand what we are, that we can leverage our skill and our knowledge worldwide.
We also continue to focus on our Brew a Better World strategy, our S&R agenda, and our talent program, making Heineken a more performance culture than before. If we look further in growth, I have a slide here, showing the bow tie, as we call it. We want to make sure that people understand that the focus of our business is beer, as you can see in the center. We can move away from beer into beyond, into RTDs, into spirit beers like Desperados. In lower alcohol offers, we can also venture with 0.0 alcohol beer, malt products, whatsoever. But the main focus is beer and all the adjacency around it, meaning that we can leverage our marketing and sales expertise, our distribution strength and our supply chain.
It has to support our business. If we want to venture into a more beyond beer proposition, it has to really support our core beer focus. With that, we are also focusing into four segments where we believe we have a leadership position and we can maintain it, and it's the premium beer segment where we want to lead and shape really that category, strengthen our mainstream proposition. We want to be the leader. We have sort of established the low and no category, or reinvigorated, I should say. We want to continue pioneering in that, we want to selectively go beyond beer into more RTD offerings and flavors, flavor type beer propositions.
I already spoke a bit about, I'm going to skip that in interest of time, but I want to just reemphasize the power of the brand Heineken, which has been sold over 190 countries. It is the number one beer brand, and we've seen a 50% growth over the last five years, which is an acceleration of a brand that has already been there. The biggest driver behind that was that we centralized the governance around the brand here in Amsterdam.
All the marketing efforts, et cetera, were organized centrally, which has been a big driver of success, and that is something we're going to apply on the other global brands that we have identified that can be the biggest contribution to global beer growth, which already has grown 6% over the last quarter. The big global brands are Amstel, Birra Moretti, Desperados and Tiger. A strong portfolio really can drive growth going forward. Supplemented by, in some markets, a more local offering, which are also very important in order to get the volume growth in these 25 local power brands and our global brands get the most attention and the most funding to make sure that we are very focused and are winning in each market.
As said, we have been able to pioneer in the non-alcoholic beer category, 0.0, putting a lot of Heineken marketing spend behind the 0.0 offering. First led by great tasting beer without any alcohol, which is the key to unlock that category. Great taste, and then by a lot of marketing effort, making it more aspirational and making it a social acceptable to have a beer without alcohol in the bar, without yeah, being made fun of, so to say. That has really unlocked the category. The beauty is that it's at the same price point as a regular beer, but you don't have to pay extra, so it's at a margin accretive proposition.
I'm going to skip this beyond beer slide in the interest of time, because I just wanted to wrap up the presentation, also leave some room for questions. I want to quickly address productivity, where we see a lot of opportunities to focus on our skill knowledge and getting out costs each and every year out of our operations and operate more efficiently. We're doing that by consolidating our supply chain networks, by closing down breweries and making it more effective and efficient from a logistical perspective, from a more harmonized way of operating, and also more better procurement, making sure we don't have to buy 50 type of fridges, but just have one spec sheet of one fridge, et cetera.
There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that has already been implemented, but there's still room for further growth. The Heineken Business Services is a business support center in different markets that can contribute to that. We've announced that we want to transition a lot of roles to these hubs going forward, and that will be a driver of getting costs out. These growth savings we want to convert also into a net savings, so also that you will see it through in the bottom line. That's something we have discussed at our Capital Markets Day that we want to improve, but also more cash conversion in order that we are more efficient with our capital base. Of course, it allows us to invest in what we do best, growing our brands.
Another point that we are doing this year is multi-market operations. We're clustering in, mostly now in Europe, markets together. It has been a long time coming, of course, to be more efficient. We were a very decentralized company. We try to be more efficient by clustering some of our activities that can be done in a bigger operation than individual operations. That's something we're really accelerating as we speak now. I think in interest of time to close, I want to quickly address the Green Diamond. I talked about our strategic priorities, growth, productivity, and future fit, always in service of growth, as I said, and that should in the end, all work together and come up with attractive shareholder returns.
Our management gets incentivized based on the Green Diamond, on the growth, profitability, capital efficiency, and S&R agenda, with S&R being the down-weighted now because we have introduced a new metric in our LTIs, which is ROIC, more focused on capital efficiency. It hasn't been there before, so we are glad to have introduced that in our LTI package to also be more focused on capital efficiency because we are lagging there in terms of peers, and we see a room for improvement there. Same goes for cash conversion. We have been on an average below 80%, and we wanna be above 90% every year again. To close, I want to discuss our capital allocation priorities.
As said, we are very much focused on organic growth for business. Most of our funding and growth needs to come from our productivity agenda, that we are able to invest in our growth. We hold to a very strict financial discipline now with the net debt-to-EBITDA a bit above 2.5x. We're bringing that down over times very shortly. This is of course about from the FIFCO acquisition. We have a consistent dividend payout policy. We will expand into markets when it makes sense, when there's a value accretive opportunity. If it's actionable, that is something that we always will look at. It's not a priority because simply the consolidation has slowed down. There's simply not too much opportunities out there.
It does make sense to focus on organic growth at this stage. We are running a share buyback program, which we are already including in the second tranche of as a start of this year. We are making progress on that. All in all, this comes together in our medium-term ambition, that we wanna grow revenue by focusing on growth. By mid-single digits in our medium term, we want our operating profit to grow ahead of that ahead of net revenue, and that makes sure that our EPS is also growing faster than organic operating profit.
We want to improve our cash conversion, our ROIC, and we hold to our sustainability and responsibility agenda by the metrics and incentives that you see on the slide on the scope one and two net zero, water usage, and our talent LTIP. I believe we don't have any time anymore for questions. I want to close unless there's anything that the moderators would want to bring up and come forward. Thank you for your time, at least, and hopefully see you soon. You can always reach out through Deutsche, of course, or to us directly on our webpage to ask more questions should you be interested in more questions on Heineken, and I will get back to you if you have submitted a question in the Q&A chat. Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you.