Good afternoon, everyone, and a warm welcome to the Acerinox Capital Markets Day. My name is Carlos Lora-Tamayo, and I am the Chief Investor Relations and Communication Officer of the group. It is a pleasure to welcome you to this two-day event in Germany. I want to express our gratitude to all investors, analysts, and bankers for your presence here today. We know that it's not easy to be out of the office with these volatile markets that we live in, so thank you very much for your time and your interest in our business. We would, we would also like to thank those of you who are following us via webcast. We are sure we'll make it worth your time. We started High Performance Alloys journey in March 2020, three years ago, with the acquisition of VDM Metals.
Many of you know the stainless steel industry and Acerinox very well, so we will take this opportunity today to give you more color in the HPA market and VDM. In this sense, tomorrow we will have the visit to one of our plants belonging to VDM, the plant in Unna, where we will see the melting production, forged bar finishing, and powder manufacturing facilities, among others. Today, we'll have a full agenda, so I don't want to spend more time in my initial remarks. We just remind you to leave all your questions to the end, in which we have a specific Q&A session. Once again, thank you very much for joining us today here in Düsseldorf. Now, let's get started with our first round of presentations. It is my pleasure to welcome our first speaker, Dr. Niclas Müller, CEO of VDM Metals. Dr.
Müller holds a master's degree in metallurgy from Aachen University in Germany and a PhD from the University of Leoben in Austria. He has worked in the steel industry since 1991, including in various management positions at Thyssenkrupp. He joined VDM Metals as CEO in 2015. Thank you, Dr. Müller, for hosting us on this special occasion. The floor is yours.
Dear bankers, dear investors, dear analysts, dear colleagues, friends, and guests, on behalf of the Board of Directors of Acerinox, I would like to welcome you very warmly, but also in the name of the entire senior management, and of course, of my colleagues of VDM Metals. I would like to welcome you all to Düsseldorf. It is the first Capital Markets Day after 2018, and lots of things changed inside Acerinox. First of all, as mentioned already, the group is having a new member called VDM Metals and representing the newly formed HPA, High Performance Alloys, division. But also in the stainless steel division, lots of things changed.
The Acerinox Group vision statement says we want to become a global supplier that responds, responds to present and future needs with the widest choice of materials, solutions, and services, and placing the customer at the center of our business. Consequently, our intention for this Capital Markets Day today in Düsseldorf and tomorrow at our melt shop in Unna is to, in detail, inform you about the progress that we made in all fields and areas of our company to accomplish our vision. Second, to make a deep dive in the HPA Division to explain to you the success factors of this business model, also in comparison to the stainless steel business model that you know for many, many years. Last but not least, I would like to point out...
We would like to point out why Acerinox became a better company after VDM Metals joined the group, and to prove that Bernardo Velázquez, our CEO, is right if he keeps on saying, "One plus one is more than two." Let me finish my introduction with a few personal remarks. After restructuring VDM Metals on the private equity ownership prior to joining the Acerinox Group, I had been, and I am still, very happy and glad that VDM became a member of the Acerinox Group. Why? Private equity primarily is a short-term to mid-term investor and had been the best owner for the time being, but Acerinox became exactly the right owner, a long-term strategic owner, that VDM needed to further develop. Second, this long-term orientation of Acerinox gives VDM and the whole group organic and inorganic growth opportunities.
And I can tell you, I'm very happy since I joined the Board of Directors meeting yesterday in Madrid, that we discussed a CapEx project that will increase VDM's shipments by more than 10%, and we're very, very positive that we will get the final official approval. I think this is absolutely fantastic and proves it's not only words, but it's facts also. Third, the synergies that we already sustainably realized and that we will more and more generate as we go on, will increase the profitability of both the stainless steel and the HPA Division. To give you a first informational, but also maybe a little bit of a emotional deep dive into the HPA Division, I would like to show you the VDM Metals image trailer. Please enjoy the ride.
Our world is getting ever more complex and challenging. Urbanization of cities and towns is steadily continuing. Global resources are becoming increasingly scarce. Modern technologies place higher demands on materials and service. We challenge ourselves with the goal of pushing the world forward. At VDM Metals, we develop materials that stretch the limits, materials with mechanical and physical properties for use in high-temperature environments and corrosive atmospheres. At VDM Metals, we develop materials for the future: for the chemical process industry, for the oil and gas industry, for aerospace applications, for automotive and electrical engineering applications, and for renewable energy generation, conversion, storage, and use. Our partners place their trust in us, not just for our reliability and customer service, but also for our experience and our innovation. As part of the Acerinox Group, VDM can look back on a history of more than 90 years.
Steady investments in research and development, in equipment, and in people have made us what we are today, the world's leading producer High-Performance Alloys the majority of crucial production steps are performed in-house at our own manufacturing facility. From hot forming to cold forming to customer-specific finishing. Today, we melt more than 100 alloys. Our production range includes nickel and cobalt alloys, as well as high-alloyed special stainless steels. Our technical capabilities and state-of-the-art production equipment allow for the provision of premium products. We have a passion for innovation and ideas. We search for new alloys, for new applications, and for new processes. One of the latest innovations concerns the most physical form of Industry 4.0, additive manufacturing.
A complete powder production facility has been set up at the Unna site, so that we, as a materials specialist in this segment, can open up new paths to innovative products, specifically for our business partners. Materials made by VDM pass particularly stringent quality control. At a very early stage, we established quality assurance as the overriding principle and developed it into an advanced quality management system with in-process checks and inspections. Thus, we are not only experts in manufacturing processes that have been tried and tested for decades, but we also adapt to future-oriented manufacturing methods. When it comes to the production of forgings, bars, plates, strip, wire, or welding consumables for demanding applications, no one can hold a candle to us. We make our customers' challenges our own in terms of efficiency, sustainability, or technical change.
From Toronto to Tokyo, from Milano to Melbourne, we share one vision: to be the first choice for products, services, and solutions in the world of high-performance metallic materials. Join us on our journey.
Thank you, Dr. Müller, for this warm welcome. It's now my great honor to introduce the CEO of Acerinox, Bernardo Velázquez. Bernardo has worked in the stainless steel industry for the last 33 years. Today, he is chairman of North American Stainless, UNESID, and VDM, and vice president, and vice president of World Stainless, in addition to serving on the board of World Steel and Eurofer. He has served as CEO of Acerinox Group for the last 13 years. Without further ado, I give the floor to Bernardo.
Thank you, Carlos. Hello, dear friends, and thank you very much for joining us in this session. It was November 2018 when we announced the integration or the acquisition of VDM in the Acerinox Group, and we tried to explain the main reasons of this incorporation to the group. We spoke about one plus one is more than two, and our cryptical sentence, "The synergies beyond the synergies." Now, it was October 2018 when we celebrated our last Capital Markets Day, and we were willing to show you what is the new Acerinox. Now, what is behind this romantic title of a new way for a new world? Now, what is behind this?
I think it is that we want our wish to show you what is the new strategy of Acerinox. And I'm sure that you are going to enjoy it, and you will understand perfectly today what is behind the reasons of acquiring VDM Metals. Let's start with sustainability. Now, why are we speaking about sustainability? It's not just a trend. There's four reasons to be realistic, to have this realistic approach to sustainability. First of all, because this is the society's decision. Our society has decided to be sustainable. Our society have realized that we need to preserve our planet, and Acerinox cannot do any other thing, have to support the society's decision. But it is also a great opportunity for our material. Stainless steel is the paradigm of the circular economy.
We are producing stainless steel High-Performance Alloys using recycled materials, and we are producing a long-lasting material that is forever recyclable. So this is a great opportunity for us. Third, because it is a great opportunity for the industry, especially for the West, Western world industry, for the stainless steel industry, because we will show that we will get the preference of our customers for offering a more sustainable material, and I think that's something that has to be marketed, you know? I think that sooner or later, you know, our customers, and in general, society, will understand that we will have a premium to be a sustainable company because we are all aligned in this, in the same targets. And finally, because it's an opportunity for Acerinox.
Because, you know, for many years, most of you know us for many years, and you know that we have always had an obsession for competitiveness. And this obsession for competitiveness made us to be the main group in the stainless industry, in stainless steel scrap utilization, in CO2 emissions reduction, because we always wanted to be efficient, and we needed to be efficient. So this is something that is in our DNA. So something that, for us, sustainability is a great opportunity that we will use. Of course, we are getting, you know, thanks to this position, we are getting our awards in EcoVadis Platinum.
We are between the top 1% companies in the world, and we are the best awarded company in the stainless steel industry, and we, of course, have developed two years ago, before our competitors, our call it EcoAcerinox, our premium sustainable stainless steel. Now, remember, and you will have to remember this, this pyramid, because this will give you the reason why Acerinox joined VDM and is integrated this as a part of our group. Because forever, you know, Acerinox, as the cost leader in the world, we're very focused on commodity stainless steel with a lot of distribution and also entering the tailor-made stainless steel, that this is, this is not commodity. Now, we have been developing this area, and we included HPA. That HPA is, most of it going to foreign users, going for projects, and we need to fill this gap.
This pyramid is going to be key in our study because nobody else in the industry can offer the broadest portfolio of products that we can offer: flat products, long products, commodity stainless steel, special tailor-made stainless steel for end users, super stainless steel, super ferritic, super duplex, super austenitic, and of course, HPA. How can we do this? How can we fill the gap between HPAs and stainless—traditional stainless steel? Because together, joining the forces of VDM and Acerinox, we have the most powerful R&D force in the industry, as you will see in the rest of the, of the presentations. So this is important because with this, with this, image, you will understand what is, our, our mission. That is, create solutions. We are not supplying stainless steel. We are not just selling.
You will put the customer on the center of our universe. We are customer-centric. We are changing totally our approach, going to end users, going to projects, going to develop new applications for new customers, for new applications. Now, we will be a supplier solutions, supplying solutions for each application, also contributing to the progress and quality of life of sustainable society, because sustainability is in the center of our strategy. So with this idea, we will become, you know, a solution supplier, the one-stop shop in the stainless steel industry.
Another thing that have changed since the last time that we met, and you know that we have been promoting this idea for many years, is, you know, that the industry is not important, it's key, it's necessary for Europe, and it's necessary for United States. And we have been developing this idea for many years, with more or less success, but we have been participating in the developments of trade measures in Europe, in United States. But something have changed in the vision of the general world. What is happening in the market? First of all, we have been living very interesting times, no?
Because we have suffered disruptions in the supply chains before with the, that vessel, you know, that stopped in the Suez Canal, cutting supplies to Europe for more than 10 days. We have lived COVID as a major disruptions, because it started from the east to the west, and was a continuous stopping of the economies, but later they were opening in different times. No, it was not the same synchronization between Western and East. And what happened with this was a total disruption of the supply chains. Most of the supply chains in the world were broken, and we lived, for example, lack of chips, something that nobody and nobody thought before.
Later, nobody understood, you know, what the United States was doing, putting steel and aluminum in the center of the commercial strategy with Section 232. Now, they understood that they needed to have a kind of a strategic autonomy, that they couldn't depend on imports for strategic materials as steel and stainless steel that is necessary for many things, including defense. And then, the Ukraine war... Sorry, go back. The Ukraine war came to Europe, and we saw how can we cut again or can cause disruptions in the supply chain with the lack of cables from Ukraine, but also with all the sanctions to Russia. Also, another difficulty. So what has happened during all this time?
What has happened is, you know, this a natural movement from purchasing managers of most of the companies trying to diversify. Now, everybody has realized that you cannot have your major suppliers in a distance of more than 20,000 kilometers. Now, you need to have some or important part of your supply close to your industry. Now, this is happening. So we are becoming in a different world, we are becoming or following this trend of this natural purchasing manager. Also, the governments have realized that we need masks, we need breathers, we need so many things that we need to have this, what is called today, the strategic autonomy. And what is this good for us? First of all, you know, because we are local in the main markets of the world.
We are local in United States, we are local and number one in United States, we are local in Europe, and we are the only mill in South Africa. So our customers need us, and we will be in the center of this supply. And also because governments will try to develop more measures, and we are discussing things today that we couldn't imagine several years ago. For example, the Global Arrangement for Sustainable Steel and Aluminum. This is the negotiation between Europe and United States. What is happening there? United States has a very clear view. United States want to have a kind of club of sustainable market economies with no excess of capacity, or is the opposite. They want to put duties to countries that are non-market economies, more polluting factories, and with overcapacity. Put the name to these countries, no?
It's very easy to find out what countries are we speaking about. But this will be an advantage for us because the industry is becoming more local. And what is this good for us? First of all, because we are located in the major markets, and we are local in these markets. Second, because imports are going to go down in most of the markets. So that will include our sales, but not only will include our sales, because if that's happened in most of the industries, also, stainless steel consumption is going to increase in the United States and in Europe. So consumption will go up, imports will go down, so we'll have a more natural competition in these markets, and we expect, you know, our margins to go up.
This is what we are trying to explain, and to let you understand in these presentations. Note that the situation now is better. It's better because the Acerinox Group is better, and it's better because, you know, the world is becoming better for us after a decade, from the year 2000 to 2000... Sorry, from the year 2010 to 2020, where we have been suffering different crises in Europe and in United States, but also at the same time, that China developed consumption from 3% in the year 2000 to 68%, including Indonesia, last year. No? So that will give us the opportunity to have a better market for a better Acerinox.
So I will finish or go back to my presentation, saying: What is the new situation? So we have the past, you know perfectly. We're the cost leader in the industry, and we are always very proud to say that we are the only global company in this industry with four plants in four continents. You will remember this sentence very well. We are number one in United States, number one in cost, global. Then, what are we doing now? The present, of course, we have VDM, number one High-Performance Alloys. we are focused on circular economy and sustainability... but we're looking to the future.
The broadest portfolio of products, customer-centric, making the most of the circular economy sustainable, keeping our excellence in that is something also in our DNA, and taking advantage of the de-globalization. Of course, we will never forget the four pillars of our strategy: added value, going to high added-value products. Excellence, we cannot we have to do everything with excellence, from production to sales, from finance to administration. Everything have to be excellent because in this competitive world, we need to do the best, not only good things. Sustainable, and of course, always supported with a strong finance sheet, as you always know, you know, with a conservative but a good capital allocation, no? And also trying to do the best for our shareholders. Trying to do the best for all our stakeholders, but especially our shareholders.
Remember that we announced, after our shareholder meeting, the idea that we are going to change the remuneration policy, that we are going to move from a fixed 0.6 EUR per share to a fixed EUR 150 million per year. That means that with the share buybacks that we have done during the last year, next year, remuneration is going to go up to 0.62, because we will divide EUR 150 million between a less number of shares. And this is the strategy that we approved in the board, and this is something that we are going to fulfill this year.
So, I hope that during this session, you will agree with us, you will approve our strategy, and you will say with us that Acerinox is in the best shape of the industry or of its life. I wish you... This is how we see Acerinox, and this is how we say that Acerinox is in the best shape of its industry. This is our previous situation that you know perfectly, very competitive. Contribution with HPAs, contribution with synergies between Acerinox and VDM, but also contribution with what we call at that time, synergies beyond the synergies. And also supported by all these things and the de-globalization process. So that's why we think that the best is still to come for the Acerinox Group. So please enjoy the visit, enjoy tomorrow's tour.
We will be open for questions and everything that you need from our side, and our wish is that you will leave these sessions with a better knowledge of the Acerinox Group, and you will even support us more than you are supporting us today. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Bernardo. I would now like to welcome our next speaker, Antonio Gayo, Director of Strategy of Acerinox. Antonio holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Comillas and an MBA from IE Business School. He has been with Acerinox for the last 15 years. Antonio will now share insight on the company's strategy. Antonio, go ahead, please.
Thank you, Carlos, and good evening, everybody. According to our CEO, Bernardo, you've seen that our industry is facing a very challenging... He call it a new way for a new world. During my presentation, I would like to share our vision and how our company is not only ready, but also committed to seize this opportunity. So overcapacity is still one of the main challenges of the industry. Bernardo just mentioned, no? And probably you all know that more, around 70% of the stainless steel production is done in China and Indonesia. Also, all the geopolitical unrest has increased our production cost, especially in labor, energy, inflation, and this is driving us to some difficulties now, or it's a challenge to get access to competitive supplies. Supplies, raw materials, main consumables.
But what I can tell you is that we see more opportunities rather than these challenges. First of all, we're number one leaders in USA through our stainless steel plant, NAS. We are leaders in HPA, and this is giving us the opportunity to access to higher value sectors. Sustainable products is also becoming now an opportunity. Sustainability is in the core of our business. We're starting to see demand in sustainable product, and believe me, that Acerinox is really well positioned to be part of the sustainability path. And also, Bernardo mentioned, and he explained it really, really well, this de-globalization process is a real opportunity for Acerinox. We are number one leaders in our market, and we are very well positioned. So all these opportunities and challenges are well analyzed and tackled through our strategic plan.
Our strategic plan is, centered around four main pillars. The first one, added-value products, and how we are moving our revenue mix into higher-value, products, customers, and sectors. The second one, excellence. Excellence is in the DNA of our company. This is the pillar where we leverage all our activities in order to maintain and to keep and increase the competitiveness of our company. The third one, sustainability, is the core of our business, and we have a very challenging, sustainability plan in order to deliver value to our customers. And the last pillar is the financial strength. I mean, all these actions, all our strategic, activities have to be balanced between our cash generation and our net financial debt ratio. So as you can see, the four main pillars are 100% aligned to deliver value to our all shareholders.
Starting with added value, what does it mean? What we are doing? So we have two lines in parallel. The first one is organic. So we announced last year our investment at NAS to expand our capacity 15% in cold-rolled products, added-value products. We also have a very challenging strategic plans in Acerinox Europa and Columbus to switch and move our production into this gap between commodities and high added-value products. And as Niclas was mentioning at the beginning, we have some challenging plans also for our HPA Division to keep growing. So the combination of all these activities, in the end, give us the opportunity to offer the best solution and the widest portfolio of products. And the second line in parallel is the inorganic growth.
We already have a consolidated platform with Stainless and HPA, and we can enhance and expand our portfolio there. So in summary, all these actions can be summarized in two figures. Our target for the next five years is to move this revenue 8 percentage points, okay, through this pyramid that Bernardo mentioned at the beginning. And we expect, and we are targeting and working, that all this movement represent around 2.5, between 2.5 and 3.5, percentage points of EBITDA margin increase. Excellence. This has been our DNA. This is the main pillar where we focus all our initiatives to be more competitive. Now, in December 2023, is the fifteenth year of our Excellence Plans. To be honest with you, this has been a, I believe, a very successful history of plans.
We've able to deliver more than EUR 100 million through our plans in these 15 years. Now, in 2024, we are making a step forward. We are working, and we are launching our new plan, Beyond Excellence, with. And we're changing our approach. We're coming from a more internal benchmarking and operational efficiency focus, and we are changing it to a more holistic approach to create value in all the areas of the company. The new plan will be supported, and it's 100% aligned with the strategy in six pillars: decarbonization and sustainability, commercial, quality and customer service to serve the added-value product, efficiency, production or productivity and automation, and purchasing. The new plan will be leveraged on a change in the mindset and continuous improvement mentality, and also will leverage on technology and digitalization.
Yesterday was our Board of Directors. I cannot release today, which is the scope of the new plan, but believe me, it's ready to start in January, and very, very soon, we will communicate externally the scope of and the target that we have for this new plan. When talking about sustainability, is the core of our business because we are in the circular economy. We have a very challenging sustainability plan to deliver value to our customers, and out of our this sustainability plan, we see a very huge opportunity on decarbonization. Why? We identify three opportunities there. First one, be sustainable is be efficient. In the end, it's using the minimum resources to produce one ton of stainless steel and HPA, and we are tackling this through our excellent plans, as I just mentioned before.
Second opportunity that we see through the decarbonization is putting all these efforts together to sell a premium product. This is the EcoAcerinox that Bernardo was mentioning at the beginning. And the last is related to this, the globalization. We see that some of the trade measures that are today in place can be changed to environmental measures. And again, we are very well positioned. We are number one in the U.S., we are very well positioned in Europe, and this is clearly an advantage for our sustainability strategy. And our last pillar, which is our financial strength, Miguel will talk about later in detail, okay? But what I want to tell you and is that-...
All the investment and all the projects that we have in our strategic plan are 100% aligned, not only with our long-term vision, but also with the profitability and the value that that creates to our shareholders. So just to give you an example, our last biggest project that was approved last year, the NAS Expansion Plan project, this plan, well, I talked before that we're gonna increase 15% and it's focused on added value. But when you see the numbers, we're targeting around 20%-25% internal rate of return from this, out of this investment, okay? And less than two-year payback from the starting of the operation. So this is just an example that all the projects that we have in our strategic plan has this focus, a clear focus on deliver value to our shareholders.
So just to sum up, capital efficiency is really important because, as you can see, we have to balance all our projects with a very solid balance sheet. Having a solid balance sheet is still one of our main priorities. We need to keep our target, net, net financial debt less than 1.2 through the cycle. So in the end, we have to balance all the projects to keep investment in our assets, maintenance, organic growth, looking for opportunities in inorganic growth, if there are some, okay? And last, and very important, consistent shareholder remuneration. This is the, this is the, the way we are approaching. So this is it. This is what I-- this is the vision that I wanted to, to share with you.
Right now, my colleagues are gonna talk in detail about all and many of these pillars that I just mentioned, but this is how we are approaching our strategy for the next five years. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Antonio. And now, I welcome back to the stage, Dr. Niclas Müller, CEO of VDM Metals, who will provide an in-depth look at High-Performance Alloys. dr. Müller, the floor is yours.
Thanks, Carlos. Well, I hope you enjoyed the pictures that we gave you about VDM. Some of it you're gonna see tomorrow. Let's go through the figures, that's behind the more than 90 years history of VDM Metals. We're having 7 production facilities, 5 of them in Germany, 2 in the United States. We're the only HPA producer in the world that's active producing in 2 of the main markets of the world. We're having 12 subsidiaries, 6 sales offices, 4 service centers in the East, and we're using agents, 18 agents, mainly together with our colleagues from the stainless steel side. Very important that you keep the segments in mind, CPI, chemical process industry, one of our big markets, oil and gas, automotive. E&E stands for electric, electronics, and the aerospace. This is our end markets.
I'll come back to that a little bit later. With more than 40,000 metric tons shipments per year, we by far shipping the biggest volume of all our competitors in the world, and in combination with the CapEx approval that we are very positive about for the future, we will even increase this number significantly. You know our financial numbers from the Q3 call. I don't want to get into details. We are on a good way. We're having around about 2,000 employees, and we're serving 1,700 customers worldwide. What are we doing? We are High-Performance Alloys, and I'm gonna explain to you what it is in detail so that you know that you're having a better picture. But this absolutely is our core competence. Now, what is High-Performance Alloys?
First of all, they are extremely resistant against corrosion. Doesn't matter whether it's acids and alkalis, or/and very resistant against high temperatures. The headline says HPA, HPAs are used if properties of other materials are insufficient. My colleagues from the stainless steel division might excuse me, but we start where stainless stops. That's very simple, and this is what Bernardo Velázquez says. If you look at the pyramid, we are on top. This is high-end material, and I explain to you the difference even further. We do produce materials, very, very important for the aerospace industry, for the electric, electronic industry, that keeps volume stable over a very big variety, over hundreds of degrees. While other materials will contract or expand, this material stays volume stable over 500, 600, 700 degrees.
We can produce materials with a specific magnetic parameters, and the fabricability and the weldability of our material, in general, is very good. Now, I would like to take you on for a bet. I'm betting that all of us was at least using one thing that would not work High-Performance Alloys in the last 24 hours. Let's see.... This is, this is more or less our world, and it's very important. I will talk about the oil and gas industry. It's important for you to understand that whatever is connected with exploration is called upstream. Whatever is connected with transportation from offshore to the first storage onshore is midstream, and everything that's produced from oil or gas further on is called downstream.
It's, it's a little bit important that you keep this in mind, but nevertheless, oil and gas, chemical process industry, petrochemical industry, renewable energy, like, concentrated solar power plants, electrolysis for producing of green hydrogen, application in automotive, in aerospace, but very simple applications also, where I'm confident that most of you was using it today or yesterday. We'll come back to that a little later. Let's get into the oil and gas industry. The oil and gas industry is facing an investment volume of $4.9 trillion until 2030. The peak demand of oil and gas is expected to be happening early in 2035. And especially due to the, due to the pandemic, the big oil and gas companies reduced their investments, and there is a danger of, of a lack of oil supply.
So we're looking at yearly investments of roughly $650 billion in exploration in the next couple of years. How can we contribute? On the right-hand side, you see what I call upstream. This is material that's directly in contact with the media being explored from the subsea, oil or gas. And these medias, because they can't be treated, they're natural products, they can be, and very often are, very corrosive. Extremely corrosive, sometimes warm. So everything that's happening down there, like pump shafts, like fuel supply lines, everything is made out of High-Performance Alloys.
As the media gets transported to the platform, from the platform, it has to be transported to the first storage, and still there is no treatment possible of this oil or that gas, so it has to be transported in an environment that is resistant against corrosion. What you see here, and I'm gonna show it to you, to you tomorrow, is a so-called cladded pipe. Because of our material being based on nickel, I'll show you the difference a little later, our material is extremely expensive. So it would be impossible. It is possible, but it would be not economical to make a pipeline out of HPA material. So this is why the industry invented so-called cladded pipes. It's a carbon steel pipe where there is an inside protection layer made of our material.
These pipelines are part of a $3 billion or $2 billion infrastructure investment that the oil and gas companies do, because they will not move this pipeline. Wherever this platform is, the pipeline will be not relocated, but it lasts for kilometers from the platform offshore, then onshore to the first storage area. This is one of the very, very big markets. While the right-hand side is more round materials, this material to clad pipes in general is either strip or plates. Chemical process industry, I think it's easy to imagine that wherever acids, aggressive materials has to be produced, stored, you need vessels, heat exchangers, that that can stand this very aggressive corrosion atmosphere. We also call fuel cells, stationary or moving fuel cells, or even application for geothermal energy, is also with us in chemical process industry.
Filter systems, heat exchangers, desulfurization facilities and power plants, all these things that are happening in a very corrosive atmosphere are these kind of inside the chemical process industry. Once again, we're serving the whole way from, as I said, upstream, midstream, downstream for chemical, petrochemical and chemical plants. Well, I never saw that kind of airplane, but one of the biggest markets is the aerospace market. No turbine-driven airplane in the world functions without HPA material, because whatever happens after the combustion chamber of a turbine, of course, is very hot, is very corrosive, and can only be handled by this kind of material. I mean, everybody was flying. Let's take an A320.
Everything that you see from a turbine, from row number 15 on, so whatever is in the back of the turbine, all of this is HPA. HPA is nickel-based alloys, because it's hot, it is corrosion intensive, and has to be very strong against heat and corrosion. The increase of individual mobility and at the same time the downsizing of engines in terms to reduce the negative impact of driving a car, both are trends, megatrends, that is helping our material. Because downsizing of engine means increase of pressure, means increase of temperature, and where in the past stainless steel was working, now the industry needs HPA material. We're producing material for sealing discs for turbochargers. We're producing material for anodes and cathodes, for spark plugs, for exhaust system, foils for catalytic converters, elbows, lambda probes, valve rods, fuel injectors.
So the automotive industry, with roughly 50% of our sales, still is an important customer and customer market. But we're having very simple applications, and this is why I was so convinced in the beginning that everybody was using this material. I mean, I was using a hairdryer. If you put normal steel or stainless steel inside a hairdryer and you switch it on, you're gonna have fun for a couple of minutes, then this wire will be gone, because the oxygen from the air will burn the iron. HPA material resists this temperature. I was eating a toast this morning. It was quite nice. A toaster, same principle than a hairdryer, will not work without HPA material. So there is, as you can see, various applications, so I think I am winning my bet. I personally came with an airplane from Madrid last night, HPA.
I came with a car here, HPA. I've used a hairdryer and a toaster, four times, and the gasoline in the car and in the airplane still has to be explored with the help of HPA material. So it is invisible, but nothing, nearly nothing works without it. Bernardo Velázquez already showed this pyramid, but one of the big differences is the size of the market. The stainless steel market is roughly 46,000,000 tonnes of stainless steel in the world. The nickel-based alloy market is only 360 tonnes worldwide. So this is only 0.8% of the stainless steel market. In this nickel-based alloy market, we can say we for 7 years number one, and we will remain number one for a long time.
Because it is a clear declaration of our shareholders and the Board of Directors to strengthen the HPA Division for many, many reasons. I will come back to that a little later. Now, let's talk a lot about... a little bit about material. Why is this material so expensive? If you today go to Thyssenkrupp, because unfortunately you don't find it with Acerinox, and buy a cold-rolled carbon steel, you will pay around about 1,000 EUR per tonne. If you go to Acerinox, I mean, I don't want to have any price negotiations here, but you're going to buy cold-rolled stainless steel material, around about you will pay 2,600 EUR per tonne. Here, you're having 98% of iron. In the stainless steel, you will have around about 70% of the metals will be iron.
HPA, you will have 62% in a typical alloy, 65, 62% nickel. You will have 21% chrome, while in stainless it's 18% chrome and 10% nickel, and then you will have another portion of 10% molybdenum, which is even more expensive than nickel. So a ton of cold-rolled material with us, you will unfortunately not get for less than EUR 30,000. And if you come back to cladded pipes, you can imagine that it makes lots of sense to take a pipe from carbon steel and try to protect it from the inside, High-Performance Alloys, instead of making the whole pipe out of that very expensive material.
It is not very clear, I have to be honest, but it is a fact that one of the big differences, which is a benefit for the Acerinox Group, is the different cycles that we're looking at between the stainless steel and the HPA. I want to point out to you what happened in COVID. The moment the pandemic started, the stainless steel market in Europe, we're talking about Europe here, was dramatically going down while our sales was going up. I know that there were, very shortly after the acquisition of VDM, that some of my colleagues in the Acerinox thought, "No, the pandemic will not touch VDM. They, they're going strong." Why was it like this in this case? Because we had a very full order book. Sometimes we're having a visibility of one year, sometimes even more.
So in this period, our order book was full. The orders did not come, but we had a big order book that we could work on, and while stainless steel very quickly came up, we only went down then because our order book was finished, and we did not gain enough orders. But as you also know, the stainless steel market in Europe at the moment is not in the best condition, while the HPA market for the last 1.5 years is in a very good condition. And this makes Acerinox a better company of joining, of VDM joining, because we reduce the fluctuation and the volatility of the business. And this, I think it's very easy to see, is a very positive impact of VDM joining the Acerinox Group. Now, what is the main success factors?
Bernardo already said we are having a very strong R&D team. The combination of HPA and stainless steel R&D makes us a very, very strong innovation leader. VDM is the leader of having the strongest track record of patents in our industry, and the combination between the stainless and the HPA Division is making us even stronger. R&D with us works always in a triangle. It's our own R&D department, it's our customers, and it is a university out of a big network that VDM is having in Europe and United States. Another very big difference between stainless and HPA is that sales for us is, in general, application engineering. We are sitting together, our engineers are sitting together with our customers, discussing what is the best application for the customer's need.
95% of our orders are only melted the moment that orders are in-house, and this is very, very important and quite a big difference. We are very, very close to our customer. The end customer business is by far the majority of our customer base in comparison to the distributors. And last but not least, we're having service centers all over the world to try to be as close to our customers, even in markets where we don't produce, like in Asia or in Australia. I think it's very good that this is a blue world map, because at the end of the day, this shows the common sales network of the stainless steel and the HPA Division. Consequently, after the acquisition of VDM and part of the post-merger integration was to integrate our sales network.
Wherever the stainless steel colleagues were more present, we moved in with them, and wherever we were more present, the stainless steel colleagues moved in with us. So wherever I go in the world, I meet stainless steel colleagues and HPA colleagues, and this, of course, is increasing the synergies between the two divisions. You can see here, if we look into the future, the possible sustainability related and climate friendly applications that open multiple additional growth opportunities. Not only them, but more and more. Of course, as we move into, try and move into a more sustainable world. And I would like to give you, to my mind, the best example why one plus one is more than two, and that's related to the production of green hydrogen.
The green hydrogen engineering business, and I had been in the engineering business, I know that need wide coils from our material. Wide coils from strip is material that's round about 1 meter 20 broad. HPA Division is limited to 750 millimeters. So in the past, we could melt it, but not process it. And the stainless steel colleagues, they could process it, but they can't melt it. We signed a contract, a big contract, with one of the leading engineering companies for hydrogen electrolysis in the world.
Two-year contract of roughly 10% of the total shipment of VDM in a nickel grade, where we, using our melting facilities in Unna, that you're gonna visit tomorrow, to melt the material, we transport it down to Algeciras, and our friends and colleagues in Algeciras are processing it to cold rolled strip, wide strip. So we, together as a group, could enter a market that was not accessible for the stainless steel or the HPA Division before the merger of VDM into Acerinox. I think this is one of the best examples how we as a group can contribute to green energy and how one plus one makes more than two. Sustainability for us is self-evident. Nevertheless, we're increasing our approach.
You're gonna see tomorrow, I'll point it out to you, that we changed our whole—nearly our whole forklift fleet into electrical forklifts. The value of our material makes recycling, as you see here, very, very self-evident. We are trying to do everything to get every gram and kilogram of material back to recycle it. So sustainability is one of our big approaches in the future, and with this, we are in line with the Acerinox Group. Let's talk a little bit, a little bit about facts and figures. I am sure, and I know, that in the HPA world, we are the company with the broadest variety of products, end markets, and regions. And the price for this simply is complexity. I think VDM is the most complex company in the HPA world on the one side.
But if, like in the beginning of the pandemic, the oil and gas industry and the aerospace industry collapse, we're still carrying on being profitable. Our competitors are getting down to utilization rates below 10% because they're only serving these two industries. And this is, I think, makes us, makes us a very strong situation. You can see here that plate and strip, so the flat products, are making roughly two-thirds of our, of, of our product portfolio, while the HPA market worldwide is exactly the other way around. The market is two-thirds round and one-third flat. So we are by far world market leader on the flat product side. I mentioned already, we serve the oil and gas industry, the chemical process industry, automotive, E&E.
The biggest markets that we are in, as you can see here, but that changes year by year between CPI and oil and gas, is again, around about 2/3 is CPI and oil and gas. The rest is automotive, aerospace, and electrical and electronic. To give you one example where a very important alloy is working for a big variety of application, is the OLED technology. Everybody, I think, knows about the latest television technology. The crystal mass that you need for this kind of technology is getting casted into frames out of HPA material because this material stays, as I said, volume constant over hundreds of degrees.
So, as the crystal mass gets hot, it fits into the frames by 0.01 millimeters, like a percentage of a millimeter, and that's very important for this kind of product. But it's getting used also in the aerospace industry because these big plates getting used to form as to produce molds out of it, because the carbon composite materials that's used to produce wings and parts of the airplane will be baked in these molds, and these molds will not change the dimension, and this makes sure that the wing will fit to the body of the airplane.
If you go to regions, of course, Europe is the biggest region for us, but keep in mind, plated pipes, cladded pipes will be produced in Europe with our customers, but they will be sent in the world. So it's more international market. We sometimes don't even know where our products end, but the customers, the majority of our customers consequently are in Europe, then in Asia, and only then in North America. Important for you might be to know that there is three big markets for HPA material in the world. It is Asia, majority China, but also Japan, Korea, and countries like industrial countries, North America and Europe. This is the most important markets for HPA, not South America at that stage. Let's talk a little bit about health and safety.
VDM is the seventh company that I'm serving as a CEO in 24 years, and the first thing I always did, I implemented a health and safety program, because the reason is that 80% of all the accidents are behavior-driven. And I believe that if you can successfully work on the behavior of your employees, you can reach ways more than only health and safety. Health and safety is a company cultural aspect, and company culture is very, very important because I am 100% convinced that you only need market and leadership as part of a good company culture to manage or even restructure a business. And this is why we invested a lot into leadership culture, into company culture. We got awarded the St. Gallen Leadership Award in 2021 against Munich Re, against Daimler, against Porsche, Lufthansa.
Consequently, only two weeks ago, we got certified by Great Place to Work as one of the top 500 employers in Germany. Why is this important for us? Because you know that in Germany, we are right in the middle of the war for talent. We need qualified people to secure our future, and we're working with this certificate on all the recruiting platforms that we're using to be the most attractive or one of the most attractive companies for qualified people to come and work for. We're educating our own people, but we're not getting enough people out of our own qualification center, so we need people from the market, and we have to be attractive to them to rather come to us, as we are certified to be a great place to work, than they move next door.
We created a culture of change, which was important for the things that we changed inside VDM in the past, but we will change in the future as well. One of the most important things is, of course, net working capital, net financial debt, and you can see here what, what we achieved as we started. This is our relevant order book. We needed three times more inventories than we needed, than we had relevant orders. Today, as the relevant order book increased, as our volumes increased, we not need much more than we needed before. So we're using our inventories ways more efficient and therefore could reduce our net financial debt and our inventory level, our inventory level and net financial debt. What you also can see here is, this is now once again COVID.
Of course, the relevant order book decreased, and automatically, because of our inventory management system, we decreased our inventories and released cash, and I think Miguel at that stage was very happy about the cash providing of VDM. At the end of the day, it's all about profit and cash. I don't have to comment that chart on the left-hand side, but I just want to point out, and I'm very happy about it, that the best years that VDM had so far was under Acerinox's flag, and I think more message you don't need. And this is why I said in the very beginning, I'm very happy that we are an integrated part of the Acerinox group.
Looking at the order book, after our sales push that we initiated beginning of 2018, the order book, except for the COVID years, constantly increased. And this is a little bit of a slight outlook into the future. I think we're on a good track, and I think, and I'm convinced, I know, that we will have another fairly good year in front of us. VDM Metals' vision is very much in line with Acerinox's one. As you can see, we strengthen our position as globally the most attractive provider solution products and services in the world High-Performance Alloys year by year. That makes lots of sense, and how do we want to achieve this in the future? How do we want to get there even further than we had been so far?
I mean, one plus one is more than two. You will hear even more today. That's, that's one of the things. Expand market leadership through developing markets. I gave you a good example how we develop the white goods market in cooperation between the stainless steel and the HPA Division, and there's lots to come. So this is, this is how we want to grow, even in new markets that we could not serve in the past. Maintain innovation leadership, very, very important. Our customers are relying on this. Our customers are asking us for new alloys because temperatures in cars are increasing. Turbocharger producers can't live with the material that we supplied them in the past because temperatures and applications are getting higher and higher. We have to be innovative, and we will.
Even, and even better in combination with our colleagues from the standard start. Sustainability is very clear. We're going to carry on, that, on, on that path. I think I'm losing my microphone here. Digital transformation is one of the, one of the very, very important things for everybody that is in, in business, today. I think, and I mentioned that to be employer of choice, especially in Germany, is one of the critical success, success factors for companies that want, wants to, wants to play an important role in the future. Because getting qualified people that secure our future is one of the most important things that we have to, make sure of. Strengthen our competitiveness, cost management, inventory management, efficiencies. Continuous improvement is, of course, self-evident, but has to be on the schedule for our everyday business.
Last but not least, there is a consistent company and group strategy in place, and it is up to us to consistently implement that strategy. Part of the growth package that we introduced to the Board of Directors yesterday is part exactly of that strategy. This is the outside-in look from SMR. We are in a growing industry, so it is important that we accompany our customers. They need more of our material. We must be more present in our markets. We must be loyal to our customers, and this is why it is important to be member of a group that clearly declared the growth in HPA as one of the growing pillars, and this is exactly what Acerinox announced, and Bernardo repeated today again. Let me summarize what I said.
We are HPA leader in the high-performance alloy market of very high, sophisticated, high-end products. We participating in growing markets and following world's mega trends, lately, and even more and more, the sustainable production of energy for this world. We are acting sustainable, environmental, social, and in an economic sense. We want to promote the ideas and empower our employees and make them part of our success, because this is the most valuable part of our business. The nickel alloy market remains... the outlook remains positive, and that's good. The strategic management approach allows for further sustainable and profitable growth, so we are in good shape to design the future. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dr. Müller. I'm pleased to introduce now our next speaker, VDM Metals Vice President of Research and Development, Helena Alves. Helena joined VDM Metals in 2001, bringing great passion for materials and future technologies. She has spent her first five years at the company in materials development and technical customer support, and another 12 years managing sales. Since 2018, she has served as the company's Senior Vice President of Research and Development, leading innovation from idea generation to development and launch of new materials. Helena, the floor is yours.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to bring you now the R&D view on stainless steel and HPA, the materials of the future. This is the agenda for now, the R&D organization and the way we work together in the group, the innovation process and examples of those innovations, and a way forward. Let me start with the way the R&D is organized. We have two groups, for the stainless steel and for the HPA, and these R&D groups are overseen by a global innovation committee who is formed by our CEOs of the group, our COO, our strategy and Acerinox director, and the responsible for the R&D in both sides. So this global innovation committee oversees the activities, gives the strategy, gives the resources, and aligns the targets.
On the stainless steel side, we have different areas: the product development, the process development, also the corrosion area, and the new circular valorization, the sustainable aspect, supported by an innovation team. On the HPA side, there is material development. There is a team for integrated computational materials engineering, which is use of simulation, use of artificial intelligence tools. There is a group for welding, technological service center, competence center welding, and there is a group for the new part of the team, the powder for additive manufacturing, and all this, again, supported by innovation and knowledge management. So our R&D strategy goes along three strategic lines: the development of new materials, and this for traditional markets, for traditional applications, but for the future applications as well.
The process development, so we are pursuing process innovation across the whole group in order to improve costs, productivity, and quality, not only, but also to develop and implement new process for future technologies. The sustainability pillar to push for new circular raw materials and new sustainable product lines. So how do we work together? The stainless steel core competence lies on the process efficiency, and this is backed by a premium laboratory services. On the other side, the HPA core competence lies on the material development, the development of new materials with unique selling points. So together, we complement, and we can generate holistic projects that position our group in both areas.
You heard already a few times these three groups of materials that we consider: the stainless, the special stainless steels with more added value, and High-Performance Alloys, and this is exactly our approach. The approach of the R&D is to develop from the stainless steels via special stainless steel grades to the High-Performance Alloys in the group, we cover and we research in all areas of customer needs. And that is also why one, two plus one is more than two. Yes, the HPA is a clear leader in innovative portfolio. We are leading on material patents well above our nickel alloy competitors, as you can see in this chart. Now let's have a closer look in the development process.
We, in our business, the development times and the qualification times, they are quite long, and this relates very well with the long product, expected life. So the life of the components where our materials are used, they are expected to have long lifetimes. And for example, development times and qualification times in the chemical process industry, CPI, as you heard, can be five or more years. If we go to the oil and gas, it is 10 years is usual, and if you go to aerospace, it's even more than 10 years. So how to cope with this? This is a big challenge because at Acerinox, we have to anticipate today, the materials that we'll be need in 10 or more years. How to do this? Well, we do this together with our customers, and best-in-class universities. And this is triangle that Dr.
Müller has just mentioned. It's a kind of magic triangle, and this is R&D, applied R&D. And yes, we have a very strong network with customers and with universities. Okay, innovation does not happen by accident. It is a decision, and the group has an implemented process for innovation, where the ideas coming from different sources, for example, our ideas, the customers, the market, associations, universities, the conference that we visit, our research, and the mega trends, they are put in an idea database. They are transferred into an idea database, and they are evaluated in a stage gate process, and the most promising ideas, the most promising projects, go into realization, to develop new innovations and new products. And this works like a funnel.
Yes, and now I would like to explain to you the top of this funnel, the Acerinox workshops for the future. So when trends and when customer needs become visible, when technologies become visible, then it's relatively easy to develop an idea, to start a project, to have a development for that technology, for that trend. But remember the development times that I showed you in the last slide; we have to start, due to these long development times, we have to start well before market maturity to start the right projects and to start the right developments. So how to do this, since the future it is unknown? So how to get today resilient insights about which technologies we'll establish, and which materials from Acerinox will be required for that technologies in the future, and the future, let's say it's T-10 or more years?
Well, for that, we have implemented a workshop methodology in order to, in a regular basis, and at group level, to evaluate these megatrends and to generate the new ideas for the more long-term future topics at the group and with customers. So this consists of about five steps. The first step is the common vision, the future thought. Then we have a step of giving training on the tools, on the methods. The step three is the analysis of the current trends, megatrends, and we pick each time, each cycle, we pick one. Then we go into a long research phase, which is necessary to identify the challenge, let's say, to identify the unsolved problems. And always, unsolved problems are opportunities for innovation. And finally, and this research phase can go, or it goes over several months.
Then we have this, the last step, where we bring the future scenarios, the ideas, possible ideas to solve the identified problems, and then we feed these ideas into the idea database , and we process them in the funnel of innovation process. The current cycle has just been launched last month, and it is about the energy of the future. So let's talk about the energy of the future. What I'm showing you here, this chart, is there are the most or important technologies for the energy transition and for the decarbonization. You don't need to understand this. I'm not going to explain it in detail. My message here is Acerinox materials are already in all of these technologies, in all of these process streams.
So many of these technologies are still future music, but our materials already qualified and developed for those technologies is reality, is already today. Good, and that being said, let me show you two examples. One is in the area of electrolysis for the production of green hydrogen, and the second is in the area of the synthesis of green fuels. Okay, you heard Dr. Müller explaining the production of green hydrogen out of water using the alkaline process, the alkaline cell. This consumes a lot of Nickel 201, high-purity nickel, but there is another process to produce green hydrogen out of water using renewable energies at high temperature, and this is the so-called solid oxide electrolyzer cell. The advantage of this process is the efficiency.
It has an efficiency, a conversion, and a energy efficiency of about 80%, while the alkaline cell is something like 65%. And the other aspect is that this technology is reversible, so you can operate the cell, or you can operate the process in the other way around. From the hydrogen, with the oxygen from the air, one can produce electricity in the so-called solid oxide fuel cell. And now, remember the magic triangle? And VDM, HPA Division R&D, has developed two materials for the interconnector plates of those cells. This was developed together with the research center in Jülich and with trend-setting customers for these technologies. They are called Crofer 22 APU and Crofer 22 H. So these materials are today a proven concept. They increase the efficiency of the cell, they decrease the degradation of the same cell, therefore, cost reduction and a improved environmental impact.
So second example, second deep dive, is in the production of environmentally friendly fuels and chemicals, e-fuels, and this is called the synthesis. So very simply, this is in a high temperature co-electrolysis, out of water and the CO2 from the atmosphere, together by using renewable energy sources, we can produce syngas. And syngas is a mixture of H2 and carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, in different ratios, and this is a fuel. This can be used as a fuel. To do so, one has to cool down the gas in order that it can be processed into methanol, ethanol, naphtha. And while cooling the gas, in this phase, a very aggressive kind of corrosion can occur, and this is called metal dusting. And metal dusting, as you see, destroys the material, the metal, into metal dust.
So to cope with this, of course, if you cannot operate in these areas, you are cutting your efficiency of the process. So together with end customers and engineering companies that were facing this problem many, many years, we have developed 3 new materials that are resistant to this metal dusting corrosion type. This is 602 CA, this is 602 MCA, and the newest one, 699 XA. And in particular, the newest one, 699 XA, is a real game changer for resistant into metal dusting. So it's a real game changer for an efficient cooling of this syngas. And of course, this is really money for the customers because they can operate with higher efficiency. They can run their processes with higher efficiency. Good.
Lower maintenance as well, so cost reduction and improved environmental impact, and for VDM, this is potential, and this is high value material. So two examples on material development, but innovation in our business is not only material development, new materials. And this is one example that is in, right in the middle of Madrid. So this is an example... Other kinds of innovation can be new functions or new properties, new surface on very normal, conventional grades. So in the very middle of Madrid, the Real Madrid stadium is being covered with a Acerinox stainless steel. So the challenge here, this is the inner skin and the outer skin. So the challenge here is that this stainless steel typically is a very reflective material.
So, and this, in such an urban environment, as you can see here, this can really cause problems. So the colleagues and friends of the stainless steel R&D division, they have tailored this property to get a exactly suitable specular reflectance for this application, for this building, and the patent is under progress. Okay, my last slide. Ladies and gentlemen, the R&D teams at our group, they are committed to develop new grades and products with higher added value. They are committed to find new applications for our materials with higher margins. We are committed, as already heard today, to maintain innovation leadership, to strengthen our customer and our university partner, our academia partner network. And this is very important: we are committed to speed up these long development cycles by using computational and new artificial intelligent tools.
We are committed to explore the future and to develop, in time, the materials that will be used in several years, in particular, in these times where the technology change is very dynamic. And this to do this ahead of the competition so that we can secure our blue market, blue ocean market. We are committed to find new synergies and to start common projects where one plus one is more than two, and of course, sustainability as well. So, ladies and gentlemens, believe me, the current and the future new technologies, they will not be mastered, they cannot be mastered without our stainless steels and our high performance alloys.
You have heard today several times that 1 + 1 is greater than 2, and I, as the head of the R&D department, I would go further, and I would claim and say that if you take in consideration the involvement that we have with our, our customers, I would say that 1 + 1 + 1 is more than 3. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you. Thank you, Helena. I'm pleased to welcome now Acerinox Chief Operating Officer, Hans Helmrich . Hans holds a degree in Business Administration and Management, and a master's degree from IE Business School. Since 2020, he has served as COO of the Acerinox Group. Previously, he was Chief Global Manufacturing Officer at Cooper Standard Automotive in the USA, and Group Director of Research, Development, and Innovation at Saica. Hans will address the group's approach to achieving excellence in all plants. Hans, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Carlos. It's a great pleasure being here with you this afternoon, and trying to bring forward how we see excellence, and how it provides value to all our shareholders. So let me, first of all, start by making a connection between excellence and our mission, vision, and values. We've talked a lot about how it important is excellence, but really, it's in the core of everything we do, from getting an order to delivering an order to a customer and everything in between. And that's what we consider that it's a core element of our DNA, day by day in the company. So as mentioned before by Bernardo and Niclas, being a customer-centric organization provides a lot of value to everything we do.
We have the best global footprint around the world, as was mentioned in the industry. It's a differentiating factor, allowing us to getting a product from stainless steel High-Performance Alloys, everywhere in the world. Our footprint provides the ability to serve our customers through our direct customers, through our distributors, and evidently with the extended footprint we have with service centers, providing the best service to our customers. So really, the focus goes around quality, service, and delivery excellence. Going back to the product side, from a product portfolio perspective, we do have the best and widest product portfolio in the world, as Bernardo, Niclas, and Helena explained to all of you.
We can develop and deliver solutions to any customer around the world, from the very basic applications as the most complex ones that you have seen in the last two presentations. Focus on quality in the widest sense, not only the product quality, but the service, the delivery, makes a big difference to all our customers. As you can recall, we were the first ones introducing the sustainable stainless steel and called as EcoAcerinox, we will cover later in our presentations. So what are the main contributors to excellence in Acerinox? There has been a significant transformation in the last years from a product perspective, the creation of High-Performance Alloys division, to significant changes in how we do things. It's really all about the how, more than the what.
All this to provide sound, operational and financial results. To do so, what we need is to build a culture of continuous improvement, where we challenge always the status quo in what we do, where complacency doesn't exist in the things we do. We embrace challenge and change every day. We continuously do an internal and external benchmarking in the different factories, but as well with external peers. Live a culture exchanging of best business practices throughout all the facilities around the world. We use technology and digitalization not as a goal, but really as a tool to improve what we do, and I will show you a few examples later on. We take very good care of our people, understanding that skill and talent requires a continuous development in everything we do.
So in the next pages, I will try to cover a few of those examples and that deliver greater returns for our shareholders. In Acerinox, we view excellence through the whole organization, from the shop floor to the boardroom, providing returns to all stakeholders, from employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. Our focus in excellence allows you to drive through the cycles of this difficult industry in providing results that you have seen the best in the peers industry for this 2023 and the last two years. Let me give you a couple of examples from how we approach things. You all know Columbus Stainless, our facility in South Africa, and the only manufacturer of stainless steel in the whole continent of Africa.
Local and global market changes have made us reconsider the way we Columbus should be a part of the group and have an important place going forward. Therefore, initiative was started on how we could maximize the assets we have in Columbus and deliver the best return for those assets. Columbus became the most flexible plant in the industry by doing so. Originally designed only for stainless steel, but thanks to the efforts from one of the best teams in the group and in the industry, we identify a local market opportunity with the growth and improvement of the local infrastructure activities, and we managed to change the way we worked. Without any additional investments in the factory, the team managed to develop and produce and sell added-value carbon steel. We call it mild steel with, between us.
Now we see it is ready to support the growth in Africa, South Africa, and across the world. Not only that, the plant has been working heavily to further support the growth High-Performance Alloys division, and being able to produce as well some of the high-performance grades from there if needed. Let me give you another example now on what you have heard, which is the improvement that we're going to be making in North America. So you are well aware of this investment that was mentioned before, $244 million. We are the number one manufacturer in North America and the supplier of most profitable market in North America. Our facility is the most advanced. Not only we say that, our customers and competitors also consider that this is the best state-of-the-art facility in the industry.
This could have made us very happy, and sooner or later, our complacency would have kill us. So by doing and looking into what we do, we decided to eliminate that complacency from what we do and support the growth of the local market in the future, improve our product offering, and provide a better operational and financial results to our shareholders. Through continuous improvement activities and no investments, the team managed to increase our output in our hot rolling mill by more than 15%-20%. And going beyond the equipment design capacity, which was not designed to do so. So we managed to change what the manufacturers of those equipments considered was the optimum and more achievable, and we did go beyond that.
When we had proven that we could sustain this level of performance, we saw the opportunity of improving the total output of the factory and trying to rebalance the factory in its whole. So with just $250 million, and the best return, returns, as Tony explained before, we remain, and we will remain the number one manufacturer in the North American market. We will support the growth from all of our customers and the Acerinox Group while supporting all the industries in the local market. As you can see in the right-hand side of this slide, we created a digital twin of our factory. So the use of the digital tools that I mentioned before, intelligent artificial intelligence, are allowing us to de-bottleneck those areas in the factory that couldn't provide the output that's needed.
An intended increase of 200,000 tons, as was declared, was achievable throughout the whole process. This also shows a great collaboration, not only of the use of those tools, but as well the collaboration with our suppliers and peers to deliver the best returns that we could do. As you have seen, probably the best returns that the industry can deliver in the market with a very low investment for that return. We're looking into the near future and thinking, what else can we do? The need to focus for improvement in our returns, equipment yields, maintenance costs, and quality are on the front line. These are the key elements that we need to look into the future to improve our performance.
So we see this opportunity and have understood it became a priority for us and have set global teams to work on those topics in a coordinated way with the use of external and great expertise as well, and the newest technology tools to help us improve in this area. All our plants are engaged in this initiative throughout the whole group, using those expertise that we have in different areas and part of the business, allowing us to provide some good results in the future. We understand our customer expectations are changing. I think that was also very well covered by Niclas in the way we see those expectations growing in the future even more than today. We need to remain laser-focused in what we do and becoming the supplier of choice for all of our customers.
Increasing our presence in high performance and high added-value grades requires a stable and predictable quality, so we have to go beyond that. Predictive quality is much more than just linked to maintenance only. In this and other industries, we understand that there is a correlation between the performance of the equipment and the quality of the products. With experience from our teams and the use of digitization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensing, we are starting to see very promising results, which will, due to confidentiality, I cannot share with you today, but will be sharing with you in the future on how much they will be providing.
You can imagine, and you can understand that those efforts will lead to lower maintenance costs, equipment reliability, equipment yields, OEE improvement, production scrap reduction, lower logistics costs, higher capacity availability for future growth at no cost of capital, better on-time delivery, lower non-quality costs. In summary, lower costs, higher EBITDA, and higher returns for our shareholders. A good example of this is, as I explained before, are the improvements done in NAS, in our hot rolling process, which it has been proven to be very successful in all those things. This initiative is a key contributor to our future Excellence Plans, which were mentioned by Tony previously.
So we will be able, at the end, to have a good monitoring system throughout all of our facilities on what problems are going to come, not the ones that are happening today, which is the traditional way of looking into these things, but what are the things that are going to happen in the future and how we can prevent those from happening, as I said, improving our performance. So, and last but not least, a very short introduction to what Carlos is going to mention in a, in a few minutes from now, which is our sustainable product. Bernardo mentioned we were the first ones in July 2021 to introduce what we call at that time, the sustainable stainless... now called EcoAcerinox, which is really a game changer for the future.
It's really a special product which will deliver the expectations to our customers in terms of sustainable products for the customers, for the end users. EcoAcerinox will be focused on maximizing the use of scrap, as was also mentioned before, dedicated routing in our factories to reduce the consumption of energy, which we believe as well in the case of Spain, we are in a unique position to launch this product because we have the real green energy, like solar, wind, and hydro. We can expect the lowest Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions in the industry by doing so in the way we are doing. So thank you very much, and open later for questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Hans. Before taking the coffee break, I'm very happy to introduce our next two speakers, Carlos Ruiz and Denisa Pufeh. Carlos holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid, and complemented the Management Development Program at the Spanish School for Industrial Organization and Open Innovation Program at Deusto Business School. He currently serves as Chief Sustainability Officer of the Acerinox Group. Denisa is an executive with more than 30 years of international experience in the automotive and civil explosive industries. She has been the Acerinox Group Global Director of Indirect Purchasing since the year 2022. I now welcome Carlos and Denisa to the stage, please.
Good afternoon. My name is Carlos Ruiz. I am the Chief Sustainability Officer at Acerinox, and I want to share with you what is our approach in terms of sustainability. Sustainability is our nature, and I wanted to introduce this concept with a little video that is going to explain a little more information regarding our product, stainless steel and high-performance alloy.
The dome of this building is covered in stainless steel. For more than 90 years, it has withstood violent storms, freezing cold, boiling heat, pollution. But even so, many more years will need to pass before it begins to deteriorate. So many that we don't even know how long that will be. What we do know, however, is that the day it no longer serves its purpose, it will not become waste, but a host of other things. Perhaps one day, this same stainless steel, recycled hundreds of times, will again be a dome or maybe a tunnel or a bridge. You see, the raw material behind Acerinox does not come from here, or here, or here. It comes from here. Over 90% of our raw material is recycled, basically from scrap metal, a valuable raw material.
What's more, in recent years, we have managed to drastically reduce the energy required for its smelting. Thanks to a process of reconversion and transformation, the very same stainless steel that gave life to domes, tunnels, and bridges is once again forming resistant and long-lasting structures, yet without losing any of its properties, quality, or resistance. This sustainable production model is called the circular economy. In other words, Acerinox offers a clean, durable, and infinitely recyclable product, one that is capable of improving people's quality of life while minimizing the impact on the environment. Not only is our product a model of the circular economy, but also an essential asset in driving energy transition and a key material in the creation of a sustainable future. Nevertheless, at Acerinox, we are not happy.
We continue to take firm steps towards a more sustainable product, thanks to a more meticulous traceability in all our processes and the implementation of advances in a production process that progressively reduces CO2 emissions and uses more and more clean energy. This is how we'll forge and manufacture stainless steel High-Performance Alloys for many years to come, adding value to the circular economy of our customers and suppliers while respecting the limits of the planet.
So, as you can see in the video and also in the previous presentations, our product, high-performance alloy, stainless steel, is a key product for a lot of sectors, and it's crucial to get a more circular and low-carbon economy, to get a better and sustainable world. So let me start my presentation with a milestone that we have just received last week. As Bernardo told at the beginning of his presentation, we were awarded with the EcoVadis Platinum Medal. This implies that Acerinox is in the top 1% of the sectors in terms of sustainability. This implies that EcoVadis has recognized the commitment of Acerinox to sustainability and to create the most advanced and the most efficient material to get a more sustainable world. So how we are managing the sustainability issues?
The commitment of Acerinox with sustainability is focusing on five pillars. The first one is ethical, responsible, and transparent governance. Second one, eco-efficiency and mitigation of climate change. Third one, circular economy and sustainable products. Fourth one, committed team, culture, diversity, and safety. And last one, supply chain and impact on the society. We have a master plan that is called Positive Impact 360, that includes more than 200 initiatives to try to get better results in all these pillars at a corporate level, but also in all our mills. In addition, Acerinox has set six sustainable targets with a 2030 vision to get a more sustainable production model. We want it to be an example of efficiency, and so we have identified different areas, different targets, to get better results in this area. The first one, it's in carbon emissions.
We have set a target to reduce the carbon intensity by 20% by 2030 compared to 2015. We are considering Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2 emissions and the level of production of our mills. We have achieved a 2% reduction year to date, in spite of the fact that the low production levels in our mills. Also, in energy efficiency, we have set a target to reduce the energy intensity by 7.5% to 2030 compared to 2015. This ratio has not improved since 2015 due to the low production in our mills. As you know, the stainless steel market is suffering the economic crisis that we are suffering in Europe and in the whole world.
This implies that Acerinox has had to accommodate the production of their facilities, of their mills, to the needs of the market. This implies to increase the energy consumption also to—we will get ratios of energy efficiency and carbon worse than the year before. But Acerinox is reinforcing the commitment with meet these targets. As Tony says in the previous presentation, we have approved a new Excellence Plans called Beyond Excellence, to try to improve the operations in our mills and also the efficiency. And we are also working in developing a new decarbonization plan to reduce the CO2 emissions. We are also working to review our carbon targets, taking into account the Science Based Targets initiative methodology and the decarbonization plan that we are running, and we wanted to go in detail a little later. But we also work in terms of water.
We have set up a target to reduce the water withdrawal intensity by 20% by 2030 compared to 2015, and we have just reached a 16% reduction in this KPI. We are working also in more initiatives in those facilities where the water stress is bigger. But also, Acerinox is an example of circularity, because almost 90% of raw material that we use in our mills are recycled, and we wanted to move forward. We have set up a target to achieve to recycle 90% of our waste by 2030. We have achieved almost an 80% recycling of our waste now, and we are also working to try to valorize the slag in Algeciras to use as steel grains in different infrastructure constructions.
But we also have a commitment with our team. In terms of health and safety, working with health and safety is the way that we work. So we are committed to reduce the lost time injury frequency rate by 10% compared to the previous year, and we have achieved a 19% of this KPI right now, and we are working to get better results using tools such as Gemba Walks, 6S, audits, and boards, and also the Cardinal Rules . And in terms of diversity, we really know that it's a key issue for all of us, and we know that women are underrepresented in the steel sector... So we have committed to achieve 50% women in our workforce by 2030.
We have achieved a 13% right now, year to date, and we are working to try to get more visibility for women to the steel sector. We are working with universities, with colleagues, to try to attract women to work in our company. And also we are improving our conditions, our labor conditions, to try to retain the female. But we think that all the companies have to demonstrate a general approach in terms of sustainability, and this is an holistic approach that we are trying to explain that we have in Acerinox. But we really know that also climate change is gaining more and more importance for investors, for customers, and for other stakeholders.
So to move forward in terms of decarbonization, we really believe that, Acerinox wants to be more transparent and go harder to abate CO2 emissions. Because of that, we have published information regarding the environmental product declaration of some of our products, and also the carbon footprint were verified, including the Scope 1, 2, and 3 , were included in the annual report. Both information are available in our corporate website. But we wanted to go further. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are reviewing our sustainability targets, taking into account the SBTi initiative, and we are reviewing our decarbonization plan. This decarbonization plan takes into account some technologies that we think that can allow us to reduce our carbon footprint significantly.
We are talking about in Scope 1 , we are analyzing measures to heat recovery, to substitute heating process using electrification, or to substitute natural gas by using biofuels or green hydrogen. We also work in several projects to try to analyze the possibilities of the carbon capture and storage, that it's another way to decarbonize the industry. In Scope 2 , we are moving to use more renewable electricity, and in Scope 3 , we are working to use more scrap to reduce the use of ferroalloys or using low carbon ferroalloys, where this is possible. But stainless steel, as I mentioned at the beginning and in other presentations, it's an example of circularity. Stainless steel is endlessly recycled and is going to have a major role in the decarbonization of the economy because it's supporting a lot of sectors.
We wanted to contribute to this process, defining our own sustainable product that we call EcoAcerinox. This standard implies three different KPIs. The first one is the recycled material. We are going to verify that the sustainable product of Acerinox is made up for more than 90% of recycled material. We are also using more and more renewable electricity, and some of our mills are developing specific projects to incorporate renewable energy or signed PPAs to increase this percentage. And because of that, and also trying to improve our processing of routing and the raw materials that we are using, we are focusing to try to get the best carbon intensity reduction.
All of this information we are measuring to our sustainable product, EcoAcerinox, is going to be verified by a third party. So every delivery of EcoAcerinox to our customers will include information verified by a third party. So I wanted to end my presentation with the sustainability achievement. As I mentioned at the beginning, we Acerinox was awarded with EcoVadis Platinum Medal very recently. But we also work in a lot of sustainability assessments that are recognizing the sustainability model of Acerinox and the commitment to Acerinox in terms of transparency and accountability with all the stakeholders. Thank you for your attention, and please let me introduce Denisa Pufeh, that is the Global Director of Indirect Purchasing, and is going to talk about what we call supply chain. Please, Denisa.
Hello, good afternoon. I think everything was already said by our great professionals. It's a pleasure to be here, and it's a privilege to speak alongside such an exceptional group of professionals as you are. Let's go through the supply change, okay? We will talk about five pillars. It's the first time I think that purchasing is here, because we are behind the cameras, but I think we are becoming more and more important for a company because we are going directly to the results. So we'll talk about operational efficiency, to digital transformation, innovation, risk management, and talent. Operational efficiency, we are going for a supply change. It's not a typing error, it's really a change where we need to go for in the future if we want to be in the market.
So we talk about operational efficiency, which is one space, one face supplier. We need to have one portal, we need to have contract management, total cost of ownership under control, and do strategic purchasing in everything we do, and good category management. We need to optimize our process, right-sizing, and consolidate volume. ESG inside our risk management. So Carlos already mentioned the importance of ESG and responsible purchases in the future, but ESG needs to be inside the global risk management as a company. What has changed 10 years ago to today's situation? Instability, risk, ESG, many new things which was not a priority in procurement in the past. It was buy less, buy better. Now, it's buy less, buy better, and cover the risk. So I think it's a big change for all the companies to be... and to have under control the risk.
Optimization of the processes, ESG predictive model, comply with regulations along the whole Acerinox companies in the world. We need to comply with regulation and be in line with the future requirements. Digitalization, it was also a big and important point, which was presented by Tony. We need to have data. We need to be the owner of the data in terms of seconds, not collecting data manually. We need to digitalize and be advanced in analytics and go to the market. We need to have market intelligence and category dossiers done, and real-time digital spend cube, because if we are the owner of information, we are the owner of the market. Okay? Innovation, another point. We need to have good market research and presence in innovative forums.
As my colleague said, the future in procurement is to have artificial intelligence inside the tools, because when we have this, we are able to collect everything we need for a good negotiation with the suppliers, which needs to be our strategic partners. Talent, for me, the most important part of a company. It's the biggest and most appreciated asset of a company. As Carlos said when he introduced me, I was working most of my life in multicultural environment and different industries, and I think the talent and the transformation and the training of the talent is the biggest and important goal of a company. To have cross-functional teams shaping the talent for the future and help them to be prepared for the supply chain, like strategic purchases, category management, and everything which is advanced or which is the future.
So our roadmap to have a strong supply chain is very simple: Be sustainable and build a smart solution for suppliers and the users. Be sustainable was already said by all the further speakers. We have stage one. We need to be mature. We need to be analytical. And we need to implement and improve our supplier base and all the used tools for the future. Most important message, risk monitoring, which is the future, and data intelligence. We need to have under control our data and our risk. Then we are prepared for the future supply chain. ESG inside the risk management. Everybody is talking about ESG because this is the future, and we need to go forward.
As I said or I mentioned before, we need to monitor up all the rest of the risk which we are approaching during our daily business, financial, business continuity, cybersecurity, geopolitical, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We need to be prepared to do a very good, responsible future purchases and be in line what the market is asking for. That's from my side. Thank you very much.
... Thank you. Thank you, Denisa. Thank you, Carlos. We have now a short coffee break, and we will start with another round of presentations in 15 minutes. Thank you. ... Well, welcome back. We hope you enjoyed that short break and are ready for the next series of of presentations. In the first one, we'll hear from Manuel Landeta, Acerinox Head of Business Intelligence. Manuel holds a degree in law from the Complutense University of Madrid, and a postgraduate degree in International Trade from the Madrid Chamber of Commerce. He joined Acerinox in the year 2004, and spent 10 years of his tenure at the company in Asia before returning to the head office in Madrid. Manuel, I give you the floor.
Okay. Good afternoon. Thank you once again for joining us today, and we are gonna start this second part of the Capital Markets Day today, talking about what is the market environment out there. So we are gonna split into three blocks, okay? Something has been said already about the globalization, but we still, we are gonna share some thoughts on that. We're gonna discuss, so we are gonna talk about what is Acerinox positioning in that context, and we will end with some insights on the market evolution, focusing on stainless steel, as Niclas already talked extensively on the HPA side earlier. Let's start with the globalization, and we are gonna discuss, we are gonna talk about some of the long-term drivers, okay? You have here on the screen.
So we start with the economic fragmentation, and that shift towards strategic autonomy Bernardo was referring to earlier, okay? This is not really something new, it has been, let's say, cook in the oven for a while. The term comes from the European side back in 2016, I recall. Okay, but what is clear is the pandemic, as well as the supply chain disruptions we had following the post-pandemic, has exposed the vulnerability of the globalization, with governments across the world now reconsidering, okay, seriously, all the risk linked to that overdependence on said countries, and getting to reconsider how to rebalance and how to keep what is the security and competitiveness by protecting, promoting key industries.
For that, obviously, steel is a key industry, or materials are key, not only as a key industry itself, but also as a key sourcing of materials for other key industries, okay? So this, in the context of the green transition, we will get to talk shortly, will have clearly a positive impact in our core markets, okay? Both for new technologies, new niche markets, such as the hydrogen Niclas mentioned earlier, as well as traditional industries such as automotive, white goods, other consumer goods, for which we see... We mentioned here are reshoring and nearshoring. We see that trend happening already, with some main players relocating part of the production next to the market, okay? So, as we say, the globalization is not new, and we have been talking about protectionism for years.
This was indeed the subject of my presentation five years ago in Algeciras, at the previous Capital Markets Day. We have been talking about what is the increasing protectionism playing a crucial role, especially for stainless steel, in line with those overcapacities generated mainly in Asia, driven by China, both in China and Indonesia. I think we have been referring to this number before, about what is that huge percentage of the total production for China, Indonesia, and the massive impact of that excess production on the trade flows, leading to a proliferation of measures worldwide. Okay, this is not unique of stainless, okay? So that's why we include this chart on the bottom right, where you can see the number of anti-dumping investigation initiated not only for our industry, all industries. Then we have green transition.
Crucial, and we have all clear that we need to move towards more sustainable models. And for this, we see governments, especially we see United States, European Union, leading the way with a number of policies they are deploying. But most importantly, also they see these policies, okay, ambitious policies need to go together with environmental measures to keep the level playing field on those countries. Such as the CBAM, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism of the European Union. This initiative more focused on what is the carbon emissions, or we have, let's say, more specific of our sector, the GSA. Now they have renamed as GASSA, standing for anyway for the Global Arrangement for Sustainable Steel and Aluminium. Okay, they keep negotiating, they have a new deadline for the end of the year. We think it's gonna be further extended.
In any case, what this is aiming to is to have an alliance of clean countries, starting with the U.S. and the E.U., but we'll have other members for sure, to get to have somehow that alliance against those overcapacities in non-market economies, which, by the way, are more polluting. So this we say is gonna be gradual. It will take time. We are in that process, clear. But we already see some aspects, and something has been said before on this, such as responsible sourcing. Denisa and Carlos mentioned earlier where we are a reference, and we need to go for that supply chain, Denisa mentioned. And we also have green products, and I want to insist on green products are holistic, okay? From a holistic approach.
So not only the green line of products that we can offer to the market, we are working on this, but also for our end users to reconsider what is the their own positioning and getting to move part of the production next to home, also to reduce emissions, to reduce especially Scope 3. So moving into Acerinox's positioning in this context, we start talking about our materials. We are pretty clear our materials are here to stay, and we are very clear our materials will play a crucial role as part of that transformation for that future we all want. I will not get to review all the wonders of our materials. A lot have been said.
I will just focus or emphasize how important they are in terms of efficiency for endless applications, the endurance of our materials, and I love the video of, we saw earlier about the Chrysler Tower and so on. Endless or infinite recyclability of our materials. So our materials are crucial for the future, and we are gonna continue to be there in that future, contributing with our materials, leading the way as the global leader for both our materials and solutions to our customers. And this will be thanks to our unique, both geographical diversity, diversification of footprint, as well as, it has been said before, our diversification in terms of product. With that widest portfolio, whilst we continue to work on expanding towards higher, higher added value products and solutions to our customers. That said, we talked earlier about market dynamics.
Overcapacity in China is clear, especially for stainless. We have been focusing more of the activity, obviously, in our core markets in Americas and Europe. For this, we need to mention, or we need to insist about the importance of trade measures, okay? Trade defense. In this sense, we have been very active in trade defense in recent years, for obvious reasons. Here, what we need to say, just quickly as a review, insist about how efficient the measures in the United States has been, especially Section 232, while on the European side, even though the efficiency of the savings have been rather limited because of the nature of the tariff rate quota system, we have managed to complement with many other anti-subsidy and anti-dumping measures that, to a certain extent, has been helping us to protect the market from unfair imports.
So we move into a, let's say, maybe a more dynamic subject. Talk about market evolution. We start with this slide because we need to talk necessarily about what is the bullwhip effect we saw in the last couple of years. Massive bullwhip effect. We never have seen something like this before. In the post-pandemic recovery, we have a, let's say, a frenzy buying spree. Okay, with stock levels going to record heights, and we are still digesting these stocks, as I will get to talk shortly. So behind this bullwhip, obviously, there was a huge impact from the import side. So despite the measures in place, okay, the market, many players in the market, the stock is mainly, they decide to, to go for, for the import side.
So you can see here, I was referring before to the efficiency of the measures in the United States, pretty clear, okay? And still, you can see how in 2021, 2022, we have the increase up to these pre-Section 232 levels of 25, 25, 26%. Now, so far, 2023 has been a correction year, and the latest data we will see now is suggesting we may end up the year around the 20% mark. Let's say more or less fair levels. In Europe, I mentioned earlier, not that effective, okay? You need to distinguish here, hot rolled, cold rolled. We managed to keep at bay cold rolled, but it's still on hot roll, and mainly because the eruption of Indonesia in the picture. We have a huge increase on the imports quota.
We managed to get the anti-dumping for hot rolled for China, Indonesia, so successful there. And then we managed to get measures, especially against India, Indonesia, both anti-dumping, anti-subsidy. That has some effect that obviously distorted here because of that bullwhip effect. In any case, now we have that correction below already 20%, and we believe it's going to stay around those levels by the closing of this year. So I say we will talk about inventories and the correlation with the imports. So you can see here very clear the correlation, both markets, and we can see the correction towards the end of the year. Up to Q3, we have data both for imports, thanks to the license data. Also, we have some more data on the stock side, okay? And I can tell you the trend continued to go down, so positive in that sense.
The same in the European Union. Obviously, the stocks is limited to the stock information we have for Germany in this case, but the trend is still the same, especially on the import side. Okay, so with this slide, probably what most of you have in mind is, "Okay, what's next? What is going to happen?" Everyone is expecting to have a turning point, so when is it going to be? Unfortunately, I can tell you, I don't know. Okay, but we feel is some analysts out there talking of as soon as Q1. We prefer to be more cautious. We think could be later on in 2024. What we feel is that probably the turning point will be closest in the United States rather than Europe, okay? So time will tell. So we move into the long-term, long-term prospects.
Okay, we start with this slide. I mentioned I will not get to talk about HPA. And for the stainless side, just to mention globally, for both divisions, we have very good prospects, okay? Similar levels, Niclas winning. But when we look at the stainless, obviously, we need to look into the split for what is our core markets, that is North America and Europe. So here, what we see is still healthy growth on both sides of the across the Atlantic, and especially for the United States, okay, with that cumulative, sorry, compound annual growth rate of 3.8% for the coming years, translated into next to 600,000 tons. Okay, that will be in line with our CapEx there. Hans was explaining earlier, okay, our growth prospects and our long-term strategy.
Okay, so you can see the split across sectors, and everyone will quickly get to look about the what is negative there. So only automotive happened to be negative in the coming years. This is the view of our analysts, in this case, SMR, because they really consider the, the impact on the exhaust systems will be huge. From our view, we see there will be many opportunities there for both the stainless and HPA and other applications also related to automotive. And with this, as a wrap up, the conclusions is pretty clear, no? We say we know where we're heading for, we know what we need, okay? We are heading towards that sustainable future, and we have it clear our materials are going to be part of that future and part of the solution.
So at Acerinox, we are committed to contribute to that sustainable future with our materials, with our solutions, and the commitment to our customers, okay? Good growth expected for the coming years, so helping us in our strategy. Also important, just to insist, besides trade defense will continue to play an important role. We see, okay, the globalization and that strategic autonomy approach helping us to maintain the level playing field in our core markets for the years to come. Thank you very much.
... Thank you, Manuel. Let me now introduce you to Miguel Ferrandis , Chief Financial Officer of the Acerinox Group. Prior to his appointment as CFO, Miguel gained extensive experience as a lawyer in the group's legal department. He has now been CFO of the group for more than 20 years and serves on the Board of Directors of NAS, Columbus, Acerinox Europa, Roldan, and Inoxcenter. Miguel, please, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Well, it has been a long day, especially for those of you who have been traveling, this morning. Probably after 7 presentations, getting dark outside and bringing the financial slides, this clearly is a risky business. So my goal today definitely is thinking on ways to stimulating your attention. On that basis, I ask you to play a game with me. I am replicating the same game I made in my first speech to VDM managers, just 3 years ago. My presentation shall be formed by 15 slides. During my presentation, I shall mention 15 titles of songs, all of them excellent songs, and then the goal is that you must find the 15 songs.
Those of you who find the 15 titles of songs, later tonight after the evening, you shall be invited to some Düsseldorf-made schnapps, and then we can celebrate it. Let's start. For the last month, we have been making roadshows, and we have presenting the Q3 figures. I'm not going to talk now about them. I think all of you know them, have analyzed it in detail. The market has made a well reception of them, especially in view that other players are reporting their figures and they were far away. I think that it does not make sense today for going through the Q3 figures. But what we want to explain is the KPIs that we establish more or less financially through the cycle in our business. Stainless is a cyclical business.
High-Performance Alloys is also a cyclical business. Niclas explained previously that the cycles are different, but also obviously it's cyclical. So it's clear that we are a cyclical company, but Against All Odds , we are presenting some KPIs that by far are not typical from a cyclical company. We have KPIs of having a margin of above 10%, not only two digits, but even higher than 10% of return on capital employed above 15%, and also keeping the prudent target of the net financial debt to EBITDA below the level of 1.2. We have more or less mentioned through the day that we are entering in a new era. We are contemplating probably that this is a new period.
We are entering in a new era that is coming, differences and especially for the Acerinox Group. I just want to indicate that the figures that we are achieving up to now in this year are even better than the KPIs established. This is something to stress and highlight because in this year, apparent consumption in the stainless market in America is down 27%. In Europe, it's down 26%. And having said that, still, we are having our KPIs that are even above the targets that we already implemented. This is a good demonstration, probably of the efficiency and the better position that we have now on, and also is a very comfortable position that we are well prepared for whatever may come.
So maybe in the next capital markets day, we are in position of explaining to you why we have improved the KPIs. But up to now, in a difficult year, we are even better from the three main KPIs that we have for our business. Prior to explaining the KPIs, what I want is make you some explanations for a better understanding of our sector. So I have taken more or less the four peak years in the history of Acerinox. This has been the Walk of Lif e of Acerinox in its history, the best peak years that we have. President Kennedy said that, "A rising tide lifts all the boats." Consequently, we want to analyze has been that rising tides, how has been the peak of the cycles, and analyzing the peak, you can understand what has been placing between peak and peak.
Because at the end, what's also relevant is obviously keeping sailing, sorry, in the low part of the cycles. So in this world, you can imagine how profitable was this sector in years such as 1995, for example. So the gross margin, I prefer to talk now about gross margin because all the improvements we have done at the middle level in efficiency, in reducing costs, obviously are benefiting. So I just prefer to go above and go to the gross margin. Sales minus raw material, sales minus cost of sales. Raw materials and inventory variations. So in the world of year 1995, 52% was an incredible margin. Everybody was profitable at that time because it was a big space for them for getting to be profitable at the bottom of the P&L.
But what occurred in 10 years? 10 years later, this amount was 20 points lower, and it's obvious and simple to realize that several players, even in the peak years, were not able to survive with margins of 20 points lower than in the previous one. During that decade, prior to what later on was coming with a new entry of Asian players, but during this decade, relevant historical players in the stainless business, several of the big names already disappear, could not keep on running lowly, were absorbed, were consolidated, or even were forced to restructure or even close. In that period, disappear as relevant names as Krupp, the one who start with the stainless steel not far from here, Avesta, Thyssen, Usinor, ALZ. In America, we have names such as Armco or J&L.
These people were not running by their own later on because they could not survive in the squeezed margins that were moving the stainless industry. What we have been doing from that, and it appears how we have been facing and sailing in this period, is that even though the margins each time have been getting squeezed, our EBITDA, by far, has been escalating. Keep in mind, in any case, you see that even we have been able to increase the gross margin from the previous peak to the last year, 2022, and we even gaining 2 points. This is also as a consequence of part of the efficiency we are making.
Most of the efficiencies are assumed to be in the cost areas, appearing at the level of EBITDA, but also part of our efficiency, as has been explained previously by Tony, is more or less related to raw materials and efficiency in the raw materials. So through this, we have been able to even increase the gross margin in this period. So I think this is a clear demonstration for analysts how we are sailing and moving from peak to peak, but what's more relevant is more or less how we handle or how we sail through the cycle. Now, we are going to talk about the cycles and how we deliver through the cycle during the twenty-first century.
At the end, you can realize in these cycles how Wonderful World the European players had in the first cycle of the century. At the end, the stainless consumption was driven mostly by the ups and downs of the economy. So we are cyclical business, developing obviously on the economy cycles. This was a safe period. We saw previously. At that time, as I say, it was a Wonderful World for the stainless players, but we realized that we should invest out of Europe. And in that period, in that cycle, we integrate North American Stainless, we put in place a melting shop, as well as we acquired Columbus Stainless. So we design our strategy was to grow out of Europe.
The coming cycle was tough because even though 2006 was a nice year, then the world financial crisis came on in 2008. Fortunately, through the new two players that we have in the group, and with the additional two integrated plants in the group, we were able, even though the difficulties through the financial crisis, to keep on running and having, more or less equivalent figures. But then the world changed, and, and, and since 2010, it more or less appeared, this Wrecking Ball that has been destroying the status quo of the Western world players, which has been the massive entry of new capacity in China with a strategy of full capacity utilization from the day one, instead of making it gradually.
This, as I say, it alter all the basis of how the market was doing. In addition, in that cycle, it also appeared the financial crisis. We all remember what took place in year 2012 and 2013. We were able to keep on sailing. Obviously, we adjust, our profitability was adjusted, but we were able to keep on sailing, but at that time is when we implemented the Excellence Plan. Consequently, with a huge work on improving efficiency and on reducing costs, we were able to take advantage in the following cycle, which also was tough. In addition to the Chinese capacity, it appeared the new giants in Indonesia, as well as this relevant investment for transform in Indonesia, the nickel pig iron on stainless through a high contaminating process.
So this was tough, and also for us in our main market in the States, we suffered at that time the entry of new players create a great distortion on prices. So even though we were affected by those factors spontaneously, we were able to improve our profitability, especially because of the Excellence Plan that has been explained today. And just with that, we have came to the last cycle. We have been, for the last years, telling you now our cruising speed is much more different than in the past. The last cycle has not been wines and roses. The last cycle, we have been experiencing the COVID crisis, which has been the highest world crisis since World War II. But even through that, we have been able to achieve these figures. So I think this is something to be proud about.
These are the magnitude in figures. If we move to understand how is the evolution of the EBITDA margins, let me remember the statement of Charles Darwin when he said, "It's not the strongest that survive, but the most adaptable to change." So following Darwin in this Circle of Life of what has been taking place in the last 22 years, what we have seen: that several Western players have been forced to disappear, and then leaving space to the emerging Asian giants. And in these circumstances, we have been obviously adapting ourselves to a change, and consequently, we have been able to increase our profitability, reaching margins for the whole last cycle of around 12%. Moving to the next slide, let's talk about the return on capital employed, the ROCE.
It's clear that we, our sector is intensive on capital. This is one of our main characteristic. But at the end, through the years, what we have enabled is obviously generating cash. We have been able to reduce debt, and at the end, our return on capital employed is increasing drastically. And at the end, we must say we are obviously in. Our P&L is improving, so our margin is improving, and our debt is gradually reducing. So we have been able to achieve in the last period, these figures of 18%. Even up to now, in this year, we are in figures of 19%. Our target appears to be prudent, with a 15%.
We all consider that by far, we can do more than this, but at the end, what we must keep always in mind is that we are capital intensive, and the capital employed in the coming years may force us to raise our debt for making the most advantageous expansions, organically or inorganically. So consequently, still, we prefer to be prudent. Having said that, we consider that these are extremely satisfactory return on capital employed ratio. If we move to our balance sheet strength, I think this is some of our virtues. Everybody recognize that. You know it perfectly. It's clear that with this balance sheet, we are strong enough for keeping doing organic investment. We are strong enough for keeping not paying to shareholders steadily and increasing the dividends.
In addition, we are strong enough for thinking further possibilities in organic growth, as well as we are strong enough for also contemplating that, in addition, we may be able even to make supplementary returns to our shareholders. If we analyze what we have been generating as cash in the last years in our sector, normally the cash generation comes in the lower part of the cycles, and in the proper part of the cycles, there is high necessities of working capital, and sometimes it may be cash destruction. It's not unusual that we consistently provide a strong generation of free cash flow almost every year. It took place in the difficult year 2020, with the crisis coming from the COVID.
But even in the strong-performing cycle, peak of the cycle of year 2022, we were able also to generate more than EUR 400 million of cash, of free cash flow in the year. The figure up to now in this 2023 appears to be lower, it's just 92, but I remember you that the figure only of the Q3 has been around 260. So we have necessities of increasing working capital, the straight cash in the first semester, but most of it is going to be reverted in the second part of the year, as you know. Moving now to the financials and our debt. This is one of my favorite topics. You may understand why in my position.
But it is clear that we have strength enough, not only for keeping a policy on a flexible working capital, for taking advantage of the cycle. This has been demonstrated, as I said, in this first half of the year, especially in the case of VDM, with the order book full, in a good market momentum, and also needing to solve, as has been the case since the last year, the disruption on the raw materials procurement. So we must keep a strong balance sheet for being flexible in working capital, but also at the end, we are very committed to maintain low leverage. We are not the player reporting less debt, but by far, we are the player experiencing lower financial expenses. And at the end, we are very active.
Our treasury team all over the group makes an extraordinary performance, and at the end, we are working on both sides now. We are having a very competitive term debt that obviously is supporting us, and most of our bankers, you are coming here, and through our long relation, we are obviously supported by you. But also, we are working on both sides because we are also obtaining high remuneration for the strong deposits we are keeping in the States. But capital allocation also clearly needs a continuous investment. We are a capital-intensive sector, I already mentioned, and investments must be done continuously. Helena always talk about the possibilities in R&D. We also are making CapExes, not only on solving bottlenecks, but increasing efficiency.
Obviously, we are committed to environmental CapExes, and in addition, we—it's clear that we must keep on doing maintenance CapEx. So the CapExes in our case is a constant. We must be step-by-step, every single year, committed to make the proper CapEx for keeping our plants and at the state of the art. So at the end, our goal is definitely keeping our plants forever young and our production forever young, for remain being an efficient player. Our CapExes historically have been more or less in line with our depreciation.
Now, in the actual projections, we are contemplating that our figure of CapEx with the new presence of other players in the group, such as High-Performance Alloys and also with some of the plants we are actually facing, probably our CapEx figures should move up more at the range of EUR 200 million. This is another issue in which, at the end, we are proud for being a player in which never, ever the reduction or the dividend cancellation has been contemplated. So, all of our life, we have been paying dividend. Paying dividend has been a never-ending story for us, so we have been continuously paying and even increasing dividends in the proper times. Only, for example, for this year, we are taking advantage of the 20% increase in the dividend per share that was decided last year.
So our yield actually is at 6%, which by far we consider that it's no doubt an attractive yield. But in addition, we must remain strong and in order for developing further growth. And then we are talking about growth, which must be organically and inorganically. So, we have two evident examples on that that we shall highlight today. The clear example of organic growth is in the States, is in NAS, North American Stainless. We know we are in a expansion phase, investing $244 million in the States. You know that our most efficient plant, it has been mentioned today, the reference plant of stainless in the world is North American Stainless. We have our best and more efficient plant in the best performer market.
So all of you know that our origins, we were born in Spain, we were born in Europe. We have not been born in the USA, but it's clear that more than any other issue, we are Americans. So it makes sense, and we have a quick return investing in the States, but also we are open to inorganic growth. And the clear demonstration of our strategy in inorganic growth has been the case of VDM. As it has been mentioned previously, several times now in the group, there is a new kid in town. This kid in town is VDM through High-Performance Alloys and the demonstration of what has been able to achieve, and what was the strategy when acquiring VDM is expressed in these five points.
So it's clearly in line with our strategy, diversification and minimizing the cycles, bringing synergies, be value accretive from the day one with a cultural fit, and in this case, it's clear that the integration among the teams has been excellent. In addition, securing our market position and increase the diversification. So all these targets have been absolutely covered through the acquisition of VDM. But in addition to this, obviously, we have other targets, and at the end, it's also remain with the increase the shareholder returns. We maintain in the mood for keeping or increasing shareholders' returns, but obviously, we are conservative, you know, we are prudent. And then for increasing shareholder returns through extraordinary dividends or through buybacks, this obviously must be conditioned to four main issues. One is the confidence in the leverage target. So far, we have that.
Other is that we, our share price remains for making buybacks fundamentally of undervalued. This is clear that we are, that we are suffering that. But what we also need is to have market visibility, and I think in these days, we have a lot of uncertainty areas all over the world, so nobody has a clear picture of what's coming. In addition, obviously, we must keep in mind that we are subject to keep on, making strong growth options. Consequently, those are the conditions for us to make a clear message or a clear decision for when proceed to increase the shareholder returns. But clearly, we are in the mood for that. Up to now, all the charts that I have been presenting have an upward trend. So we have been increasing, improving, all our figures have been going up.
Now, I'm presenting a chart that is more or less going down, and this is absolutely a frustration that all the management in the group we are facing. So we are generating value continuously through the cycle, but still, we realize that this is not appreciated in our share price. In the best moment in our history, we are trading at multiples, as you can see in the last cycle, of 4.3x the price value of EBITDA. This doesn't make sense. So this is by far not logical, as well as the price earning being as low as appears here, the lowest ever in 9.4. We understand that this is something that sooner than later, the market shall realize, so we highlight this point.
So our strong message should be obviously take a chance on Acerinox because, as I say, sooner than later, the market should reflect the value creation. From the whole analysts covering our sector, which most of you are here today, 85% of the analysts have a recommendation of a strong buy Acerinox, with targets of increasing share prices above the level of 30%. So and I say 85% have clear buy recommendations, combined with 10%, which has a recommendation of maintains. But still, the market has not moving accordingly. We hope that it may come soon. And at the end, as previously was expressed, we are in a excellent momentum. I think we have demonstrated the efficiency that we can obtain through the stainless steel. We are the most efficient player.
In addition, through High-Performance Alloys, not only we have diversified, but we have brought a strong profitability as well as synergies, and we are entering in a new era. In this new era, probably the main characteristic is going to be the de-globalization. For that, we have the broadest portfolio, so we are the most diversified player. In addition, we are taking the advantage, as is appearing in our margins, of all the Excellence Plans. So it's clear that Acerinox these days is in the best shape in its history. And what was probably my conclusion and the first message to you is that you may understand that we are simply the best sustainable investment you can find in our sector. Thank you. Okay, please raise the hands, those of you who have found the 15 songs. Well done! So two people.
In fact, I gave an additional, additional help, which was providing 2 songs more. In fact, there were 17. But I think the HSBC team made a... Has it been both of you or jointly? Because. Okay, in that case, you shall share the schnapps. Okay, let's make. Sorry, let's try to go quickly and see which were the main songs. It's just take 1 minute more. Let's go to the appendix. Okay, we are a cyclical company, but Against All Odds , we are able to provide these KPIs. In the Walk of Life of Acerinox, even though the margins go down, our profitability goes up. Let's analyze the story. So what a Wonderful World for the Western players until the Wrecking Ball, Miley Cyrus, those who have teenagers at home may know Miley Cyrus, until the Wrecking Ball of the overcapacity in Asia came on.
The EBITDA margin, after mentioning Charles Darwin, obviously, I should introduce the Circle of Life, which also has another value that it's an African song. This is a tribute to Columbus Stainless. In terms of the ROCE, we are putting, for whatever may come, a prudent ROCE of 15%, but we have a clear feeling that it can be more than this. ROCE music. And then strong enough. The marvelous Cher, we have a strong enough balance sheet in order to invest, in order to maintain or increase dividend, in order for inorganic growth. We, our balance sheet is strong enough for that. And it's not unusual that we generate cash every single year. Tom Jones, the Tiger of Wales.
When we're going to finance through, thanks to the, to the treasury team now, we are effective on both sides now, not only having competitive debt, but also we are obtaining high deposits from our cash, for high remuneration for our cash deposits in the States. Investments are needed in our sector. Step by step, we may keep investing every single year for maintaining our plants forever young at the state-of-the-art. Return for us, the dividend policy has been a never-ending story. Never in our life we cut or reduce the dividends. And then clearly, for organic and inorganic growth, we have the two examples. This was relevant. Obviously, one, we are not born in Europe. Sorry, we are not born in the USA, but we are more American than any other. And definitely, when talking about VDM is the new kid in town.
Let me say that the song says there's a new kid in town, great expectations, everybody's watching you. I think I, I, I could not avoid, I could not avoid. And people of my generation love the Eagles. Okay, we maintaining the mood for, when possible, go to increasing retribution to shareholders. By far, message to all investors, take a chance on us. We deserve it. The glorious ABBA. And last but not least, Tina Turner, "We Are Simply the Best." Thank you very much. So, sorry, last message. From this evening, you have available on Spotify this list. You may find it. You can, at the end, check that all the songs already appear. I strongly recommend you to listen this playlist while you are making your reports, in the case of the analyst.
While you are making your risk assessment, in the case of the banks, or when you are taking the investment decisions, in the case of investors. Because at the end, maybe you can obtain inspiration with songs such as "Step by Step," such as "Strong Enough," among others, and by far, such as "Simply the Best." Thank you.
Thank you very much, Miguel. It's my pleasure now to welcome back to the stage the CEO of Acerinox, Bernardo Velázquez, who will conclude today's session. Bernardo, I give the floor to you.
I don't need it, Carlos. No, after Miguel's presentation, I cannot go up, you know? We are not going to sing the songs, don't worry. No, but I can just summarizing, you know? We have the... Please put the conclusions there. Focus. Okay, then I will not add anything here. You have received all the messages. I think we have been very clear. We have been trying to explain with clear, simple messages what is new in Acerinox. And, you know, for us, it's important, no? For us, it's important because we are living in a new scenario, and you have to admit that the world has changed. Since we met in 2018, the world is totally different. Globalization is not an advantage today. No, you have to be local in most of the markets, especially the Western market, because that is our market.
Second, that we have changed our strategy, no? This is... And we use VDM, as we explained in 2019, as the lever for this change, and the situation is working perfectly. I mean, nobody expected such a result in the integration, in the synergies, synergies beyond the synergies and the result of the group, I think. So we can be very proud of this. I think this is a case, Niclas, that, in the future, you people will study in the universities, no? As integration case. It's fantastic. I mean, and that will give us, you know, the oxygen to think in further expansions and organic and inorganic and in a fantastic situation because we have the best strategy. We are the best located, the best situated company for this, and we are the best result.
We have the best results. We have already demonstrated it. So we just want you, first of all, to believe that Acerinox is in the best ever situation of its history. Second, that it's an investment case, you know? And third, that you have understood what are the changes, I think. The reason of this Capital Markets Day is mainly that you understand why we decided to join with VDM, that what we explained in 2019 was true. That was a vision that is now a reality, no? That this is the best Acerinox in the history, that we have transformed the company in the last 5 years, and that you will see that in the profit and loss account, no? It's not only our transformation, it's also the environment.
I think Tony estimated how much is going to be that in our profit and loss account. Yeah, you can make your model, you can have your calculations, but for sure, that the next through the cycle, EBITDA is going to be much higher. How can we estimate it in EUR 200 million plus VDM, EUR 300 million? That is your job. You are the analyst, no? But I think that you must admit that you are in the best situation of our history. And I would like you to understand what High-Performance Alloys and I think we explained very well, you know, how, where our material is used. What is High-Performance Alloys? what are the applications? What are the sectors? What are the dynamics of this industry?
I would like you to know that we are even making our portfolio of products bigger and broader, developing new stainless steel and High-Performance Alloys we have the best and most powerful R&D force in the industry. And this is something that I would like you to know. If some of you that knowing us before, knowing us in 2019 and knowing us today, and you know, if you look at the change in the presentation, you look at the change in the performance of the company, I think that you must admit that this is a new Acerinox. If some of you haven't understood what we are doing, what we are changing, then I will feel very frustrated because will be you know, an unsuccessful meeting. But I think that we are working very hard.
We have an excellent team. We are working all together. We are all integrated, and you have seen the environment, the atmosphere, the good relation that we have, and everything that can be only positive. So having said this, no more to add. So I would like to invite Carlos, all the speakers to come here with me and be open to the Q&A session, because you know that we feel very comfortable speaking with you. And with this, we will start a session that is going to last more than one day, because tomorrow, tonight, we will be always open to answer your questions and be ready to clarify your doubts. So thank you very much for your attendance, and now, Carlos, we can start.
Yes. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Bernardo. So, yes, please, all the speakers, if you don't mind, please come to the stage with the rest of the team.
If you don't mind, we will sit here. We'll feel more comfortable, and then you can start making questions.
Yes, so please raise your hand, and we will bring you a microphone if you have a question. Please provide your name and company before making the question. Thank you. So, Francisco, please.
Yes, so Francisco Riquel from Alantra. So, congratulations for the presentation today. I have two questions. The first one is on VDM and the synergies. You guided at the time of the integration and EBITDA contribution of around EUR 80 million through the cycle. This year is going to be much higher. You guided at the time some cost synergies, and more importantly, the synergies beyond the synergies, the revenue synergies, that you did not quantify at the time. So I wonder if you can please explain how much of the jump in profits in the last two years has been due to, say, external tailwinds, the cycle helping, and how much due to the synergies, and if you can quantify the cost and the revenue synergies that you have been able to achieve.
If you think that you are done already with the synergies, or there is more to come, and if you can quantify? Third, this EUR 80 million through the cycle contribution, if you can update what would be the new number with the synergies that you have already achieved?
Thank you, Paco. You know, I'm going to break the rule because having Daniel, that is the Director of the integration team, you know, who's better than Daniel to answer this question? So you will open the session, Daniel.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Paco, you always make very easy questions. Thank you. Now, synergies. Now, synergies, we are in the beginning of the synergies, but also for us, it has been, I think, an excellent news that we are at the level at, that we are now. If you remember, when we announced the deal with VDM, no, we estimated synergies of around EUR 14 million. When we bought VDM, okay, we estimated the synergies after three years at EUR 23 million. We achieved in the first year already those EUR 23 million. We are far over those levels right now, and we will inform by closing the year, no? But we are already EUR 4 million above the target for this year, and we expect much more to come.
You saw one of the examples that Niclas brought today, one plus one is bigger than two, is those electrolyzers. This is big future. Everybody speaks about green hydrogen, those electrolyzers need those cathodes, nickel cathodes, that we are the few companies in the world supplying them. And this is only possible because VDM can melt this special material, and Acerinox Europa can produce those cathodes. And this is going bigger and bigger year by year. So this is one example why we think the synergies are coming, are going to be even bigger than we expected at the very beginning.
Paco, and you have to understand that this is going to be the last year that we speak about synergies with VDM, because VDM is now, you know, part of the Acerinox Group, as the same that Columbus is. We never report synergies with South Africa, with Columbus. So from now on, we will not report, you know, the synergies with VDM that is an important and totally integrated part of our group. Niclas, do you want to add anything?
Yeah, but I think one of the biggest synergies will still come is to insource certain steps that we need to do, produce, and perform with third parties. We are in a big trial for the hot rolling of strip to basically bring it inside the group. There's lots of potential on that side. So it's gonna be tremendous, more to come, and most probably, we're gonna be one day one of the maybe the only company on the HPA side that is fully integrated.
It's so good to say, you know, that we have fulfilled our expectations, and the synergies are not coming from restructuring because we bought a good company. Now, the synergies are mainly be coming from the commercial side, top in the, in the account, in the profit and loss account. And we have made more than 100 customers in the last 3 years, and there's more to come. This is what we said at the beginning, big synergies beyond synergies. So more to come, but we will not disclose from now on.
And I think, you know, these oil and gas projects is project business. We, we've VDM knows how to handle projects, and we're trying to, and we're successfully doing, teaching and, and, and, and in, in, in the sense of best practices, explain to the stainless colleagues how to deal and use our good contact to our very, very long-term customers to get the stainless steel colleagues into project business. So there is lots of synergies on, on, on the road.
... Thank you. Then my second question would be about capital allocation. So we learned here the good fundamentals of High-Performance Alloys business, and VDM has been a great deal. But you are also, you also have the ambition about inorganic growth, and you are looking for ways to complement VDM. At the same time, you mentioned another alternative is shareholder remuneration, share buybacks. High-Performance Alloys players trade at a higher multiple than you trade now. You are very depressed. So what's your priority now in the short term, the balance between share buybacks and inorganic acquisitions, and how do you measure that?
Our priority is very clear: to give value to our shareholders, and we will do it the way we can, the way is the best option in the right time. I mean, today, so we have a comfortable situation. We have a strong balance sheet. Probably is not the best time, you know, to go to a share buyback. Having, you know, the lack of visibility that we have in the industry, we always promise that we will make another share buyback when we have a comfortable debt situation, when the situation is good, when we have visibility and it's recommendable to do it. But otherwise, we are keep on trying to find new ways for organic and inorganic growth.
Probably, we are defining several projects for internal growth, organic growth, and you will know soon about this, and that will be the priority. I'm sure that you will be very happy when we announce the payback of the new expansion projects of VDM, because then you will realize that it's better than a buyback of shares.
Any other question?
Hi. Hello. Sandeep Peety from Morgan Stanley. I have two questions. I'll take one at a time. So firstly, on leverage. So your leverage is expected to be significantly below the comfort level, by year-end. Should investors be expecting additional returns on top of EUR 150 million? If yes, could you give some indication on size and timing?
Well, return the leverage, as I think it has been explained during the year, we more or less accompany the good momentum in the first semester, especially in High-Performance Alloys so we increase working capital, especially in the first semester, and the second semester is more or less to be reverting that increase in working capital and reducing debt. The year-end figures, by far, should be lower than those of the previous year. We finished last year with EUR 440 million. This year, with the cash generated, we are going to be below that. So obviously, there still are several issues that may be taken in consideration, how more or less we have obviously not November, not December figures. But just by far below the previous year debt, no doubt.
Keeping in mind that most of the cash generation has been taking place in the second semester.
Okay, thank you. And then second question, what level of EBITDA margin has been assumed to get to internal rate of return of 25% for your North American expansion? And what level of stainless steel price base price are required to achieve those level of profitability?
Well, the expansion, I will ask you the expansion in America.
Can you hear me? So the expansion in North America, as Tony explained before, is gonna provide one of the best return on investments. And he mentioned that it was gonna be less than two years, the payback, once we are in production of that full production of the whole project. That's the idea we have.
Any other question, please?
Hi, thank you very much for your presentations. My name is Moses from JP Morgan. Couple questions also on my side on High-Performance Alloys business. So firstly, you had previously talked about planning to grow within the aerospace end segment as well, right? Which is, of course, a segment that benefits from high visibility 'cause of long-term contracts and also very high-performance materials that are required for the use case. And some of your peers obviously benefit within that segment, and it seems to drive a higher rating for those peers that have greater exposures in that segment. But a lot of the focus here today obviously has been on the chemical process and segments and oil and gas.
Should we still assume that you have interest to still grow within the aerospace end segment near term?
We are already growing in the aerospace industry. Niclas, you can explain it, our approvals and-
Aerospace industry is not aerospace industry. There's different applications, and it is different. There's different roads to go into aerospace business. Traditionally, if you talk about the rotating equipment, this is blades after the combustion chamber of a turbine. There's only three companies in the world that did this for the last 50 years. There's American competitors. We went this long road. We are flying in airplanes now as well, so there is growth potential in this field. But as Helena says, it normally takes very long to get in there. We all used to use airplanes. I'm very happy that they're not changing the material every second week. So it will take quite significant time to get in there.
We're on the road, but there is potential to grow in aerospace business because as you, as you saw today with my presentation, the aerospace business, in comparison to the market size, is fairly low. So yes, we want to grow in aerospace business.
I guess, with the slide where you talked about, obviously, the long product lifetime of some of these high performance alloys, are there opportunities for you to get into any aftermarket businesses as well, to be able to generate sales beyond the initial product sale through the lifetime of that product?
Well, well, we're partly in there. We partly invented the long-lasting spark plug, so we are in the aftersales market of spark plugs. But in the oil and gas market, there is no aftersales market. You either replace these things because it's a very conservative industry, you either replace them, otherwise these cladded pipes, they will last for the lifetime of the project, which is around about 20-30 years.
And then, finally.
These aggressive applications, HPA do not last forever, but the replacement time is much longer than with other materials, so productivity of these petrol platforms and these things is much higher using these materials.
Thank you. And then finally, just, still within HPA, so 5 of the top 10 producers that you mentioned, are also Asian competitors. Obviously, we've seen how the stainless industry evolved, through the past 2 decades. Are there any risks for, overcapacity or, excessive growth within HPA from, the Asian peers as well?
You know, in every industry in the world, you know, can have overcapacity, you know? That is a question of time. It's a question of having, you know, a priority in a country like China to develop one material or not. You know, what happened with the overcapacity in steel and stainless steel in China is that, you know, the Chinese government, in the 15-year plans, decided that we are a strategic material at the beginning for the development of the country, and they put all the power of the Chinese state, you know, to support the growth in this industry. So this is very unusual, no? This is - can only happen in a market economy. Do we have the risk to... for the same in High-Performance Alloys?
You never know, no, but they say what we know is that today they are not here. They are small in this business. They would like probably the best stainless steel players or the best specialty steel players would like, would like to enter in this business, but they will need time. They will need time to develop the alloys. They will need time to develop the application. They will need time to be certified by the users, so that will give us, you know, several years of comfort.
Absolutely. I can confirm that we do see a local market of HPA material in China, but we don't see HPA material ex-China in our relevant markets yet. It will happen, as Bernardo said, but it will still take a while, since the production routing and the production method is so complicated that any quality requirements in conservative industry like oil and gas, like aerospace, are so high that they will not enter into international markets yet.
Also, remember what we have been discussing during the meeting, no? That the world is becoming more regional. So I don't expect, you know, a European or American or South African companies using strategic materials acquired from China because it's totally the opposite. We are now relocating the industry in United States and Europe because we want to have this strategic autonomy. I don't believe, you know, that in the future, Rolls-Royce, Westinghouse, or these kind of people, you know, will be open to import material from China when, you know, the situation, the geopolitical tensions between China and United States are getting-
In addition to that, I can tell you that in the exit process, before we became into the ownership of Acerinox, I can tell you that the most potential investors for VDM came from China, and they were very much interested to take a shortcut, especially on the aerospace knowledge that we do have. This was the highest interest was taking know-how to take the shortcut to install a local aerospace company. I think I'm very happy that we kept that knowledge in Europe, and we develop it together with our group in Acerinox and not selling this know-how to other countries, especially not to China.
Next question. Nino?
Hello, Maxime Kogge from ODDO. So I have a first question about nickel. It has been falling even more since your last Q3 results, and I think the HPA Division is even more impacted. It uses six times more nickel as stainless steel. So could you outline the short-term impacts, notably in terms of inventory valuations? And could we envisage that by lowering the sales price of both stainless steel and HPA, lower nickel prices could have an impact in terms of improved demand? Not necessarily now, but next year or even after.
You know that we don't like speaking about prices. For prices, we only refer to the consultant company CRU or whatever, because you are not allowed to speak about prices. On the other side of these cameras, there are some of our competitors, you know? So something that we cannot answer. You know, we're going to speak about what the magazines, the specialized magazines are publishing. You know, still the market is very positive in HPA, so we are keeping good margins in HPA. Situation in the stainless steel has been very low with all the excess of material in all the markets, the excess of stock. We think that we have already digested these stocks.
In terms of if you compare, or if distributors compare the size of the volume of the stock with the others that they have on hand, probably they still think that is very, very, very high. But in historical figures, in historical volumes, they are under the average. So that can change in a, you know, two months. I mean, this is, this is our... Not in HPA, but in stainless steel, you know, this is a cyclical business, and we follow these trends. Remember that after COVID, you know, the supply chain was totally empty, and then when we started to go up, extending our delivery times, everybody wanted to replace stocks. Everybody. We were living a party that it looked like were never ending, you know?
And today we are living, you know, we are suffering the hangover, you know? But this is the, what everybody described as the whip effect. I mean, we are in the beginning of the supply chain. Supply chain was empty, and then when you went to the car dealer to buy a car, there was no car in stock. But there was no car in stock, there was no car in the stock of the car producer, there were no exhaust systems in the stocks of the exhaust system supplier, no stocks in the stainless steel distributors, and no stock in the mills. So then we suffer, we suffer. Boom! Now we are in the bad part of the cycle. The situation today is, how to say? Is not very positive in Europe and in United States.
We're speaking about the possibility of a recession, these things, but our cycle is different. We have been suffering this recession since May 2022. I mean, we have been one year and a half in the crisis. So when everybody will start speaking about the recession, then we will start speaking about recovery. So this is very clear. We have a different cycle. And now, who knows? If you ask me about visibility for next year, nothing. So it's good or it's bad for us? Because if there's no visibility, it's because our customers are not taking orders, but they are not going to stop all the plans. I don't think the industry is going to disappear in two months.
I mean, you know, stainless apparent consumption of stainless steel in Europe and in North America from January to October was minus... How much was? Minus 27? Minus 27%. Who can imagine these numbers, no? If you speak about the recession, we are speaking about, okay, we are not going to grow. Germany can be below zero, but minus 0.2. Then industrial production can be minus 1%. Stainless steel real consumption can be minus 3, minus 4%, but not minus 27. So what is happening? That the supply chain is empty again. So now we don't have visibility, what means that why not, you know, in a couple of months our customers will start looking for others because they don't have the contract, and they will need to find materials urgently, and then the market can boom again.
Because if this is a dip, the performance is going to be like this until we have the equilibrium again. So who knows? The situation, I don't complain. You know, we are back in the trenches. This is. We are used to this. We are used to living in this cyclical industry. We have a strong heart, no? And we know that when everybody is speaking about crisis, normally we are speaking about recovery. And we, what can we say? It's not a clear picture, you know? But probably next year we will start, maybe can be Q2, third, or at the end of the year, but we will start looking at green signs in our business.
Okay, and just a second question on M&A. So you've demonstrated you've shown some willingness to grow by M&A, and would you consider to go further in terms of upstream integration? Because your two main competitors in Europe, they are more integrated than you are in ferrochrome and in scrap, and that's something where you're not in. Is that something that you're ruling out because you don't have the competence, or is it something you are open to?
You know, when people ask me if we are considering certain movements, I always say yes, because we have to do it. We have to study every possibility. What I can tell you is that, as far as we think, as far as we know, you don't have an advantage owning a scrap dealer. I'm going to explain you why. So first of all, because, you know, you don't produce scrap. You collect scrap. If there's somebody collecting scrap in certain area of Europe, if I want or if I need a scrap and I don't find a scrap in my area, in my network area, I will have to go to buy a scrap.
I will compete or, Acerinox or Acerinox suppliers will compete with the other scrap dealers to get this material from the collectors of the, of the material. So what can happen? That we will get a scrap the same than the others. Probably, if we start doing these kind of things, we will increase prices, no? But, scrap is always available, available for the best buyer. The one who pay, who pays more will keep the scrap. Second, you know, we have been traditionally number one in scrap utilization, so we have the techniques that we have already developed in our plant for many, many years to be very intensive in scrap utilization. So we know how to blend the scrap to, you know, to have a higher percentage, no?
Probably, other people need to have their own scrap dealers. We have been doing this with our traditional scrap suppliers. We are continuously working with them, continuously developing new technologies and trying to analyze, you know, the chemical composition in order to make the most of the scrap that we receive, no? This is a very selective scrap. What are we doing today? First of all, of course, we are taking special care with our internal scrap because in the process, we produce more than 10% of scrap. This is the efficient, the normal efficient efficiency of the process.
We classify all the scrap in the way that if we have a grade, stainless steel grade, that is using nickel, chromium, and titanium, we will use it in the same grade because we need to use this nickel, this chromium, this titanium. Something that you will see tomorrow because it's especially intensive in VDM, because we don't waste any single kilo of any single metallic element, no? So this is something we do, we do by ourselves, and we do in cooperation with the scrap dealers, no? But it's very, very good because we are developing exactly the same than the rest of the people, but with a good partnership, good relation with our suppliers. Tell me, what is the advantage of owning 10% of a scrap yard?
Because if you, if you convince me that it's good for the business, you know, I have the possibility to do it tomorrow because all these scrap dealers are open, you know. If you give them 10% of the business and you don't control the business, they will be very happy. But tell me, what is the advantage of doing this? Because then we will follow this, this, this idea, but until now, we are very comfortable and very happy the way we are.
It's Bastian Synagowitz from Deutsche Bank. My first question is one for Niclas, and I just want to get back on all of the growth opportunities you've been talking about. So clearly, there seems to be a lot of things coming. I guess also in a year like this, you've been doing pretty well in an environment where metal prices have been falling. I guess you probably did quite better than some of your peers, which were, I would say, exposed to similar trends. But looking at these growth opportunities, is there basically a certain EBITDA level which you're aspiring to, which you're happy to share with us?
Well, as Bernardo says, it's a little bit difficult to share EBITDA levels with you. But I can tell you, for example, the white goods business, that is not the end of the story. The potential that I have pointed out today is 5 to even 6,000 tons. Some of the projects that Helena explained to you is still in a very early stage. But I think, for example, the stationary or the moving as a fuel cell will have lots of potential because, I mean, you're also following the discussion about the mobility of trucks. Electric mobility of trucks will not be suitable.
I think on a long-term future, it will be fuel cells that will make trucking more environmentally friendly. I think there's lots of potential in this as well. E-fuels is a big field that we're looking at. Some of these are more advanced, some of them are in the beginning, and in every process like an R&D process, you're having a certain hit rate. You have 10 opportunities, and 2 is gonna materialize. So there is somewhere we definitely know, like in the electrolyzers, the white goods business, if we would be able to use the full potential of another 2,500-3,500 tons, we know exactly what the EBITDA level would be. But others, we are investigating.
We're having cooperations with fuel cell producers, with R&D, universities, cooperations. We're not sure yet, but if you follow the discussion and the wide field of green energy that is requested, I think we are well positioned.
Thank you. Then my second question is on the eco label you've been talking about. And if—I guess, if we look at the carbon steel space, I think the players are talking about 200-300 EUR per ton premium for green products. My understanding at least is that so far in stainless, it's been more difficult to actually capture that price premium. So I'm wondering, what's the your commercial approach here? And do you think you can get a premium at some point, or do you basically need CBAM to sort that out for you?
... We believe, we believe that the market is gonna go there. I think it's not, definitely not today there. I think we all are, as, as consumers, we are all of us, it's difficult that we are putting money behind some of those things. It depends as well on the country. But we are - I think we are, we are working, and we are creating a market that will be there in the near future, and that's why we have to be ready. We were the first ones announcing this, this new product line in the market from all the, the competitors, and we've been in contact with many customers across the world because it's not only affecting Europe, and the feedback from the customers is positive, that they really think this is gonna come.
We are ready to get started, and I think the important element is to make sure that in the same way that we have a category when we buy a washing machine from A to D or E, depending on the electricity consumption and efficiency, there will be some kind of grading that will differentiate how environmentally friendly that washing machine is from the CO2 that was generated by producing the washing machine. I think we have a competitive advantage as we are definitely in Europe and in North America in the same way, and we can be ready to provide the products. But also, it's also true that putting a euro on top of one of those elements today is a discussion with the customers.
There are some that see that, and they are ready to go ahead.
You know, sometimes our society is very contradictory. I mean, you know, people in Europe do not want to have a stainless steel or whatever plant next to their house, or at least in the country. But we want to have reasonable salaries, to work a reasonable amount of hours, to have to be environmental respectful. And then, okay, and having said this, then we go to the Chinese shop, you know, and we buy something that have been made, you know, with kids or with, you know, abusing of people and dirting the rivers and these things.
No, I think that's something that is still our society have to recognize, that we, the industry, we are making an extraordinary effort to be the cleanest industry and the cleanest ever, you know, industry in the history, and we are doing that. And the society or our customers are starting to recognize it. We are creating the market. There's not a market yet, but we are creating this market. When you buy a washing machine, you see that you have a, you know, a sticker there saying what is the electricity efficiency, no? This is very good, and probably if you, for more or less the same amount of money, you will buy the more efficient washing machine.
Our hope, what we are negotiating, is that in the future, in the close future, in a very close future, you will buy the washing machine, and you will have a second sticker that is related to sustainability. And then you will see that to produce this washing machine, they have used materials, recyclables, they have used recycled material, and the CO2 emissions or any other emission or water consumption during the process have been the lowest. And this is something that will receive a premium from our society, and this is something that we are working to. For many years, we have been trying to develop this idea with the governments, not saying: "Okay, you have to help us because if...
You have to give us, or to give the society the example of what to do." And that is the new initiative that we have seen in Europe, that is the responsible purchasing. Not that in infrastructure. Now, how can you imagine, you know, that the German government is going to spend, you know, a fortune in infrastructure, in bridges, and they are going to buy material from China? There's no sense, no? If you want to be sustainable, you want to follow these sustainability issues, you have to buy from a sustainable company. And if you look for a sustainable company, this is Acerinox.
And even if you're going to go further, and you want to buy an especially premium material that has been especially designed and processed, you know, to be less aggressive with the environment, then you will get it, but that is going to cost you more money. It's reasonable.
Any further question? Íñigo.
Thank you. Thank you, Carlos. Íñigo Egusquiza from Kepler Cheuvreux. 3 questions from my side, Bernardo, and thank you for the presentations. Now, the first one is on the... I think it was you, Antonio, that mentioned an EBITDA margin expansion of between 2.5 and 3.5 percentage points in your presentation. The first question is, what is the starting point on that EBITDA margin expansion that you are assuming? The second question that I have is on the hands on the Excellence Plan that you presented. I don't know if you are gonna share a number. You mentioned that it was approved by the board yesterday. I don't know if we have to wait a few days to know that number.
The third question, in a different topic, we talk a lot about VDM, which was great to better understand the business, Acerinox Europa, Columbus, NAS, but we didn't mention a lot of things about Bahru. So I don't know if there is—what is the situation on Bahru? Any update you can make for us? Thank you.
What is Bahru?
Bahru.
Okay, so can you hear me right? Okay. So coming back to your first question, as an easy one, we've built these models and with all our strategic initiative based on market consensus for 2024. Okay? We haven't released yet our 2024 budget, but this is a year, a base year, normalized year, where we believe it represents what Miguel and Bernardo mentioned in their slides, what could be the normal profitability margin right now.
In regards to the question on the Excellence Plan and Bahru. So on the Excellence Plan, we are not able to still mention, as you said, we need a few days, but definitely we will communicate what is our plan going forward. I think we are all very excited about it because I think it's gonna provide very good results to the company. It's gonna be a differentiating factor, and it's gonna be driving performance, and it's part of what Tony was talking about, how to improve further the profitability of the company and contributes to that profitability going forward.
We have the plan is already defined, you know. It's already pre-approved, but we need to have to do everything in the right and perfect way. So we need to be sure of the traceability. So we are assuring the auditing system because if we are providing this kind of information for you, that you are including it in your models, it's something that have to be audited. So we have to be ready, you know, to accept the audit, so we need to do it in a formal way.
The idea is to...
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll be already starting from January 1st, the new plan. So it's gonna start in 2024. And then to the last question on Bahru. Bahru is one of our assets that we have. I think in the last earnings call, Miguel and myself were talking about Bahru, and we explained that it is another asset we have. It's not a core asset in the way that NAS can be or VDM can be, but definitely it's today not creating us a problem in the way we manage the situation in the local country. It's a bit challenging and difficult environment, as you can imagine, what is the situation in Asia with overcapacity, with a non-market driven economy that is not focused on the...
on what is needed in the country, but producing to export to the rest of the world. But we are managing it very well. So we are focusing on, I think, driving and focus on certain customers, certain products. So the same thing that we have been telling for the last 12 months is what we're doing in Bahru at this point in time.
More questions?
Any further question?
So-
Hi, Moses here, from JP Morgan. Question for Dr. Helena, please. I think you mentioned the growth potential for the hydrogen end segment for High-Performance Alloys to be 1,600 tons per annum. Could you please guide how many volumes maybe that you're currently able to produce today? And then also, if we look at obviously the larger theme of de-globalization, and you know, in Europe here, we have a higher levelized cost of hydrogen because of high renewable energy costs. Is there a shift perhaps maybe to develop this business in other regions where there is perhaps a lower cost of hydrogen? You know, think about Brazil, Canada, Middle East, where we see the demand for electrolyzers as well.
Thank you for your question. I think this is not... Now it's working. Regarding the example I gave, that was only an example, the Crofer, for these particular applications, and the hydrogen, the green hydrogen, is much more than that. You heard the other example on the nickel side. So the customers are on the ramping curve, and prospections and forecasts are much higher. So this is something we consider realistic in the next years. And considering the production of hydrogen outside, far away, I think this is going to be difficult because hydrogen is difficult to transport. So you have to compress, or you have to pressurize, so it's a great advantage to produce it locally as well. So it's mainly linked with the renewable energies to produce it green.
Of course, you can produce it gray or other colors from steam reforming, as oil, natural gas, but it's not a green hydrogen. So it's going to be local because it's a difficult substance to transport. I hope you answer your question.
Good.
Yeah. Good morning, and thank you for the presentation. It's Alberto Esposito from JB Capital. I have a question on the through the cycle figures. So you said that you're going to achieve a 10, over 10% EBITDA margin through the cycle. What is this target by division? And, well, I'll go later.
Sorry, what is target by division?
What is the target by division of EBITDA margins? So it's at over 10% EBITDA margin for the group. What is it High-Performance Alloys and stainless steel?
So, what we explained today in the through the cycle increase of EBITDA, I think is not a target. It's more an estimated number. I mean, we think that limiting in certain extent the competition in Europe and in United States, you know, to more European and American producers, that will give us an advantage not to suffer, you know, or because we will avoid the Chinese or the Indonesian companies to fix the rules, the pricing rules of the region. No? So just with this phenomenon, we think we estimated very conservative our numbers that, you know, our average price will increase. I cannot tell you how much.
Now, but we made an estimated numbers and say, "Okay, can be at the level of 200." So don't, don't believe it, you know, because... Or don't believe it, no. Believe it, you know, but don't take it as a precise number because it's just an estimate of what can happen in the, in the coming years. Of course, we have our numbers, we have our, our, our targets. We know wh- how much are we going to improve with, our efficient, with our excellent plans, with, VDM, with the expansion of VDM, the expansion of North America, but, we, we never give this number. No, Miguel, are you?
No, that's at the end, that's right. We historically, more or less, the information we disclose is regarding the business unit. So we disclose HPA and we disclose the stainless. I think in HPA, you have all the data. The HPA is the best performing in these days, even than expected. This has been mentioned and also it has been mentioned by Dr. Müller through the presence of VDM in the NAS by far it's overperforming compared with what were our multiples at that time. Still, any case, we prefer not to commit to any specific margin EBITDA. In the case of stainless, as Bernardo mentioned, there are several facts where we prefer just to not disclose figures per regions. When you...
We're just looking at the reports that exist in the market from a specialist. The situation in Europe still is a bit dramatic in prices because there are a lot of uncertainties in Europe taking place. We have seen that most of the players are reporting losses in Europe. So in the actual situation, this is one of the reasons why it was mentioned that the situation in Europe cannot remain for long, but still we are in the trenches, as Bernardo said. The situation in America is more favorable. The American market is a much more mature market.
It has maintained the prices stable in the last two years, while prices in Europe had that rally in the first semester of last year, and now, later on, they pay the bill of the rally that took place at the first semester. The American market is a much more mature, and the prices remain more flat. But we, we do not segregate figures by regions.
We are providing a lot of information. Remember that we never spoke about payback of our CapEx, and now, you know, we feel comfortable here, we feel relaxed, and we start to say, you know, not somebody mentioned, no, less than two years or this kind of things. No, I think that we are normally much more transparent than our competitors. We are giving a lot of information, but there's a limit.
Hello. Yeah, I think this one will go off the limit also. But, you've provided through the cycle figures, and I understand it's a very volatile business, and it's very difficult to predict, and that's why you're giving a through the cycle figure. With these figures, what would be the through the cycle free cash flow level, more or less? Could we expect around EUR 350 million-EUR 400 million free cash flow ex-dividends?
Well, that has been the case when we were tough in much more difficult basis. So in that chart, it appeared that at least we have been consistently obtaining higher cash than the dividend to be paid, and consequently, we have been reducing debt. So this has been working at every part of the cycle, and in addition, gradually it's coming higher. In the COVID year, we obtained EUR 320 million, so... And then this was the year of the acquisition of VDM, it appeared, but this was a difficult year for the industry. And in the peak of 2022, we were above the level of EUR 400 million, no?
So I think in this regard, the cash generation obviously is submitted to the working capital needs, and consequently, depending on when you put the limit or you establish the border, it may appear differences. But we are a strong cash generator. We have a very low level of debt, and as is coming, just contemplating the recurring cash generation and the level of debt is we keep as we are. Maybe in three years, we can be in cash position, but in the meantime, as has been contemplated, we are also contemplating possibilities for growth. But as I said before, for us, debt is not a headache. We are having extreme competitive term debt. We are having a strong cash position in the States.
We balance that very properly, and we are not affected by that. In addition, we are reducing debt every single year, so this is a good sign.
Thank you.
Robert, last question, and I think we should better go to see the Christmas markets in Düsseldorf, because we will have enough time tonight and tomorrow to answer all your questions.
Okay, last. Robert Jackson from Banco Santander. So the question is related to the CapEx. So the last 20-25 years, your timing of your CapEx has been, I think, quite successful. Could you just give us your thought process in terms of what's keeping you back over the next year or so? I mean, what is the main decision-making behind the next CapEx, large CapEx or inorganic growth? And the second question is related to your HPA. Do you think you need to expand your commercial network, your global commercial network, to be more successful?
Robert, you know, answer your different question for CapEx. You know, we normally say that we feel comfortable with around EUR 200 million, no, Miguel? That is the, that is the number. And we always say that we want to be very conservative in our debt and keep a debt EBITDA debt ratio of below 1.2. I mean, that means that in one hand, we are generating enough cash to maintain our CapEx, and more or less around this number, plus or minus 20%, and have enough cash to pay our dividend. And if we have an excess of cash, we do the buyback of shares. But also we have a good situation, and there's a lot of bankers here.
You know, I think we have a healthy situation that if we need money, you know, to further expansions, I think we will get it, right? We trust in you. So I think it's something that you can expect. You know, the expansion plan of NAS is 250 million US dollars, but we will split it in 5 years. So it's more or less the same rhythm of investment that you perfectly know that we have been tackling in the last years. Now, speaking about expansion, what is the expansion of commercial network? What expansion can we add if we have offices and service centers in all the major countries in the world, combining VDM and Acerinox, huh?
On top of that, I can tell you that we, just 3.5 years ago, during the last 3.5 year, expanded our commercial network dramatically because we found our friends from Stainless. So they were present already, so we decided to rather get somebody to join them or basically teach them how to sell our material. So the white spots on the world map got reduced dramatically already.
And what I can add, Robert, is that in we have mentioned in all the presentations, in the new strategy of the Stainless Steel Division, that we are going to be closer to the end user's market. That will need a lot of investment in human capital. I mean, we will need people. We will need more salesmen. And we are expanding our commercial network, but not in number of locations, but in number of people, you know, in the street. That is where we need to have them. Also, we have to develop the technical departments, and we are developing the technical commercial teams. You know, we have to go together in this direction, and this is the expansion that we are facing now.
I think it's also important to understand where we are in the value chain. If we're going to deliver that material for a big pipeline project in the oil and gas industry, our material goes to somebody that clads the material. This plate goes to a pipe manufacturer. This pipe manufacturer is talking to the engineering company, and that will serve the end customer. So we don't have to necessarily be present in the Far East, Near East, in Brazil, to serve international projects. So the physical presence is not deciding about the success of the business.
We have, you know, a commercial office in Brazil. You know, the last country that we have been studying in order to put a new commercial office is Nigeria, you know?
But most of the consumption of Nigeria is coming with a finished equipment. I mean, they, they are not producing many things in Nigeria. Most of the equipment for the petrol industry is coming from Europe, U.K., or, or United States or other places. So the engineering companies are still major.
What about transforming VDM into more, providing more solutions in addition to the actual product you're providing, which would need more qualified engineers?
You mean growing downstream of-
No, no, providing a service to your clients as well, additionally to the actual products. Is that a way you could, a road you could be going down in the longer term, bearing in mind the potential in different, in new segments?
Well, I mean, I met somebody that knew that I was in the engineering business inside Thyssenrupp. So if we had a problem, or we want to have a basic engineering, we would discuss with all the experts, with the guy that builds the reactor, and the guy that builds the reactor brings the guy that supplies the material. So we, at a very early stage, are sitting together with our customers, even we're going to bring our engineer to where the engineering company is. So we're sitting at the table and discussing the best application for this. But it's not always necessary to have a presence in this country.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Okay, thank you very much-
... Thank you all for your participation in this Capital Markets Day, and your commitment with Acerinox. Thank you to all the speakers for your fantastic presentations and your comments. And let me, you know, give a big thank you also to all the team, you know, who has been involved in the preparation of the Capital Markets Day.