Right, thank you. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us at our 2024 Investor Day. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today. We recognize their strength, resilience, and capacity, and pay our respects to their elders past and present, and to all First Nations people here today. I remind you to review our disclaimer shown here. Our group executives are here today on either side of the stage, and I'm really excited to share with you our business of the future and our drivers of growth over the short, medium, and long term. Before I hand over to Chris, I want to highlight that partway through the presentation we'll have a break.
It'll be 10-15 minutes to stretch your legs and get some tea, and for those in the room to engage briefly with the displays. At the end of the presentation, there'll be a Q&A, followed by the opportunity to mingle for an hour or so with our leaders and also with the booths. It's customary for us to start with a safety moment, and today we actually are going to focus on a value of ours. We value Life. We have a 90-second video that I'm going to actually show you, which is a personal story from Ned Baxter, who's our VP for our hydrogen business, and he is passionate, you will see that, about leaving his fingerprints on the energy transition.
Our society absolutely owes it to the future generations to do what we can to improve their Life going forward, and I think to ensure that we can really leave the world in a better spot than where we came, right? You know, you really do hope that they are in a world that they can succeed and they can have their own family one day. In the energy transition, we're going to require different thought, diversity of thought, diversity of intellectual arbitrage. We're going to have to apply different types of thinking and different kind of lessons learned from other industries to solve these energy transition problems we are facing.
In terms of what we're trying to achieve in low-carbon hydrogen, we're trying to solve a problem, and we're trying to figure out, how does that become a significant piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is the energy transition? My role specifically is working in that team that is trying to come up with better solutions to deliver low-carbon hydrogen assets to our customers. It takes a village to raise a child, but it's going to take a much bigger village and a really globally collective effort to get to the point we need to as a society to make these problems and solutions to these problems a reality.
Thank you. Now, please welcome to the stage Chris, our CEO.
Welcome, everyone. You've got to admit at 9:25 A.M. I was getting a little bit worried because the room was empty, and then I learned that you were all at the booths outside. So at the break and at lunchtime, I encourage you all to spend a bit of time at the booths outside in the foyer, but as well here, because you'll see there are real examples of what we're doing in the organization here and now, and we're doing this worldwide. So look, welcome everyone, and welcome to those who are joining us online. Today we want to leave you with three key messages. The first is that Worley is a leading provider of global sustainability solutions. We're seeing a long-term growth trend in our end markets. Second, our disciplined approach to the execution of our strategy is evident in our results.
We're consistently delivering on our strategy, as demonstrated by increased earnings, margins, and cash flow, all in line with our expectations. In 2021, we announced a $100 million investment, and what we're seeing with that $100 million strategic investment is it's been focused on growing sustainability solutions, and this $100 million investment has returned, delivered accretive returns. $6.8 billion has been returned so far on the almost $100 million. We're not quite at the end of June, and we'll spend up to the $100 million then, but $6.8 billion of accretive returns against that $100 million organic investment that we used to develop and deliver value propositions to the market.
And third, we continue to build a high-performance business with a clear path to increase value for our shareholders as we develop solutions that we believe are going to help reshape the industries in which we work and continue to build on our differentiated position. Today I'm excited for you all to hear from the team. I'm going to do a little bit of an intro, but we've got the group exec and we've got other members of our team at the booth. But I'm excited for you to hear from the group executive about what's happening in our business and around the world. It's a powerful team with deep expertise who are, in fact, deeply collaborative, share common values, and have a deep sense of working together for the benefit of the whole. And the evidence of this is the great outcomes that we've been delivering.
The leading indicators in our quarterly update illustrate continued momentum. We're still seeing growth and opportunity in the markets we serve. If we look at our leading indicators, we continue to see the overall trend as increasing. Our pipeline has increased over the quarter, but more importantly, look at the growth since 2021. It's been significant, and we expect to continue to benefit from the volume growth as our factored sales pipeline continues to flow into backlog and, in turn, flow into revenue. If you exclude Venture Global, which we know we'll probably have questions on today, but if you exclude Venture Global, which remains in our pipeline until the project reaches final investment decision, our pipeline grew by 8% over the quarter. Backlog over the quarter is steady at $14.8 billion, and our wins continue to exceed backlog delivered.
While projects always ebb and flow, we're not seeing project cancellations, and any scope reductions or deferrals that we are seeing are actually what we would normally see in the normal course of business. Remember, as a result of the world's focus on net zero, our markets continue to shift toward a prolonged cyclical upcycle. This means while there will always be cycles, the overall trajectory remains positive. For those of you who've been covering us for many years, you know that the markets in which we operated have always cycled, have been on a cycle downwards. What we're seeing now is a cycle upwards, and we believe that's going to continue to occur, and we're positioning ourselves for not just today, but for the future. For Worley, we're playing to win today, but also with the investments we're making, we're positioning ourselves for the longer game.
Sustainability-related work continues to grow at a faster rate than our traditional markets and now represents 82% of our factored sales pipeline and 53% of our backlog. Just to remind you, back in December, we passed a significant milestone with over half of our aggregated revenue coming from sustainability-related work. As you can see, we're well on our way to achieving the ambition of deriving 75% of our revenue from sustainability-related work by FY26. However, it's important to note the traditional work we do continues to be an important part of our business and remains steady in both the pipeline and the backlog. We continue to add to the headcount, which is up 3% year to date. Our Global Integrated Delivery center in India continues to grow, and we're now delivering around 15% of our project hours through that Global Integrated Delivery center, up from 14.2% in December.
And finally, I want to reiterate that our expectations for FY24 remain in line with the outlook presented at our results in February. So why invest in Worley, and why now? We believe our shareholders have an opportunity to realize value appreciation as the full impact of the energy transition and other demands in the markets in which we operate, the shifts as they materialize. We've begun a multi-decade transition that we believe is going to require trillions of dollars in annual investment. The IEA estimates a record $2.8 trillion US dollars was invested in energy last year, of which $1.8 trillion was in clean energy. Under the IEA's Net Zero 2050 Scenario, they estimate energy investment needs to reach nearly $5 trillion by 2030. And to be clear, that's $5 trillion a year, and that needs to continue at those levels through 2050 and beyond.
So what's clear is that the investment in the energy transition, even while it's large today, is still in its early stages, and the significant increase is yet to come. What's less clear is what exact pathway that's going to take to get the world to balance the increasing energy demands with affordability, security, and sustainability: the energy trilemma. And that's the challenge the world is facing. We believe we're powerfully placed to capitalize on the trajectory, whether the capital spend of our customers is in the traditional space, the transitional, or, in fact, the sustainable. We're positioned powerfully for all three. So we believe we've got the right strategy. We've got the right structure, and I'm confident we've got the right team, and we'll see some of the team today.
So as a leader in the sectors we serve, we have a compelling value proposition as we face what we believe and what the IEA and other research shows is going to be a prolonged upcycle. Our diversification across the energy, chemicals, and resource markets, together with our global footprint, giving us geographic diversity, makes us more resilient to any short-term impacts in any one of these sectors. The early mover advantage has positioned us in new and attractive sustainability-related markets with low competitive intensity and high barriers to entry. The work we do is complex. The industries we work in are challenging, and we have the skills and we have the strategy to position us to help those customers we work with enable their own transition. We've seen a fundamental shift also in how we do business. We're now partnering with our customers like we've never been partnered before.
In 2019, we introduced into our vocabulary working with rather than working for. What we're seeing now is an increased propensity of our customers to want to work with us in partnership rather than for us to work for them. We're partnering with them. We're partnering with them in a way that's to bring down the cost of their projects to help deliver them in new and innovative ways. Today you'll see around this room and in the foyer, you'll see examples of innovation in action. Importantly, we're delivering more value to them. Even more importantly, we're sharing in that value. Finally, but importantly, we've got a strong capital position on which to execute our growth plan. We have a strong balance sheet with good cash flow, and that's allowed us to invest in growth.
We have a disciplined approach to capital allocation, and we're investing to stay ahead and retain our differentiated position. When we consider Worley's competitive and comparative advantage, we ask ourselves, why do customers choose Worley over our competition? We believe it comes down to three things: exceptional performance and delivery, our innovative and differentiated solutions, and our inspired people together with a values-based culture. We have almost 50,000 highly capable people around the world, 88% of whom provide professional services. That's almost 43,000 highly skilled engineers and professionals across multiple disciplines. We have a strong focus on higher value services, including increasing our professional services offering. Our high-value, full project delivery solutions position us ahead of our traditional competitors who have a higher proportion of lower margin blue-collar work. Professional services, importantly, typically generate a higher margin.
Those who deliver these services can easily pivot into new and emerging markets. So engineers, a mechanical engineer, can work on a traditional project, a transitional project, or a sustainable project. And the ability to have that pivot, to have that ability to move from one project type to another, enables us to utilize fully our skilled workforce around the world. We have greater diversity across our end markets than our competition, with a strong margin profile in both backlog and pipeline. And there's no doubt that our pivot to sustainability has given us an early mover advantage in providing sustainability solutions for both our existing, but importantly, emerging customers. We have a higher proportion of sustainability revenue now at $2.9 billion, and we maintain, importantly, we maintain our low-risk appetite for work, with about 80% of our work being reimbursable.
Importantly, as I've said before, and I'll emphasize again today, we do not do any material, lump-sum, turnkey EPC projects. There is a graveyard of organisations that entered that market that could not manage the risk, and that is not a market we are in today, and it's not a market we will enter. You'll hear today from Laura Leonard on Technology Solutions. Our Technology Solutions business is a leader in the sectors in which it operates. As an expansion strategy that you'll hear from today and more about today, as the energy transition presents new opportunities, we have digitally enabled solutions focused on delivery efficiency as well as reducing the delivered cost in support of improving project economics for our customers. In 2020, when we launched our purpose of delivering a more sustainable world, we moved early, we moved quickly, and the moves we made were bold.
That's paid off. You'll hear later today that we're doing the same for digital and artificial intelligence, leading the way in this space again. What you'll see as an example today, you'll see it in action. We're not just talking about it. We've invested in it, and we're delivering these artificial intelligence and digital solutions into our business. We're investing to accelerate this, the digitally enabled processes and systems from consulting all the way through to full project delivery. We've got a good and strong customer base and have worked with many of them for decades. But also, we have a growing number of emerging customers: Northvolt, Umicore. These are customers who, 3, 4 years ago, we wouldn't have heard of. And these are bringing capital to the market, bringing capital to projects that present new and growing growth opportunities for Worley.
In addition, we're going into new partnerships with emerging customers in the high-end, high-growth end markets. I believe one of the key reasons our customers choose to work with us is because of our willingness, as I talked about earlier, to partner with them to deliver lifetime value across their assets. We've announced over the last few months a number of significant wins. The first, the continuation of our work on Shell's Holland Hydrogen project located in the Port of Rotterdam. Once built, this will be Europe's largest commercial-scale, this is a big, over 200 MW green hydrogen facility, be the world's largest commercial-scale green hydrogen facility. I mentioned Umicore, where we're working with Umicore, providing EPCM services for their battery materials manufacturing plant in Canada. They're a new customer for us in the high-growth market of battery materials.
On the traditional side, we've got a renewal of our longstanding contract with Saudi Aramco for their General Engineering Plus services agreement. That is allowing us to continue to support Aramco as it doesn't just invest in a traditional, but it's transitional and its sustainability strategy. We're very excited about that. If we look at what we're doing with Aramco, that allows us to expand the portfolio. In summary, we've got structural industry fundamentals in our end markets that are changing. They're strong. There's momentum there, and it's in our favor. Our total addressable market is growing. With our leading position in these markets, we're best placed to capture the opportunity that we're facing into. We have an actionable strategy that's been executed in a structured and disciplined way. Strategy execution is a discipline. It's not just about what you do.
It's about what you're not willing to do. Importantly, all of this is driven by a powerful purpose, an experienced dynamic team, and a values-based culture. What I really want to do now is open the floor to some of the team. I'm going to start with Sue and Andy, who are going to come up and talk to you and share a little bit more and, in sharing more, unpack what I've been talking about a little bit more and share some of the trends driving the structural changes in our market. Yeah, so Sue, Andy, over to you.
Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everyone, for being here with us today. Andy and I are sharing the stage today because, as most of you will be aware, sustainability is inherent in our growth strategy and our position in the market. Andy and I talk and work together regularly, as do our teams. Over the next 20 minutes or so, Andy and I will share the changing world that we're living in, that we're working in, that we're running our business in, and the key trends that are shaping our markets.
Good morning, everybody. Thanks, Sue. We position Worley to leverage this focus on sustainability. As a result, we're growing in our key markets. I think Chris touched on strategy, but the key point I want to get across is our strategy is agile. What that enables us to do is stay one step ahead, but also leverage the opportunities. I mean, we're in a very, very dynamic market. I think in this session, we'll look at what's changing, but critically, how are we helping our customers respond to this? Just maybe I'll hold on that. It really is around helping our customers navigate this transition. I'll address how this translates into strategy and how our sharp focus on where we play, how we play, and how we win has been key to growing our natural share of the market.
That's a bit of a thematic you'll hear from me over the next 20 minutes: where to play, how to play, and how to win. I'll also take you through the specific areas that we've identified that we believe will create value for our customers and, in turn, our shareholders.
Finally, with our leading position in the markets we operate in, we're helping to deliver sustainability at scale in partnership with our customers. Our whole team right across the world is really proud to be part of the solution. With that in mind, I'll share more on how our thought leadership in this space is reflected in our work. Let's dive in. Over to you, Andy.
Yeah. Thanks, Sue. I mean, just first, before I get into some of the specifics, what an incredible time to be in our industry. I look at the change in energy, chemicals, resources. I've never seen anything like it. It's absolutely fantastic. I think, as Chris mentioned earlier, we've been consistently delivering growth in line with our expectations for a number of years now. We're delivering. A key underpin for that really is our strategy and our disciplined approach to strategy, I think, is really key to driving those results. The strategy, and Chris touched on this, it's about being intentional and focused. For us, when we look at strategy, it's really answering those three critical questions: where do we play, how do we play, and how do we win? We've got a really good strategic architecture that runs through the entire business.
And that's been really guiding us well today. It gives us that strategic architecture. It gives us that focus. And really, it helps us drive execution to our ultimate goal, which is our ambition. So when we look at (I talked about being super excited about the market) but when we look at the markets, we see really strong fundamentals. And these are fundamentals that will drive long-term growth in each of the sectors that we're focused on. And there are a number of sort of really pivotal global and local trends that are going: the continued urbanization, population growth, and with that, obviously, comes consumption, geopolitics, what our last couple of years' geopolitics has been. But most notably, the energy transition. That is going to shape the markets for decades to come.
Now, while this adds layers of complexity to the dynamics of the market, it actually creates fantastic opportunities for us to lead. And we'll be talking a little bit about some of those areas shortly. But given this, we need to be intentional in navigating this complexity. We need a clear path of how we get through it. And it's really, really important that our strategy remains agile. So we've got a fantastic strategy, but it has to adapt. So how do we achieve this? And for me, there are three critical components. Number one is diversification across sectors. Now, what you'll see with Worley is we're diverse across sectors, regions, customers, and across all of our growing markets. But what that really means is that we're not overly exposed to any particular subsector. We know the growth is going to be choppy, but we're not overly exposed.
So that's number one. Number two, and this is super important, and I think this will come through the theme of the whole day, and that's the relationship we have with our customers. Chris mentioned we don't work for our customers. We work with them. In today's market, with this complexity, it has to be that way. It has to be a partnership. Now, within Worley, we've got a structured account program. And that means that we keep close to all of our critical customers in real time. We're partnering with them on their critical investment programs, their CapEx programs. But I think what's really, really important is we understand what makes that capital investable. We know how to get projects done. And that's really, really key. So finally, sorry, third point, and finally, and you'll hear Adrian talk about Worley Consulting later.
And we've got Fabricio Sousa in the room as well, who leads it. We've got a fantastic consultancy business. So right at the front end of these capital investments, when we're looking at different options, maybe site locations, different technologies, our consultants are working hand in hand with our customers, helping them get those projects through their gates to FID. And what that does is that gives us fantastic insights into market trends, new technologies, what's happening, this huge funnel at the front end of our business. So I think, finally, the opportunities that lie ahead of us are significant, and they're really, really exciting, but no more so than the energy transition. Sue, over to you.
Yeah. Thanks, Andy. So when it comes to the, oh, is that me or you?
I don't know.
When it comes to the energy transition and the global imperative to move towards a lower-carbon future, the direction of travel is very clear. Now, why do I say that? First, there's significant political and policy momentum around the world. Second, there's extensive quantities of capital looking for investments in transitional and sustainability projects. And finally, our industrial customers need to respond to secure their future in a lower-carbon economy. However, just because the direction of travel is very clear does not mean it's going to be straightforward. There are many potential pathways to net zero. The pace of progress will change over time as markets continue to adapt and scale and as we adjust to the complexities of those three elements of the energy trilemma. Current geopolitical issues, the inflationary environment, have shifted focus in the near term onto energy affordability and energy security.
Over the longer term, we need to grow as well as decarbonize the world's energy system. That need has never been greater. As Chris mentioned, we're at the start of a multi-decadal energy transition that requires $ trillions of investment every year for the next three decades. I was really fortunate to be in Dubai at COP28 late last year and participated in a number of formal and informal meetings there. What I saw was really firsthand the push and pull and sometimes intense pressure being brought to bear to make this transition happen. Plotting the path of this transition is definitely not straightforward. However, what resulted from COP28 was a number of really significant agreements and pledges. Perhaps most famously, the UAE Consensus saw for the first time the parties commit to a transition away from fossil fuels in the energy system.
More than 50 of the world's largest oil and gas companies, including many of our customers, pledged to end routine flaring by 2030 and to get to net zero operations by 2050. Around the world, governments are introducing domestic policies in a variety of different ways to translate their COP commitments into action and to encourage that investment into low-carbon energy and infrastructure. This includes lots of different types of policies, things like energy efficiency, methane abatement, securing critical mineral supply, improving the circularity of battery materials, and support for industrial hubs and shared hydrogen and CCS facilities. And of course, also the hallmark industrial policies like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal in the US and the EU Green Deal. And here in Australia now, we've got the Future Made in Australia Act. So Worley plays a huge part in this transition.
Our technical and project delivery skills are an essential part of the value chain to actually deliver the intended outcomes of these industrial policies. However, this is a transition. So over the past year, we've seen some customers announce near-term rebalancing of their portfolios towards more transitional traditional project investments to ensure their own profitability. This really underscores, I think, the importance of the point that Andy made earlier around the criticality of our very deliberate zippering relationships with our customers. We stay very close with our customers, and you'll hear more from colleagues later on the panel, and absolutely committed to supporting their broader investment portfolios. We're part of an energy transition that will span decades and believe that we're facing into a prolonged upcycle, upcyclical return, as Chris referred to.
We expect, and in fact, already we are seeing twists and turns, speed bumps, acceleration ramps on the route of this transition. The imperative to transition is clear.
Thanks, Sue. What a fantastic market we're facing into. Just to reinforce that again, I mean, you think of the trillions of dollars that are going to flow into this energy transition. Absolutely incredible time. I've never seen anything like this in my career. So I think the key question is, what does this mean to our strategy? And as I touched on earlier, we've got a broad exposure across the markets. And actually, we're actively managing our portfolio business. So as the market shifts, we're shifting with it. We're selective in the work that we pursue, the countries that we operate in, and the customers that we work with. If it's six bids and a buy, lowest cost, that's not Worley. We're working with customers who value the partnership and value what we bring.
I think the other key point is we're focused on a subset of markets where we have a competitive edge and where we expect to see accelerated growth. So it's really about picking those parts of the markets that give us that long-term position in this energy transition. I think what I'll do is I'll run you through some of the markets, and I'll just give you a bit of a sense of how we see them and what's happening. So as Sue mentioned, in the energy markets, there's a renewed focus on traditional and transitional projects. Some customers are looking to balance decarbonization commitments with the need for profitability. But we're working hand in glove with those customers. And we work with them across all of their projects: traditional, transitional, sustainable. So we're on that journey with them firsthand.
If we look to gas, gas is a key transition fuel. And you'll hear, I think, Mark Trueman touch a little bit on some of the projects we've got in the portfolio. But gas is still a critical transitional fuel, and it's needed. It's needed as we go through this transition. What it does is it drives down the carbon intensity of the overall energy system. Hydrogen, hydrogen is top of everybody's mind. And we're seeing the projections, and we're seeing investments in our customers continue to build momentum in hydrogen. Green and blue hydrogen plants are really going to drive the decarbonization of industry. It's the clean molecule the industry needs. Now, what we're actually seeing is blue hydrogen's moving a little bit faster. We've got some very, very large blue hydrogen projects going at the moment. But green is coming. Green is coming.
Australia has set aside AUD 2 billion to invest and accelerate green hydrogen. The US, the same, the UK, the EU. So it's coming. I think what's really telling is we've been awarded 150 hydrogen projects this financial year. Now, if you look at the CapEx that represents, it's AUD 126 billion in investments. And just maybe I'll hold on those numbers: 150 projects. Now, all of these projects won't proceed to FID. We know that. But by getting involved in it, we're learning more and more about the sector. We're learning how we make these projects economic and what's needed. And I think demonstrably, we are the advisor the market needs. Carbon capture and storage is a critical cross-sector capability as industry and energy look to decarbonize. We're actively working on 37 CCUS projects.
When you total all of that together, it's 90 million tonnes per annum of CO2 that will be removed from the atmosphere. Now, we're incredibly excited about some of these new markets. We continue to work on our traditional oil markets. I think there's a key point to land, and that it's with key customers, and it's in geographies where the focus is on driving down the carbon intensity of those oil developments. Even in those traditional markets, we're playing our role in driving the future. If we look to chemicals, long-term growth will be driven by the energy transition. Then, of course, population growth, increasing GDP, and with that, consumption. I think this longer-term positive outlook and momentum is particularly stark in petrochemicals.
That's driven by the need to decarbonize petrochemicals, adopt circularity, but also adopt low-intensity feedstocks, bio-based feedstocks and electrons, which I'll touch on later. But again, we're really well-positioned in this market because we've got strong relationships with our customers, and we're working with them as they deploy their capital. These customers, they're continuing to invest today to secure their position in the future because they can see the long-term fundamentals and growth. If we jump to refined fuels, so naturally, the energy transition will result in a reduction in refined fuel demand in the long run. There's still a lot of uncertainty as to when that's going to happen. There's still a lot of planes in the air and a lot of cars on the road.
But what we're seeing is that a lot of these refineries, they're using that existing acid infrastructure and starting to convert to renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel. And that really plays to our strengths. These are large, complex assets with major modifications. Worley is the company that can help the customers with those changes. And we were an early mover in the low-carbon fuel sector, particularly in the US. And we're using that market experience and expertise to grow our market share. Resources. We need minerals and metals to fuel the energy transition. So you may see some short-term imbalances, supply and demand. But there is one thing that is absolutely fundamental. And that is that demand will exceed supply in all future-facing commodities in the long run: copper, aluminum, battery materials. These are the big winners. These are the sectors that you're going to see disproportionate growth.
Our customers are already investing to support this demand. The good news is we built the right expertise in the right markets with the right customers. And that's the critical thing back to strategy, about intentionality and moving first and moving with purpose. And just keeping on resources. So today, in Australia, we have AUD 20 billion worth of copper investments under study. $ 20 billion. This targeted approach is paying off, and we're winning work at record levels. Most notably, if I think of the sectors, it's crop nutrients, copper, battery materials, iron ore. And these are sectors where we're seeing our customers invest for the long term, for growth. So you can see we're striking the right balance. A diversified business and focus on the right markets means we're positioned for long-term growth. And critically, we're not overly exposed to any short-term bumps in any particular sector.
We're able to adapt quickly to our customers and to support their needs and help them manage through this complexity as they develop and they scale into these new business opportunities. I talked a little bit about where we play. Let's segue now into how to play. When I think about how to play and when we think about it, we're thinking about how do we play to our strengths? We understand our distinctive positions, the differentiators from the competition. Chris, you touched on a few of those earlier. We're playing to these strengths to create value for our stakeholders. Chris also mentioned about a number of strengths and comparative advantages. These are real. These are real differentiators for Worley in this market. I'd like to take a moment to focus on our people. Our people are at the heart of everything we do.
We're not afraid to have thought-provoking, challenging conversations at Worley. We encourage it. Sue and I, Sue and I, we have them every single day. That challenge, really, it speaks to our broader culture. We value our people. We value diversity. We value different views. When we take those into consideration, it makes us stronger. No one has a monopoly on the right answer as we move forward into this huge, complex environment. The more we challenge each other, the more we test it, the stronger we are. The good news is we have a diverse group of highly skilled and energized people across 45 countries. What that means is we can support our customers anywhere. So we're focused on understanding the skills that we need. And then really critically is attracting and retaining the right people so that we're future-focused.
The final piece of the jigsaw, going back to that thematic of where we play, how we play, how we win, the last part, which I'm sure is of interest to you, the critical part is how do we win and how do we create value for our shareholders and for our customers? Now, we've said we're facing into a long-term upcycle the likes of which we've never seen before. But the strategy's not just focused on market growth. Now, we're also being deliberate about the levers and the opportunities that amplify our signature strengths and specifically create value for our customers while also driving quality of earnings.
Shortly, you'll hear from my good friend Adrian on how transformation is helping deliver some of the critical elements of the strategy, including scaling some of these new businesses, growing our Worley Consulting business, and then leveraging this Digital Accelerant that we see coming across all of our markets. Laura is going to get you excited and passionate about Technology Solutions. You have a fantastic opportunity there. And then Tiernan, who probably needs no introduction, will talk about our portfolio management and maintaining and growing our operational leverage. It's how do we bring all of these pieces together to fund the growth that we see ahead of us. So if I look at the new growth markets, the key point I'd like you to take away is that we have a disciplined approach to exploring and evaluating new and emerging markets.
So we're already looking at what's over the next horizon, what comes next. We're currently evaluating the next wave of growth engines and capabilities that we need. We've already demonstrated the AUD 100 million that we set aside to organically invest has been a fantastic success. We're looking at how do we continue this? How do we continue to build on that momentum and drive value? We've identified already 30 new markets. We're expecting these to become material in the mid to long term. But as I mentioned earlier, it's really about getting in there early, building the right expertise, building the right capabilities so as these markets grow and develop, we're at the forefront and we're right in the middle of it.
Just to give you a couple of examples, key to the energy transition is going to be using clean electrons to produce clean molecules. Adrian's got a really, really cool demo that he'll show you in a short while. Another area that we're seeing a lot of interest in is small modular reactors and nuclear being used for industrial decarbonization. That's something that we're already involved in. Our agile strategy means Worley can anticipate and adapt to key changes now and into the future, even if the pace of the market is still bumpy and lumpy. It will change. Frankly, it will continue to change. The challenge for the world will be developing new and innovative ways of delivering the capital that must be deployed. Now, the spend is absolutely huge.
Now, we know that capital projects will need to be delivered differently in the future. The good news is we've already started. And Sue will give you some examples of where we're already putting that into action.
Great. Thanks, Andy. I'm sure there were people scrolling down some questions for the end of the session panel for Andy's view on the market. Yeah, look, you're absolutely right. We do need to change the way that we deliver capital projects. So this is the rationale behind the work that we've been doing with Princeton University for the last three years. We know that delivery needs to change. We've been working with the Princeton Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment for the last three years on the From Ambition to Reality thought leadership series. The important thing about that is that we're now moving from that being simply thought leadership through to actually bringing that thinking to bear on the projects that we're working on. We saw the need to adapt early, and we've done that work.
What I'm going to do now is just step you through the five shifts that we describe in the From Ambition to Reality work and look at how we're deploying those on the projects that we're doing. To start with, broadening value, which is really about expanding the definition of the value of a project to being beyond simply the financial value, to look at the environmental and the social value that these projects bring. It's about gaining and retaining social license by really baking in social and environmental value from the get-go. We've got some great examples of work that we're doing in this space with First Nations partnerships that we've created in Alberta and the Northwest Territories of Canada through our environmental consulting business there. Worley's proudly 49% owner of three Indigenous businesses there.
Each of our partners, which are Indigenous First Nations enterprises, own 51% of those partnerships. They create more than $ 20 million per year of shared wealth for the partners. By delivering projects through our Indigenous partnerships, we're not only providing employment and pathways to training and development for First Nations communities, but we're also bringing that traditional knowledge and value to projects and enhancing the social license of those projects. Our second shift, Enabling Options, is about developing and proving up a range of different technological decarbonization options, recognizing that it's going to take a bunch of different solutions to get the world to net zero. There is no one or two technologies that are going to do the job for us. We've got a leading role in scaling up emerging technologies through our technology and delivery expertise honed over the last five decades.
Our partnership with Oxy is a great example of this. We're delivering for them at the moment the world's largest direct air capture project, Stratos. It's a flagship project of global significance. direct air capture is a relatively new technology at scale. To put the scale of this project, Stratos, in context, at the moment, the amount of carbon dioxide that's being removed from the atmosphere using direct air capture is 10,000 tonnes a year. Stratos will be capturing 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That's just the first project. Oxy have plans to build many more of those across the world out to 2035 and beyond. This brings us to the third shift, Standardization or Design One, Build Many, which seems to stick in people's minds. The standardization of componentry is really a foundational principle in the design and construction of Stratos.
So we're using this in real time. Replication across projects provides certainty to supply chains and allows manufacturing to be done ahead of project curves and allows programs of work to run more in parallel than sequentially. So we're working with Oxy to continue to drive down the levelized cost of carbon capture. The fourth shift, Creating Partnerships, is about collaboration and really collaboration at a new level and in a new way. It's about sharing learning in real time and, in some cases, sharing intellectual property to help things and industries move faster. We've been co-developing solutions with our customers and other industry partners. And a couple of examples of that are we've been working with a couple of large LNG producers to develop a carbon footprinting solution for the LNG industry.
Another example, a collaboration with Minviro to produce a guide to the issues and opportunities in establishing a circular ecosystem for battery materials. The fifth shift, finally, is digital or the Digital Accelerant, as we like to say at Worley, whereby we use digital platforms to enhance all of these shifts, actually, so to share information, to build trust with stakeholders, and to drive faster and more efficient project processes. I'm going to pass to Adrian now, who's going to be sharing with you some of the advances that we're making in this space internally at Worley and the role of automation and AI in our business. Over to you, Adrian.
Thanks, Sue. Thanks, Andy. Quite the storyteller, isn't he? Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here. And before I start, I thought I'd do a quick explanation of what transformation means within Worley. So we take critical elements of our strategy and deliver them through a disciplined and programmatic approach, or as Andy likes to tell people, he thinks and I do. The transformation team's role is to build and scale both internal and external market-facing solutions and then embed them in the business. As Andy mentioned earlier, I'd like to cover off on three key value creation levers: an update on our strategic investment, growing Worley Consulting, and finally, how we're leveraging the Digital Accelerant, which we believe is a key differentiator. Firstly, our strategic investment. We set ourselves a very ambitious transformation agenda three years ago. And as you can see here, we've delivered accretive results.
This program has been pivotal in accelerating our entry into sustainability-related high-growth markets. You've heard earlier that our AUD 100 million investment has positioned us as leaders in new markets. The markets we've selected to focus on have returned AUD 6.8 billion in wins, which is up from AUD 6.1 billion at the half. And I think you'd all agree that that's a really good return on our investment. Through this transformation program, we've created high barriers to entry for others across the markets we serve. We continue to leverage the whole-of-Worley approach to find solutions for our customers' most complex problems. Although this phase of the program will conclude at the end of this financial year, we'll continue to scale these businesses and then embed them in the wider Worley.
To build on the growth story that Andy shared earlier, within transformation, we continue to retain a rigorous incubation process for the future growth opportunities that we identify. The second value creation lever within the portfolio is Worley Consulting. We're investing in broadening and expanding our consulting services. We view this as a pathway to increasing earnings as well as expanding our capability to work with customers at the earliest stages of projects, assist in them, and make strategic decisions. This positions us for subsequent phases of work. And we'll do this by building on our existing footprint, expanding our offerings, all on a digitally-enabled platform. I might just shift gear, and we'll take a look at how we're reimagining the future of project delivery and, in particular, how automation and AI will not only be the driving force behind our business but the world as a whole.
Similar to when we were an early mover into sustainability, from an automation and AI perspective, we're moving fast, and we're moving early. We're developing digital solutions at scale, enabling us to create solutions which will both lead and reshape our industry. Our ability to develop and deploy digital technology into every aspect of our business is critical to maintaining our leadership position across the energy, chemicals, and resources markets. One of the strongest aspects to our legacy is our leading-edge development and implementation of digital solutions to complex problems. In fact, our founder and current chair, John Grill, was a pioneer of early computational analysis of offshore platforms in Bass Strait over 40 years ago. This culture of innovation and early adoption remains, and it's our key source of strength.
So in that spirit, today, we're pleased to announce that we've formed our Advanced Development Lab, which is our center of excellence for artificial intelligence and broader digital initiatives. We view digital solutions as mission-critical capabilities, and we have a focus on tangible financial returns. Our Advanced Development Lab is comprised of a centralized development team who take ideas from across the business, prioritize these ideas, prove and test them, and then embed them in the business. We have disciplined business processes to test and scale as we go, aggregating successful innovations and failing fast on others. We believe that this approach will accelerate project delivery transformation in a safe, secure, and disciplined manner. There are three fundamental principles that guide the solutions we develop in the Advanced Development Lab. Principle one is to enhance operational cost efficiencies, which will drive our cost base down.
Principle two is to boost labor productivity, supporting our customers to achieve lower levelized costs and freeing up our people to work on volume, scale, and the complexity of work to come. Finally, principle three is to align our commercial models to appropriately share in the additional value that we provide to our customers, ultimately delivering top-line growth while improving our margins. This means that if we're doing work more efficiently, our current reimbursable model will need to evolve to be based more on output. An example of this could be it may look similar to our GID model, where we share the value arbitrage that we generate with our customers. We're not the only company talking about this, but we do believe that we are different.
To help explain why, I want to walk you through what we're doing now, what's in development, and how we're planning to reshape the future. We have a number of digital solutions in place, including ones built on generative AI, and they've all had a material impact on our business. We have a brief video which highlights a handful of these solutions, all of which support improved project economics and reductions in levelized costs of new technologies. So let's take a look.
Worley's next generation of digital solutions empower our people to better support our customers through the use of automation for repetitive tasks, rapid processing of performance data for optimized solutions, and generative AI to synthesize our decades of experience into higher-quality insights, all resulting in increased productivity and, ultimately, allowing our people to act like many thousands more in delivering increased value to our customers. With Replic8, we're pioneering repeatable engineering design through data-centric process automation, instead of our people having to handle repetitive tasks such as the replication of standardized drawing templates. Our proprietary software significantly increases processing speed while reducing human error. It also frees up our people to focus on more high-value activities. In the last 12 months, Replic8 executed 37,000 deliverables, automatically updated millions of data points, saved tens of thousands of hours with zero errors.
We're also seeing a significant schedule improvement versus traditional methods and a positive shift in engineering efficiency. Replic8 embodies the concept of Design One, Build Many, and is just one of the 90 bots we currently have operating across Worley. Worley's Power-to-X Optimization software application is our commitment to leading the energy transition by helping our customers optimize their Power-to-X value chains, a multi-trillion-dollar industry that's focused on the conversion of low-carbon electrons into low-carbon molecules. This powerful new Worley application is our solution to deliver faster and more consistent results for our customers by guiding them through the optimal value chain configuration for their complex Power-to-X projects.
Specifically, the benefits our customers see are identification of the lowest levelized costs across the configurations analyzed, faster decision-making by rapid option analysis for complex value chains, ability to compare various projects by applying a consistent approach, and increased confidence for investment decisions with suitably managed risk outcomes. It's just one of the many solutions that will help the growth of our Worley Consulting business. Artificial intelligence is quickly changing the way many organizations operate, and Worley is taking a leading role in how it will reshape the future. By leveraging our 50+ years of global experience and related data, we're developing the building blocks for our own customized large language model in a highly structured, well-governed, and ethical manner. We aren't simply talking about AI. We're actively developing and deploying proprietary solutions to supercharge our entire sales process.
Just one example is our Smart Response Generator, which utilizes generative AI to harness the ecosystem of Worley data. Our solution auto-generates curated responses to expressions of interest we receive from our customers. Ordinarily, these responses can take two weeks to complete; now we can turn them around in less than two days. This frees up our people to devote more time to higher-quality output and to drive sales of more value-focused deliverables. We're shifting from a philosophy of performing manual, research-intensive tasks to leveraging our single source of truth, born from our own experience. Although this isn't the first step of our digital journey, it's an exciting next chapter. We have a long history of being on the leading edge of successfully executing digitally-enabled solutions. We look forward to shaping even more solutions for the rapidly changing and complex challenges the world is facing today and tomorrow.
How cool is that? And it's cool not only because it's leading edge, but it's real. These things are in use in our business today. What I hope you took away from this video is that we're already using automation and AI to deliver innovative solutions both within our business and for our customers. In fact, Sue mentioned Design One, Build Many, and Replic8 is a tool that does exactly that. And it's only one of a number of innovative digital solutions that we're employing on 1PointFive's direct air capture facility. And we'll have an update on that project later on. So what's next? In the AI arena, we've evaluated over 500 ideas across our value chain over the last year and have consolidated and prioritized them into six key opportunity areas highlighted here.
Taking this a step further, we have five specific use cases currently under development with plans to deploy these into the business over the next quarter. To give you a flavor of two of these, the first one will mine Worley's project data to gain insights and optimize designs, to improve and accelerate decision-making, and to boost labor productivity. The second one deals with the creation of a draft cost estimate for projects, providing faster generation and analysis of estimate insights, including sensitivities and risks that need to be addressed. This approach allows us to build a growing catalog of building blocks, which will enable us to accelerate the use of generative AI across the work that we do. Before I wrap, I just want to touch on our opportunity to reshape the future.
We have an exciting path ahead, and we continue to collaborate with our customers and leading-edge partners to create an ecosystem to tackle the greatest challenges our industry is currently facing. However, it's not simply just about technology. It's about people and our collective ability to leave a meaningful legacy in place for generations to come. Our Advanced Development Lab will be fundamental to achieving our purpose of delivering a more sustainable world, and it also affords us the opportunity to enable our 50,000-strong team to leave the fingerprints of 100,000. We'll continue our transformation journey until we've optimized the value that it offers. My ask of all of you is get out amongst the booths today and have a look at these in real time and give us some feedback. And that's me, and over to Verena.
Thanks, everyone. Now's the time for you to take a short break. Please stretch your legs, get some tea, and I'll call you back in about 10 minutes or so. Thank you. Thank you for coming back into the room. I have a very, very quick handover at the moment. I would like to, as you're taking your seats, bring Tiernan to the stage. Thank you.
Cue the cheesy photograph of the CFO, the best airbrushing money can buy. Thanks for coming back in promptly. Look, I'm really excited about you getting the opportunity to hear from my colleagues in the group executive. I know Chris and I talked to you a lot, but it's a really great opportunity for you to talk to my colleagues in the group executive who are actually helping us collectively to drive this strategy forward. It's really important that you get this opportunity. Thank you for joining us and for those on the webcam. Why that's important is that I've been in C-suite roles for 21 years. This is the best exco I've ever worked with. We have a fantastic opportunity of delivering not only the ambition that's ahead of us, but beyond that.
That's why it's important that I talk about the building blocks, about how we're going to grow, how we have grown safely, and how we're going to continue to grow safely in the future. I'm going to start with talking about the deliberate actions that we have made so far in our journey on our ambition to grow safely. I feel like Danny DeVito up here. I normally am tall, but this is an enormous screen. I can use it to the effect of this solid foundation that I'm talking about. What have we done to grow safely, to deliver consistently in the last few years? Well, we've focused on capital management. We focused on maintaining the costs program that we achieved a couple of years ago. We have sustained margin improvement each reporting period.
Of course, on top of that, taken leading positions in various markets and created growth through the organic investment process that we've talked about a number of times. Why have we done that? Because we've delivered all of these outcomes on the right-hand side to get to where we are today. That includes portfolio management, active portfolio management. We're prepared to optimize the portfolio by selling businesses that don't fit the strategy that you've heard about today. All of this is designed to deliver double-digit EBITDA CAGRs in the medium term. And I think we're well on the journey for that. That allows us to run a business that is high cash-generative and also low capital intensity. And that's my job as the CFO, is to continue to develop this platform as broad as it is because the growth ahead of us is going to require additional guardrails.
I think it's pretty obvious from those of you who've followed us for a long time, and there's a lot of familiar faces in the room, we need to grow safely. We have been doing a lot of active management. If I flip on to the next slide where I talk about the building blocks that are going to take us forward safely as well: market growth, new work at higher margins, operational leverage that Andy talked about, and of course, the whole area of tech. I just wanted to dwell on a couple of things before I dive into a little bit more detail on each of these slides. First of all, in market growth, what's really important and interesting is that we are still yet to deliver our full capability in our target countries.
So we have an opportunity to scale our business in places we already work and do that safely. Second, on the higher margins, two of the threshold issues that you've heard us talk about a lot, which you'll hear us talk about a lot in the future, are project assurance and risk-adjusted returns. Risk-adjusted returns is now in our vocabulary. We need to grow safely, not only to manage risk, but to optimize opportunity that comes with managing the business that we're in. And it's why I'm so pleased that Karen Furlani, who you'll hear later, our new Chief Risk Officer, is drawing together all of our risk capability, which is already very strong, but really to help us to guide the growth that's ahead of us and generate risk-adjusted returns at all times. Project assurance, equally, threshold issue. We must optimize the projects that we're running at any time.
Today, we've probably got around about 12,000 live contracts. That's a lot of contracts to manage in 45 countries. Project assurance, therefore, not only to look at scale projects, but to look at non-financial impacts on projects, is the task of project assurance. We are very, very focused on that. That really helps us to guide the discipline around increasing our margins. It's not good enough to just increase prices. You must build in the risk that we are taking on with each of those projects. I'll talk more about the other two on coming slides. If I jump then to the first two of those building blocks on the next slide, in terms of market growth, and I'm a big fan of comparative advantage, Worley is better than many of our competitors right now because of the investment we've made.
We have generated comparative advantage from first mover and early mover moves that we've made in recent years. Comparative advantage will come up a lot. It's not just competitive advantage. It's comparative advantage. We have done things that others have not done. In terms of market growth and increased market share, we are experiencing from doing. The more we experience from doing, Design One, Build Many, we are moving ahead of our competition and staying ahead of our competition. Similarly, we have very much focused on the customer journey. John, when he started the business in 1971, focused on the customer. We have maintained that focus ever since. We are doubling down on that because when we focus on the customer, we know what value we're adding to them. Therefore, we know what our worth is.
When we know what our worth is, we can price accordingly. Interestingly, arguably, there is a huge amount of a step change in investment ahead of us. Chris talked about the $1.8 trillion of clean energy investment last year. The fact that it's likely to rise to $5 trillion, that gives enormous opportunity. But it also means we have to prepare ourselves for when the number of contracts isn't 12,000. It's a significantly higher number. That will require a huge amount of discipline to manage. If I move to new work being won at higher margins, and that's a really interesting question and important question.
We have said to you that in the medium term, we are looking to grow our margins to high single digits as the first phase of margin improvement since the lows of the very commoditized sector that we had 5 or 10 years ago. You've seen these charts before, but I repeat them just to remind you that we are showing you some of the leading indicators for how margins are growing, not least how we factor the pipeline that's ahead of us and how we show you the correlation between the factored sales pipeline converting into backlog and therefore into revenue and the speed with which those are happening. We're constantly developing the disclosures to try and help you to guide that forward.
This is a really interesting and important part of the work that the group executive do together to ensure that margin improvement continues at a consistent and sustainable level. If I jump into the next two building blocks, principally around operational leverage, and it is an inherent part of how we ensure the structure of our business is maintained on a consistent basis. A number of the leading indicators are here. If you look at professional services revenue, 88% of our people are now dedicated to providing professional services. That's a huge percentage relative to most of our competitors. And of course, as Andy talked about with Fabricio Sousa on the Worley Consulting side, the pull-through benefit of front-ending consulting work is enormous, but it also generates higher margins at the front end.
Global Integrated Delivery Service, even last week at the Macquarie Conference, we were talking about wanting to drive Global Integrated Delivery service arbitrage higher. It's now 15% of the total hours that we work, up from 13% at the half-year. So we are driving that efficiency and the access to high-quality resources as a real backstop of our business. EBITDA per headcount, as a result, productivity is high. Our win rate has just come down from 70% last year to between 60% to 65%. It'll sort of bounce around there, giving our people time to develop. Then our professional headcount is growing in a market that's quite constrained around resources. Why? Because we're an attractor of talent. Our attrition rate has been coming down every month this year.
Our average days to hire have only increased on average by 2 to 3 days this year to about 35 to 36 days. So these metrics are provided to you. We show you these signposts. And they also help to guide us. And then on digital technology, you've heard it off there from Adrian. What's interesting about this, it's a new frontier. The margins that we're talking about don't include an investment here. This is in its early phases, as you heard from Adrian. And indeed, all of the investment that we've made, the vast majority of that is already in our margins. We haven't been capitalizing. Most of it is software as a service. So under accounting standards, we're expensing it. We may need to invest capital to accelerate that in the next couple of years to stay ahead of the competition.
But we have the ability to allocate that capital. And it's not material. And then on Technology Solutions, honestly, I think Technology Solutions is the best kept secret at Worley. And you're going to hear from Laura in a minute. And I think you'll agree with me after you hear what she has to say, that that is the case. We're already fantastic at it. It is an inherent part of the decarbonization journey that we've all been talking about. But Technology Solutions is one to watch. And then I'll just bounce on to my favorite slide. And in fact, it's not just my favorite slide. It's some of my competitors' favorite slide who have copied it ruthlessly. I'm surprised they even went to the trouble of taking the Worley logo off it. But it is a way of showing a capital plan on a page.
Why is it important? It's important because I've got to make sure that we have adequate funding for the business. We will make acquisitions when they make sense. If they're not accretive, they don't make sense. We will focus on the strategic investment that we've been looking at. While we're not committing to continuing that program, we're in the middle of our budget cycle. We're evaluating that. But I can tell you there are people queuing up in the business to access that strategic investment. I think it's highly likely that we will continue that investment. I just don't know what the ask is going to be yet. But we will manage that. Fantastic return on investment for that. I also want to call out particularly the funding and liquidity part of our business.
David Rowe, if you haven't met him, is our Group Treasurer, global Group Treasurer. David and I have worked together before. David is reshaping the way that we think about treasury. In the room and online, I'm sure we have a number of our debt investors. I want to thank them for their support because it's an absolute essential part of driving a business forward, is getting enough liquidity, including surety bonds and bank guarantees, which you all know a number of our competitors are struggling to get access to. I really thank our debt investors for their support. It's a really important part of our growth. I'm really, really happy with the strength of our balance sheet. We're going to need that to grow into the future. Our cash culture and our cash generation focus is maturing very nicely.
All of the group executive are incredibly focused on it. To sum up, I'd just like to say three things. First of all, we have built a very solid foundation on which to drive growth in this business. The second is that we've got the building blocks to help us to continue to grow safely. The third is we have a capital plan that we are executing. And that includes a significant focus on cash, which I know is very important to all of you. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks again for coming. I want to hand you over to Laura Leonard. Laura wasn't here last year because she's just clicked over a year at the business. But I think you're going to be blown away by her business and what she is bringing to the table. Without further ado, over to you.
Thanks, Tiernan. You heard earlier from Sue that enabling technology options is one of the five key shifts needed to make our shared ambition of net zero by 2050 a reality. At Worley, we're well-positioned to enable the technology options that we need on the path to net zero. We have the expertise in place and capital available. Said differently, the energy transition is creating the opportunity for new and innovative process technologies because innovative solutions are needed to drive down the cost of the energy transition and reduce the carbon intensity of our economies. Our customers' needs are changing as they adapt to the new world. The emergence of changing markets and changing customer needs is creating white spaces for new entrants in process technologies, in spaces where there's not big established players today.
Our response is to expand our technology portfolio with a blended build, buy, and partner strategy. I'll share with you three key insights that demonstrate how we're seizing the opportunity in front of us. One, I'll show you that we're operating successful process technology businesses today that form a strong foundation for us to build from. Two, I'll give you insights on where we're focusing to build a technology portfolio that's aligned with our strategy and facing into growing markets. And three, I'll share examples that demonstrate that we're already taking action to expand our portfolio. My ask is that you lean in and consider how we're rising to the challenge to accelerate the technology options that we all need on the path to net zero. First, we have a strong foundation to build from as we expand our technology portfolio.
Today, we're operating two longstanding technology businesses, Worley Comprimo and Worley Chemetics. Worley Comprimo is a leading supplier of gas processing and sulfur recovery technology. Over our 100-year history, our team has designed more than 1,200 units. More than 60% of sulfur recovery units worldwide carry a Worley Comprimo design. Worley Chemetics is a leading technology provider in sulfuric acid and chlorine electrochemical plants with more than 300 plants installed worldwide. At Chemetics' fabrication shop in Pickering, Ontario, we have deep metallurgy expertise and the specialized capabilities that are needed to produce reliable equipment for highly corrosive services. Our proprietary equipment designs, combined with our fabrication and metallurgy expertise, are key differentiators for Chemetics versus the competition.
From a commercial perspective in Technology Solutions, we deliver value to our customers and our shareholders by licensing technology and providing basic engineering packages that transfer our intellectual property to our customers to enable them to build their facilities incorporating our technology. We also supply proprietary equipment and catalysts. In some cases, we deliver our technologies using an EPF business model, meaning engineering, procurement, and fabrication. We tailor the scope of supply to allow us to deliver uniformly around the world. We stay connected to our customers throughout the life cycle of their plants by providing technical advisory services to help them optimize their operations, equipment upgrades, and catalyst refills. These business models often deliver margins that are above the usual margins for Worley.
So you can see that we have the right business models in place to contribute to our overall margin expansion as we grow Technology Solutions. So turning to our second point, how we're designing our technology portfolio for the new world. We're targeting a suite of technologies that are fully aligned with the strategy you heard Andy articulate earlier. We're focused on highly attractive subsectors in energy, chemicals, and resources where we will have a high degree of alignment with our customer base, with our regional operations. This approach gives us an opportunity to maximize the synergies between our technology portfolio, our consulting, and our project delivery capabilities. In process technology, highly attractive markets are markets that have a strong growth trajectory. And we expect to be stable for the medium to long term.
We're specifically looking for technology platforms that will enable us to deliver meaningful and quantifiable value to our customers compared to their next best alternative. And we've adopted a blended build, buy, and partner entry strategy that allows us to balance the growth potential, the time to revenue, and the risk, considering both the market maturity and the technology maturity. The depth and breadth of our Worley organization around the world, combined with the strength of Comprimo and Chemetics, is a springboard for us to grow our share of wallet in our existing segments and to expand into adjacencies. Finally, I'd like to give you three examples of technologies that we have already added to our technology portfolio. The first is our Pseudo Dry Gas technology. This is a subsea liquid separation system that eliminates the need for subsea compression and topside processing.
It enables our customers to monetize longer subsea tie backs with lower capital costs and lower environmental impact by eliminating the energy associated with compression. The performance of the Pseudo Dry Gas system was validated at full scale, which means we've achieved a technology readiness level of eight. The technology is ready to deploy commercially. When you visit our booth in the back, you'll be able to see an actual two-scale model of the Pseudo Dry Gas technology and the Innovation Award that we won at the Asia Offshore Technology Conference this year. The second example is the expansion of our Chemetics specialty fabrication equipment shop. This month, we're completing a 50% expansion of the footprint of the shop. In parallel, we've expanded the capabilities by securing the ASME certifications required to make heat exchange equipment for small nuclear reactor facilities.
This Chemetics strategy is in lockstep with our Canadian operations as the Canadian government supports the expansion and establishment of a local nuclear supply chain. This is a clear example of the synergies I mentioned earlier. We're leveraging our track record as a technology provider combined with our expertise designing and fabricating equipment for corrosive services to grow into emerging technology areas, which brings me to my third example. Earlier this month, we announced a partnership with Nano One to deliver, market, license, and deploy Nano One's proprietary One-Pot Process. The One-Pot Process makes high-quality cathode active materials at lower cost than traditional processes and with reduced environmental footprint. We expect our alliance with Nano One to accelerate market access to important cathode active materials. We'll collaborate with Nano One to incorporate the One-Pot Process into a comprehensive technology package.
Chemetics will design and fabricate the reactors, incorporating metal alloys that we specify and design for corrosive services. So in conclusion, I hope that you now share my excitement about the opportunity that process technology represents for Worley. And you share my confidence that we're well-positioned to grow because, one, we're building from a strong foundation, namely the breadth and depth of our global teams combined with our successful track record with Worley Comprimo and Worley Chemetics. Two, our technology growth strategy is fully aligned with our ambition and our strategy. And three, we're already making progress adding technologies to our portfolio. So you should expect to hear more from Technology Solutions in the future as we grow towards our ambition to become a material contributor to Worley's earnings and margin over the long term. Thank you.
Worley is working with 1PointFive and Oxy to deliver engineering, procurement, and construction services for the Stratos facility, the world's largest direct air capture facility. Stratos is designed to capture up to 500,000 tonnes of CO2 annually once fully operational. To put that into perspective, this is equivalent to removing the annual emissions of 119,000 gas-powered vehicles.
Yes, I'm Mike Avery. I'm President and General Manager of 1PointFive. I think the strategic alliance is really important because you need two companies that are fully committed to taking on a challenge this big. It's totally unique. It needs deep commitment, not only at the corporate level at the very top, but within every employee that's involved as well. And so I think that exists between Oxy and Worley. And that makes it really important. This is a first-of-a-kind project. It's never been done before. There is no manual to explain how to do this. And so it takes an incredible amount of creative thinking to get through all the different pieces that need to come together to deliver a project like this. And that includes the technical work, the execution work, the construction work, the economics, the policy setting.
Everything needs to come together all at the same time to make something like this successful.
The plant will advance large-scale carbon capture to help Oxy and others reduce emissions and accelerate their respective paths to net zero. We've interviewed members from the team on why the Stratos project is important, how Worley and Oxy are working together, and perhaps most importantly, how the project is impacting individuals on the project, their communities, and the world.
I'm Sean Murphy. I've been involved with Direct Air Capture since 2021. I lead the program from the Worley standpoint. The alliance itself is really geared around ideas, innovation, changing the way that we work together. So ultimately, it has to do with people. And I think so far, we've had a great response from our business in Worley, certainly from our partners within 1PointFive, Oxy, Carbon Engineering, on getting everybody motivated to be part of our team. And I think to see that in the excitement that people have in the office, the excitement that people have in the field, and really that appreciation that what they're doing now will make an impact tomorrow in terms of a positive impact on the climate. Good days, bad days, if you're doing things that ultimately deliver an outcome that can change the world, that's pretty exciting.
The thing I like most about this plant is this plant is the first of its kind of this size. But what it's going to do for the society, the world, my family, my kids' future is it's going to help clean the air. And that's something good that we all need.
It's very exciting. It's a great privilege to be able to work with this team here and on this project.
Me personally, when I think about my children who need to grow in an environment that needs to be clean and getting there to a cleaner environment by 2050 would be a great goal for my children.
What this means to me can be explained in one word: change. Personally, it's a change for my future, what I typically build, where I typically work. For my family, it's also a change. On a larger scale, it's a change for humanity. It's a change in the direction towards sustainability.
Impact to the community is jobs that we're bringing to the community. The world is cleaning up our environment.
This is not only going to affect us right now, but as my kids get older, it's going to affect their life.
This is what removing CO2 from the atmosphere at scale looks like. It's a very exciting project. It's the first of its kind. It's the largest of its kind. And it has the ability to make an enormous positive impact not just on our climate, but on our economy too. Although the world is faced with some significant challenges today, with projects like Stratos, the Oxy and Worley team are helping to make a positive impact across the globe. It's another great example of Worley living up to its purpose, of delivering a more sustainable world.
You ready?
Yeah.
Oh.
Thank you.
Thank you.
No, I'll push mine back again, yeah?
Yeah.
Surprised you did that. Let me just. Yeah. Not too far.
Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us in this Business Operations in Focus panel discussion. My name is Joel Labi. I'm a Director of Corporate and Financial Communications at GRA Cosway. And this is my second year getting to moderate this panel. I'd like to introduce Mark Trueman, the Group President of the Americas. If you tuned in last year, he was beaming in from Houston. So good to have you here in person. Vikki Pink, who joins us again, Chief People Officer here at Worley. Karen Furlani, the Executive Group Director of Risk. This is your first Investor Day. So welcome and thanks for joining us for the panel. And Mark Brantley, the Group President of EMEA APAC, who is joining us again today. So we've heard from quite a lot of the leadership team today, some very enthusiastic presentations.
Mark T , I want to start with you and just pick up on something that Chris mentioned at the beginning of the day. You know, he was talking about the pipeline of opportunities. A lot of focus on sustainability in that factored sales pipeline. I think it was 82% of the projects are in that sustainability space. So some of the sectors that might be on the uptick in your eyes, we're talking chemicals, resources, energy, and how does that all fit into this green transition?
Thanks, Joel. I might answer it by looking at three ways across the Americas, which is the part of the world I'm responsible for, accountable for, so from Alaska to Argentina. We've seen pretty broad growth, actually, geographically, all the way across the region. In terms of the second angle is from the sectors, certainly across mining, bulk commodities, energy transition materials like lithium and copper, and then actually into the more chemical side of battery materials. We've seen really strong growth and lots of opportunity across the region. And then as we move on more onto the direct energy side, carbon capture in all its forms, so direct air capture, and we just saw the Stratos program, but also into blue hydrogen where we're capturing CO2 as well. So they're probably the sectors that we're seeing the most.
I just want to say as well, it's what we're offering to our customers. Our customers see a competitive advantage in Worley and our global relationships and allowing us to. They're saying, "Can we deliver entire programs for them, not just in the Americas, but globally?" Mark and I are pretty joined at the hip at making sure we bring that global solution to them.
Sure. And Mark, I'll ask you the same question, but interesting because you obviously have APAC in your regional book as well. In Australia, even in the last week, we've seen the federal government hear a lot of talk around keeping gas on the books for as long as possible. A lot of discussion at Beef Week last week around carbon capture storage. So that must be welcome news to you and for your customers in the region.
Yeah, absolutely. To see our APAC spread across a lot of different countries. And the sector question earlier, we see the sectors all getting investments moving. I would say across where we're seeing the most capital invested is Australia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, India. And it's good to see the action that's going forth and the government's trying to lean in to get the movement. Something that we're seeing is the resources. We're seeing a lot of investments in iron ore, copper, battery active materials. And Andy was touching earlier on low-carbon fuels, hydrogen, and carbon capture as well we're seeing in our region. So with our APAC being spread out as large as it is, we definitely see the investments depending on which country and how far they're advancing.
Okay. I'd like to just shift the discussion to the competitive landscape and bring Vikki into the discussion here. Vikki, this time last year, we were having a bit of a different discussion. We were talking a lot about retention and headcount. On the numbers today, there's definitely a big upside here. If you can just drill down into the way that Worley has kind of brought people into the business and that balance between the external factors and the internal factors as well.
Yeah, thanks, Joel. Our confidence in our ability to have the right capability and the right capacity and the right skill base to deliver what we've talked you through today is based on two things. We fundamentally focus on the right people. That's the skill and capability piece. And hand in hand with that is the right experience. So what does it feel like to work at Worley? And I'm sure everybody in this room knows today that what you create for your people and the environment that they work in is so critical both to attract and retain. It's an incredibly tight market. And particularly in the areas where we are currently working and where we're growing, those skills, we absolutely have to have in our business. And we're very deliberate on how we're going about that. We do have a very strong brand.
I think I said last year that we were seeing people starting to knock on our door. They wanted to come and join Worley. Well, today, that's every day, many times a day where people are approaching us because they want to work with us because of what we're doing.
How are you seeing, I suppose, the skill takeup or the upkick in skills? Obviously, now the focus is moving towards a more sustainable future. These are skills that are having to be learned in traditional industry. What are you seeing from a people's perspective?
Transferability of skill is really strong. My colleagues have mentioned that earlier. That's key. Coupled with that, the turnover is reducing. Tiernan mentioned that earlier, that each month we're seeing that reducing. We watch our voluntary turnover very tightly, particularly around these skills. We're seeing people stay. Our time to offer. Tiernan also mentioned he talked about the time to offer is a little bit up to last year. I'll tell you why. We are increasing our focus on inclusion and diversity. We're asking our leaders to take a breath as they make their decisions about the skill that we bring in and the people we bring into the business, both in what they're able to do and how they deliver that work. So who they are, what they do, and how they deliver.
Just taking an extra day or two to make those decisions. We are seeing that come through in our numbers. It's critical that we bring the right people into this business, people we can trust to be able to deliver.
Well, you've brought somebody into the business in Karen Furlani, who has been with Worley now. This is your first Investor Day. So welcome. And I want to bring you into the discussion here. And let's drill down a little bit on risk. I'd love to get your early impressions of the sort of risk culture within Worley, the sort of governance procedures that you're seeing compared to other places where you may have worked. If you could give us a bit of a 30,000-foot view on that.
Yeah. Well, it's exciting to be here. And I'm impressed. It's a great organization. And when we talk about culture, it's a really important part when you think about it from a risk perspective. So what I have found, Worley has just got a really robust risk framework, right? Strong governance processes, procedures, practices. And all of that is underpinned by living our values. And as you've heard today from a lot of our colleagues earlier in the program, a lot of those key elements around life, right? We had our safety moment. But there's another element of this when you dig further into our values of we do the right thing, we act ethically and responsibly. That is a key cultural tenet to mitigating and addressing risk.
And that comes through some other themes of innovation, leaning in and continually looking for the next way to improve and drive performance, that delivery excellence and disciplined execution that's so essential, and staying close to our customers. We heard a lot of that from Andy and Sue and partnering with, not necessarily just working for, but really building those relationships and having those dialogues and those zippered pieces are an important element from a risk culture perspective.
Yeah, because there's a fine balance, isn't there, between how much work you win, balancing growth and all of that, how that feeds into the risk profile of the business, if you can elaborate on that?
Yeah. We've got some just fantastic gated reviews and dialogue. So much of this is bringing in the right leadership, the right expertise, and having the dialogue and conversation and then having the governance structures that support that to help us understand and not just manage risk, but really leverage risk and let it be the business enabler it is to drive growth that we're leaning into and enabling.
Mark Brantley, I'm interested in your thoughts on some of the key trends that you're seeing in the traditional and the sustainability areas of the business. They are kind of two heads there and kind of working in correlation there. They need to find some common ground. If you can give me some examples of kind of the value proposition that Worley is bringing in both those spaces there.
Yeah, sure. It's definitely something we're leaning in with our customers to help navigate. Something that's really good to hear. And Mark and I sit on a lot of global sponsor meetings with customers. And it's consistently the customers committing that they're on the journey. They're still staying with their commitment to net zero and all their targets. Then we get into how we're going to help them get there and work through the different projects, and if it's traditional, transitional, or always sustainable. And hearing that journey, that's where the partnership comes in. So that's consistent. In our region, my region, EMEA APAC, we're delivering 50% sustainable projects this year. And we're in the 70% to 75% in the sales funnel. That'll fluctuate. But that's good. That's still showing our customers have projects in the pipeline coming through that we're working with them on.
And they do see us as partners to help them on this energy transition and the journey that they're on. I think Sue mentioned earlier a couple on standardization and replication. Adrian talked about that's something that customers are looking at. And that's really becoming in every discussion of projects. How can we replicate? How can we standardize to help tighten schedules up, bring TICs down? And then another is coming to us for global delivery. We have our global footprint in multiple countries, multiple offices, and we're close to their assets. So they work with Mark and I on how do we replicate and get these synergies across projects. We woke up this morning to emails from customers about just that. I mean, that's real live every week, every day that we talk about.
Well, let's pick up on that. Mark Trueman, let's talk about the Americas then. I mean, they are wanting particularly the U.S. is wanting to be at the forefront of any sustainable and green transition here. So same question to you. How are you seeing things play out?
I might answer it a little bit differently. I think Mark, agree with everything that Mark says as I always do, that sort of picks up some of the themes. But maybe answer it by talking about some specific projects and sort of across the region. And starting in the very north is the Jansen fertilizer potash project that we're doing with BHP. So global relationship we've built from the traditional in iron ore, and we now have that global relationship. And so fabrication and construction in Canada. The other end of the continent, the Rincon lithium project with Rio Tinto, again, global relationship, traditional into sustainable and full delivery down there. And then in the US, three projects. We're delivering the largest liquefaction LNG terminal in the world with Venture Global. I should have said before, by the way, integrated gas is definitely a growth theme.
The world's worked out that gas is critical to the energy transition. Second project, we're in the early planning phasing for the largest blue hydrogen project in the world. And that's with one of the global traditional super majors where we're supporting them on their entire program. And thirdly is the Stratos or the direct air capture program that we've just seen the video on with Oxy, which this is where 70%+ delivery of that first project. And there's very public plans from Oxy working to deliver dozens of these plants around the world, initially primarily in the U.S.
Yeah, it is a particularly impressive project that we've just seen there.
That's extraordinary.
Look, I want to move on to a couple of other matters, but kind of at a global macro level. We've got 50+ countries going to the polls. Some already have gone to the polls this year. Obviously, in November, a lot of eyes around the world will be on the U.S. And so it's only natural that I ask the Australian on the panel when we have two Americans sitting here as well. I would never dare ask you to predict the outcome of an election. But I am curious to know, would a change in administration in the Americas mean anything different for your customers? Or does it not really matter who is in power these days because so much of the green transition and the sustainability ethos is already ingrained in legislation?
Yeah, I look... I'm just an engineer from the Northern Beaches. But yeah, with two very much more respectable, intelligent American colleagues next to me. But I'll give it a go. No, look, the answer's no. On the edges, there's a little bit. But the world's commitments, our customers' commitments to net zero are set by societal expectations. And they've made their commitments. And it doesn't matter over the medium to long term who's going to be in government. Now, the question that people talk about the most in the U.S. is around the IRA. And IRA funding is primarily actually going to red states, Texas, Louisiana, and others. And we acknowledge our customers are continuing with their plans. Will there be some tweaking of the rules? Maybe. But either way, whoever gets in in the traditional, transitional, and sustainable, we're confident that we'll continue as we are.
Mark, are you seeing similar sorts of legislation in EMEA, APAC? The IRA and infrastructure bill are huge packages of legislation in the U.S. and have been long talked about. But what are you seeing in your neck of the woods?
I'm really glad Mark got the U.S. question. I don't want to venture off into that.
Well, good luck with the Australian.
So the European Green Deal, there's a lot of energy around that. And customers are trying to figure out what does that mean? How does that kind of deploy? Here the Future Made in Australia Act. A lot of discussion here, I guess all of you would be aware of. And I guess the renewable energy target, we hear customers talking about it. I guess the big question is, how is it going to unfold? How will the money be deployed when? So we'll work closely with our customers through that. You referenced the elections. And it definitely could shift in countries. But typically what we see, we're a global company in 45 countries and a lot of offices. And if a customer needs... they slow down on a capital investment in a specific country, they're talking to Mark and I about where they're going to move that capital.
Can you help us with that project? So we're in a good position with us being a global footprint.
Well, let me touch on that with Karen because the business is obviously growing. You're moving into new and emerging markets. There is political shift around the world right now. How does that all FEED in and potentially change the risk profile for Worley?
Yeah. I mean, we do have, I would say, an evolving risk profile. That's important because as our customer base and as the market evolves, we need to evolve. Otherwise, we become the obsolescence for not staying current. That said, we also really are really clear on our appetite, I think, as Chris laid out earlier, and making sure that we're relying a bit on our conversations and our gated process and our understanding and knowledge so that we're really clear on what is our exposure and that we are staying in balance within our appetite and all that around our evolving strategy. I think there's another piece of this when you look at... as you heard about Laura and Technology Solutions and digital enablement, there's another piece that's really growing that does adjust and evolve within our risk profile.
Vikki, just this discussion, what, if any, trend does this have in terms of resourcing? Do you see people tending to stay put when there are elections going on? Or is there more of a move around the market? I'm interested in your thoughts.
Yeah, we are seeing people staying put. And you would typically see that when you think about the number of countries that are going to election this year. This is a global trend. And it really is helping customers. And we're benefiting from that too. So part of our reducing turnover does reflect the market. That is a key part of it. And it'll be interesting, I think, as we go into 2025 calendar year and just see what decisions people make. Fundamental to that is, often for people, their job is something they can control. And if their environment feels a little bit out of control, this is the one thing for some people that they can anchor on. They'll tend to stay.
Well, let's talk about retention then drill down a little bit more on what you brought up earlier. Worley's workforce is now around 50,000 people. So just talk to me a little bit about the experience of working at this firm. And what feedback have your workers and your staff been giving you and your team?
Yeah, we recently asked our people, what is it like to work at Worley? What does it feel like? What are we doing well? And where can we place more emphasis to make this a great place to work? 87% of participants in that survey told us that their experience meets or exceeds their expectation, which is incredibly high. It's very strong. But I tell you what, it reflects a few things. Worley has always been based on a culture of integrity, a values-based culture. And you will see that we mentioned that today. We take our culture and our behaviors incredibly seriously. Chris used the word intentional this morning. And we've been very intentional about the behavior that we expect from our people and the behavior of our leaders. And we've been very deliberate about that for a period of years. Coupled with that, our focus on inclusion.
So really challenging our leaders' understanding around what does it mean to lead a business inclusively? What does that actually mean? And what behaviours do we need to change or strengthen to make sure that the Worley environment is somewhere where a diverse workforce wants to be and they want to stay? A strong focus on well-being. So we have repositioned our mental health network. We're very targeted on our psychosocial safety and applying that globally, even though we have legislation that is quite different country by country, is a key. So they're great examples alongside a very structured program on recognition. So we know that research will tell us recognition, particularly peer-to-peer recognition, adds enormous value to the environment.
And so we have tactically and intentionally for four years focused on the experience at Worley because we know just focusing on what I said before about the attraction without that experience is not going to get us to where we need to be.
Well, Mark Brantley, another critical stakeholder, obviously, are your customers. What do they tend to tell you when you have discussions with them on projects? And again, why are they choosing Worley over your competitors?
Yeah, that's a great question. We have a lot of long-term customers, repeat business customers. And we don't take that lightly or for granted. We've earned that. And we taught our teams we're going to continue to earn that by delivering good projects and working through challenges. Projects are difficult. And we inevitably are going to go up against some challenges. So working through that. And they respect that. They talk about transparency that we have and the trust. Of course, you got to continue to earn the trust. We have a number of new customers coming into the energy transition that need help to deliver their goals and strategy and their ambitions for their companies, new companies. So we're able to bring that to the table. And again, a lot of times our global footprint attracts them because we're able to help them in a consistent way.
Mark and I are setting out a lot of and Laura, depending on the customer and the need, sitting at the table with them and them seeing Americas and EMEA, APAC setting together, working together. It means a lot to them. I guess two more aspects, the Global Integrated Delivery with GID. That is since the pandemic and customers seeing and all of us, I guess, globally working in a virtual environment and seeing it can work. That's opened the door more so than it did previous to the pandemic. So we're seeing customers really open to utilizing India. And we're over 7,200 people, around 7,300 people now in eight offices. And that has become just kind of the way we do projects as we do digital. I think the depth and our ability to do these projects globally, and it's just how we do projects is interesting to them.
Thank you. Look, I'm mindful of time. I don't want to let our panel go without some final thoughts and reflections on the day. Mark, I'll start with you, perhaps.
Final thoughts. Look, it's a really interesting time. I mentioned those three large projects in the U.S. as an example. For those of you that there was recently a whole section in The Economist around the energy transition. Those three projects were the three that were talked about the most. It really just shows that we really are at the front. The energy transition is on the front page of the newspapers. It's what politics is about. It's what the movement of capital is about. It's what legislation is about. Now we're really doing the things absolutely at the front of the bus. We've got something our customers want. We're partnering with them off into the future. It's pretty exciting.
Yeah, absolutely. And for anybody local tonight, obviously, the federal budget being handed down in Canberra. So it'll be very interesting to see what is in store for the energy market. Vikki, final thoughts on people and the culture within Worley?
Yeah. Look, here's my thinking. If you want to join a great team, join Worley. It's absolutely a fantastic place to work. This is the... in my career, this is the role where every day I wake up and I work. And I know exactly why I'm doing it because I know the impact that we are having. This is a fantastic place. As the group exec, we spend a lot of time with our people, either in our offices, on sites, with our project teams. And I had the absolute delight to be on the Stratos site last month that we saw the video on earlier. And you know what it's like when you go into an environment and the leadership quality and the culture is palpable. And you can feel it. It's not just words on a screen. We feel this in our business all over the world.
If I could capture it and sell it, I don't know what margin we'd make, but it'd be pretty strong. So that's my last thoughts.
Thank you, Vicky. Karen?
Yeah, I might go back to just that cultural element, Joel, that you had kind of asked early on. And I think this element around continuous learning. And when I think about our culture and probably a lot of what we've even talked about today, this part of we're just as things are transitioning and evolving and changing through the energy market and with our customers and our growing customer base, that piece of weaving back in those learnings and having that agility, I think Andy also referenced this a bit around the strategy so that we are strengthening our risk ecosystem and our framework and evolving as the business grows. It's such an important part.
Thank you. Mark, you've got the last word.
Yeah, what I think about when we talk about the energy transition globally and what our various countries and the pace that they're in and making big decisions and talking about investments, our customers are at different areas on their journey as well. And how we've earlier really positioned nicely to help them. And we're seeing it real time and every day and able to adapt and move around to help them on that journey. So really proud of where we are on our journey, Worley. And I think we're positioned very nicely going forward. So really good place to be.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you very much, all of you, for joining me on the panel today. That concludes our Business Operations in Focus discussion. If you could put your hands together for Mark Trueman, Vikki Pink, Karen Furlani, and Mark Brantley.
Thank you.
Do stick around. I believe there is Q&A coming up.
Yes. I guess we're good.
Yes, indeed, Q&A. We're going to do this slightly differently this time. All my colleagues are going to go onto the stage. I'm going to rove around all of you and make sure that you ask the right questions. Can I just say two things? Number one, I respectfully ask you to focus questions on people that you don't see all the time. You see Chris and I all the time. We'll be available all the time going forward. But you have the brain trust of Worley here. It's a great opportunity to ask them questions. Particularly, I see A noop is up there. The second thing just to note is there are two of our colleagues that are not here. I just wanted to call them out. Nuala O'Leary is our Company Secretary based here in Sydney with me.
Larry Kalban, also based in Houston, our General Counsel. They both contribute enormous amounts to the collective focus of this group. I just wanted to make a mention for those, a call out for those two. I think we're almost set. Yeah, great opportunity to ask questions from some of my colleagues. I've got the lovely Carly at the back who has a microphone as well. She's waving down there. She can also provide it because I've got a really bright light in my eyes. I see a question already. Here we go. If you could just say your name and people can answer you.
Hi, everyone. James Byrne from Citi. Firstly, let me just say this is a really energized group executive. Thank you. I haven't seen something like that in a while. Look, today was really helpful to conceptualize a lot of the levers that you, as a management team, can control to grow earnings in the medium term as opposed to a lot of the things we heard last year around what the industry tailwinds can do for Worley, right? But I guess the missed opportunity is helping people like myself this afternoon go away and quantify it. This is a bit of an opportunity to go ahead and quantify. What we know is things like what Tiernan said, that the first phase delivers a high single-digit margin outcome before you then talk about the initiatives, the things that you can control as a management team.
The consensus for EBITDA margin ex procurement tops out around, call it, 8.5% over the next two or three years. And so does that, to the group executives, seem like a very conservative number? Because as long as the macro conditions don't move against you and this cyclical uptrend that you talk about is able to be maintained, then presumably, that consensus forecast would be very conservative relative to the initiatives that you presented today.
Well, maybe let me start. And then I'm going to hand over. But we delivered 7.5% of the half-year. And we've guided a 7.5% to 8% for the full year. So if you do the math, you would expect the half-year to allow that 7.5% to 8% to be delivered. So I think your assumption of 8.5% in the medium term, while I understand why you said that, I think there's opportunity if we continue on the path in the absence of any dislocation, then we think we can get higher than that.
Maybe, Andy, you might want to make a comment just in terms of what you're seeing in pricing and the environment around the whole competition?
Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, we've got a number of competitive advantages. And we're playing to them. But if I just speak to the things that we're doing to push margin, I mentioned that we're being very, very selective about the customers and the markets that we're facing into. So the low-margin tail continuously cutting. We're pushing margins. I think you still see that our win rates are very, very high. And we continue to test the market. The new solutions that we're working on, that we're developing through transformation and that Laura has in Technology Solutions, give us additional differentiation. And then perhaps the final point I would draw attention to is our GID organization is world-class. And we continue to expand and stretch that operation, which drives additional earnings.
A number of levers that we're pulling that will show that improvement in quality of earnings over the longer term.
I'm mindful that we only have 30 minutes. Thanks, James. That was a great starting question. Who else?
Hi. It's Mark Busuttil from J.P. Morgan. Just a really quick question. Just in the supplementary slide to the back, you've got your factored sales pipeline. And it looks like your traditional sustainability projects have gone backwards in the quarter. Can you maybe just elaborate a little bit on what drove that?
Anyone want to have a go at that one?
We'll have to have a look at the park.
Verena, are you there? Do you want to make a comment on that? Or maybe we'll just come back and answer that. Any particular, Mark, any particular location in the? Yeah. Why don't we come back to that because we probably need to have a quick look?
Just to make a comment. In the beginning part of the pack, you'll also note that we stated that traditional business is steady. So we are still seeing growth.
Yeah. But we'll come back on a more detailed question.
Thanks. Gordon Ramsay, RBC Capital Markets. Appreciated the presentation this morning. A similar question, but slightly different angle. You're saying that you're seeing an increase in feed and detail design wins in Q3 and Q4. Just interested in understanding where that's coming from and how that might lead to additional work later on.
Mark?
Yeah. I mean, the FEED and detail design are different things. But obviously, in any capital project, you start at the beginning. So you'll start with a concept, move into pre-FEED, pre-FEED FEED, and then execution, which includes detailed design. So winning FEEDs and pre-FEEDs is generally a good sign that you're building the funnel for the future. Yeah. And I would add to that. Increasingly, customers are rolling over from pre-FEED to FEED, FEED to detail engineering, detail engineering, negotiated sort of procurement, construction, or construction management. And it's about shifting the dynamic between us and our customers from a working forward to working with. There's always schedule loss when you go out for competitive bid in between phases of projects. And if you look at that in aggregate, you can have a major impact on the timeline of a project being delivered.
I also just think that one of the dynamics we're seeing is there's a lot less competition now. We've talked about this. If you look at a global place, there's only three of us. The opportunity to align with one or two of those companies as a customer and work with them more closely for full project development is becoming more and more prevalent, becoming more and more frequent. We have longstanding relationships with most of the majors where we don't competitively bid things. I mean, 40% of our work today is sole-sourced. It's just a natural evolution as the dynamic between supply and demand shifts in the supply favor. The customer wants to get assurance that they've got continuity through their project delivery. It doesn't always happen. Middle East, it doesn't happen. The Middle East will always competitively bid.
But it tends to competitively bid lump sum turnkey PC, which is not a market we're in. So it's not a loss. But the rest of the world, we're seeing a shift to rolling over into follow-on phases in many parts of the world.
Yeah. Maybe I'll just add. Both Mark and Laura talked about this. Customers really expect an integrated data-centric approach and are really thinking construction and then moving left. So Advanced Work Packages. And then, of course, protecting the data. So they're very, very collaborative, transparent. And I think working with leading industrial software providers and enterprise software providers is making a difference.
Good morning. John Purtell from Macquarie. And thanks for the presentations this morning. You mentioned in one of the slides in the deck there that some of the energy transition areas are economically challenged. You referenced hydrogen, CCS, and nuclear. So the broader question is, how is that impacting Worley? I mean, the concern would be that that may have some impact over time on your growth rates in sustainability. Appreciate you helping your customers to reduce costs. And it looked like your sustainability wins were at a pretty good level in that quarter.
Yeah. I can take it. Yeah. We're helping customers with their studies and FEEDs and trying to figure out, can they fund the projects moving forward or not? And that's not uncommon. I mean, we did it before. We got into this energy transition. And if they are challenged and it might be now they can't move forward, but later they might, then, as I mentioned earlier in the panel, they might move their capital to another part of the world or another investment. And we're there with them as partners to do that. So we're watching it. And it's a concern. But we believe that their capital's going to move. And we're going to help them on this journey. So we believe the project's going to move forward. I think, Chris, you mentioned earlier that the projects aren't getting canceled.
Some's just not awarded yet, which is a good sign. So it's the journey we're on. But our confidence is still strong that they're going to move forward.
Now, Mark.
Oh, sorry.
You go on.
Add to that, John. Good to see you. You've probably put our customers into three different buckets. One is the ones that have got the commitments to decarbonize. And they've got the balance sheet to say they're going to do it no matter what. And obviously, favorite projects that are economically the most viable, best return on capital. But they're going to do what they've got to do, CCS, whatever, no matter what. You've then got the, if you like, the next tier where they've made the commitments a lot more focus on the short-term economic viability and when government legislation, whether it's carrot or stick so carrot in the US, stick in Europe, if I can say that. They're waiting to get that right. And that's where there might be a deferral or it might be a or speeding up.
And then you've got the third bucket, which is probably the opportunist developer that only has come to exist of, "We're going to be participating in the energy transition because there's money sloshing around where there's a business case that can be built in that environment." And we're deliberately prioritizing the customers that are going to go through all the way. And we've got the benefit of the global footprint. So as those rules are changing and capital's flowing, we can support them no matter where it will be.
I think one addition I'd just raise there is that we touched on the consultancy business. That's doing a lot of the techno-economic analysis on some of these areas. We've got a pretty good handle on which are likely to be which are likely to be economic and go forward and which aren't. We're judicious in our pipeline in terms of what we're putting in there for the subsequent phases.
I mean, I look at it quite simply. Global population is growing. Energy demand per capita is growing. The energy can only come from one of three sources: traditional, transitional, or sustainable. Capital investment has to be deployed to increase capacity. We're positioned to support our customers, enable their own transition, whether it's more traditional, a little bit more transitional, more sustainable, whatever the ratio is, we're positioned across all three. The fact is, energy demand globally is increasing. Yeah.
Thanks. Richard Johnson from Jefferies. I just want to ask a question about the risk profile of the group over the longer term. This may not be right. But just sort of reflecting on it, as the energy transition develops, do you get a far greater exposure to mega projects? And if that's the case, what does that mean for your risk profile overall?
Well, our risk appetite, they always say it's what we don't do rather than what we do do. And we don't do high-risk, lump-sum, turnkey EPC projects. That will never change. That will stay what it was in the past, what it is today, what it will be in the future. As I said, when I got up on the stage earlier, there was a litany, a graveyard of companies out there who thought they could manage the risk associated with that risk profile and have that appetite. And they're not here. And we won't do that. If you look at the mega project, there's none bigger than the one we're currently doing with Venture Global LNG. And it's reimbursable. Yes, there are, Mark. You can talk, Mark Trueman. You can talk to him more.
But we're not going to shift our risk appetite to anything outside of that which it's traditionally been and it currently is.
Carly, you've got a question over there.
Oh, yes. Good morning. Cameron Taylor from Bank of America. I think everyone in the room here don't question the amount of growth coming from the transition. We've seen competitors touting the same. I guess my question is, when will Worley realize that growth in terms of EPS and free cash flow? Because there hasn't been a material step change for the last decade. And we've seen these growth stories over the last 12 months. But do you envisage a significant step change near-term? I think consensus have EPS around $1 a share 2026. Can you imagine getting ahead of that? Or is that sort of in line with your expectations as well?
Well, I'm going to defer to my CFO. But I will say 28% growth, EBITDA growth for half-year 2023 yeah, 2024 to 2023 is material. So I'm not quite sure I support your thought there. But I'm going to hand it over to Tiernan. Yeah?
Yeah. I get all the easy questions. I would just say that one of the things we've been focusing on is phase one is to get to positive return on invested capital. The Jacobs acquisition was an incredibly positive acquisition, well-integrated. But it did come with a lot of goodwill. And with high single-digit EBITDA margins, we are going to generate positive return on invested capital for the first time in years. That's phase one. I think a lot of the initiatives that you heard about today are going to take time. You can't deliver wholesale generative AI input into the business overnight. Someone asked me in the break the same question. And my answer was that I think you need to give us a year to really establish all of those projects that are in flight to see how they resonate within the business and with our customer.
And that's really the holy grail, is delivering different solutions to our customers, most likely changing the business model. You can change the business model overnight. However, and this is the big however. We have a track record in convincing our customers that in sharing arbitrage benefits like this is to their advantage. Bringing total installed cost down for assets is a significant step change. And it goes back to an earlier question about how you make assets economic. So I don't think you'll hear a step change in margins for phase two in the August full-year results. But I think in a year's time, we'll have a much better understanding from the energy you saw from this team as to what our direction of travel is. But I agree with Chris. I think the first phase is already delivering accretive returns for shareholders. Nathan. Oh, yeah.
Can I just grab Nathan first, Carly? Then we'll go back to you.
Thanks, Tiernan. Yeah. Nathan Rowley, UBS. Question for Andy, actually. I think in one of your slides, you referenced an aspiration there of having 50,000 people doing the work of 75,000 people. So it's quite a step up in productivity. So I'm just curious if I well, just two questions, really. I mean, firstly, can you give me a practical example of maybe what that looks like at a project level where you've been able to deliver that? And the second question is, how does that change your, I guess, the way you price your services going forward if engineering hours becomes a less impactful factor in pricing work?
Yep. I think you're addressing me, Adrian, rather than Andy. But from a productivity point of view, a couple of those use cases that I described or put up on the video are two examples of where they're happening now. The Replic8 is an example of where we can do a lot more engineering a lot more quickly with the same amount of people. Or flip that on its head. We can do three projects versus one in the same amount of time that it takes us to do the one. And we're starting to really trial those on what we're doing with DAC, for example.
The other use case that I described as being in development right now, which was around mining our project data, that's one where we can see we cut down on the initial time that it takes for us to do early research, early calculations, back-to-the-envelope type things that we do in study phase, and then start to move into further detailed design. And we can almost hold hands with more junior engineers rather than have a more senior engineer coupled with a junior engineer. So there's another example of where we can actually derive that. That one's not operational yet. But we're working pretty hard to get that one up and running. So they're two examples.
But let me, if you look at, for example, the response generator for proposals, what would have taken two weeks we can do in two days. That means we've got resource freed up who can do other things. That's a cost reduction. But the AI becomes a real force multiplier for the way that our people operate. And we'll be able to leverage AI to do tasks that were otherwise taking up time of people. In terms of the commercial models, we've had a history to date. Still to date, most of our work is generated on a work-hours billed basis. The future will be different, Nathan. It has to be different. We will bill on a value-delivered basis or even on a deliverables basis rather than the number of hours it takes to create a deliverable.
So one of the things we're looking at in the team is, what are the commercial models that we will need to consider going forward? Because it's no good taking something that once took 100 hours and now do it in 10. And all the value flows to the customer. There's got to be some value sharing. And if you look at the history of GID, GID, our workforce in India, we share the value with our customers. They get access to resource at a lower cost than they would pay if that cost was in, say, Houston or London or Canada or Perth or here in Sydney. And we make good margin. And so it's a two-way benefit. And we're going to have to look at that opportunity.
We'll have to look at the shift to deliverables-based work or some of the model through the use of AI and look at how we generate revenue and profitability.
Yeah. I'll just say.
Oh, you go.
We're not the first to think about this. Airlines have been buying aircraft engines for two decades with reliability and power by the hour, the energy industry. Especially in Laura's business, process solutions where reliability is ultimate, safety. But then you can really monetize outcomes. Maybe, Laura, you'll say a few words.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at how we operate in the process technology business, we're pricing based on the value we're delivering to our customers, which is exactly what Chris was saying that the future looks like. I think it's not just AI. It's that broader use of technology. Everything we do to reduce the manual input reduces error rate. It's that digitization that we have spoken about today. We will continue to pursue.
Question on that.
Yeah. Thanks, Tiernan. David Gray, Insight Capital. I've got a question for Mark Trueman. Mark, we talked about US elections. And I'm not going to make a prediction around that. But clearly, the election year and US politics has had an impact on the Venture Global CP2 project in terms of the FERC authorization and then subsequently the FID. But you guys have managed to continue to sort of accelerate early engineering works ahead of construction. So can you sort of run us through how you've managed to do that? It appears to be there's consensus from both administrations that, hopefully, post the US election, that barrier will be removed. And obviously, it can move forward to FID. And subsequently, that project then goes into the backlog.
Can you run us through sort of how you've managed to pivot, as it were, in terms of or still keep things moving despite the fact that, obviously, that authorization, that FERC authorization and FID hasn't been able to be obtained late last year?
Yeah. So I mean, there's a few things in there, David. To be clear, both the Democrats and Republicans and their leaders have said that the pause would be reversed. Pause on LNG, DOE, Department of Energy export approvals, which is what it is, would be reversed in a change of government. And in fact, there's been signs and signals out of the White House that maybe the Democrats will reverse it earlier because they've looked at the environmental politics, the economics, the internal domestic politics, and also geopolitics. So if the US doesn't continue with gas, the world needs the gas. It's just going to come from regimes that are maybe not so friendly with the US, so. But bringing it to our project with Venture Global, they're very committed to the project.
Mike Sabel, the CEO, has been out recently saying they're spending $4 billion this year on the project. For them, FID, it's a soft FID. We would have been doing engineering and construction essentially at the same time. The benefit, really, is that we can delay construction till we've completed engineering. It's not just early engineering. We are on our path to complete engineering in calendar year 2024 and then move to the site as soon as we can. I'm not going to predict when that would be. We've got a milestone that we're working towards. U.S. politics has got to do what it does. What we're actually waiting on is a FERC approval, which is notionally independent of politics because it's an independent commission. That might happen this month. It might not.
[crosstalk]Good numbers, yes.
[crosstalk]Yeah. Be careful. Be careful. Yeah. Yeah.
We've had a few about the second week every month. We've said to ourselves, "Is it going to get approval? Is it going to get approval?" We don't know. That's the reality. It's not an interface with the FERC. We don't interface with FERC. It's a customer interface. And so what we learn is from the customer or by looking at the DOE or the FERC website to see if the project has been put on the agenda. What we've been told is, "FERC never puts something on the agenda if it's not going to get approved." So we either find out something from the customer or we do our own scanning of the FERC website about the second week of every month to see if it's on the agenda. But it's an election year. And as Mark said, while notionally, FERC is independent of the DOE and the government.
Yeah.
But we're full speed with engineering. We're full speed with most critical well, with all critical procurement. Obviously, we'll delay things that we don't need to buy together with the customer. But as I said, they're spending $4 billion this calendar year alone. The project's going to get built.
Yeah. I mean, not only that they've spent $4 billion, they've ordered 9 LNG carriers. I mean, this will be their third facility. They've got a fourth and fifth they'd like to do. They're ordering 9 LNG carriers. So they've got their own supply they can manage their own supply chain. This is a company with a vision and the determination to be the major player in the LNG space. I was at site Mark and I were at site 3 weeks ago and looking at CP1. CP2's next to it. Fantastic to see a facility of the kind we will build. The one that we will build will be bigger than CP1. I mean, both phase one and phase two of CP2 is 20 million tons a year. It's a massive plant.
Really looking forward to FERC approval being received, at which point the VG will give it FID. And then we'll move to the field. Yeah.
I think, like Venture Global, we are as prepared as we can be. We understand the skill base we need and what we need to do to get ready for that. It's just the approval. We're there.
Hi. It's Mark Busuttil from J.P. Morgan again. Apologies for the slightly off-piste question. But your largest shareholder sold out probably two or three weeks ago. And I know that Worley and Dar Group have had a pretty sort of troubled past. There's been a lot going on. But I was wondering if you have any comments about what they could do about your board composition, governance, way of doing business, and even possibly some comments about maybe what they're seeing that has caused them to sell out given they're in the same sort of industry as you.
Well, the chairman's left. I'm not in a position to answer any questions on board governance and board size. That's a board area. Well, it's clear they put a bid in for Wood. And long may that pursuit continue and hopefully successfully. But that's why they've let down released the sold down. They've made a GBP 2.05 bid for Wood. And when we were at Macquarie conference 2 weeks ago, I was on the stand with John. And on a fireside chatting, John asked me the question. And we'd heard from pretty reliable sources that was in play. But it wasn't our position to say it wasn't official. And I think on the was it with Tiernan? Was it on the Wednesday after or the Thursday after it was released? So yeah. Look, they've released the because we look at the Sidara issue through two strata.
One, as a shareholder, 23.5%, clearly major shareholder. I spoke with them every half year, every full year. Any time in between they want to have a conversation, I would speak with them. Respectful. But from an operational point of view, there was no synergy. Dar brought nothing to Worley. Worley brought a huge amount to Dar or Sidara now. But they brought nothing to us. And so the separation had no impact financially on the business from an operating perspective. And obviously, 100 million shares sold down has had an impact. And we're seeing choppiness in the share price. But that'll work its way out. And you guys know and ladies know this more than me. But that's the reason they sold down.
They had a better place to deploy their capital because it was clear they weren't going to get operationally from Worley what they hoped their 23% would give them.
I'll be very blunt in my answer and say, we talked to them twice a year like we do to you. They were a major shareholder. We talked to them. But we talked to you more than we talked to them. So they didn't know anything that you don't know. In fact, I think you know more than they did. So there was nothing untoward about that other than what Chris has already said. Very mindful of time. We're about a minute off getting your chops around some food. Chris, do you want to say some final words?
Look, we're going to be around. Happy to, we're going to mingle at lunch. Happy to take any questions. We're all available. I want to thank all of you for coming today. I know we've got current investors, some who've been with us a long time, some who'll be more recent, some who may be thinking about joining us. We've got the analyst community here. I want to thank you for your coverage. And we've got our debt investors. And if I've missed anyone, come and let me know. But I just want to thank everyone. I want to recognize this team and Nuala and Larry who are not here today. I'm blessed with what I consider to be - and I say this unabashedly - the strongest leadership team in our industry. And what brings them together is the common thread of values and beliefs.
I know no matter what decision they make, they make it in the interest of the strategic direction we're taking the business and the ambition that we've set out. And what that brings about is a level of collaboration, cooperation, authentic sort of way of working that I think will continue to deliver the kind of outcomes that we've experienced and enjoyed over the last period. By the way, we've 5 reporting periods in a row. We've delivered what we said we're going to deliver. So just end by recognizing the team and Tiernan for everything that you do each day. It's hard. It's hard. But they do a great job. So hats off to these folks.
Thank you.