Good morning, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Welcome to all of you live here in the room. Welcome to everybody listening online. Just so you know it, we are approximately seven-five in the room, and just as many have signed up online. First of all, you don't have to check your screens and see if there's a company announcement, because there isn't a company announcement today. There will be one later about share buybacks. We do that every Tuesday, but nothing out of the ordinary. It's that kind of Capital Markets Day. My name is Flemming. I'm heading up investor relations, in case you didn't know it already. On behalf of the IR team, I would just say we've really been looking forward to tomorrow, of course, also today.
We have a packed agenda. It's been a while since we had our last Capital Markets Day, so it's an ambitious program. You will start the day with sort of a high-level strategic overview with Jens and Jens. We have an R&D session. Before the lunch, we also have the customers in focus and an ESG event. You won't remember more now, so I will go deeper into the rest later. This is what you have in front of you, so fasten your seat belts. This is the strongest team we can put together. These are the colleagues presenting here today. It's a strong team, and I know they've been looking forward to this.
One important thing I will ask you to do is make this an interesting day with dialogue, good questions. We've tried to make sure that we have time in the agenda for that, for Q&A sessions. Please take part in that. My job is to make sure that we keep the schedule. I think that's just about everything I have to say, except if you are listening online, if you wanna ask question, it should be pretty intuitive on the screen where to write your question. It will appear on an iPad that I will have in my hand, and then I can see the questions. One very practical thing, you have a small table in front of you.
You can use it, but it's not very stable, so please be careful if you put your coffee on it. That's it. The first speaker today, I think he needs very little introduction. Please welcome CEO Jens Bjørn Andersen.
Thank you, Flemming, and welcome also from me here to Hedehusene to a hopefully action-packed day. We've been looking forward to it also, and Flemming, thanks for taking five minutes of my very scarce time. We have to be over in 25 minutes, Jens Lund and myself, so we can get your questions going. This is what I'm gonna talk about: delivering on our strategy. I'll spend a few minutes on that. This is why we go to work at DSV every single day. This is why the almost 80,000 people come to the office is to generate what we have generated. This is a slide that we are super proud of. This is the most important KPI that we are using in our company.
This is what all the work, all the efforts, all the hard work of our company really boils down to: what earnings do we make per share, and how does that develop in our company? This is pretty self-explanatory, and we are happy about this development with a 28% CAGR development from the last time we met, at the last Capital Markets Day in 2015. Some of the most cynical of you will probably say, "Yes, but it's highly inflated at the last couple of years." Let's just assume we take those away. We can still show to a very, very a high development on a CAGR basis, which is probably at any timeframe, you would say, exceeding 15%.
We're very pleased about that, and I guess when everything is said and done, this is also what you get as a shareholder. How is it being comprised? It comes from some of these figures. I'm sure that some of you know them yourselves. We had an EBIT result of DKK 3 billion last time we met. Last year we made DKK 16 billion, and you know we have a guidance that exceeds DKK 20 billion this year. What also pleases us is the fact that we have managed to achieve industry-high margins, and every time we have gone into a new year, and particularly due to the acquisitions of our company, we have been able to increase our margins also.
Last but not least, you also need to have a look at what you get from the investments that you make, and I think also it's satisfactory for us to see that the return on invested capital now exceeds our long-term financial targets of 20%, which is also super relevant for us. That was just the start. Now it's the agenda. I just wanted to make all that clear for you that we are happy about the performance, and it was just something which I really wanted to emphasize before we even get going. This is what I'm gonna talk about, and without further hesitation, I'll jump straight into it.
A lot of the value in a company like DSV lies in the network. We have a lot of super profitable and very strong countries in our organization, but they can only thrive because of other countries in the network. DSV the U.S. can never make the very high results they do if they did not have a strong DSV in China, in Germany, in Vietnam, and in the U.K., for instance. A lot of the value lies in the network. This is our footprint today compared to what it was in 2015 when we met the last time. We were 76% European company at the time. We're very pleased about the fact that we have grown outside of Europe.
There's nothing wrong with Europe, but we all have to realize that growth is higher outside of Europe. The fact that we now have close to 25% in Americas, close to 25% in APAC, and that we also have an increased size in Africa and the Middle East due to the acquisitions primarily of UTi and Agility is really satisfactory to us. We can debate what is the ultimate kind of situation. We'll probably never agree to what that exactly is, but we are close to something that we find very, very attractive. The reason that Europe is still big is that the large road operations that we have, they weigh in a lot in Europe.
As you all know, M&A is a very important part of our strategy in our company. We have been able to do three relatively large acquisitions since we met last time. We just thought it would be appropriate to tick that off in terms of what we actually set out to do back in 2015. You can see up here we had some criteria that we set at the time. This is some of the characteristics that the future acquisitions of DSV need to have. They needed to be asset light. They needed to have Air & Sea exposure. They needed to have a presence outside of Europe. There's nothing wrong if it was a restructuring case, and then we could also do bolt-on on road.
You can all see that the three acquisitions we have done, UTi Worldwide, Panalpina, and Agility, they all ticked at least most of those boxes. Not to offend our guys, our new colleagues from Agility, we kind of put a bracket around restructuring case. They'll probably argue that it was not a true classic restructuring case. What is also very important and very interesting, I think also for you guys, it is at least for us, is to look at the EBIT impact that we have communicated to the market. The standalone profitability plus the synergies amounts to a little over DKK 7 billion for these three acquisitions.
As you probably remember on the previous slide, the earnings of our company before we did these acquisitions were DKK 3 billion, and then you put like DKK 7 billion on top, meaning DKK 10 billion. Today we make DKK 20 billion. We have this escalation of the profits. The impact of the acquisitions, they will have or they have had a very big impact on the existing business that we have in the company. This is why we think that M&A is so interesting, that it's not only possible for us to lift the margins on the acquired companies to the levels that we have, but we have seen that the margins of the combined and total company has gone up after the acquisitions.
This is, of course, something which is very satisfactory and also something that you should expect happen also. Of course, when we spend EUR 10 billion of your money, of the investors' money, when we do acquisitions, I guess it's also relevant for you to be able to see that we actually have seen this development. We are pleased about the companies we have acquired. They have all generated value for all shareholders. The industry is still fragmented. This is how it was 10 years ago to the left-hand side. It's not just anybody that we have bought. It's three sizable, respectively, market leading companies.
We still believe that there are room for further consolidation. We are full of aspirations to continue the journey in our company. We feel it still makes a lot of sense in our industry where scale is very, very important. There could be names on the right-hand side on this list that we would like to acquire, but it could also be companies outside of this list. It remains to be seen what the future looks like. It's still a fact that the combined market share of all the companies you see to the right is still something between 30% and 40%. You know, in other industries one player alone would have a market share of 30%-40%.
There's still room for further consolidation. That's the message we wanna send across here. From a capital allocation point of view, no change. I think it has been consistent for the last 20 years. I think this is also what is important in a company, that you know what you get, that we are not changing our minds all the time as to what we do with the cash. We still have the opinion that we can continue to convert 100% of our earnings to cash going forward. Just if somebody was in doubt, just make it very clear, we wanna repay debt if we are outside of our targets. We are way below our target of 2 x earnings right now.
Number two, from a capital allocation point of view is value creating M&A, and number three is giving the money back to shareholders, primarily through share buybacks. You can see that the M&A principles that we have had for many, many years, they are also unchanged, so nothing new on that front. Before I finish, I just wanted to touch upon some of the trends. A lot of things are happening in our industry. We are super happy about that. That makes it actually easier for us to grow with customers because we take part in that also, and we have a strengthened service offerings to give to the industry. Of course, there's a lot of speculation right now about global trade flows, what's gonna happen.
Will globalization continue, or will we see a more fragmented world? We are of the opinion right now, also from speaking to our large clients, that globalization is here to stay. I always take my iPhone up and say, the day that this phone is gonna be produced in Texas with components also being produced in Texas, it's a day that I will never see for sure. We do believe that the globalization will continue. The supply chains of the world need to become more resilient compared to what we have seen. We will see changes in the supply chains, but we are of the opinion that we will see not a fragmentation, but we will see more complex supply chains in the world going forward.
Sustainability, decarbonizing our industry will be a license to operate for a company like DSV in the future. We see that going forward, and you will hear Lindsay coming up talking about the very ambitious targets we have on decarbonizing also what we do in our company. I think it's nice. Actually, we can say due to the knowledge we got from the Panalpina acquisition, we are among the leaders in our industry on that. Digitalization and automation in a company where 70% of your cost base is related to headcount is very, very important. It's also something that will take some of the day-to-day. I think we are also in a situation where we can show that we have a satisfactory situation.
The proof always for me lies in the conversion ratio. If you are to establish if a company is highly digital and have good processes, you should look at how much of the GP is left when you get down to EBIT. It tells you about the productivity of the company, and without good processes and good digital capabilities, you simply cannot have a high conversion ratio. Distribution channels are also changing. I think that also is positive for a company like DSV. We have strengthened our competencies within e-commerce, and you'll probably hear that, or you will hear that from Brian also, I think today. It does not go against the traditional B2B.
The shipments still need to get home from China, for instance, and then we will use our e-commerce and e-fulfillment centers to do the last mile distribution. I think these are all four pillars that we will also spend more time on today. The last thing before I finalize, it's something which is very important to me personally and to all of us in the company. I think it's a super cool picture by the way that we have found. We talk so much about IT. We talk about digitalization. We talk about algorithms. It's great. It's fantastic. We need that every day in the company. There's one thing we need even more. It's skilled and good and loyal employees, and we have that in DSV.
It's still a people's business. It's very, very important to say. No customer the last two years would allow their supply chain to be run by some algorithm in a basement in California. I can guarantee you that. It's not working. It's the people that makes the difference in DSV. We need, and we have that. We have. I was just in the U.S. the last couple of weeks. I was in Chicago. I was in New Jersey. Two very large offices in DSV. Probably 500-600 people sitting in our New Jersey office. It looks a little bit like this office. Fantastic. Really nice Scandinavian furniture. Totally refurbished. This is not the traditional kind of freight forwarding office that you enter into the U.S.
I think we are an attractive workplace for the talented people from our industry. Also, our culture with empowerment, decentralized organization still, and the accountability is something that attracts people to DSV. Last but not least, I think we can all be very, very happy and very proud about the fact that we have, I know for sure, we have the most stable management team in the industry. People do not leave our company, and that's something we should not underestimate. That does not mean that we do not get new inspiration. We do that. We add a lot of new resources also on management level when we do acquisitions, but we don't have to go through the hassle of people changing all the time. It's something that you guys should also not underestimate.
That has been a really big part of what we have been doing. The last thing is the new purpose that we have in DSV. I'm just gonna touch a little bit upon that. We have defined our purpose as a company. We wanna keep supply chains flowing, and then we had to put in also in a world of change. It's obvious that we play an important role. Our people are proud of what they do. We have always known that what we do is important, but to the outside world, we have been a company that has moved things from A to B. How difficult is that? We have known if we did not go to work, you go down in the supermarket the day after, it will be empty.
Also for our employees, what we have done during COVID and also now in support of Ukraine, it has actually felt really great. We have felt our purpose stronger in recent months than we have maybe before. What is it that we wanna achieve? We wanna have a sustainable growth. That's the vision of DSV. We're here to support our customers and in the service industry, we always have to take their needs first, and I'm sure Rene will come back to that. Of course, we also need to generate some opportunities for our employees and grow the value for our shareholders also, as I said in the beginning. How do we do that? That's with the mission.
We wanna continue. I don't wanna say we wanna have, because I think we have that, but we wanna continue having a high degree of focus on operational excellence, and this I can tell you is something that Jens will also touch upon in his presentation. With that said, just if you are in doubt about what I've been saying, just to wrap up, what is it that I have wanted to, which messages is it that I wanted to get across to you is the earnings per share. We are happy about that. It's grown 28% CAGR since 2015. There's no change in the M&A philosophy of our company.
It is a very critical part of our capital allocation policy. We simply believe that spending the money that the company generates, and sometimes a little bit more than that, in consolidation of the industry, is superior to just having a dividend or a share buyback. We wanna grow as a company. We wanna grow faster than the market. You will hear that from Carsten later on. For our customers, employees, societies, and not least also for the shareholders of DSV. With that said, it's over to you, Jens, and then we will take a Q&A after Jens's presentation. Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, and good morning, everybody, from me as well. I'll just check the time so that we have the time for what can I say, the Q&A session as well, because as you all know, some of these things I can actually talk quite a bit about, but I'll just address the change that we've made in the management team and when I started in 2002, I mean, we've probably grown quite a bit since that happened. In the company, I mean, what can I say? A CFO would typically cover many of these areas that we're talking about up here. Since the company has grown quite a bit, we could sort of not really keep up with the structure that we had.
We decided to let Michael take some of the work. He was doing much of it anyway, but also, I guess, to formalize it a little bit and sort of split the role into two. That's sort of the reason behind it. There's been quite a few questions about it, so we just thought we would address it on the slide here. If you have questions to it, you know, please feel free to ask them separately. When we work, Jens Bjørn talked about strategy and basically what is it that strategy means to us.
Well, I think when we talk to many companies or whatever, we always talk about, you know, I have this application or something that can do something for, you know, me in serving our customers. We would rather have a focus on what is it actually that we wanna do for the customer as the first thing, not via an application, because that comes later on in the discussion. We really try to say, what is it that we can do? Jens Bjørn alluded to it. We have a network business, and let's say we would dive a little bit deeper. What is it in our network business that creates value? We could then try to say, well, let's say for road, a European groupage, its network has a much higher value than the FTL business has. So perhaps we wanna focus on that.
Well, if we wanna focus on that, what is then the service catalog? What is it we need to do for the customer, so they will choose us? Why would the customer choose us? This is very, very important. Once we've figured out what this is and we have a pretty good idea about that, then we can say, how do we then wanna operate it? What's the workflows? What's the user interfaces? How are we gonna do it? First then we're gonna talk about what kind of application is gonna support us. I think that's why you go wrong on strategy for many companies that you then do this. Of course, if we wanna do this, we need, at the end of the day, to have control over our data, so they are in databases.
What we try all the time is to consolidate our data on these platforms. Of course, then what lies behind it is then the consolidation of our data centers. Jesper will come and have some words about this a little bit later, but it's a key enabler for our strategy that we have control over our plans and roadmaps for this stack that you see up here for every track so to say. Because if we can't do that and don't have that, then it's very, very hard for the company to grow at the pace that we've been doing. We always measure in three things when we talk. We always talk about the transparency first, then we talk about productivity, and then the scalability at the end of the day.
As Jens Bjørn talked about, the first thing is in reality, the transparency, so that our operators, they know what they're doing, and they take fact-based or informed decisions when they sit and do the business on a daily basis. What we have found when we buy companies, we find that they often lack information. It's not because it's bad people we buy, but they simply don't have the knowledge. They wouldn't take as good commercial decisions as our staff. It's part of the empowerment. People, they like to go to work and create good results. You don't have to beat them up to do that. They do it on their own. We have to put them into a position where they can be successful. Transparency is very, very important for our staff when they come into the office.
The next thing you have to give our staff is productivity. If they have some good tools, infrastructure, as Jens Bjørn alluded to, then they will be able to produce more. It is actually also important for M&A strategy that our staff can produce more than the staff of the companies that we acquire. Otherwise we cannot take out resources, and then there's really no business case. The hardest part of it, and that goes both for the organization but also for the infrastructure, is the ability to scale. The way we govern and manage the company and the people that you're gonna meet today, from the team, they have all created a situation where their teams, they can handle this volume that we add. That's not something that you take for granted.
It's basically a management structure, a philosophy you need to have. That's very, very important for the scalability. On top of that, you also need then the infrastructure to be able to handle this growth. There's a many things you need to do that, and it's really hard work. Once you then get that, you get this business and an operation that people would like to call a platform business if you have all these things. That's in reality sort of what we're trying to have in all the business areas. In certain areas, we have more, and in some areas, we are on a journey where we should be able to do the same.
If you look at it from the customer perspective, because at the end of the day, they have to pay the bill or the invoice, and that's how we make our living, it's clear that they, today, this demand-driven approach from the customers, they want the transparency so that they know what is going on, and basically more or less on demand. Whenever they would like to have information or status, they should be able to get it. Of course, also the KPIs and the business reviews, they need to be accurate.
Now, for example, also on the CO2 reporting, here, I guess we all have to up that type of reporting so that the quality gets better and better, so that the initiatives that we take, they also get measured correctly and that we sort of all get the benefit of the investments that we make in the decarbonization. Productivity, of course, also very important for our customers so that we deliver a very efficient service to them. Also pricing is key in this industry, whether we like it or not. Also for them, if we have high productivity, they'll be able to get part of the value out of that. Then, of course, the scalability.
It's clear that if we grow, let's say we bought GIL, now in the Middle East, we have a much stronger offering than we had before, or UTi in Africa or just in many of the countries where we have increased basically the service portfolio that we can offer across the board. Scalability also, very, very important. You can then also look at this picture from another angle, basically from a DSV perspective. Of course, we need to create value for our owners. That's very important. Jens Bjørn talked to that as well. I think also if we sit and look at it for our customers that pay our bills. We have to be able to create value for them and develop the value proposition so that we stay competitive. You can also basically look at it from these perspectives.
We can talk a little bit about the capabilities and the digitization that we talk sort of that we're thinking of. What is the process? How is the company running? What is it actually that is happening? We have a sort of a simplified process here where we talk about some quoting, some booking and what does it mean for the customer tracking the events we just talked about. The way that we exchange information with our customers and at the end of the day, of course, also get the billing in place. If you sit and look at this, you could say it's fairly simple. But depends on what type of transaction you're doing.
If it's customs formalities, if it's complex import from the Asia-Pacific, there are probably 200 fields you have to populate in databases in order to get the cargo from A to B. When you move cargo, you have a physical flow, and you have a digital flow. If you sit and look at that digital flow, it could also be simpler. In a simple route, let's say domestic shipment in Europe, it's much fewer fields. The fewer fields we have to fill out with what can I say, human intervention, the more automation we get, the higher conversion ratio. This in reality, what we are working on all the time, if you look at from an operational perspective, you can see there's workflow automation, there's workflow automation all the way across the board.
This is what we spent quite a lot of resources on with the divisions to have roadmaps where we try to automate to a further extent than we have seen before. We've basically been doing that for many, many years, and that is what has driven our conversion ratio up. Also then when we do M&A, this is very important for the evaluation of the conversion rate. We take out the infrastructure of the companies we buy and add more volume to the infrastructure we have. This then gives us a higher conversion ratio overall or economies of scale, I think they called it in the books that we read when we went to school. In reality, that's what we are trying to do all the time.
Let's just try to focus on, for example, booking, and we can then see where we at within different industries, here. I just have to check the time so you get the Q&A. You can say you could get bookings in many different ways. In the past, you got really many manual bookings, then you got some EDI, which is very common in our industry still. Many customers have low, what can I say, sort of, quality in their infrastructure, so they can only exchange in EDI format. Then eDC is basically our purchase order management tool, where we handle purchase orders for our customers. myDSV is our portal. Of course, API is the modern way of exchanging these days. It's also something that is growing quite a bit these days.
If you look at the different divisions, for example, in Road, because we have more than 40 million shipments, we have to be able to exchange the data in a more efficient way because there are really many transactions. It's also less complexity, we have to say so. Let's say in Air & Sea is it 8 million shipments that we have in the division. It's more manual because, in particular in these days as well, where there's so much disruption in the supply chain, you would have a more manual approach. But of course, what we are trying to do is we're trying to move up the, what can I say, the stack so that we get shipments in that have a higher level of data quality.
You have to remember when you talk about this, that we are only talking about the booking process. There are many other things that you have in your workflow that affects, what can I say, your productivity. You would like to get the data from the source at a high quality so that we can basically automate our processes. Otherwise, take Air & Sea , we would have to key in quite a bit in order to complete the last fields, and get the booking in such a state that the cargo it can move seamlessly for the rest of the workflow until we send an invoice. To have a picture framing this, you can say, digital capabilities on the one axis and basically logistics capabilities. We've tried to put some word on what that could be.
Of course, if you are a digital player, you have an app and you have integration capabilities. That's in reality what you have. You don't control any kind of infrastructure or whatever, but you have really, really good IT that is very easy to integrate with. If we sit and look at us, that's what can I say? It's very demand driven, it's very easy to work with and all that. If you look at us, what do we have? Well, if you look out the window down there's a cross dock. That enables you to do groupage, so consolidate cargo. In-house, you would call it a CFS, a container freight station. You will control that so that you can consolidate cargo there as well. A digital forwarder can't do that in their own network. They don't have that capability.
They simply don't have control over that infrastructure. We would then have many types of service offerings, where if you have a fully digitized flow and a sort of a very small service catalog, you can't offer the same services as we do. We have global reach, so we sell all over. We have all these customer relationships we've had for years, and of course, the carrier relationships we also have. You will hear more about that a little bit later. Then, of course, we have the physical infrastructure. We also take responsibility on the ESG side, which is highly valued by our customers. All these capabilities we have. What we need is, in reality, an app and integration in order to get up to the corner.
Now, would you rather have to work on an app and integration, or would you rather establish basically thousands of locations? I think you know that we are of the opinion that we will get up to the right-hand corner sooner than our competitors. Basically, my job is to continue to develop the infrastructure of DSV. Michael will do all the audit committee and all these interesting meetings. I don't know where he is. There's a lot of other stuff as well, obviously. Transparency, productivity, and scalability is part of most conversations we have. I think that we both, you know, need, you know, the digital competencies, but certainly also the classic competencies that sort of we have within our industry. I feel confident that nobody's gonna disrupt us at the end of the day.
That was it from my end. Now let's have a Q&A session.
Excellent. Thank you, Jens. If you, here in the room, have questions, raise your hand. Sebastian and Alexander will come with a microphone because we have to remember the people joining online. We already have a question online, so we can start with that. How do you see the competition for M&A? Do you see heightened competition from other freight forwarding companies or maybe integrators or shipping lines? And can you share some financial hurdle rates?
I don't think there's a big change in the competitive landscape when it comes to M&A. Sometimes we have a single track, kind of like we had with Agility. There was zero competition. They wanted to partner up with DSV, which we were very proud about. Of course, they had certain expectations as to what the price would be. I don't think it has changed a lot. We have seen that new entrants are coming in, trying to buy a couple of logistics companies. For the companies we would like to acquire, I don't think there's any big change. I don't know, Jens, if you have any views on the hurdle rates. I mean.
No, if you look at, you know, I think we have always this rule that we have for the capital allocation. We follow that for years and years. In reality, we have to make the return on invested capital, you know, that is above 20%, then we are happy. We believe that we have a good, what can I say, understanding with our shareholders that that is what is required in order for us sort of to continue to get access to the capital that we need, and that's sort of unchanged.
Yep. Great. I think there was a question from Lars here, and please state your name and company.
Yeah. Morning. Lars Heindorff from Nordea. A follow-up on the M&A. I think, one of the DNA in DSV for many years have been the ability to integrate these companies and turn them around. As you've been growing larger over the years and the M&A also become larger, how do you protect that DNA and the commercial culture, assuming that you're gonna make even larger acquisitions in the future?
It's a relevant question. I think so far we have managed to do it. We see no risk as such that the culture and the DNA of our company will change. We are changing every single day. We are a very different company now than what we were last time you were here. The nucleus, the core of what we believe in, it's still the same. It's basically the same as it was also 25 years ago when some of the ten founding truck drivers were still running this company. The core principles that what we believe in, but that does not mean that we run the company like we did in 1976 or 1986 for that matter.
It's this balance, but we believe very much in our way of doing it, and a company can only have one culture also. With the deepest respect for the acquired companies, we embrace all the new ways that we also learn about when we acquire companies. The core kind of competencies or the core culture of a company can only be one, and that's the culture we have. So far we have seen that the acquired companies, they also appreciate that, at least most of the people that comes from those companies, and they feel really welcome, and they like our culture also.
Maybe Cristian over here.
Hi. Cristian Nedelcu from UBS. Can you tell us a bit more about where you think you are on that journey of productivity improvement in Air & Sea? Maybe can you give us a bit, some numbers or some ballpark estimates how much more you can do over the next few years there?
I think we are maybe preempting the agenda a bit, so maybe we can wait with that until we have the Air & Sea session, if that's okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Same. Eric?
Thanks. Similar but related question. Thank you very much for the slide on kind of the journey from manual through to APIs on booking. Does that imply that there's more upside to the 50% target over the very long term? Is 50% kind of as high as we can go? Any thoughts around that, please?
Yeah, if we look at our conversion ratios, I think we started much lower historically. There's still roadmaps where we drive our productivity up and basically the automation levels are higher. We would normally set the targets, you know, and have sort of a five-year horizon on them. Of course, sometimes we have to adjust them a little bit on the journey because we made it sooner than we thought. I don't see that that's gonna change that type of behavior if we look at it.
I think we had Michael over here first.
Sorry if I missed something.
Yeah. Thank you very much. It's Michael Rasmussen from Danske Bank. A question on the carriers, which seems to have been moving more and more into your field over the last years here. Could you comment if this has made you change the strategy, how you think, how you're gonna evolve over the next three to five years? Also when you meet them out at large tenders, what is it that makes DSV stand out in terms of winning these tenders? Where do the carriers win from that perspective? Thank you.
You used plural carriers. I'm not so sure about that. You should maybe say carrier. I think it's very, very important to say there's a lot of carriers in this world. We have had several sessions with CEOs of some of the largest ones here in recent weeks. A lot of those have said to our face, "We are not competing with you. You are our customers. We wanna grow with you." Our strategy is the same as it was 10 years ago. There are different ways of looking at this between the carriers, but what certain carriers or one carrier has done has not made us change our minds at all.
Thank you.
I think we have Stig Frederiksen. Stig Frederiksen, remember to mention the company.
Stig Frederiksen from ABG. Just a question around the. We talk a lot about M&A, and M&A take a lot of attention among investors and analysts. A question about the organic growth. How do you ensure as an organization that, you know, you've been doing three acquisition very close to each other, you don't grow really organically during when you do M&A? How do you ensure that the organization is still focused on growing the business organically and not just wait for the next transaction to be made?
Yeah. Yes. Maybe you can talk to that, Jens.
It's about the transparency and the data, and the reporting on that also.
Yeah. Of course, when we do the integration, there's sort of, you lose some customers in that phase because, that's typically then, what happens in particular from the acquired entity. If the organization sort of can be much more growth-focused than to retain customers that you've taken over, because that's really where the efforts will be in that transitional phase. I think there are some slides a little bit later on, if you take a little bit longer horizon, where we've, for some years, not done the M&A. I think you can see that in these years we've actually done, fairly well. We're perhaps not as much focused on volume as some of our peers. We would like to have profitable growth as well.
That sometimes means a little bit as well for the journey that we have. We have thousands of salespeople in the company, and we have solid reporting on that, and we're basically also driving that agenda, so that there is focus on the organic part. As I said, if we don't do the M&A, then we've seen our growth rates higher than the market growth, and there's nothing sort of in the way that we operate that should change that. Of course, you could argue that in certain verticals, you know, which we're also doing, we should have increased focus because there are certain verticals that are definitely more attractive than other verticals. Of course, we try to have in focus on these as well.
Great. I think we have to say, just for the time's sake, the last question for this round. Satish, sorry.
Yeah. Thanks again for your presentation. If you look at your slide, you said about, especially on M&A, bolt-on in Road. What would make a change, say, as you see the Air & Sea? Is it the Road Way Forward platform what actually is stopping you from doing bolt-on rather than full-on large-scale acquisition?
If you take the Road platform right now, we have a transparent platform. We have transparency. We have probably better productivity than most of our peers, but we don't have scalability on the platform to the extent that we need. That's the hardest thing strategically, to get access to that. That's really where we can create superior value. That's when you do the Road Way Forward, then the platform, it has to be more productive, and it also has to be scalable. Right now we're running the Road Way Forward project. I'm sure Søren, I don't know where he is, he'll put a few words on it, as well. That's sort of the planning for Road. There's nothing in Road that should prevent us to go to much higher conversion rates than we have today.
We simply have too many tasks that are human or manual today.
If you all promise to be quick, then Alexia, then we will just take one more. Sorry, Sebastian.
Thank you. It's actually a short one. It's Alexia Dogani from Barclays. Can you just give us indication of what is your market share target? What is the end game here? Clearly only 4% at the moment. How big would you like to be in this industry?
The answer is very clear. We don't have one. We look, we need to be looking at the targets that are ahead of us, and then we'll have to see what the future looks like. It would be surreal to think that we should triple or quadruple our size. I mean, but who knows? This company will hopefully also be successful 25 years or 10 years from now, and the world could change. Maybe I'm wrong, but we look at each transaction by itself, and then we would see where we get to after that. We don't have a target saying we wanna be number one in our industry. That's very important for us.
You also lose focus, then you become irrational and irresponsible, maybe also in terms of capital allocation, if that is what drives you. It is the return. Every transaction need to be able to compete with the alternative being share buybacks. If it is not, then we shouldn't do it, regardless of how much we like the targets.
I could say one thing more to it. Let's say that we come to a situation where you have negative economies of scale. We just don't see it right now. Even if we've grown a lot in R&D, for example, where the most of the growth has been, there's nothing that prevents us in the infrastructure or the way it's organized to continue.
Great. Sam, you look like you have a very short question, but you have no microphone.
Yeah. It's Sam Bland from JP Morgan. Just on that digital journey and sort of improving your digitalization. Can you get to where you need to be yourself, or are you kind of dependent on your customers and how they deliver the data and provide the booking to you?
Yeah. If you take the booking, what we do is we create some reporting on the booking quality, and you're absolutely right that if the customer has poor data quality, then of course they will send bookings in with poor data quality. You can work with the customers if they have, let's say, a particular booking that is very frequent, you could ask them to change that data. To get them to clean up their master data, it means a strategic, what can I say, change for the customer. You can work on them on things that matters. Of course, with AI, what we do is, in reality, then we would have enhancement of the booking, where you would then have algorithms that help you to improve the quality.
It could be other data that you key in, but that's sort of the thinking. Always create the transparency, then we can work with the customers on the top.
What I would say is, we share the interest with the customers. They have the same interest as us. It cannot be in their interest to do manual bookings. It cannot be in their interest that we call them all the time saying, "You have spelled the name of the consignee wrong," or something like that. It's also a way, if we can automate the processes, that can actually generate value for the customers as well. This is the beauty of it, that it's not a fight between us and the customers to get a more automated process. We actually share the same interest. Great. I think that's it for now. Short break. Please be back here in just about five minutes. In the next room where we were before, there's a goodie bag for you.
You can take one each. It's more the bag that or than the goods that's in it, but it's for you anyway.
Welcome back. Also online, welcome back, if you left the desk in the meantime. Now it's time for Air & Sea. We have a very strong team of Carsten Trolle, Mads Ravn, and Michael Hollstein, who will give an introduction to Air & Sea and the markets. Please take it away.
Thank you very much. You see we all have the same corporate haircut, so there's a barber shop out here, you know, so just in case somebody has an interest. Yeah, you too guys, you know. Anyway, it's been very busy. We've been very busy since we met last time in 2015. We bought three companies. We integrated three companies, and we have done that, we believe successfully. We're almost done with the last one. I'm sure there'll be some questions about that. We've been able to do this due to the DNA or the culture we have in the company, which is empowerment, and it's hard work and just to make it happen, basically.
You know the figures, and I'm sure we will have some details about that or questions. We'll go into a little bit of some focus areas, value proposition, digital workflow, Jens talked a little bit about that as well, and volume growth. I know there are some questions about that as well, particularly on ocean. Also, where are we today comparing to 15, when we met last time? It's very balanced today. I'm not gonna get much into that, except Africa, if you see in general is a little blank. We did go into it some years ago. We also went out of it again simply because of compliance and things like that. Maybe it will come up again in a few years, who knows?
So far, we are okay with agents in that area and so forth. South Africa, of course, is very strong for us. Our focus area after three acquisitions, and I know there was a question, what do you do? How do you get into back to business, and how do you to run the business? We have a very strong culture and organization, and we'll talk about this. I'll talk about this a lot. The culture and the foundation of the Air & Sea division, it's we're very high and close with our customers. Our customers is why we go to the office every day, and of course, we need to deliver some money to you. We have local leadership and transparency. Transparency all the way. It's every employee has transparency.
Every employee can see how much money they made today on this shipment, down to all the details, and every employee knows where we are today, where we need to be tomorrow. We're very performance driven. We are a winner team. We want to win. We deliver. We want to overachieve, which sometimes is very difficult when we do very well, and then we need to do well, even better. If you run a marathon, obviously I don't, but if you do run a marathon, for the ones who do, and you run it in two and a half hours, if you run it in three hours, you'll be a loser, so you need to do better than the two and a half hours.
It's similar to what we do when we go to work every day. We really like to win, and that's the foundation of the culture. Every time we have bought something, acquired or merged, we get better at something. We add to scale. We add customers. We add things we do could be IT systems that we take some of the better from. With UTi, we got scale, the first real scale. We got network, a good, strong network in South Africa and in Americas. We got into the oil and gas business, which is kind of paying off now, as you can say. With Panalpina, we doubled the Air & Sea division. Again, scale, we absorbed it. Very, I wouldn't say it's nothing.
It sounds very easy because we did it fast, but it's not that easy. We strengthened our footprint in APAC and in South America. South America in particular, obviously, is growing very heavily now and doing very well. We got the Air Charter Network, and then the LCL network we have added on. Every time we add on, we become better, a strong organization. Agility, obviously a strong presence in APAC and in the Middle East, where we suddenly got scale, and then we added the chemical business. Again, in some oil and gas business as well. Every time we get better and better. Our value proposition. Expertise. We believe we have the best freight forwarders in the world. We are just better. We are good.
Sounds a little, maybe very easy to say, but we are delivering. We have a strong know-how. We educate our staff. Neutrality. We can use different carriers for ocean freight, so we keep that neutrality, which customers like. Proven products. We have capacity. We have our Air Charter Network. Mads will talk a little bit about that. We do have our LCL business, et cetera. We have systems. We have the system to really deliver to our customers PO management. There's thousands of different systems that we deliver every day. The one thing that becomes more and more important, data quality. If we don't have the data quality, we will be the loser. We have + 90%-95% data quality today. Here we get into some digital workflow.
We have one file system, so when it's entered in Asia, for example, the import country has the information already, so don't need to re-enter information. Integration with major carriers and customers. We saw that, Jens showed where we are today in the market. We can do better, we need to do better with digital bookings. Volume growth yields. Actually one thing I forgot about, we talked about digital bookings. In South America, you have about 270 million people that use WhatsApp. So we need to convince these people that they should use myDSV instead. It may take a little time. In China, they use, you know, WeChat, and there's about 1.2 billion users on that, so that's also a little bit of a challenge, but we'll get there. Market share.
We aim to continue to gain market share and grow above the market, but not for the sake of just growing. It's very easy to go out and deliver, take customers at, make zero GP. That's not gonna give any value to you, or our staff for that matter. We need to grow to make money. It's network business, so we support each other. There is business, a lot of business out there that is a one-way traffic, so it's originating in Asia, for example, but it's just low-yielding with no network. We don't really have a lot of interest in that. When we buy companies, I know that was one of the questions, we lose some focus. We do lose some focus.
We have customers, and we lose some business. Could be there's non-profitable business, we get rid of that. Or we have customers that both use DSV or Agility or Panalpina. They don't want to put all the eggs in one basket. That's what we're up against. Here are the yields. Where will it end up? I know there's gonna be a lot of questions about that later. Where we will end up, we don't really know. We have made a good guess, we believe. We believe it'll be higher than where it was pre-COVID, but obviously also be lower than what it is today. That's our big, best guess at this time, where air freight and ocean freight will be lower than it is today.
However, some of that, we'll be able to, some of that loss of yield, so to say, percentage-wise, we can actually gain by better productivity. Today, the operation are probably. Then some will ask, "How much is that?" It's gonna be 20% or 30% or 50% or whatever, you know, the number is. A good guesstimate is probably somewhere 15%-20%. Today, the operator, we also have some. Today, the operator use about 20% of the day actually, doing entry in Air & Sea. Is, the 80% is actually dealt with, problems, getting the containers, getting the bookings, et cetera, et cetera. So the issue is not, it's the 20% that we are talking about. Today, the 80%, they spend a lot of that on because of the market situations.
That will change. I'm pretty confident, once we see it ease up, there's not a lot of the problems we have today, we will start to see better productivity. Something we're very much aware of, something we talk about a lot in the organization, we also talk about brace for impact. When will the market sort of drop, et cetera, et cetera. There's some speculation right now, we could go there. I mean, you know that better than me, likely. Are we going into a recession and all that stuff. We are very much prepared for all these things in the company and have shown that in the past as well. There we go. I'm gonna be quick because I know there's gonna be a lot of questions.
Basically wrap up is, we have a performance culture in our organization. We like to win, we want to win. We have industry-leading margins. We have a strong value proposition we believe to our customers, both customers and staff. We can pursue organic and inorganic growth. We have the organization. We know we can do it. We have the tools for it, so we're not missing anything, and we also have the staff. We expect yields to stabilize above historic levels. When I say historic levels, if we talk 2019, we saw rates a few years back from Asia to Europe-ish, some of you may recall that $200 a container, actually below $200 a container. We will probably never get back to that market again.
All right, now I'm gonna give the word to Mads, who runs the Air Freight Network for DSV. You're good?
Let's hope so. Well, thank you guys. I am new to Capital Markets Day, but I'm not new to DSV. I been around for 25 years with DSV. I'm based in New Jersey. I head up the global air freight for DSV.
Was actually part of one of the first acquisitions, or major acquisitions, that DSV did and still around, came from Samson Transport back in 1995, from right here actually, and been gone for 25 years since then. Nevertheless, I'll talk to you a little bit about the air freight today. And in order to understand what's going on in the market, what's going on with how we have been able to create solutions as well at DSV for our customers, we need to talk about where the market is today and where we are heading. So we'll start with a little bit about the capacity in the market, and then I'll talk about carrier relationships, how we procure today, and then a little bit about our Air Charter Network and how that has evolved.
Looking at the capacity, first and foremost, this is official statistics, capacity is down approximately 4% when you look at it on a global basis. However, it is important for you to understand as well that these numbers are a little bit deceiving. What I mean with that is if you look at the statistics here in the corner, a lot of the capacity that's come into the market is really not available in as resale. Meaning that it's integrators that have brought in more freighter capacity in the market. It is the likes of ourselves that have procured full capacity on charters that's operated exclusively by DSV.
Our competitors have done some of the same, and you also have airlines that have now bought their way into exclusive charter capacity, which is not available to every customer or to DSV for that matter. When we look at true capacity available in the market, it is still significantly down. There's obviously a lot of reasons for that. If you look towards the right-hand corner here, you'll see some of the reasons why. No surprise, we have our issues in China right now. That will be overcome at some point, but right now it has a major effect on capacity.
The Russia-Ukraine and more so actually the Russian airspace being closed has a huge effect on where the market is trending in terms of lack of capacity, but more so that the business traveler is really not traveling yet. Yes, there is some activity starting to happening, but in reality, nobody's really urging on to go on a business travel trip overseas, especially the long hauls. Nobody wants to go to Asia and sit in quarantine for seven days in countries where that's still an issue. That's why we will continue to see a lack of capacity when it comes to belly cargo.
Just to give you an idea of the severity of how bad that really is, if you look at the Asia to Europe and also the intra-Asia, and again, no surprise, we're talking about a region here which has been on lockdown for the most part during the last two and a half years. It's starting to ease, but the major manufacturing countries in China and also where we see the output going in and out of from Hong Kong is still being affected by COVID. That's the reason why we continue to see a market that's down almost 50% on belly capacity. This is what it looks like now for the summer of 2022 compared to 2019, which is really the only year we can compare any normalcy to.
Just to give you an idea that we are very, very far away from being back to full capacity. A little bit about carrier relationships. Our strategy has not changed, as a result of acquisitions. We continue to have the belief that local empowerment is important to DSV. We believe that you can still wheel and deal on a local basis. However, the last couple of years, and also as a result of how we have evolved as a company from a tonnage perspective, we do need to have a little bit more steering behind the scenes, and this is where the global product group comes into play. Makes larger deals. We're talking about block space agreements. We're talking about the charter network. In general, just creating solutions at a larger scale than what we had to do before.
We are now a base customer for all the major carriers, meaning that we need them as much as they need us, which is also why getting capacity is not really the biggest issue that we have. It's piecing it together and how do we do the distribution? How do we control the ground? I'll talk a little bit about that on the charter network. How do we control that we meet a transit time that customers should expect from DSV and something that we are committed to? This is what the market looks like or has looked like over the last couple of years. We expect that this will continue for a little while longer. Very much a spot market still, meaning that these are one-off trades, something that we are buying into on a shipment by shipment basis.
There's good reason for that. The airlines have become extremely picky on commodities. They wanna piece it together in order to get the perfect payload. You can have density and you can have volumetric, which is typically how we make our money as a forwarder, but the airlines have now become extremely picky as well. They have less departures, they have less capacity, so they know exactly who's who on that plane. It's not just DSV or our competitors any longer. They know it down to the customers when you talk about large volume, which is why it still makes sense for us to do quite a bit of spot rating, so we also ensure that we get the perfect mat-mix with the right carrier. A right carrier may also carry freight for our competitors. They usually do.
If we have the right mix of that particular customer, we are able to price ourselves on board at a competitive level and still get ahead of the game. That said, we are still doing some block space agreements, of course. This is more specific to typically the Asian market is block space heavy, also to a certain degree, Germany. There's some other markets as well, but it's changed over the years, over the last couple of years, I should say. And the reason for that is on a block space basis, customers still wanna stay true to the market. The traditional block space is six to 12 months. Over the last couple of years, nobody wants to procure six to 12 months rates. They wanna stay close to the market, get the rate down as quickly as the market starts dropping again.
It's been very, very turbulent. It's been a roller coaster of a market that we've been dealing with for the last couple of years, which is also why most customers are hesitant in contracting for longer than three months. We actually don't recommend it, either that they should contract any further than that unless you wanna be on a block space agreement, but that's for good and for bad. Meaning that you pay the rate for the next six months or 12 months, whether the market drops or not. That obviously calls for some different discussion, difficult discussions from time to time, but that is nevertheless the name of the game, but also the reason why we are only doing 20%-25% block space agreements, which will most likely increase in the years to come.
Our Air Charter Network, about 10%, 15% of our total volume goes on our own control. I'll talk about it in a minute. Here we can offer longer-term contracts. Here we can offer more comfortably a six-month contract. We can do 12 months if you'd like to do that, but you still need to stick to it. Whether you're block space with DSV or you're doing it with an airline, it's the same terms. We still expect you to meet the terms of the contract and pay the same rate whether the market goes up or down. That's also why we are able to go in and lock into longer-term contracts on our own controlled and charter network with some comfort, meaning that we don't lean out too far.
We make sure that, let's say 75% of the base load is covered already. The rest we play in the market and as resale, sometimes we make more, sometimes we make less. At the end of the day, we look for the right commodities to match up with. The Air Charter Network, this is obviously something that we inherited from the acquisition of Panalpina. Panalpina ran an Air Charter Network for 25+ years, and had a vision of expanding it, so they had a global reach where you could act more or less as an airline, where you would use different hubs and then connect it from one, let's say, country to the other or even a region in some cases. It never really materialized to the fullest extent of what the vision of Panalpina did.
However, the intention of the charter network came in quite handy during COVID, for obvious reason, when basically the entire belly capacity collapsed. Panalpina, DSV now is still flying freighters, so we were utilizing that to the fullest extent. It was not only, let's say, highly valuable customers or customers who wants to pay more for a specific transit time, your pharma, your automotive, high tech in some cases as well. It was really everybody. Anybody who needed to move air freight immediately would be interested in the charter network. It came in, relatively handy to have a charter network at the time of the pandemic, and it still has. It has evolved tremendously.
Just to give you an idea of what the charter network looked like at the time of Panalpina, this was piecing together, let's say, more of Europe, North America, and then with some one-offs into Latin America and Brazil particular. Also with some flights going in and out of China, but still not really a global network if you compare to the large carriers of the world. The vision of Panalpina was to tie it together and they were never able to do so because they couldn't scale up to a point where they could fill the plane in each direction. That's what it's all about today. This is also how the carriers are looking at the DSV as a customer. Can you fill up the plane in both direction? Are you a good customer overall? Do you support the entire network?
If you support the entire network, well, you are worth more to the carrier than the guy who can only fill the plane out of China, but he cannot fill it on the return. What ends up happening for those guys is that they basically pay for the round trip without getting anything on the return. We are looking at fulfilling both legs, and we are able to do so with the way the charter network looks today. As you can see, quite a few more routes has been added onto the network, and today, we actually carry approximately 12% of our global volume in this network. We are doing more loops around the world.
Let's say we cover Latin America and over North America, continue to China, to Hong Kong, or we go back to Europe, and we piece it together like this. Not really much different than any other large freighter operating airline would do. What to expect for the future? We are looking at a market right now that's downtrending, that can also be explained, it could be a short downtrend. A lot of it can be related to China. 25% of the capacity out of China has been eliminated in Shanghai, and even though there is some signs of improvement, we are very, very far from being back to normal in China. It's only speculation, as you all know, when China opens up, the question comes around every day and nobody knows. That's just a fact.
The Russian airspace being closed has also something to do with this, and the fact that some carriers have simply stopped flying. It doesn't make sense for them anymore to fly around the Russian airspace. We call it the southern route when you go from Europe into, in particular, Northeast Asia. It is so expensive to do that in some cases, it just doesn't make sense anymore. At the same time, with China being closed to the extent that it is, it's really affecting everybody one way or the other. It's affecting all the countries in intra-Asia. Everybody needs a piece from China, and for that reason, a lot of the capacity has simply disappeared and moved elsewhere. We're seeing a market that's downtrending in the short term.
However, we also do believe that there is a huge backlog in China that needs to be moved. The question is: How long is that backlog going to take? You can relate to some of the other issues that we have around the world. Are we going to have a strike on the West Coast, on the ocean side of things? If that's the case, you saw what happened last time, or we'll remember what happened last time. We could have again a tsunami of freight that will be stuck coming inbound to especially North America and the United States.
If that is the case, we will have a totally different market than what we otherwise could predict for, let's say, Q4, 'cause at this point, it looks as if it could come down just a little bit after the tsunami that we're expecting out of China. Also, what will the effect be of this so-called tsunami out of China for everybody else? For Europe, for North America. Right now, Europe and North America, so the transatlantic routes are actually doing quite well. No issues here. We typically see a slowdown over the summer, and we expect to see that once again. What will happen on the other side? We will see. It's speculation at the end of the day.
We still believe that it will be somewhat of a roller coaster market for at least the rest of 2022. Going into 2023, at some point, I think it's fair to assume more capacity will be coming in, and also we will see a slight slide in the rates. I think that's it.
Okay. Thank you, Mads. Michael Hollstein.
Yep. Thank you.
Yeah. A very warm welcome also from my side, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for having me. I'm also, like many other of us, not born in DSV. I had a pleasure to join the company six years ago during the acquisition of UTi. Be aware I said before 24 years, so in total 30 years of ocean background. I'd like to take the opportunity today to give you a bit of a market update where we stand in the global container ocean market. More specifically, we'll touch base on where do we stand in view of port congestion. I think you're all aware about this one. We will talk a bit about the freight rate development, why our rates are rocket high for a long time.
Third, that we also will have a look on the capacity situation. Next to that, I wanna spend some words on how do we deal with our ocean partners, how do we cooperate, and how do we manage through challenging times with our allocations. Furthermore, I wanna touch base with you on LCL, and, last but not least, a quick summary and also, of course, doing an outlook, how do we foresee the future. Yeah, first things first, here on that global map, what you see here, the numbers in the gray bubbles actually reflect the vessels sitting outside of the port and anchorage, waiting to get a berthing window to unload the cargo and to pick up return cargo. I have to admit, this is a snapshot.
You know, there's a high dynamic behind these numbers, and they are changing while we speak. Nevertheless, it should give you a bit of a flavor about the magnitude of that problem. It is a real problem. I trust you all recall the pictures that you have seen in the media back from the West Coast, where ships were lining up at the horizon, and everyone saying, "Oh, it's not doing well on the West Coast." It has softened there a bit, you can argue, but at the same time, the cargo just found alternative routes and it moves into the Gulf, into the East Coast. With that, the problem is no longer local or regional, it is really a global problem, eh? While in that, globally, globalization, every port is interconnected with the other one.
If one port has a congestion situation, it has a ripple effect into the other part of the globe. So we have that on the west side, western hemisphere. We have big challenges right now in Europe, in the Med area, but also in the Northwest continent, be it Hamburg, Bremen, Rotterdam. It's all over the place. Of course, you see the big number driven in China, 350 vessels, of course, driven by the two-month lockdown in the city of Shanghai. While the waiting time that we have indicated is still rather okay-ish, yeah, but it is huge. Yeah? Many of you will recall that last year there was that blockage in the Suez Canal with the Ever Given, and that vessel was blocking for six days.
Now, the biggest port of the world, the biggest container port of the world, is now more or less in a slowdown mode for two months. The projection is a bit unclear what this will mean. There are different voices in the market. If we will see a huge tsunami of cargo coming in, others are more predicting it's become softer, will not become that worse. Already the uncertainty in that is already driving the market a bit around. We have seen the SCFI index being on a downward trend after Chinese New Year for 18 consecutive weeks in a row. Over the last two weeks, we saw slight increases. That you normally can just argue by the uncertainty caused by the situation when Shanghai city is really opening up again.
Next one, I mentioned at the beginning, what is the background for these super high freight rates that we have now seen for, more or less two years already? Prior to COVID, the rates were rather flat with minor seasonal peaks. Then we know of course, a lot of the regions went into lockdown mode. Afterwards, carriers as a reaction were pulling out capacity, laying off vessels. Then first, the Asia to North America trade, the TP trade, then Asia to Europe, they recovered back. They recovered faster than expected. Carriers did not really manage to phase in the capacity in the same speed as the demand was picking up. Plus carriers also moved hardware into those trades, paying the highest freight rates.
By that circulation of vessel capacity, the whole global system got out of sync or in kind of imbalance. Next to that, and as a reaction, of course, carriers made use of that opportunity and implemented a lot of different charges, be it general rate increases, premium surcharges, imbalance surcharges. The demand was so high that they actually managed to deliver all these increases more or less 100%, and that journey was going on and on. On top of that, we had certain disruptive events. I just mentioned the canal blockage in the Suez. We had terminal blockage in Yantian and Ningbo, also caused by COVID back in the days. Again, the pressure on the capacity further increased.
As a consequence, the freight rates really went up, and that had the peak situation in Q3, Q4 last year. That last Chinese New Year that I mentioned, since then, we saw a slight downwards movement. It ended in a kind of high-level freight plateau that was kept, and it's still there. We see hardly any major movements anymore. Now we need to see what will be the impact from that situation in Shanghai dominantly. We also still have challenges in Tianjin and other areas.
It is one of the overall port congestion topics here. Talking about future capacity, and I don't know if you've seen it on the previous slide with the world map and the headline, it was mentioned that port congestion currently is taking out 12% of the total capacity, which is material. We have to assume that the terminals and the port operations will get these things more and more under control. Going forward, this 12% will be released back to the market. On top of that, carriers actually have used the strong results of the recent quarters to sign the order books in ordering new vessels. That new capacity is going to join the trade somewhere, 2023, 2024, 2025, actually big time.
Of course, they are doing this to expand their fleet, but also to become more efficient, to reduce the unit cost, but also to become compliant with future regulatory requirements. You of course know IMO 2023, IMO 2030, there's a lot of things going on and carriers have to make major investments to keep their fleet up to date and active. Of course, not every vessel is capable to get retrofitted to meet all these requirements. So there's a certain amount of vessels being taken out of the fleet and going for scrapping. If we put all this together, we assume that the capacity compared to today in 2025 will be more than 30% higher than what we see right now.
If the demand will increase in the same speed over the same period, that's okay, time will tell. There is definitely light at the horizon. A long time we spoke a lot about shortage about equipment or shortage about capacity. Equipment is fixed and also capacity is massively on the way to us. To conclude from that additional capacity will automatically lead that freight rates will go down or even collapse and go back to pre-COVID levels, that I definitely do not share. If there's one thing what the carriers have learned over the recent years, is to play the capacity game. Of course, the ongoing market consolidation being organized in vessel alliances is helping them to live on, deliver on their strategies. Yeah. As soon as it become too hot for comfort for these carriers, they will pull out capacity.
I think there are certain consensus in the market that the rate levels will not stay where they are right now. It's also clear they will not go back to where they had been two years ago. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Of course that is an element that we need to consider. Carriers have also become more rigid. Which is positive, as a higher freight rate level will also give us better margin opportunities. Just a few words on our cooperation with carriers. How do we design our volume setup? In general, we strive for splitting up our volumes in different contract types. It's on short-term, midterm, and long-term.
I have mentioned a few different contract types in the bottom line here. There are different models like open baskets, where you can more or less book all your clients under a certain deal. There are closed baskets, where you can only put predefined businesses into a certain contract. Matt's made reference to block space situation, air freight. That already arrived now also in ocean freight, become very popular, combined with hard binding terms, penalty-driven, which is a good thing because the business becomes more predictable for both parties, and it also has a higher priority when it comes to lifting. It's a good way to bring higher quality to the supply chain of our clients.
Matt's also made reference to the situation when you become an attractive client for the carriers, if you have a proper matchback ratio. Same story in ocean freight, yeah. There's always a headhaul and a backhaul, and you become by far a better partner if you have strong contribution on the backhaul trade as well. The volumes operated by DSV are of course helping us a lot to combine these volumes into packages which makes it attractive for our partners. From a setup with our carriers, we have segmented and we are dominantly talking about 10 global carriers that are left on a global scale. We have segmented these carriers into three groups, yeah.
While the core carriers, as you can take it by the name, are the ones that we are focusing the most, where we see the strongest strategic value. Within that three groups of carriers, we operate more than 90% of our global container business. To give you a bit of a feeling what kind of contracts these are. Across these 10 carriers, the deals on annual basis are spread between 25,000 TEUs per year, up to 500,000 TEUs per year per individual carrier. The grouping and who is sitting in that, in these individual circles is being reviewed on an annualized basis. Of course, there's also a lot of focus that we have a balanced share across the three alliances, 2M, THE Alliance, Ocean Alliance, to keep the flexibility not to become too dependent.
Carriers also changing strategy here and there, so it's something that we are revisiting on an annual basis. Of course, then we consider the innovation power, operational performance, financial performance, sustainability approach from these carriers. Things that we are revisiting constantly and then set the scene for the following year. Just a few words on LCL that strikes a bit into the direction what Matt was saying to the charter network. For decades, ocean carriers have a certain share of BCO cargo and NVOCC cargo. Some or maybe one of these carriers have re-strategized and lowered its threshold to do business also with BCOs. That is all very beautiful as long as the freight rates are low, but it's not really helping if you look into products which are super volume-driven and require super strong network capability.
That's where here I'm making the link into LCL, which is our one of our premium products in our Air & Sea organization. We control more than 2.5 million cu m, that brings us up to the top level in that arena. We have 600 own services weekly that we control end-to-end basis. To put this a bit in the ratio, the total volume that we talk about is an equivalent of approximately 100,000 TEUs. You see that on the top header, it actually just represents 4% of our volume, but it stands for 20% of the gross profit. It's a highly attractive product, and speaks for itself.
The further development of that business, of that LCL and the own groupage operation is one of the core focus points. The total network exposure that we offer our clients is counting more than 30,000 origin destination pairs, and with that deliver super comprehensive solutions for our clients. Okay, that brings me already to the last slide here. What to expect. I think we touched on a few points. There is certain uncertainties. I think we all keep track on these geopolitical challenges that we all see right now in the media that may also have impact on how the consumer behaves and with that, how the demand will look like. We have the potential strike on the U.S. coast, which may also become another disruptive effect with quite a ripple effect to other ports.
We have the situation and you most likely also follow the development or the investment the Chinese government made for years in the Silk Road with the rail connection between China and Europe that more or less collapsed. Trains are still on the way, but the cargo owners hardly find somebody who giving insurance coverage to move all the cargo to Russia. There is all that volume and that market size in the meantime is also up to 1.5 million TEUs, is now penetrating into ocean again, is again also serving additional pressure on capacity. There is on the one hand additional capacity requirements, but we also see capacity coming in. As mentioned, the outlook is that the freight rates will soften, yeah?
By far not to the level what we have seen before. Another and last element we need to consider is the increase in fuel prices. One year ago, or two years ago in the meantime, after the first wave of lockdowns, the rates collapsed to $200 per metric ton for the VLSFO fuel. Just a few weeks ago, it peaked by more than $1,000. Just this morning the four global ports average was peaking up again to $996 per metric ton, which is severe, and that is also driving. When I'm saying the rates are going down, I'm talking a bit about the base rate, yeah, while they are compensating effects from the fuel price.
Don't expect that the rates will completely go down, even if there's more capacity coming in, yeah? Shipping will stay on a higher level. Again, I'm repeating here myself, we as DSV have also benefit if freight rates are on a healthy level for the providers and for us because it creates room for us to generate decent margins. With that, I thank you for your attention. Yeah.
Thank you, Mike.
We have a little extra time for questions now.
Yes. Great. That's perfect. Thank you guys for being on time.
Coming.
And, uh-
We are the best, so what can I say? I, you know.
Yeah. I have to be objective here, so I can't say. We already have online questions, so I will take the liberty of starting with one here. It's from Antti Hautola from Nordea. Can you put some figures on internal factors impacting yields? How is the mix between value-added services and markup today? And what can impact this in the future?
Pre-COVID, we have approximately 75% and 25% split, meaning 75% value add and 25% on the core ocean freight or air freight for that matter.
That's the gross profit.
The GP. Today, the market is probably 50/50, close to 50/50. We will probably not come back to, we don't know where we will end up, but it will probably move closer to the 75/25 again. That's what we will expect. We still create and could also be additional what has happened in the last two years, different services. We don't really know where we will end up eventually.
Great. Just one more online. It's from Parash Jain from HSBC. Can you share a ballpark figure? How is the conversion ratio between air freight and sea freight?
It's approximately 50/50. It's you know-
Same level.
The same level between the two divisions or the two segments.
The thing is we don't have a separate reporting of them. We operate the two segments together in the countries.
Yes.
Great. Guys with the microphones, just get to work, we have things.
Get to work.
Dan here first. Yeah, take the front row.
Dan Togo from Carnegie. Maybe to Carsten Trolle. Which verticals and capability would you like more of? I mean, you got some oil and gas from Panalpina, some chemicals from GIL.
Yeah.
That would be the first part. The second part, maybe more importantly, are there some verticals you'd like to avoid, like perishables? I know some of your colleagues, some of your competitors have huge success within perishables.
Yeah.
Why not? I mean.
It's a good question. The perishable business is actually a good business, and we do perishable at DSV. Something has been said that we don't want it, that's wrong. We want perishable business if it makes sense. If you can make money on it, and there's some guarantees. A big part of this perishable business is mom and pop shops. You know, it's a grower in Kenya who grows tulips or probably not tulips, roses or whatever they will grow there. Basically, you deal with that grower in the middle of a field, and you make sure you get your money also. We saw from the Panalpina, they did a lot more of this, and we divested some of it.
We also kept a lot of the business, for example, in South America. We're probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest out of Colombia today, carrier of flowers into the U.S. We do some of the perishables, so it's not that there's no interest, and we also pursue it, but we need to make sure they have money and we get paid and so forth. That's part of it. Another vertical is obviously pharma. We've been doing great with oil and gas. We've, you know, turned it from -$1 million to what we'll probably make $40 million-$50 million in EBIT this year in oil and gas business. We've been very, very focused on this. We do automotive already, very successfully, and we also...
One thing that we probably don't do enough of is pharma, to mention one where we really wanna go in. We have the setup of the system and so forth. We've been working on this for the last three or four years, so it's nothing that we are sitting on the stool, not doing anything about it, so to say. But we have to mature also. It's just not, you just don't go in and knock at Novo's door and say, "We can also do pharma, no problem. Just give us some bookings." It's a little more to it when you get into this, compared to a normal shipment, so to say, of machinery parts or whatever it could be.
The organization needs to be set, and you need to value when it costs money to set this up, when will you get that paid back and how do you focus on this. That's something that we really wanna get into, and we are into it. It's not that we don't do pharma, so we do a lot of pharma, but we can do a lot more.
Great. As you say, when Carsten says a number, it's U.S. dollar. He's-
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
It's real money.
Yeah.
It's not this, you know.
Chris-Christian, I caught you off before.
Cristian Nedelcu from UBS. In air, if we look at the transatlantic, some of the third-party providers out there are seeing the air freight rate being very close to pre-COVID levels, especially if you exclude the fuel surcharges. My question is your GP per unit in air transatlantic, how does it look like today versus the pre-COVID levels, and what explains the difference versus pre-COVID levels?
Well, it's definitely. It's probably a combination of both of us, but I, you know, we have definitely higher margins today in GP, also on the transatlantic. If you look at the base rate, Mads, how do you see it?
Well, the reason why the market is tanking right now is the capacity is going out of China, it's going back on the transatlantic just to try and secure some loads. This is temporary. As soon as China opens up again, that capacity is gone, and the rates will go up again on the transatlantic.
It probably also is a twofold answer maybe also. What we see is some customers be optimistic now, saying, "We heard this rate of being very low." You know, this is the way the market is moving, but it may only be one week or two weeks. It's a spot market, and it's where we see customers don't really wanna commit two or three years down the road, which it would be great for us if they wanted to, but, you know, they don't wanna commit that long because they're waiting for the market to really stabilize. It'd be a short term, basically.
I think Michael.
Yes, thank you. It's Michael Vitfell-Rasmussen from Danske Bank. A question in terms in relation to your long-term outlook, the 8,000 and 4,000 GP per unit. So two questions. First of all, when I calculate that those levels versus the historic levels, it actually seems like the air ambition are less optimistic than the sea ambitions. I actually thought it was the other way around. So can you please talk a little bit about that? And also maybe combine it a little bit on the wording gradual. So it's not gonna.
Tank.
Tank, exactly.
Overnight. I think it's difficult because we don't really know where it's gonna end up. So it's a best guess. I mean, it's a guesstimate we came up with simply because we don't know is it gonna be four, or it's gonna be five, or it's gonna be three, you know, probably not three, but it will be above where we were. We are fairly confident of that simply because the world has changed. It's not that we have no ambitions or for air freight versus ocean freight at all, at all. We believe we have grown actually quite faster on air freight recently, so we have. It's just because a box is a box, so I say.
On air freight, we have a little bit, and we've grown with the purchases and so forth. We don't necessarily. Then there's the perishables part of it, where the volume is very much seasonal, whether it's Mother's Day or and so forth. There's no real difference in that for us. We just believe that the market will be. It's just to give you an indication that we don't believe the market will be where it was, you know, a few months ago either. The second question was? I don't have Alzheimer's, but it's fine.
Just the gradual drop.
Yeah, the gradual drop will not be like this. Even though it went like this up, we don't believe it'll be like this. We'll see some of these markets. We've seen some spot markets on ocean freight also, you know, on the Transpacific, called $6,000 last week. It's one week, you know. So if you base your strategy on the buyer basing that price on your whole next year, that would be a bad move. But could it end up with $6,000 or $5,000? Could very well be, but not now. This year, we'll probably see some movement, but it's not gonna be like this.
Throughout the year, and then we see even the more capacity coming in on the ocean freight, you know, in next year, and there'll be quite a bit of a capacity. I think one of the questions is, out of that capacity coming in, how much are they gonna take out of the old stuff? How much is gonna be scrapped? Is it gonna be? You know, that's a level they have, the carrier. They can say, "I'm gonna scrap a little bit more, or scrap a little bit less.
Muneeba.
I'm Muneeba Kayani from Bank of America. Question on the air freight market. We've seen quite a bit of transaction activity happening, like, CMA CGM has this agreement now with Air France. Mr. Kühne has taken a stake in Lufthansa. MSC looking at Alitalia. How does all of that, do you think, impact the air freight market over the next couple of years? And then how are you thinking about your mix between, say, spot, block space and your own charter with these changes happening?
I don't see any negativity as a result of this. As a matter of fact, you've seen the latest move from CMA. They are now entering their fleet into the Air France-KLM portfolio, which means the capacity will be available to DSV as well, whether it's a CMA, KLM or Air France on the side of the plane, really doesn't matter for us. What matters is that it's market levels. We actually see it as a positive that it's not being marketed as a single carrier any longer. Who knows what will happen with Mr. Kühne's investments and the CMA bid. That's pure speculation at this point, but there doesn't seem to be a long-term plan, at least on what exactly it is. It doesn't add any capacity at this early stage, so yeah, we don't see any immediate issues.
Maybe, Mads, on the mixed block space, will it change?
Yeah, the block space will change to a certain degree. There will be more block space in the future. This relates back to what I was saying before about carriers getting more picky on the commodities in order to maximize the capacity on the plane. Yes, they will start getting more picky. And for that reason, we should expect to see the spot market dwindling a bit. It will always exist, but not to the extent of what we're seeing now.
We used to be more like 50/50 or maybe even a bit overweight on the block space. It is an unusual situation now.
A lot of the larger customers today, they go out with a bid right now, which is valid for three months, so to say. It could be six months, but mostly three months. They will say up to, you know, I'm just coming up with 3,000 kg or 5,000 kg, these are the rates for the next three months. Everything above that has to go out to the spot market where they will ask maybe three freight forwarders, "What is your charges?" What, you know, "What can you bill me for the 10-ton shipment or 20 tons or 100-ton shipment?" We are part of that as well. Obviously, when you have the business, you have a bigger chance getting the spot market as well. That's usually the way it works. I don't see that.
That will likely change when the market stabilize. We won't see as all these high spot market rates out in the market.
There's one from Rob here, in the second row. Yeah.
Good morning, everybody. It's Robert Joynson from Exane BNP Paribas. Just a question on productivity. We know that DSV and Air & Sea is extremely productive. We can see that from the conversion ratio. When you look at more granular metrics, such as, say, the number of files per employee, and you benchmark those against competitors, and I'm sure you have much more visibility on this than we do. What do you see? I mean, presumably, you can't be best in class in every single respect.
Disrespect.
I mean, bear in mind that we prefer it when we see upside.
I-
Rather than best in class in everything. I mean, what do you see when you kind of look around? I mean, what upside is there when you benchmark against peers?
Well, first of all, I can only see what they show us, our peers. I don't know their business internally, how they measure things, because there's also, you know, we've seen in the industry, also people measure containers, two and a half containers. Certainly, that doesn't work like that. We can only see our own figures. We believe there is an upside. I've kinda alluded to it. Once the market stabilize and an operator don't have to spend three hours on one booking, you know, because they need to find all these, and they only spend one hour, obviously, automatically, you get productivity up, meaning that you can get some of the staff away again. We don't like to have a lot of staff.
I mean, we like them, but it's the idea is not to have a lot of staff that don't do anything, correct? Once we start to see that, we run KPIs every month. A branch, some branches, they can run their own KPIs. They will do it every week. They'll do it every day, depending how nerdy people are. In general, we run it every month on behalf of the country. Every month, a country manager around the world will get a KPI set. This is your KPIs against the rest of the world. Why can you not bill on time when everybody else can bill on time? We have some internal KPIs, and that's how we measure this every single month.
As Thomas said, every single day feels a little absurd maybe, but they have the capability to do this. We can see our productivity has fallen. We can see that. We're not happy about it, but we also have to serve the customers. We also have to provide that service, and that's what we are doing. It will probably we'll start to see some movement. This is just speculation, probably maybe late in this year, hopefully, and then, you know, we'll start next year when things hopefully will stabilize. We want a stabilized market. If Søren asked me, "Would you like the market to be like it is today?" You know, we just. The customer calls in, and they'll say, you know, "Can you get some space?" We'll say, "Yeah, yeah.
How much do you wanna pay?" We can decide how much we wanna pay. That's not sustainable in the market, in long term for us either. The sustainable that we have a business that we can scale, and we can predict a little bit better, so we can train staff and get the staff we want. I also said, you know, when our digitalization, today, it's about probably 20%. 80% of the day is actually the operator sitting, can I get the containers or why can't I get it, and the carrier didn't ship it anyway, and so forth. It's a huge task. It's not fun for the staff right now, and the customer is not really happy anyway, you know, even though we do this for them.
I would say, again, 15%-20% productivity, I would say. It's probably a good guess.
Lars Heindorff?
Yeah. Thank you. Lars Heindorff from Nordea. A question on risk control, if you can call it that. I mean, we've seen that the network has been growing immensely over the past number of years, and also you talked about the Air Freight Network that you've been building up now. It sounds like you are long in capacity, so to speak, i.e., that you make these space agreement before the customers actually book. So how do you control that, in particular in an environment where we might see declining volumes? Are you able to sort of unwindle or, you know, downsize this network again sort of relatively fast without any sort of cost?
Yeah. I would like to say that we probably pay a little bit of a premium to do a one-year contract instead of a three-year or five-year contract for exactly this reason. We wanna get out if the market is downturning and then procure again on another one-year deal. At the same time, we do not put a new route in place unless we have 75% backing from either a combination of customers or one single customer. That leaves us 25% to free sale that we can risk by 75%. We are usually paid for 85%-90%. So the risk is minimal, and the upside is absolutely there as long as you are controlling it on, let's say, a one-year basis, unlike these long-term contracts where we just can't foresee what's happening in the market in 2026 and 2027.
We talked a little about it yesterday. We're not going out to make a deal now, five-year deal. We see that as very risky if we make a five-year deal today, at today's market, today's rates. That's what the people that lease these aircraft out they want a four to five year deal today at the market today. We are not doing that. That'll be very risky for DSV to do that, we don't wanna go that route. We can get out, and it's not like we have 2,000 people sitting doing this network. That's not the case. Yes, do we have some people?
Let's say we shut everything down. It had to be shut down. I would say do we have 150 people, 50 people? Yeah. 50 people maximum. Yeah. We can very, very easily scale down. It's not. It's integrated in our company and the way we work, contrary to what was done in Panalpina, where it's a completely separate organization. We have integrated as part of the organization. So it's not. You don't have to be nervous there.
There's a question from Sam here.
Hi, it's Sam Bland again from JP Morgan. If we look at this 8,000 and 4,000 number, and you look at the sort of the gap between those numbers and what you had pre-COVID, is that gap driven more by your view of what the market will be like in three, five years' time, or differences to DSV's own business, whether that's types of volume, product vertical, customer mix?
No, more market. It's more market, where we believe the market will be. It's our internal, you can say, we will continue to be more well cost-effective processes. We will continue to do all those things on a cost point of view. From a buying point of view, that's what we are looking at, so what we will buy at. It's again, it's a guesstimate. You know, it's difficult whether it's be 8.5 or 7.5. I don't know. Again, somewhere in between where the market will be. Again, we believe maybe some of it will happen in the second part of the year. Correct. Also we are very resilient to these things in DSV.
We always, you know, we can cut costs pretty fast. It's very easy for us to look into our based on our KPIs, where are the costs, where do we have too many people, and so forth. We do that extremely fast. We did it in 2020. We did a quick one after a few calls, and that's something where we're extremely strong. We stand together. We do this. It's not a big process. It's a few calls, two meetings, and we'll do it. We all do it, you know, so it's
Great. We have time for two questions more, then we have to move on. Satish?
Yeah, Satish from Citigroup.
Dan has signed off.
If you look at the commodity versus value-add services, you said today it's around 50/50, and previously it was 75/25, and you expect it to go back to 75/25.
Towards that side, yes.
Yeah. If you look at the rate side, you still expect that the rates would be much above versus where it was pre-pandemic levels. How does this actually value-add and commodity would fit in with the market is still going to be tight from a supply perspective and still gives you better rates. How are you going to bring in more value-add services into your mix?
You know, the market has changed. You know, the market has changed. In the last two years, things has changed. Suddenly, logistics is part of the boardroom, you know, because the amount of money being spent. Things has changed. Whether this is short term or, you know, people don't remember that long, you know. Maybe the chaotic market in the last two years, people will not have learned from it in two years. I don't know. What we believe is that there still are, and there is a huge demand for value-add services out there. We still have a lot of upsell to do, whether it's insurance or whether it's pure management, whether it's our, you know, many of the services that we can provide.
The value-add services could also increase more, you know, and from that point of view. It could be that we end up with 80/20. You know, it's difficult to predict. What we just know is that there's a market for this. Right now the market is higher, has been higher than it's ever been, to be able to provide more flexibility, and customers are willing to pay for this flexibility. How it will change, we don't really know. It's again a little bit of a guesstimate because it was so stable for many years. It was so very predictable where we were, and now we're just kinda in a tsunami of stuff, you know.
Again, we will adapt to this very quickly.
Last quick question from Dan.
Carnegie. On the years of follow-up on that, would you say that you are more optimistic now on these 4,000 and 8,000 than you were, for instance, let's say six, 12 months ago? And why is that, if that has changed?
Yes, I am more optimistic about the market. We knew the market will come down. I mean, I believe everybody knew it cannot be sustainable where the market is today. We knew, but I'm more optimistic, if you can call optimistic. It would also be great if the rates were up for that matter, but I just have a bit of feeling of the market today. Just what we hear and you can say it's a gut feeling or it's something that we hear in the market, what are people talking about? What is shipper saying? What is our big customer saying? It's a combination of many of these things that kind of we feel that the market's speaking to carriers.
They also believe the market will drop, correct. It's not something that is, people are saying it will not happen. We are more or less in line with at least who we speak to of the carriers and our customers. The market will stabilize. Maybe it'll come in stages. Maybe it went down a little bit. Maybe it did go down a little bit. Maybe it will take one year to come down. I don't know. We know in 2023 there'll be more capacity coming in, a lot more capacity. The question is gonna be, are they gonna take out how many blank sailings they're gonna do? You know, are they gonna take out these vessels and anchor them up?
Are they gonna scrap all the old stuff that is not really cost effective in today's market? Everything is in the water today, you know. Everything that can sail is whether it's a rowboat almost, you know, with a container on, it will be out there. How much are they gonna scrap of this old stuff? There is a lot more capacity coming in. Some of the carriers we believe will start to be a little more aggressive in the market also to fill up this new capacity. There's full capacity. Fuel efficiency is better. Sustainable fuel. There will be part of this which is being started to be sold on some of these vessels. I think that is what we believe.
Sorry, Flemming.
Yeah, yeah.
Historically, if you look at, I can talk about this all day, but historically, the carriers have been extremely under extreme pressure, correct? If you look at historically. What happens today has really never happened before. Last time the market went up was in 2010, and it was only for four-six months period. It has to, it just, you know.
Just, Carsten, to maybe to Dan's point also, the fact that supply chains are more critical today.
Yes.
That customers, they are more focused on supply chain, having robust supply chains, they are more willing to pay for service. The supply chains are discussed in the boardrooms.
Yes.
That's another factor that maybe makes us more optimistic.
You would say, I mean, in the just-in-time system, which was everybody went to school, you know, kind of learned just-in-time because we don't want inventory to sit in the warehouse for a long time. That strategy is changing with the customers, clearly. I mean, a lot of customers, particularly in the automotive industry, in 2020 got really burned, correct? They have contracts with automotive manufacturing. If we don't deliver this, you are liable for, let's say $10,000 per car that we're not delivering on time. They have been burned quite a bit, and they don't wanna have that scenario again. We can see a little bit of stockpile coming up, more probably. Sorry.
Yeah.
And-
That's the end of that question and this question. I have to say five minutes, then, I will start calling you back. Go out, have a short break.
We could have to, yeah, get over that also.
Because I'm missing, now we're not gonna have punishment for making our budget.
Yeah.
That would be good. You get some extra from here in about 12 months.
Just issued share options this year to 2,000 people at 1,500.
They don't make a difference.
I mean, it's of course people are looking at what? It has no value, you said. You have to look at the spike that five minutes after. I mean, it will be valuable also. People have to look at the combination of the stakes now.
I'll just take it.
Tomorrow.
I need to get that.
Yeah. Yeah.
I could give away now.
No, I'm with you.
It's all good. They produce in China and Indonesia. They produce furniture for the garden.
I'm just asking, who you work with in terms of who adopts?
Manager.
Of course.
Manager?
No.
They might be very small.
You might see.
Yeah.
Women are a nightmare.
Yeah.
We are almost miked up now, so.
We considered calling this the commercial break. That sounds correct? Anyway, it's time to hear something about what our customers are saying. With us here first is Rene Falch Olesen, heading up our commercial team, Chief Commercial Officer. We almost have the team ready. Hit it, Rene. Start. Yes.
As you'll notice, I'm the lucky one. I'm joined on stage with two people without the corporate haircut, which is actually great. Lindsay and Eva will be on with me. Eva, after me. Looking at it, what are we facing? What are our customers facing as well? You'll see over the last few years, we've seen a little bit of an explosion in the number of incidents, geopolitical, environmental issues that our customers have to relate to. That's obviously something that has an impact on our daily lives as well, and I'll get back to that a little bit. To start with, where do I come from? I live in the U.K. I've been with the company since 1983, so I started as a four-year-old.
You can work the rest out. Very much, I was really proud a couple of years ago, not because COVID happened, but because it's, I think it's the first time ever that I've felt a recognition by external people of what we actually do in logistics as well. Suddenly, my friends who are typically in healthcare, in banking, in real estate, they always look at me with a sort of a glare over their eyes. When I say I'm in logistics, they think I'm a forklift driver, so I've left them in that belief. What we certainly were hit by was we were announced as being key workers. None of them were, by the way, can I add that? Not in the beginning.
When we look at it, we were proud to be the ones that were actually facilitating suddenly the need for PPE equipment. We'd never heard about PPE equipment to a large scale before. Suddenly, we were sort of the key component in getting that working. We were the ones that suddenly, in the U.K., there are many opinions about why that happened, but toilet paper seems to be the order of the day in the U.K. Everybody panicked and bought all the toilet paper, so there was nothing left for anybody else. We were the giants that actually brought the toilet paper back to the shelves. I think that was the most important. They didn't think about food, but it was all about toilet paper.
When I look at it, what do I believe in? You know, there's three main things. I'll leave out Man United. They don't count at the moment. But it's about the planet, it's about the people, and it's about profit for DSV as well. When we look at the planet, I think it's important that we're in a transition at this moment in time, where sustainability is becoming more and more important. I won't take anything out of Lindsay's presentation, but this is the order of the day. Without the planet, without a clean planet moving forward, there's nothing for the next generations coming forward, and that goes to the people as well.
Having been in one company for nearly 40 years, it's also the family you have at home, the family you have at work, and the family you have with your customers as well is extraordinarily important. Then it goes without saying that we are here to make a profit, and we are to deliver back to you as stakeholders in the business. It's also important, I think, to say that in the future, I'm a firm believer that sustainability is, so there's a green profit as well. If you don't do it green, you're not gonna be there, and you're not gonna make a profit. I think it's really important when we move forward.
We'll try to go through a little bit of examples how we work with our customers, how we support our customers in what we believe is an interesting time at this moment. If you look at the trends, are we gonna have less incidents moving forward than we've had, or is it a trend that will continue with more natural disasters, more geopolitical issues that we need to deal with, and we need to guide our customers through? We are very good at doing it. We've proven that. The operational excellence part, I can definitely for my sake say that dealing with a lot of the big customers, we are good at that. Are the customers happy? No, they're not happy, but they understand the situation we are in. They understand the market as well.
The procurement guys have a little bit less understanding than the guys that are actually working in the supply chain. I think we get a lot of understanding. We get a lot of appreciation for what we've actually done and what we're actually doing for the customers in general. I think we are doing well in that respect. We will go through a little bit on, as I said, the organization. We will have an example at the end where Eva will go into one of the industry verticals that we work in, the automotive, or call it mobility industry, where we do a lot of business, and it's an industry in an enormous transformation at this moment in time. I believe Eva is well-placed to give that presentation.
What are the customers looking at? In the recent phase, it's actually, it's not new. All of these things are not new, but they have probably been re-emphasized for the customers that they need to change. When it comes to lack of lead time predictability, it was said previously, especially the ocean freight has generated a lot of problems for our customers, in terms of capacity outages, blank sailings, et cetera. That's something that our customers need to work with. When we look at it, the lack of lead time predictability combined with lack of visibility and control, it's really important to also some of the previous slides that we are in one system, we are able to give better information to our customers than anybody else.
I think Jens had it on his slide as well with the way that we work with predictability, but also when something happens that shouldn't happen, how do we work with our customers to mitigate in that respect? A lot of the cost that goes into the supply chain now is actually based on people trying to avoid having line stops, for instance. I think our industry is going really also in a big transition from being largely a transactional industry to being more of a process industry as well. We need to understand the processes. We're fantastic in the industry at solving single individual problems. We've never had a problem with that. We actually, I think we thrive on it when there's a problem. When COVID sets in, we take pride in actually solving those issues.
To look at processes is something that has probably traditionally been a little bit harder for us as an industry. Obviously, combined lack of predictability, in reality, a bad service when it comes to running your supply chain, combine that with high freight costs, and overall logistics costs, that's not a good combination when you're trying to run a business as well. What do we do in order to help our customers through this? Then obviously, last but not least, we have the green logistics part as well, which is coming higher and higher up on the agenda. Actually, it's interesting, if you look back, I remember in 2007, January 2007, Marks & Spencer in the U.K., they launched an initiative called Plan A because there's no plan B.
I don't know if any of you ever saw it. They had some fancy trailers, and it was on the side of all these trailers. We actually went in to Marks & Spencer with a solution that was based on Plan A because there's no Plan B. It was all about sustainability, and this is 22 years ago that we sit there with the customer. There was one or a few elements in the proposal, is that the transit times were longer in the solution we delivered, and the costs were far higher. It was green. I tell you it was green. The procurement guy, obviously, when you look at the strategy of the company, it came down to the next level. The procurement guy was measured on maybe a different KPI than it just being green.
He looked at us like, "I don't know why you're making this proposal." We actually had a slide. The next slide was Plan A because there's no plan B, and it was a photo of one of their own trucks. I think there's a drive now that the customers really believe in it. They believe that green is good business as well. We need to find a way of delivering those solutions to them, and I think we do well already in that respect. The way just some selected parts of our organization in what we call GCO, Global Commercial Organization, where we support our customers, but we obviously also support the internal business. We run the CRM part, the customer relationship management part.
In that, in part, for instance, we run our Net Promoter Score that we run for all the countries. We run customer defection forecast. We have well in excess of 200,000 customers in DSV. How do you keep track of which ones are firmly in, which ones are giving you an indication that they might be on the way out? We run algorithms on that. We deliver that to the countries in order for the countries to actually react to the customers, and we see a clear benefit of doing that. It's very simple, but it's a very efficient program as well. On top of that, I think there was a lot of questions on the organic growth as well.
We support the countries with services around sales training, stuff like that, in order to enhance our organic growth agenda as well. We also see and have seen over the last few years a need for different services as well. Call it value add. We have an operation called DSV Lead Logistics, which is a 4PL. Essentially, we took it over from the base of it from UTi when we bought UTi in 2016, and we've developed it since then. It's a purely digital play to the customers, where we run, we optimize their supply chain. We do strategic planning, we do tactical and operational planning for them as well. We work with 3PLs that are nominated by the customers. One of those 3PLs typically is DSV.
The play is really for us to be in managing on behalf of the customer, but for DSV to take a part of what we call freight under management. That's the interesting part there. The two other, global account management and supply chain optimization. Supply chain optimization has become. We started it about eight years ago, based in Copenhagen. It was interesting in the beginning because people didn't really believe what is it, what is it not, is it necessary, do we require it? I think it's fair to say that we see a lot of customers, both existing customers and new potential customers, where part of the drive is for us to show what can we actually do to improve on your supply chain.
We talk a lot of scarcity of capacity. If you look at it, in reality, when we go in and do studies with our customers as well, it's quite often that you find, and maybe that's to Michael Hollstein's point on LCL, we quite often find that a full container means that it's full to about 60%-70%, because that's the way customers have operated. This is how we do the call-off. We have a container a week, and then we utilize it. The reason why they haven't done more using LCL concepts, for instance, or optimizing the containers better, is back to the point also that the price was so low that it didn't really pay to do it. That has completely changed.
You know, we work very closely with the customers in that side. The approach that we have to it is what we call a supply chain scan. We work with our customers on data analysis. We work on interview basis as well to find the pain points that our customers have. Once we found those, we do the implementation of them as well. We always say as a consultant, we have a bigger risk than an external consultant, because we have the risk that the customer say, "Yeah, this is all well and good. Let's implement it." Then we think, oh. We have to be really, really honest in it's something practical that is can be implemented for the customers as well in order to benefit them. We work an enormous part of the effort into.
We have a break? That's good. That was a quick break, by the way, if you noticed. We have network design and optimization. Actually, the inbound networks, how they work, we do a lot of the transport planning. How can you plan your transportation better in networks, a better utilization of the equipment as well? To the points that have been made earlier as well, how can we optimize the inventory? Optimizing the inventory might seem easy, but it relates to the forecasting you have at the other end. By the way, the forecasting customers typically have is largely between 60% and 70%. That's sort of a random figure.
You're trying to optimize something that is a completely moving target, and that's quite interesting when you have a moving target at one end, and you have a moving target at the other end, then you're really in trouble. That's what we try to work with the customers on as well. Very much to do also here with master data. We look at global account management. We operate central account management of more than 100 clients, and they work across either one, two, or three of our divisions in DSV. These are the verticals, automotive, industrial, retail and fashion, healthcare, technology, and renewable energy. Those customers represent in excess of 20% of the GP of DSV.
It's quite important, and it's a quite good dialogue. The people that we have in there are people who understand the vertical, they understand the industry they work in, obviously. They understand the customers they work with. They deep dive into the customers. We also see from all the work that we are doing with them, this is where a lot of the new value-added services are coming from, understanding what the customer requirements are, understanding what the challenges are. That expands the business that we do with them. We can see that it expands the glue between them and DSV as well. It's a combination of what we've taken over from UTi, from Panalpina, from GIL, actually from Frans Maas, and from ABX as well. It's a big combination.
There's a lot of people in there with a lot of different backgrounds, but it's working pretty well. To that, how do we work in the verticals as well? Eva will give you an introduction to the automotive side, which is an industry that is not only impacted by everything that goes on in the world at large for everyone, geopolitics, and the environment, but they are also in a massive transformation at this moment in time. It's quite interesting, some of the dialogue we have with a number of automotive customers as well. They've always been raising. It's always been about volume. How many hundred thousand cars should I produce next year?
Recently, we were with one in the U.K., not to be named any further, but they had a target. They're nowhere near the target they originally had in number of vehicles sold. They're a lot lower than that. All the vehicles have got everything selected. All the optional extras have been selected on them. Their yields are far better. Their end result is far better, and it might actually open up the question to volume in that respect, at least for that part of the industry. They're doing really well. What it also means is with the yields going up, they can actually afford, and typically, I would say in the past, automotive was one of the most difficult industries to work with when it comes to cost.
They're actually a lot easier now because their yields are up, and it's attractive business both for the customers and for us to actually do it even with the disruptions that we have now. With that, we'll have questions at the end. Eva?
Hi, everyone. My name is Eva, and I am DSV's subject matter expert for electric vehicles and future mobility concepts. I've been with DSV for about a year now, and my background is a little bit different than that of my esteemed colleagues. I actually come from industry. I graduated from university at the downturn of the economy, the midst of the recession, with a degree in mechanical engineering and a vision to be a design engineer in the automotive industry. I got out into the working world, and it was quickly apparent that the world was changing, the economy was changing, the industry was changing, and new opportunities were emerging through the disruption and the chaos. I felt like I had a very good opportunity to change my original plan and adapt and learn and see what the world had to offer. My career took a very different turn.
I remained a design engineer for many years. I worked at large automotives, automotive OEMs, and I also worked for some small ones. I am one of the original engineers that designed and launched the Tesla Model S. After that, my career took a turn towards the regulatory side, where I worked for the United States government, writing crash test regulations and developing new dummies. Later in my career, I saw additional opportunity to go back into industry, back to the OEM life, and I learned very quickly that there was a lot of opportunity for growth in our operations department. At the end of my time there, I was responsible for the operations and for purchasing of logistics services for the R&D center, our manufacturing center, and also for after-sales.
My perspective and depth of knowledge of the automotive industry and of cars in general is really what has carried me through. I am very excited to be part of DSV now, to be here in front of you today, because I think that I am in the right place at the right time to capitalize on all the change and the disruption that's happening in the automotive industry. On top of all the other chaos that we've talked about today, on top of all the issues with global supply chain, the automotive industry itself is experiencing the most disruption that we've seen in about a hundred years. Gone are the days when we could all talk about large volumes, chasing certain volumes, and finding efficiencies. Everybody used to be headed in the same direction, maybe a few degrees off from each other.
Now we have a lot of changes and opportunity. In addition to the changes of the industry itself and chasing after sustainability targets, our customers have the opportunity to grossly change their supply chain. Forever, the automotive supply chain has been taking parts, making larger assemblies, turning them into cars, selling them to customers, and maybe providing some extra spare parts at the end of life. We have the opportunity now to look towards a more circular supply chain, which is not new to DSV, even though it might be a new concept to some of our automotive customers as they shift more towards the concept of mobility.
Circular supply chain is something that we've seen here at DSV in several of our other verticals, and the opportunity to provide new services and new offerings as our customers change to give them additional opportunities for collection of the vehicles at end of life, recycling of these batteries to address some of the concepts about raw material shortages, and maybe even providing answers to supplementing the questions about whether the electric grid is sustainable for the growth that we see. Globally, there are about 1.4 billion passenger cars out in the fleet today, and we've only achieved about a 7.2% penetration of electric vehicles. Despite that, it's already a total addressable market of EUR 1 million, and that's a figure that's expected to at least double by the year 2030.
As our customers are changing, DSV is in a very unique position to change as well. We have the opportunity to be influential with our carriers, to understand the needs of the customer, but also to move very quickly and not wait for the customers to make their definition. Rene made mention to a visit that we had in the U.K. with an OEM that's trying to figure out what the world could look like, and that story is pretty typical for a lot of the automotive customers that we have. As technologies come into place for better batteries, higher energy density, and even recycling technologies and applications for battery second life, there are a lot of opportunities for the automotive supply chain to blend with that of technology, industrial, retail even.
As the automotive volume of lithium-ion batteries starts to increase, it's going to drive these technologies, which are extremely applicable to a lot of the other industries as well. It has not been economically scalable and feasible for the recycling industry to support lithium-ion batteries in the consumer product space. As the volume of the electric vehicle batteries starts to push that technology forwards, it will be. As our customers look towards higher sustainability targets, DSV is in a great position to support not only the needs for collection of these components, but also design of greener supply chains. When we look at the future, we start by extending the traditional services that we have today. DSV has always had a very pragmatic approach to customer support. It's great to look at the future.
We also have to make sure that we can support the customer needs of today, and our customers have needs that are pushing what the industry is used to and what the industry is capable of. In addition to using the products that we have in traditional ways and in new ways to support these growing demands, we're developing new products, some of which we think have patentable technology to grow the industry. To not only wait and react to what the customers are asking for, but to see where the industry is going and to push forward with these tactical, practical solutions in parallel with building the sustainable and robust supply chains of the future.
The DSV approach on this is not to look at this as transactional business, but to look at building those resilient supply chains of the future and empowering our customers to understand what is happening today in the market, where the market is going, and helping them to make their own decisions. Though the transition is about so much more than lithium-ion batteries, they are a major component of the change. They're a major catalyst for the growth, and our customers are asking us how we do the hard things. The hard thing about hard things is that it's hard to get attention in a market where we're challenged for capacity issues across all modes for even your standard non-dangerous goods. How do we push carriers to pay attention when our customer wants something that's very difficult to do?
There was a question earlier about productivity and the number of files per desk. It's difficult to convince everybody that this is the direction and this is the path forward, and we need to support these customers now. We need to support the hard things. To be able to put together either a transactional solution or a robust supply chain, it requires a lot of creativity. Understanding the regulations and saying that moving lithium-ion batteries is no different than moving any other dangerous goods commodity is a bit naive. The regulations are not sufficient to ensure a level of safety. The carriers are not familiar with the technology, and they feel uncomfortable about the lack of regulation and the lack of change as the technology has grown. In order to actually support our customers, we need to be able to find creative solutions, often multimodal.
It's not necessarily about optimization, it's about how to do this, period. To address this, DSV has formed a competence center, the Electrification and Mobility Competence Center, which we refer to as EMC squared. The engagement started with our larger customers in the automotive vertical, but as you can see, it has quickly expanded to not only our large accounts, but some of our smaller as well. It's not so much about mobility and the passenger car segment as it is about all of these different products that are using batteries, electrified mobility and future mobility concepts.
Whether it's talking to a customer about how the sales model needs to change to adapt to a circular supply chain so that they can offer trucking as a service or vehicles as a service, or whether it's talking to our industrial customers about how they don't feel like the technologies in the battery electric vehicle is sufficient for addressing the needs of today, and they have concepts about other powertrains. The Electrification & Mobility Competence Center pulls together knowledge through all of DSV, through all of our divisions and all of our branches around the world, to provide the support for our operators, for our customers, and even back to our carriers. I'll leave it at that. I think that our customers are all searching for the answer. They're all looking to outsource to the experts.
I wanna leave some time for questions and answers, but, thank you for your time.
First one.
As per usual standard, we have the summary slide as well. Disruptions continue to impact our customers. We don't believe there's an end to the disruption. We actually probably believe that there's more disruption to come of a different nature moving forward. We are prepared for that. We have to be prepared for that as well. A little bit about how we try to help our customers, and I think we succeed in helping our customers to building more resilient supply chains, both in terms of service but also in terms of cost. The new support center that we have for the mobility developments as well, EMC2, which I think is a proof of how we can also do it as a business, that we are willing to change.
You saw in the previous slide how the market is changing and how the customers are slightly different to what we intended them to be from the beginning. That's the update. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you, Rene. Thank you, Eva.
We are ready for questions. Just raise your hands. We have in here. Satish, I think you were first.
Thank you again. Satish from Citigroup. Just to think about the inventory levels, right? As your customers move from just-in-time to whatever we call it today, how does their thinking begin the inventory levels? Also, if you look at today, the shipment time is like 2x what it used to take pre-pandemic. Are we in a period that you're going to carry more inventory levels? How are you actually helping your customer to transition away from that into, say, the future operating model, what you call it? Yeah.
Yeah. I think the interesting bit is, as I said from the beginning, you have uncertainty at the front, and you have the uncertainties at the back end as well. With everything that's going on at this moment in time, we see some uncertainties in what the market will do, what the customer's market is doing at this moment in time, and will they, depending on what happens there, start utilizing the inventory that they've been building up to have resilience and be able to deliver to our customers, or will they still feed that. That would be an interesting time, probably over the next six-12 months. We will see a potential change in that. It's entirely given, driven by the customer's forecast of what do I need to produce.
I would say in a lot of industries, there's a massive backlog. If you look in the automotive industry, I think it's fair to say there's a backlog. Once the semiconductor starts flowing freely again, there'll be a lot of cars delivered. Well, I guess in here, there'll be a few people that are waiting for a car that is waiting for a semiconductor somewhere. So it depends a little bit on what the market, the industry segment is as well, how this is gonna pan out. What we see in general is a need for more warehousing space than we've seen in the past, and I don't think that will change any time soon.
I would say that just-in-time became, before the pandemic, an excuse for not carrying a lot of inventory. I think that with the stability of the supply chains and the stability of the freight market, it was really easy to carry virtually no inventory and rely on your overseas suppliers to deliver in a just-in-time fashion. Through the pandemic, I think it's been a good reminder to everybody that true just in time requires accurate risk assessment and accurate forecasting. Gone are the days when you can carry no inventory and rely on a six-week transit time to arrive on time.
Now we're seeing our customers asking for support because we are the supply chain experts, and figuring out what that risk is and what is an appropriate level of inventory to carry, balancing the risk to the supply chain going down and the risk with carrying that much inventory in a warehouse space.
Hi, it's Nikolas Mauder from Kepler Cheuvreux. We've heard a couple of times now that logistics is getting more recognition in a private and professional context and that it arrived higher on the board level agenda. Can you, against that backdrop, perhaps elaborate on the issue of cross-selling and perhaps even cross-divisional synergies and whether it's easier in that context to raise them?
Yeah, I think what you've seen, if you take the cross-selling between Air & Sea is a natural one. That's been happening for years. Then you move into air, sea, and road, maybe cross-selling in that sense as well. We haven't seen that much disruption in roads. It's starting to come now. Søren will probably go into it as well. There's something called the EU Mobility Package that has driven capacity out of the road networks in Europe as well. Those things will also necessitate that the customers look at that market being more risky as well. It hasn't been risky so far, but that could play into it as well.
I believe the integration Jens spoke to it a lot the integrations that we have with customers as well enables the customer very easily to actually connect to us as well. myDSV is not just for Air & Sea or for Road, it's for all of it. We have the ease of doing it, and obviously it's the drive that we are responsible for driving with the customers as well. Currently, approximately 15% of the customers have an overlap between two or more divisions as well at this moment in time. The potential is there, yes.
Stig from ABG. Around asset heaviness versus asset lightness. We hear a lot of customers. They're talking about they want the forwarder or logistics player to control the assets more. That's a good example. How do you play into this mindset as being an asset-light player and still creating visibility and all the data and so and not controlling the assets?
I think if you look at, Carsten had one of the slides as well, and you look at the flexibility we have to choose the best solution for our customer. There's not one shipping line or one airline in the world that is the right solution for anybody. Even if you look in the road market, you might be able to go to the asset-heavy providers as well, but you need a lot of them to actually put a network together as well. My firm belief is that there's no changes in that. It's a desire to move in and do something that we've been doing really well for 50 or 100 years, if you look at all the history we have as a company. I'm not nervous about it.
I think that was mentioned by Jens Bjørn earlier as well. It's not something that we are nervous about. The data, is it easier to get the data? In some cases, it's actually easier to get the data from the terminal than it is from the shipping line as well. It's access to data, and it's reacting to the data. I do actually believe we are better than that than most in my world.
Hassan Ashraf, Morgan Stanley. My question is on sustainability. Are customers actually paying more for green logistics products? And if so, what proportion are doing this at the moment?
Are they paying more? At this moment in time, they are reluctant to pay more. Personally, I believe that there's something called carbon taxes everybody's talking about. I think we need, in the industry, in order to go on our Scope 3, to go to where we should go, we need incentives, for the customers to do that. That could be a tax that you can avoid, or it could be, a penalty that you have to pay. I think that's the only way to drive it. I would say, Jens, you and I had some experiences last week, and I feel that the big customers that we have, they're definitely driving in that direction. It's a little bit of the catch-up effect. It's coming now, and people are aware of it. Absolutely.
I saw a very good example of a big customer, LG Chem. They've actually already implemented a rule in their company that they have internal application of carbon taxes. So all their entities, they pay what they believe is the right price per ton for carbon in their accounts. It might be something we all have to consider to say, if the governments are not doing it, then maybe we have to do it ourselves. So I think the drive will be there. Absolutely.
Thank you. I was just gonna say to take what you said, Rene. I think now we're seeing that customers are willing to pay. They also have their ambitious targets that they have to set. They come to DSV, and they want to get products that can lower their CO2. I think it is more and more coming that they are paying. Just to add to that list.
Great. One more from Rob.
Morning, everybody. It's Rob from BNP again. I just a question on globalization. There's a lot of discussion at the moment about the reversal of globalization, but it seems to me there's two very different dynamics, which is, sure, in some cases you will see the insourcing of production back to the West, but in many cases you're likely to see a kind of more diverse supply chain. In particular, if we're being honest about people moving more away from China. From a freight forwarder's perspective, which of those two factors do you think is dominant? Is it the negative insourcing or the more positive from your perspective of just broad and, well, more diverse supply chains globally?
I think what we've seen in the dialogue with customers, and you can say, the last two and a half years have proven how difficult it is. It's easy to talk about dual sourcing and nearshoring, et cetera. It's very difficult to do. I think in the automotive industry, if you look at that, they've spent three decades globalizing. You know, how quickly can they then go in the other direction? You're absolutely right. In certain industries, they'll be able to do it, they'll be able to do it faster. Maybe at the end of the day, if you look at sustainability as the right thing that they should do.
The dialogue there, I firmly believe that our role is to give the guidance, to look at the alternatives that the customers have, work with them to then build their supply chains as well. The fact of life is that we are in 90 countries. If somebody wants to move production from one place to the other, we can work with them, and we can still facilitate them. That also gives assurances when you make the changes. But will there be companies moving towards Europe for some of their production? Absolutely. They're already. Some of them are already doing it. That will just open up the door towards being a provider of a different service to them as well.
I briefly touched on empowering the customers to make those types of decisions. Our customers are looking at supply chain as a strategic advantage. There is no single answer, and it's a mistake, I think, right now for us to offer a specific menu of services for these customers to choose from, because they are ending up with very different results and very different supply chains. They all have different goals and different targets for how they're getting there. Some of our customers are small. They've only ever done electric products. Some of them are very large, and they're making the transition. As the inflection point comes, as the number of internal combustion engine vehicles dwindles, and the number of battery electric vehicles goes up, it's very difficult for them to hit a moving target and figure out how to do that on top of figuring out how to nearshore.
There are all kinds of quality targets and complex, deep-level supply chains that require serious examination. It's not as simple as saying, "Oh, we should just find a second supplier and start transitioning the business over." In the automotive industry, though, the batteries are certainly bringing in a lot of the supply chain from tech. There are regulations for the commodity itself and a complexity that doesn't exist in some of these other industries that are definitely driving the way that these supply chains are shaped.
Great. One last question.
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. A question on customer churn, please. Can you tell us a little bit about what your typical customer churn is? What are the biggest predictors or drivers of customer churn? Thank you.
It's a very interesting question, because on what basis do you measure customer churn? When we do the calculations, it's. We have to replace between 8% and 10% of the business every year. When you look, if you go into segmentation of customers as well, the churn, the smaller the customers are, the more too, I think Carsten made the point as well, the more they are going towards spot quotes as well, and the higher churn you have in that segment as well. It is typically the high churn sits in the customers that have a typical annual turnover of up to EUR 12,000. We see a far higher churn there than we see as you go up the chain in terms of the size.
If you look at a global account, we actually measure churn in two ways. We look at accounts that go from something to zero. That's a churn account. We have another component as well, where we actually look at the service they bought. Down to a service level, down to is it air freight from China to Holland, for instance. If they lose that, we count as churn. It's very much the metrics as well. I would say replacing at least eight to 10% of your business is the norm. That's also why when we look at the customer defection forecast, it's a very, very good tool to find the needle in the haystack.
What we typically do is we say, "Here we have enough analytics to say there's an 80% churn chance or risk on the customer." Then we initiate a dialogue between our operational entity and the customer in order to drive a better dialogue. We see a clear benefit from them. The quicker, you know, if you know three months after you've lost a customer that you've lost them, it doesn't really help calling them because they know you've lost them as well. It's about doing it at the stage where you see a change in behavior, have that dialogue. We typically see when you do it well that we're actually growing the business with them. It's capturing that. I hope that answers it.
Great. Just in time. Perfect. Thank you, Rene.
Wow.
Thank you, Eva.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Next person on the stage here.
Thank you.
Lindsay Zingg. Lindsay, we met first time in 1st of April 2019 at the Panalpina offices. You were thinking, "What are all those Danes doing there?" We were thinking, "What's this Scottish lady doing here?" That's all history.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Flemming. Three years later, here we are today as an integrated joint company. It's a great pleasure to be here today, and thank you for inviting me to present sustainability and focus. As you mentioned, my name is Lindsay Zingg. I'm 18 years in the industry, so a bit younger than Rene. I started at two years of age. I don't quite have the DSV haircut just yet, so I'm still getting a bit shorter. The main topic that we're gonna talk about, and I think throughout the course of the morning, you have seen a lot of mentioning of ESG sustainability. All the speakers have actually mentioned it.
To the end of this, it's nice just to wrap this up and explain what is DSV doing on this very, very important topic. Sustainability is a license to operate. Why is that? If you look at the planet, I live in Switzerland, it's a beautiful country. Very blessed to be there. I moved from Scotland 18 years ago to start my career. When I moved, the snow in the cities was like this. I was like, "Wow, it's a winter wonderland. Scotland doesn't have snow. I'm so blessed to be there." Started skiing, big hobby of mine. As you progress, as the years have gone on, there is no snow in the cities. The ski resorts are opening far later. They're losing money.
Even in countries like Switzerland, when everyone thinks it's lovely luxury, the money's there, the planet is being affected by climate change. We can just see that looking out the window in all the countries we're living in. It's the right thing to do for our planet, for our future, and as Rene said as well, for the next generation. I have two daughters, and I want to make sure I leave a good planet, and we work in that in DSV. Second of all, I mean, tightening regulations. I remember six years ago, someone said to me, "It's a phase. Climate change is just a phase. It's the next buzzword." Absolutely not true. It's intensifying and so are the regulations. Governments, NGOs, they're setting robust targets, and climate change is needed and to support the ESG agenda. Stakeholder demands. Our customers.
Rene's touched upon that as well. My team and I were talking to customers, "What can you do to support our CO2 reduction?" Again, if I go back in my career, it was ISO certification. Okay, good. Tick. Then it was, "Do you have a CO2 report for us?" "Yep, let's just put that in the drawer." Another tick. Fast-forward to 2022, it's a whole different landscape. They want the data. They want to know what their CO2 is with DSV. Not only that, logistic companies like us need to provide solutions to lower the CO2 for our customers. That's what's changed in the logistics industry. We can no longer say, "Oh, our suppliers are taking care of it." No, we have to find solutions. However, more importantly, above all that, it's because DSV wants to become a greener company.
It's headed up by Jens Bjørn, our CEO, and I've never met a CEO who is leading so strongly this topic and the executive management. They're backing it and they're leading it to make sure that we support the decarbonization in logistics industry and become a leader. Now the scene has been set. This is the agenda, and I'm just gonna start overall with our sustainability strategy. 2015, I think, was the last Capital Markets Day, and I guess this topic was not being presented. Here we are in 2022, and it's quite incredible what DSV has achieved in this area. You've seen all the disruptions, you've seen all the acquisitions, the company is growing, but ESG has not been taken out of focus. It's incredible to see what we're working on and the main focus areas. This is the strategy. It's the overall sustainability strategy.
We start with governance, and this is where it's business ethics. This is very important that we do business with integrity, respecting different cultures and the rights of individual countries. We are asset light, so we have to procure and be responsible for their procurement. We must make sure our suppliers, that was mentioned as well this morning, the air freight carriers, the ocean carriers, that they also are demonstrating high standards. Moving on to environment, and that will be the focus of my presentation today. This is the high materiality, the high risk topic, the opportunity for DSV to take that responsibility and become a greener company. Finally, Jens Bjørn mentioned that as well, we are a people business. We have over 77,000 employees, so we must make sure we take care of that. Diversity and inclusion, a very important topic as well.
Health and safety. 50% of the people work in warehouses, so they also have to be kept safe. The social aspect and also the community engagement. Ukraine disaster right now, our countries have just given so much work and financial support to make sure we support when there's a crisis. This is the overall strategy, and I think in 2015, we had a sustainability report that was 20 pages. If you fast-forward now, it's 70 pages. It's only because everything the company is doing is going into this agenda and progressing constantly. If we move on to the environmental part, what is DSV's footprint? Jens Bjørn said we're the third largest logistics company in the world. That comes with a carbon footprint, and that's what everyone's talking about. You see that in the media.
Our carbon footprint, if you see Scope 1 and 2, this is what we control. That's the terminology to say, what is it you own? What can you control? Brian, who's responsible for solutions, will touch upon that later this afternoon. That's the buildings that we're in, the warehouses, the offices. The company cars that we also operate and our small own truck fleet, which also Søren's responsible for, and we'll talk about the own assets that we have, that is something we must drive down as well. That's 0.25 million CO2. What does that mean, CO2 data? What's it equivalent to? Well, that's about heating 30,000 houses a year. That gives you a bit of an indication.
If you move on to scope three, which is the biggest scope we have, and it's asset light, that's 12.5 million tons of CO2. This is predominantly coming from air freight. Carsten was talking about this morning. It's got the highest CO2 emissions, followed by road and then followed by sea and a small majority of rail. We have to reduce that. This is a huge carbon footprint. It's damaging the environment. Back in the days when I met Jens Bjørn for the first time, he said, "Science-based targets. We want to have the science-based targets." Because this is the gold standard of setting environmental targets. It's coming from the Paris Agreement 2016. When companies set these targets, it means they're limiting global warming to 1.5%.
We want to reduce everything we control by 40%. The air freight, the ocean freight, the roads, that is the hardest challenge that we have, but we aim to reduce that by 30%. Now, we are a company who acquires businesses. Because of that, we're now setting a new baseline, and we will be resubmitting our science-based targets, which will become more ambitious because we have a higher CO2 footprint. Watch this space, and in the next quarter or so we'll have new announced science-based targets. The next question we're asked, "Okay, DSV, you have this huge CO2 emissions. What are you doing to reduce it?" Here is where I'd like to introduce our green logistics program. If the video works.
World trade drives world prosperity. It's time we remodel the way we conduct it to make it more sustainable. As one of the world's largest transport and logistics companies, we at DSV carry a great responsibility for the world's green transition. That's why we introduce green logistics, a set of solutions ranging from CO2 reporting and strategic supply chain optimization to emission compensation and sustainable fuel offerings. Each solution is designed to reduce the climate footprint of your supply chain without constraining it. Because at DSV, we're determined to do our part in the green transition. Let trade on nature's terms.
Great. That was a big project we embarked last year because we saw the customer demands. DSV, as I mentioned, what is the CO2 footprint of the cargo I ship with you? And what are you going to do to reduce that? As the video said, it's a set of solutions. We want to reduce this carbon footprint of our customers, and we also want to reduce the Scope 3 of our supply chain. The first thing is track and trace your impact. Customers want to know where is the cargo? What time did it arrive? That's no different now from the CO2 reporting. This is where the customer says, "What was the CO2 of the cargo I ship with DSV?" We've and Jens Lund was talking about that.
The data is the first step in any collaboration with the customer. We simply must have the transparency of the CO2 that DSV has and also the customers, so we can measure the footprint for our customers and we send them these reports. Once you've done that, you have a whole overview of the trade lanes. What was the highest CO2? What were the hotspots for us as a customer? What can you do to reduce it? This is where we move on to rethink your logistics. This is the green supply chain and design optimization. Rene talked about that. There's consultants within DSV. It's unbelievable that logistics has now engineers and consultants that can actually go into the heart of the supply chain and see what can you do differently, customer? How can we challenge you?
Perhaps you can do it a different mode switch to reduce the CO2. That's optimizing and reducing. Now, I studied chemistry at university, and I didn't think entering into the logistics industry, we'd talk about fuel and going into the sustainable fuel offerings. It's absolutely the case now. Carsten also mentioned that we are looking and we do have sustainable fuel offerings to ensure that the customer has a huge CO2 reduction by replacing that fossil fuel. That is the collaboration on sustainable fuels. Finally, DSV's strategy is not carbon offsetting. Many of you who buy online or who book a personal flight, you have the option to offset. That's not what DSV has as a strategy. This is the final piece. We want to bring CO2 down from the atmosphere. We want to support the replacement of fossil fuels.
Finally, that last piece we can't shift, that's where we want to offset. We can support great projects, and we do have a great partner for that. That's offsetting for carbon neutrality. This is the foundation that DSV will now build upon, bringing new products in to support the customers. We've just worked on a road strategy to also see what can we do as well to add on to this foundation, and this will support the customer and the DSV decarbonization journey. Rethink your logistics. Won't go into a lot of detail, but it's just the small things that can make a difference. When we sit with the customer, we form two project teams and we say, "Okay, have you thought about shifting air to sea? Does the timing allow it?" That can have a 98% saving of CO2.
I think, Carsten, you mentioned it as well, the flights that Panalpina had coming empty. That's a nightmare for me when I was working in Panalpina. Bringing the planes back empty, fill them. So we want to load. You must take one back and fill it as well on the other return. That can also have a 70%-90% saving. The routing, this perhaps could also change the CO2. A direct flight versus a stopover flight also has a saving of CO2. I know it's a challenging market right now, and at the moment it's capacity, but in an ideal world, it would be. We do look at the carriers. Is there a different aircraft that we could use that has a less CO2? An older aircraft versus a newer aircraft, a different truck. What can we use there in terms of CO2?
We look at the carrier selection, we look at the procurement. Finally, innovation is something we haven't mentioned this morning, but innovation is key to sustainability. We need innovative topics, and we need to collaborate with our partners to bring that in. This is a little bit regarding rethinking your logistics, looking for optimization offerings for our customers. I wanted to show this because this is something Jens Lund always mentions, and this is why we need the data. We need to compare the carriers. Just by taking a Boeing 747 compared to an Airbus A350, that has an almost 50% saving should we use that aircraft as well. Having the data, having the transparency, we can start to compare the carriers and then start to choose which one is best for the supply chain.
This is again, something we're looking at. We are asset light, but we simply have to go down to this level to in order to reduce and meet our ambitious targets. Now, there was a good question this morning that came up about pricing. It does come at a cost, sustainability, and that's the unfortunate part. Fossil fuel is still cheaper than sustainable alternative fuel, and that is the sad part of the industry right now. However, you can see here, you know, that air freight has the highest cost. It's the most expensive mode. We do have partners. We've partnered up with United Airlines, where they're providing us fuel to pass on to our customers. We've also partnered up with a company called Good Shipping, who are also providing this fuel.
It's coming at a cost, but DSV is taking care of that whole process for the customers. We're offering this to the customers with our suppliers. We hope, like renewable energy for the houses, that this cost will eventually come down. We're all buying into it, and that hopefully this will also be something that we see coming down in terms of pricing. It is the most expensive way of doing it, but then you have a great reduction in CO2. Søren, I'm not sure if you're gonna mention it this afternoon, but road strategy, that's something we're definitely looking at. It's a very fragmented market. Air freight and ocean freight is slightly easier in terms of the fuel, but there's so much going on in terms of technology with road. What is it? Is it renewable hydrogen?
Is it gonna be biofuel? Is it the electrical waste? We have partnered in Denmark, here in Denmark, with other partners and companies to have renewable hydrogen trucks. We're in that project that we're going to be testing and having renewable hydrogen. We also support the biofuels. When a customer says, "You know, can you offer this?" we go into the country, we try and get the HVO, and then we can see that in Germany, Singapore as well. Electrical trucking is also coming more into the picture. We can do that for short haul. Unfortunately, electrical trucking is still a bit to go for the long haul. We are looking at fuels and technologies to accelerate decarbonization. This was very much regarding the cargo, how we're supporting our customers.
Jens Bjørn mentioned the buildings in Texas, that we have these very high standards. I was actually blown away coming from the Panalpina side to see all these amazing offices that we have in DSV. It's of the same standard. Group property, when they construct a building, has the highest environmental standards. You can just see some examples here. It was one area where I couldn't find any improvements in terms of environment because Brian, who's heading this up, I think him and his team are doing an incredible job. They're really looking at how our buildings can be more efficient. The solutions division as well, taking it very seriously. We have a solutions team who are fully working on this as well to ensure that we lower our Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
The next thing that customers are asking: What is the CO2 of the cargo in your beautiful warehouses? What is that footprint? This is the next thing that we will need to start doing because that's what they're also looking for, the full supply chain from not just shipping, but also storage in these warehouses. We do have all the data for all the warehouses and all the offices worldwide, so we can also show what we're doing to reduce that. Very high standards for new buildings. I mentioned collaboration, I think, at the beginning of stakeholders. This is the ultimate goal that we must collaborate. DSV will never meet its science-based targets on its own, and neither will our customers and neither will our suppliers. In addition, we need to find out what's going in the market. What is the industry going?
What direction? What fuels? We've actually partnered up with the main leading companies there. EcoTransIT, that's who does our CO2 data. I mentioned the fuels, United Airlines, and also World Economic Forum. Our executive management were there last week in Davos. I think they were all very inspired. I've heard from Rene and Jens Bjørn what a great event it was. By being partners there, we can really have our voice and also see what's going on in the industry, so we can take that back to our customers. Having these partnerships, and this is the ones we've chosen at this point to be leading the sustainable future. It's been a long morning, so I'm going to wrap up.
I think very importantly to say, I hope you could see from the presentation, DSV is taking this very seriously. We have the commitment from the top management and the board of directors. We have set very ambitious targets to reduce our emissions, and I know with DSV that they will continue and are continuing, that we will really move forward to meet those targets. The green logistics is a set of services. It's a start. It's not the silver bullet that's gonna reduce our CO2, but it's giving the customers that portfolio of products to lower their CO2. Finally, I can't say enough, collaboration with customers, suppliers, and industry forums is required in order for the logistics industry to decarbonize, and DSV will be and is the leader in this to support this decarbonization.
On that note, I would like to thank you very much for your time and look forward to some questions, and I'll give you some answers, hopefully. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, Lindsay. Dan.
Can we have water?
Sorry.
Can we have water?
Alexia just after that.
Dan Togo from Carnegie. Which trade lanes would be first movers here? Where will you offer these green logistics solutions first? I think particularly in LC. What kind of a GP should we be looking out for when we try to model this? Is it on group average, higher, lower?
I'll take your first question, and probably Rene will take the second one. But for your first question, very good one. We don't focus on a trade lane as such. You know, you get your customers' report, and you get their top ten trade lanes. Then we say to that customer, "Okay, this is the highest CO2, so let's focus on that lane." The fuel actually is called insetting, and you can use that for any lane because it's not actually going on the vehicle. You buy the fuel, it goes onto an air carrier, and then that's where the CO2 reduction comes in. But it's not guaranteed on the cargo plane because there's not enough fuel to go around for sustainable aviation fuel at this moment. There's not a particular lane that's per se the focus. It has to be per customer and per CO2 that we have on the report.
On the last one, I'll try to give a response to that. We made a very conscious decision when we launched green logistics, that this was not an attempt to actually make an additional margin, because the most important, to be honest, is that we actually get this into the market, that we start doing it. What we said at the time was we want to cover our admin costs, on the cost that we have for sustainable fuel offerings as well, but the target is not to make GP out of it.
No.
One day that will change, you know, but now the most important is actually to get it moving. That's the approach we've taken. Don't change your model too much then.
Again from Barclays. Just two, please. Can you just give us an indication of what share of your top 200 customers have quite ambitious Scope 3 decarbonization targets? Secondly, clearly you are a large customer for a lot of the asset owners. What pressure are you putting on them to invest in technologies to decarbonize? Because clearly at the moment you can optimize with what the market has available, but how can you actually put pressure on them?
I think to take the first question, there isn't. I think to get the actual figure percentage-wise is quite difficult. I would say the majority of the customers are actually coming from the fashion and retail. This is where they're really seeing, and they're actually paying for it. One of our first customers who bought our fuel was actually a fashion customer. I would say most of these top customers now have set ambitious targets. That is clear, and that's. More and more companies will be going in that direction, absolutely. Then the pressure on the asset owners, I don't know if you want to answer that, yes, Bjørn, or Rene. We are...
I mean, the dialogues we're having. I mean, you had a meeting with Hapag-Lloyd last week, and that's really also to see what are they doing, the fuel that they're providing. We are partnering with that. This is the whole product of the fuel. And being part of the WEF and then the Clean Cargo Working Group, this is where we come together and can have a voice and put that pressure on our carriers. I would say that's where it's happening.
I think one thing we should add is, and remind ourselves, that the asset owners they have ambitious targets.
As well
For 1 and 2 as well.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
In reality, they will be driven in this direction anyway.
Yeah.
It will take time, and that's the whole issue. I think there's a lot of talk about 2050 targets and people wanting to break it down to say, "Yeah, yeah, that's all well and good because some of us will be gone by then." What are you doing exactly right now? That's a big part of the journey in that respect as well.
Yeah, I would say especially in the airlines and the ocean carriers.
Yeah.
I mean, the big names are out there who we talk to, they all have ambitious targets, and they have the same pressure, and they're also science-based. Yeah, we're hopefully going the same direction.
Great. There's an online question from Deepak from HSBC, and it's not practical, but actually a very good question. How do you manage offering sustainable solutions on a voyage if all customers do not prefer it? Can you put sustainable fuel on an airplane, then everybody has to agree to that. Or if you have cargo from different customers on the same plane.
Yeah. There isn't like an agreement that goes forward like that. A customer requests it, they're the ones who buy it, and it goes onto that aircraft or that ocean carrier, and they get the CO2 reduction.
Yeah.
The other customers cannot claim it. They don't even know that it's there.
I guess it's also that it's not on that actual airplane.
No
that you use it.
Exactly.
American Airlines, they would put it in on another plane. You insert the fuel but on a different plane.
There's simply not the SAF fuel in the market. The airports are not equipped. There's not enough fuel out there, and there's also not the government funding to actually do it. Yeah, the other customers will get the benefit, but they don't know that they're getting the benefit.
Great.
It's a good question.
Yeah. Rob, yeah.
Hey, Robert Joynson from BNPP again.
Lindsay, you talked a lot about the need to shift goods from air to sea, which from a decarbonization perspective, we can all see is the right thing to do. I'm just kind of intrigued about the commercial angle. You can fit a lot of air freight into one 20-ft container. I guess the way that we would look at this is like the gross profit per ton is a hell of a lot higher in air than it would be for sea. Where's the commercial balance? I mean, clearly it's not gonna happen, but if DSV transferred all of its air to sea, it would be a hell of a lot less profitable.
Rene, do you want to take that?
Yeah.
Take it from a commercial perspective.
I think the focus will have to be, you know. It's not possible. Supply chains will stop working tomorrow if you had that. It's a great ambition to say, "I wanna move it all from one to the other." I think the drive is far bigger to actually make aviation more sustainable. That's where the drive is. It's not gonna suddenly all go on ships or on rail. It doesn't work like that. The same, you could say, about Europe and saying, "Will everything move on rail now instead, and intermodal instead of moving by road?" It won't happen tomorrow. You have to make the road freight more sustainable. You have to make the air freight more sustainable over time, and that's happening.
If you look at the fuel, I think the examples that Lindsay had on the screen as well. Yeah, over time, this is gonna happen anyway because-
Mm.
The new planes are more sustainable than the old ones, so.
I think it's more to do with mode split, perhaps. Maybe part of the trip you could do with ocean and then the aircraft the rest. It's just trying to find out ways that you could reduce until this fuel market improves. Yeah. Yeah, not to shift it all to ocean.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a smart one.
I guess for the EU, one of the main pillars to reduce the CO2 footprint is to shift more freight to rail from road, and that didn't feature at all at your presentation. If you don't do this or if you don't have a strategy for this, is the EU actually likely to hit the targets on this, or is this just not happening?
I can't answer the question on rail. I don't know if for DSV's perspective with the rail.
Oh, I think they-
'Cause you're right, it wasn't on the presentation. That's a very good point.
It is shift mode, so it is concluded.
Thanks.
In the part where you say, can you shift modes, then it's also certainly road to rail when that's possible. But maybe you can say something about the available capacity.
Yeah.
for rail.
I mean, the capacity is not there.
Yeah, I think I made the point.
Yeah.
-before.
We don't have the capacity.
The rail networks are not adequate.
No.
to do that because then it would all happen. We use intermodal, we use rail, short sea shipping as well. We use it all the time where the solutions are available. If there was more available, then I'm sure Søren would use it far more in his operations as well. We do actually use it. But if you look at the network, if you look at road freight, that would be a lot easier to do very quickly because you're talking a lot of relatively cheap assets that you have to change, but you're also talking a lot about a completely fragmented market that you need to change. I believe that there, we can make the change quicker.
Yeah.
Uh, to-
I know.
Lindsay's point on, for instance, e-trucks as well, when they become available, because there's a lot of talk about them and there's very few in terms of capacity available to us as well. Then when you get them, there's very little capacity to charge them as well. This will happen over the coming five years. We probably had the same discussion on our private cars five years ago. Is it, is this ever gonna happen? It happened. It happened very quickly as well. I personally believe that will happen on road freight as well.
Great. It's lunchtime.
Yeah.
I think we should be sharp here. I will say thank you for the first part here. Lunch is 45 minutes, and you go out in that direction. I'm sure the team is ready to show the way towards the canteen. We are back here at quarter to one. Thank you.
Good day, everybody. I thought so. Welcome back. Hope you are all fired up and ready for a session with Road. Søren Schmidt, please take it away.
Thank you very much, Flemming. Can I have the?
Nope.
Good. I'm Søren Schmidt. Been in the company for 27 years, heading up the road activities in DSV. Many of you might believe that making road business is very simple. Filling up a truck, driving from A to B. It's much more complicated. Look at this video. I think this terminal is a bit busier than what you saw last time we had the same meeting as we have today, the Capital Markets Day. This is actually about what we are trying to achieve. This is about creating a groupage network. This is about developing more groupage. This is. Video is from a terminal in Germany where they handle 300 trucks a day, more than 5,000 units a day, and we want to replicate that to many more countries in Europe. I will come into that a little bit later.
When you look at our company, this is, let's say, the picture of road. We have had a decent development. The majority of the revenue is coming from organic growth. We had some spillover volume from Air & Sea. That was a consequence of the acquisitions driven by Air & Sea. We are where we are now, DKK 1.8 billion in EBIT last year. We are the top three player in Europe, and we are growing on the North American landscape as well. We have a 5% EBIT margin, so industry-leading margin in road, and then we are well on track to reach our conversion ratio. That's how it is right now, and we are far from perfect, and I will come into that a little bit later.
There is a huge opportunity and potential to do it better than what you see here, even though it's actually quite good, if I have to say it myself. This is the agenda. It's about our geographical footprint. It's about the strategy that we just have launched for road. It's about the Road Way Forward program, and it's about a market update. All of you I've been talking to yesterday and today, they ask, "How is it going with the CargoLink Way Forward? How is it going?" I will come into that, and of course, I do understand what you are saying, but hopefully I will be able to answer all your questions. When we look at our footprint, we have become more global. Europe is still the big engine. 87% of our GP comes from Europe.
7% GP comes from America, and then the remaining 6% from Middle East and South Africa. That's how it looks now compared to how it looked in 2015. We are, in road, very, very ambitious, and that's the reason why we have made a road strategy. Of course, it's connected to the overall strategy of DSV. The overall road strategy is one DSV delivering connected, reliable quality and sustainable growth. It consists of four pillars. The first pillar, that is about the people driving the growth. Bjørn also mentioned that this is a people's business. Of course it is. They have to be a part of the strategy. Number two pillar, that is reliability by one connected DSV network. You say, "What's the difference compared to today?" We are in 30 countries in Europe, but we are not connected.
We work together on a bilateral basis. We make agreements country by country. We do not have a high-performing, efficient groupage network, and that is what we are about to achieve. In order to achieve that, we need, of course, to be able to deliver the same services across Europe. We need to implement a service catalog so that we can fulfill our customers' demands in all the countries. In order to support what we would like to achieve, we need the old CargoLink Way Forward program. We need one scalable IT infrastructure with efficient workflows. All these four pillars together is a big transformation for road, but it's necessary if we want to go to the next level. We wanna be the champions of this industry. That is our aim.
We wanna do exactly the same as we have seen in the Air & Sea division. We also want to make M&As. We don't want only to have spillover volume from M&As driven from Air & Sea. No, it's not okay. We really want to do our own big M&As. If we can make that happen, then we have the IT platform where we can do road M&As. Have the same nice development on conversion ratio as Air & Sea has also shown during this morning. When I say that we would like to develop a high-performing international groupage network, then there's a reason for that. The reason is that groupage volume in Europe, when I say groupage, then it's 0 kg-2,500 kg shipments. These shipments or this market is big. We have a very, very, very small part of it.
The groupage shipments or this market and the volume also have higher margins, much higher margins than FTL and LTL. It's of course, also more complex to manage groupage in a network. It requires infrastructure. It requires IT. We have it in DSV. Basically, in order to achieve what we would like to achieve, it's in our own hands because we have the volume, we have the critical volume, so we can do it much more efficient than we are doing today. When we look at our volume mix, then it's very balanced. FTL 40%, groupage 35%, LTL 25%. When we look at our activity mix, then groupage is 80%. I'm not saying that we should not continue with FTL and LTL. That's a big, big part of our business, and we will continue to develop that. We want to accelerate on the groupage market.
We can only do that by building a high efficient groupage network. What do we actually want to achieve when we talk about IT platform and one enterprise, IT platform? Today, we have, I call it a clusterfuck of IT infrastructure. It's. We do not work in same systems across the countries. A lot of flaws when we talk about exchanging data. We want to work in a common way across all Europe. We want to have 100% automated workflows and including auto-planning, especially on the groupage network. When we talk about groupage, then you can actually make auto-planning. You can't do that yet on LCL, FCL, at least we can't, but we can do it on groupage. Today, as you saw on the previous slide, 80% of our activity is groupage.
Every time we manage a groupage shipment today, we do manual intervention. Jens mentioned that. The upside is very, very high if we can get that automated. That is what we are trying to achieve. Today we have shipments transparency and profitability, but our applications in the IT platform does not speak together. What we are trying to achieve now is an end-to-end platform where all applications speak together. Basically, when we get the right order, Jens also mentioned that, with the right booking data standard, then the shipment will flow through the system without any API touch, because this is already a part of the system who is triggering that. Of course, customers, they would like to know where are their shipments.
It's about visibility, it's about transparency, especially in this environment where it's a lot of disruption all over the place. Of course, this is also something that we are building into the system. We can also provide that. Somehow today in the new system, it will be 100% visible. The upside is, of course, significant potential to increase the number of shipments per FTE. Even bigger upside, that is that we will be M&A-ready and scalable. I think this is really important and interesting, and it's a big transformation for the road division. The road division that we see today will work in a different way in three-four years. When we talk about Road Way Forward, that was the old name of the new strategy. We told you about that in 2015.
At that time, it was an IT project to replace the legacy in order to grow the business. Today, it's actually a business project. It's not only IT, it's a business project because we can develop the business, we can grow the groupage network, we can develop the business. Some of it that we have developed during the last many years, some of the applications like the quote tool and the mobility platform, we are using right now currently, but we will also use that going forward. As I mentioned, now the name has changed from CargoLink, because CargoLink is IT, to Road Way Forward. That is an IT project, IT strategy going forward. The main points that we have currently is that we have, as I mentioned, a very fragmented and old IT infrastructure. We do not offer the same services in all countries.
We have a fragmented service catalog. We do not have a network where we really can make value to our customers. The new program, for all of you who have not understood it yet, that is basically one scalable IT infrastructure with standardized and digitalized workflows. In parallel, we are developing one European groupage network. In easy terms, it's about having a kind of a bus schedule that is driving every day from all these different terminals, more than 100 terminals a day, with double-deck trucks or double-deck trailers, and filled up with groupage. That is what we're aiming at. We would like to grow our groupage volume a lot because the margins are so high. If we can support it with our infrastructure, and we can support it with our IT, then I think it's a good upside.
Before we can roll out our new IT platform, then there is a lot of effort to be done in the countries. Because we have a lot of legacy things in our current IT environment. We need to implement a service catalog. We are already doing that. We have thousands of different ways of making agreements or quotes or agreements to our customers. This will be simplified, and we will only use about 10 templates. We have to standardize going from this big number of making agreements to 10 templates. Otherwise, the system will not work as automated as we would like. The booking data quality is also a pre-requirement, otherwise it's simply impossible to make it work. We have a standard booking now, standardization of 12 fields, and we can actually go in customer by customer and see how is.
How are they compliant with the 12 fields? Some of them, they provide nine fields. Then we go to the customer and say, "Okay, please provide the last three fields so that we can get the right booking into the order management, and then it will flow through the whole IT application landscape." That is a lot of effort that we have to do, a lot of change in the organization before we can have a successful rollout. We will do that. Already now, when we talk about the rollout plan, we have a proof of concept live in the Baltics, so in the three countries. And then in the autumn, we will roll out in Poland. That's a more complex country with 19 terminals.
In the H1 2023, we will roll out in Germany, and that is the most complex country that we have in the Road Division. If everything works well, and we will be successful in Germany, then we will apply the famous FIFO. I will not say what it means, but some of you know what it means. We will just make a mass rollout, because if we can make it work in the most complex country in the Road Division, then all the other countries can also work with the system. We hope that we will be able to roll it out by end of 2026. At least we will do whatever we can in order to do that.
A small takeaway from what to expect from Road Way Forward, higher and standardized service levels towards customers, scalability, including M&A of course, and then even better operational excellence than we have today. So far so good. Market update. When we look into our current market, we have some pressure on our capacity. It's driven by the EU Mobility Package, and it's also driven by the invasion in Ukraine, where some of the drivers, they have gone back to fight for their country. So far, we have been able to serve our customers. We have been able to find capacity. We have a strong procurement set up in DSV Road, and we have a strong network of how to source capacity. When we talk about cost inflation, then of course our cost is increasing, our prices are also increasing. Personally, I believe we have pricing power.
The cost that we receive, we can pass that to our customers. When we look at the demand, then of course, as all the other guys today have talked about, a lot of uncertainty due to the macro economy, but we see that the demand is holding up so far. Of course, when you look into the B2C shipments, there was a peak last year when everything was closed down, and it has slowed down when we talk about the B2C. In our industry then, or on the road at least, the automotive industry is also suffering due to lack of components, and we can clearly see that. Takeaway from my presentation, that is one scalable IT infrastructure.
That is what we are aiming for so that we can be M&A ready, so that we can harvest all the synergies of all the flows that we have taken in our today's environment. It's about developing one European groupage network. Everything is connected. Faster lead time, better quality, higher transparency, able to grow the market share of the groupage volume in DSV. Then when it's fully implemented, the groupage network, the IT, in 2025, 2026, we will see all the synergies coming in. It's a pretty exciting strategy, I think, that we have launched, fully supported by everybody in DSV. We are of course very excited about it, and we believe that this will take us to the next level. It requires hard work, definitely, but it will take us to the next level. Yes?
Excellent. Thank you, Søren. Just flip one more because then we have the Q&A session. We already have the first online question from Uni from Nordea. Are customers ready to change their ways of working agreements, standardized services, and how has this been received in the countries where we have rolled it out?
It's a really good question. Yes, the customers, if we go into a good dialogue with them, they are also ready to change because they can see that if we change something, they can also get a proper invoicing, they can get a proper reporting, they can get better transparency of their shipments in the system. We are not only doing it to our own benefit, we're actually doing it for mutual benefit.
Great. Satish, I think you
Satish from Citigroup. On the Cargo Way Forward, right? You've given the timeline showing mainly the European market. How should we think about, say, operations in North America or in South Africa? And then the scale you get here, the groupage, is it mainly in Europe or you. When you acquire someone, would you be able to still scale it up elsewhere in the other region?
Yes. We start with the last question. First, the first couple of years, it's only Europe that we are preparing our IT platform to cater for that we are growing on the groupage. Eventually, we will do the same in the other regions. It's not on the radar yet, but eventually we will do that. There's a different dynamics and different markets when we talk about Europe and when we talk about North America. Currently, we are more brokers in North America than we are having an infrastructure like we have in Europe. It doesn't mean that we will continue to be brokers in North America. Perhaps we will somehow adapt this solution that we have in Europe to North America. Already now in South Africa, they are actually working with BluJay.
It's also, or with a new IT application and the vendor, the TMS, system called BluJay. It's a different market again in South Africa. We are predominantly making parcels, B2B parcels, B2C parcels. So it's not the same dynamics and the same market that you see that we have in Europe. That's the reason why I can't really say, let's say that we have it on the radar, how we will do it going forward, but we are thinking about it. The first question was?
Just about the change in America.
Yeah. Okay. Good. Thank you.
Lars Heindorff from DNB. I don't know if you can share the GP contribution from groupage, LTL and FTL, how different it is and what kind of impact it will have on the contribution margin if you succeed in your aim of getting the higher groupage. That's one thing. The other part is if you can quantify any way what kind of impact the implementation of the Road Way Forward will have on your conversion ratio.
In our current system, we actually have difficulties to see the GP on FTL, LTL, isolated, and groupers. We basically do not know that. We know the average. We have a kind of a rule of thumb when you look into the margins, that the FTL low margins 8%-10%, LTL 15%-20%, and groupers 25%-30%. That's also the reason why we would like to go after the groupers volume, because we already have the existing infrastructure. We have more than 250 terminals already in Europe, but we have not connected them to each other. It's actually building up the groupers network is not that difficult. That's probably the most easy part of it. But getting the IT platform to support it, that is the one which is more difficult.
When we look into the conversion ratio, well, today we are on 26%. We are well on the way to reach the 30%. Well, now Jens Bjørn is really looking at me, so I have to be careful what I'm saying. Of course, we will exceed the 30%. We'll also exceed the 30% to a certain level. I think it could be around the 35%+ or something like that. Is it correct, Flemming? I think it's not the first time that.
35%-40% is what we
Exactly.
That's what's possible. We also say it may require M&A to really get the full benefit of it. Alex?
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. You mentioned earlier on you'd like to do some M&A in the future in the road business. Assuming this is after the initial rollout of Road Way Forward, what sort of targets would be most appealing to you, geographies, verticals, business models?
When we look into where we can get the highest synergies, that's of course in Europe. Where we will have the least risk is also in Europe. If we could have a regional player in Europe, having or doing more or less the same as we are doing, having a lot of groupage could be fantastic. That would be an ideal target. When we look into North America, it's a different ballgame. It's still a very young organization. We started after the UTi acquisition, so they are only six years old. Still, as you could see, they are contributing with 7% of the total GP. It's a very attractive market in U.S. to grow, but we also have to find out where do we wanna play. Today, we are brokers.
Will we continue to be brokers, or should we actually establish an infrastructure like we have in Europe, where we can make a lot of value add to our customers? Is that?
It is. Thank you, Søren. Sorry. Alexia, one last road question, then we have to move on.
Just on your ambition to have a pan-European groupage network, will you be the first one? If yes, what kind of barriers to entry are you building? If I just ask a smaller question, in terms of the capacity providers, do they have to make an investment to link into your IT platform?
Okay. Let me take the last question first. No, they do not need to have a big investment to link into our platform. Jens mentioned API or EDI, but preferable API, where we can exchange a lot of information very fast, and that's not a big investment for anybody, really. In general, when we make EDIs or integrations, then the cost is normally on our side. That was question number one.
The first one was, does anyone else have a pan-European?
Yes. We are competing against Schenker. They have a network. Is it highly efficient or not? I don't wanna comment on that, but they have a network. Dachser, they also have a network. It's not pan-European. That is actually where we can make a difference because not a lot of companies in the industry have a network because they have not invested in the infrastructure as we have. They do not have 250 terminals across all countries in Europe. If we can connect all these terminals together, like the bus stations, put a lot of volume into it, then we can actually do it well.
Give it to me.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry. Brian.
Am I done now?
You are. Thanks a lot, Søren.
Okay.
Over to Brian from Solutions.
Can I have it or will you?
You can, certainly.
Good. Thank you. Good afternoon. I am not so happy with Flemming. He's put up a picture of a warehouse without any, pallets or boxes or-
It looks cool.
Or anything. It looked cool. Actually it's a photo of our mechanization when it was building up down in the Netherlands. There's also no people on it, and Jens Bjørn he was happy enough or good enough to show a very nice photo. I think we probably don't mention it enough, so I'll mention it here, you know, the solutions division. We have anything between 25,000-30,000 people working in the warehouses every single day, and you were just kind enough mentioning that they do it under safe circumstances. That's good. Anyway, I'm Brian Ejsing.
Now we've mentioned everybody how many years we've been in the company, I've been 36 years in the company, I actually started before I was born. Have to play a little along this. Let's talk a little about the Solutions, warehousing & contract logistics for the next 15 minutes. The investment case, yeah, we are extremely proud of the figures which you can see within Solutions. You can see a revenue growth of 21% and a gross profit growth of 29% per year over the last, I don't know how many years, six years. Conversion rate of 34% and 13% the last quarter, which of course also was explained to be reasonably extraordinary.
Last year we made DKK 1.7 billion, and our ROIC was 13%. I just talked to Anders, and he said, "In 2015, you promised me more than 20." I said, "Yeah, it was before I know there was something called IFRS 16." In principle, we'd probably have been there if there was nothing called IFRS 16, but we don't calculate that, but we could. Still, we are targeting 20%, even with the IFRS 16. Where are we? We are global, present. We wanna talk about large and multi-user campuses. We are diverse customer base. We're not specialized. We are following the verticals of Rene's team. We play in all these areas.
We have a long-term strategy for property development. I think perhaps some of you guys might have a question about gross profit and why is it developing as it is. I think this is one of our biggest factors in this. We develop the property, we take it on a lease of 10 years with an opportunity of leasing it longer as well. In a market where we have increasing rates on leases, in principle, we can keep our rate at a level which is low, and this is good for our gross profit at this moment in time. We have industry leading in their markets, and we are trying hard to get to the ROIC which we would like to have.
What are we going to talk about? The global footprint and the market growth, our campus strategy, then we picked a couple of things within our strategy, the campus strategy and automation, and then I will wrap it up. This is how we've developed. As you can see, developed quite dramatically from DKK 330 million to DKK 2.3 billion. But the photo is actually there to see the 97% came in 2015 from Europe, and now it's 59%. So we have actually benefited quite a lot from the M&A spillover. I mentioned in our strategy, we don't really wanna buy solutions. It was more a lot of Road and Sea.
Quite good that we got something as well, but we have benefited quite a lot from that. In UTi, we got a strong American setup and a South African setup. From Panalpina, we got a good LatAm setup, especially Mexico and Brazil. Now with GIL, we got a strong presence in the Middle East. We are now market leading in the Middle East, and it's also, we've also said it in the presentations, they have provided quite a lot of good profits also into the division purely because of their strong presence in that specific market. All of them actually also, UTi gave us a piece of APAC.
We also actually came to quite a good footprint in APAC. I don't think that we should forget actually bullet point number two. We've grown Europe 100%, and the market has not grown 100% over six years. We have actually through investing in the right facilities in the right areas, been attractive to the market, so we have been able to grow Europe quite dramatically as well without M&A. What we want to do now Søren said he wants to do group network. We want to grow, make sure that we are not dependent on Europe. You'll see in the next slide that Europe is not really the place where there's.
Thank you.
It's not really the place where we in principle believe that the strongest growth will be. It's our aim to get this below 50%. This is how we see where the market is going in our part of the business. As you can see in 2021, there's been quite a dramatic growth of 9% in the contract logistics market. It's now normalizing down to approximately 5%. If you look at the bullets, you will see APAC is up there with approximately 8%, and Europe probably 2.5% in the years to come. That's important for us to be able to play in the markets where we can grow.
On top of that, we see that we talked about a couple of times now. Yes, COVID, what has it done to the supply chains, inventory levels? We see it very clearly. We see two things, high inventory levels, but we also see multiple locations for the same customer. A BCP setup. They are rethinking their strategy. We talked about near-shoring, and we've not seen it yet. Actually, we have seen it quite a few places, but very, very dramatically in Mexico, we see it very dramatically, a lot of near-shoring is happening close to the U.S. border in Mexico. We wanna grow. We wanna focus on e-com and healthcare.
It's fast-growing markets, and we are actually whenever we're putting down a campus, our strategy is there has to be a pharma part, there has to be a e-com part, there has to be a DC fulfillment factory. We have to be able to offer these segments to the market as well. Bolt-on acquisitions is not a part of the big strategy, so we are looking a little after bolt-on strategies, of course. In our division, we actually made one last year here in Denmark, Prime Cargo, together with... You got some spillover then, Carsten. So that was quite.
It is appreciated.
which was at e-com fashion, bolt-on, we would like to look for these kind of specialized companies around the globe, can both be geographically or in this, or in the segment. we are doing that. This is where we are today. If we look at the map, it looks like I have said to Jens Lund, I am everywhere I would like to be. I cannot complain about anything. I don't want to be in any country which on this map where there's no dot, there don't need to be a dot. I actually said Chile. I would like a dot in Chile. Okay. In principle, it looks very nice. Of course, I think it's important.
There are, of course, areas where the dots are very small still. Like, we talked about production moving out of China. Everybody talk about Vietnam. We don't have a good enough setup in Vietnam this moment in time. We're building it. We are investing in it. In principle, you know, there are areas where we could be much better in markets which is going to be strong in future. Luckily now, one of them actually was Indonesia. Indonesia is perceived to be a top 10 logistics market in the world in 2025 by the same source as not that source. In principle, we have nothing now with GIL. We are now the market leader, so we have we...
Through that, we have come into a very important market in Southeast Asia. As I said, a few dots where we would like it to be bigger, and Vietnam could be one of them, Korea could be one of them. Probably would like to have more dots in U.S. We, it's a massive, big market. If you look at how many dots we have in Europe compared to U.S., you know we still believe that we could grow this market dramatically. Anyway, 7.5 million sq m, 500 sites, 32,000 people. It brings us at least into top 10 in the world in contract logistics.
Cannot brag about being the same position, top three, as my colleagues, but we're working to get there. The campus strategy. First of all, I just wanna say it's not the only thing we do. We have a couple of other strategies like e-com, the campuses, the fulfillment factory I will talk about, and also healthcare, we just mentioned it. The campus strategy, what is the campus? A campus for us is a large facility or a large cluster of facility in the same area or on the same address. A 50,000 minimum up to 200,000. We're actually building now one site of 200,000 sq m down in Netherlands. It's going to be our largest site.
It has, of course, to be in a hotspot. We don't wanna build 200,000 sq m, what do I know, in Aalborg. It brings us nothing. No customers wanna sit there, so it has to be the right place. How are we doing this? I will show later why it's important for us. We're actually going into every single country trying to map where is the hotspot, where is it we wanna be, or region, perhaps not every country. It takes quite a lot of time to actually identify the right piece of land. Sometimes we even have to say we need to develop the land from one statutory right to another right.
We have a group of people sitting upstairs. You mentioned them, the property division. They are then project managing and arranging for building. After that, we are divesting the building and have asset-light model. We aim to increase our footprint with 1 million sq m a year. It's not an increase in square meters because, of course, there is a consolidation from other sites which we leave. 30%-40% of the square meters needs to be for new business growth. Of course, if we can get a couple of our colleagues also to be in the warehouse and or in the same location, it will be fantastic.
Let's say everything in this country, a company has to be about 20% ROI, this has to be to be this as well. What is the benefits of this? When we create these large facilities, we're able to flow with the customer. We are saying to the customer, "Don't come with a dedicated. We don't want to give you a dedicated space." Of course, if the customer insists, we will be able to do that. Otherwise, come into our large multi-customer facilities. It will bring you the flexibility in your seasons with your business. We can facilitate your growth. We can facilitate your strategy. On top of that, what we see is that when we are consolidating sites, we get a new modern infrastructure.
Of course, a normal site is 10 years when we leave it or 10-15 years after we first took occupation, meaning in principle, of course, technology has changed, racking system has changed, the height of the building has changed, how we work has changed over the last 15 years. What we see is actually when we get in there, you know, we actually are able to produce ourselves around 15% better in the new campuses. We put one IT in, so Jesper's probably going to talk about that, but it means that we can be standardized in our implementations. Implementations is one of the pain points we have, not just us, our industry, contract logistics. It takes a long time. It's a cumbersome process.
Because we are developing these sites ourselves, we can then in the process take a 10-year lease with an extension option, meaning that we can actually put in some automation. I'll come to this later. It doesn't necessarily need to be a customer-specific automation, because we have the warehouse for such a long time. We talked about the green profile. Of course, as far as I remember, is that 40% of all the materials in the buildings has to be reused. Well done. 40%. I actually looked it up. But 40%, this is our target. 40% of materials in the new buildings has to be reused.
On top of that, we put a few solar panels up or down in South Africa. We collect some rainwater. In Netherlands, we built a facility of 90,000 sq m. It's the first facility in Netherlands without any warming from gas or electricity. We get it from the earth, so it's quite fantastic. We have had too much text, Flemming says, so show them some pictures. I will show you some pictures. This is actually Lancaster. This is our latest new site. As you can see, we consolidated three sites, so this 15% counts there. It's a one DSV facility. We actually visited it. Jens and myself visited it three weeks ago. Fantastic.
Sometimes you have to realize the magnitude of this as well. Those three sites, they had to move into this site. 1,483 full truckloads they had to move from one site to the other sites to get it filled up. It was a project that takes approximately eight to 10 weeks to establish such a facility, in with quite strong project management. The same with Milton. In 2019, we consolidated four sites there. It's and I think it's a good story. We started it in 2019. Now it's a top 10 site within the total network of profitability. Actually, it proves that our strategy works.
South Africa, we have 130,000 sq m on it. You know, when I said to Brian Winter, "Why do we not put more solar panels on than what's up there for South Africa? The sun is shining all the time." The grid couldn't take more. The grid, in principle, in South Africa could not receive more electricity from us, and I think it's a big problem for us. In principle, you know, we could produce much more electricity than we use. But in principle, the grid cannot take it in certain countries. This is our next major project, besides the 200 I mentioned down in Netherlands. This is, of course, not just solutions. Solutions is just the part, the very nice large part.
It's not these small things in front of Søren, you know, I don't know. He can nearly not turn around in them, you know. Anyway, 320,000 sq m will be standing there in 2024 in Horsens, and we have quite a lot of sites in Jutland we are then able to consolidate. I just wanted to show you, this is what we believe that we are getting up in the next one-two years. As you can see, quite global, but quite heavily in Europe. It's mostly consolidation, as we just talked about, eight sites in Jutland.
As we just said about Reynosa, 60,000 sq m, you know, completely new business because of the nearshoring. It's so we're acting upon that. Now Kuwait and Jeddah is getting in there. It was not in there before the Agility merger. That's. We're starting to put Middle East onto the roadmap as well of how we can develop our infrastructure around this. Quite interesting for us, we just sent Jens Bjørn out to Singapore, and he met with the local authorities there, and we got a piece of land, so now we can actually start to develop our first facility in Singapore.
Going to be five stories high, 12 m inside on every story. 60-70 m high. We're looking forward to that. It's the first time for our property division that they have to build these kind of things. Good. Automation. How am I on time? Okay.
You have-
I have five minutes.
Yeah.
Okay. Let's do this reasonably fast. We do this. I'll do it in the middle. We apply the enterprise approach to most. It was not so interesting. Okay. Of course, if you look at the last bullet there, customized for large account, we will have. We'll have built to suit automation for very large auto customers. You will see a movie a little later about what magnitude of construction that can be. In general, we do have an enterprise approach, meaning that we have created a catalog of standard mechanizations, which Jesper has been kind enough to hook up so we can plug and play.
These automations, we can put them in very fast. Of course, you choose the one which fits the customer, which we have at this specific site. What we have also done is that we have created the DSV fulfillment factory. It's also a plug and play. It's quite unique. It's our answer to e-com. Or let's say it was our answer to e-com. Probability is that a problem is that it has such a big interest that quite a lot of our larger accounts says, "I also want one." In principle, it was supposed to be a multi-user e-com network of AutoStore. In principle, it will.
We have to order more, so to say, to get that network, understand, because some of them has been taken by our larger accounts. It's quite unique. It's a pay-per-use concept, so the customer in this respect are not being asked for commitment. They're not being asked for CapEx. We are taking that. Of course, then we also take the gain on the productivity. This is clear. It's quite unique in our world that we are doing that, and we are putting up a network around the globe to serve this kind of piece pick operation. It doesn't only have to be e-com, it can also be spare parts.
We had a telecom company the other day who said this is perfect for spare parts. It can be for pharmaceuticals, you know. It's dust-free. At least it's dust-free inside, and it's very good for high value because pilferage is nearly impossible. We have put up a roadmap for this. As you can see, we have put it into two waves. In principle, it is our aim to have a global network of this kind of pay-per-use mechanizations for piece picks. Right now, we have 16 points in the world, and we have implemented five. Another five will come this year. We are halfway when we finish with 2022. Very happy with this project.
Now, it's creating quite a lot of attention from our customers. That I cannot do anything about. Somebody else. This is showing the magnitude of the plug and play automation which we have created for New Balance. You can see the shoe there, so it's not a secret. Down in Netherlands, this automation will do 23 million pairs of shoes distribution in Europe per year. Do I need to do something?
You can leave it now.
Okay. Some say that group is just complicated. Okay. Perhaps also mention, we had to empty the warehouse for 12 months. Actually it was a startup investment of having an empty warehouse of 60,000 sq m for 12 months while we were building this. As you can understand, of course, it has to be a long time commitment to take these kind of investments for customers. Anyway, I'm a simple guy. I only have three words. Globalization, campus, and automation is what we're doing in the solutions or trying to do with solutions at the moment in time.
That's perfect, Brian. Since you started-
That's 27.5 minutes.
Yes, you started a bit late. That's Søren Schmidt's fault. We'll just take five minutes with questions, then we cannibalize a bit on your-
I'll take this before you run it out of my hands.
Great. Rob. Oh, sorry. We need the sound. These guys.
You have no online?
We have more than 200 online now.
Just a quick question on inventory levels. There's obviously a big debate in the market at the moment about whether business will want to hold higher inventory to sales ratios going forward, et cetera. What are your customers saying to you about that right now?
We are seeing clearly that the inventory level is increasing because of I think three reasons. First of all, the BCP, you know, I want to continue and also splitting the inventory levels. Second, the nearshoring is for us also happening. In principle, that will double stock locations because they also do it at the factory levels. We see this clearly happening at this moment in time. We have also our suppliers of warehousing, they are 99 point something full. It's really high levels of inventory at the moment. Of course, there's this disruption in the supply chains, you know.
There's also some warehouses which in principle today are completely empty, even though the customer pays for it, because they are late in their supply chain. Carsten cannot get the containers quickly enough in. As soon as they come in, they have to go out because he's late for the season. In principle, they are reserving space because they need it. They know they need it.
Just one quick online question here from Carolina from Morgan Stanley. Is automation the main driver for improvement of return on investment?
No, I don't necessarily think it's the main driver. I think we also just mentioned that we have been able to create these campuses, which gave us a long-term cost picture.
Yeah.
Which we can benefit from. Automation, of course, also helping. It takes out the cost of labor. We can, with such an AutoStore, quadruple our peak productivity. When we talk about the ROI calculation, of course, there's CapEx we put on the balance sheet for the automation. It's not necessarily giving a ROI improvement, but not necessarily the same as the productivity improvement.
It's a mix of several things, yes. I think maybe Michael.
Thank you. Yes, Michael from Danske Bank again. Back at the last Capital Markets Day, you showed us a split of your revenue split into, I think, freight management, storage, and if you could kind of give us a rough update on that. Also, you also showed a chart where you said that typically, new contracts were loss-making the first year and then about neutral the second year, and then going into-
Have you been looking it up, or can you really remember it? 25%, approximately 25% of our turnover is in freight management. I think it's the same answer as last time. There's not any specific change in this. We provide the freight services from the warehouses. Customers of course can buy the freight services and warehousing separate, but in principle, they also can buy both of them. 25% is freight. When we talk about storage and logistics services, the figures are now a little blurred because of the Agility part coming in, which is very heavy on contract logistics because of the low salary levels in the area.
We have had approximately 20% of our turnover in storage, and it might have increased slightly now. I don't have that.
That's still right.
Okay.
Yeah.
The contracts loss-making?
In general, I can say there's nothing changed in this. We've probably become a little better in implementing. We've been stronger in IT. We are probably also more professionalized in our projects. The time to profit might be shorter than it was, but there is a startup cost on projects.
Yeah.
For new customers. I said one neutral profit, this is correct, last time. It might be, what do I know, eight, nine months now instead of 12 months. I believe that we're better than we were.
Great. I think we have to cut it short here.
3:00 P.M. deadline on the other end. Thank you, Brian, and we will reconvene here at exactly 2:00 P.M.
Maybe 10 minutes break this time, not five.
Yeah.
Great. Almost on time. We are back, and we've saved some of the best for last. Jesper, take it away.
Thank you. Brilliant. Okay. Now it's time for some tech and for some IT, and I'm happy you're still here, so, great. Is it. Oh, there it is. My name is Jesper Riis, Group CIO. I've been in DSV for a little over seven years now, so I started when I was 42, just to follow up on yours. Many of you have heard about our platform, at least we've discussed it a few times. I know Flemming for sure has been talking about this consolidated IT platform scalability, et cetera. I brought a few numbers to emphasize that. First of all, if you look at Air & Sea, we handled in 2021 over 8 million jobs.
If you look at our TMS system for road, even though it's not perfect, but Søren will make sure together with the team they will get there. We're still handling around 40 million shipments on the platform. Finally, for solutions, we handled more than 220 million order lines. It's, to be honest, it's massive volumes. It's also important to have a lot of integrations to customers. We have talked about EDIs for quite a few times. If you look over here, as we speak, we do around more or less 26 million messages per month on the EDI. Public API, which is certainly moving ahead, only for bookings, over 60,000 bookings. If you look at our customer portal, myDSV, it's over 400,000 bookings per month now.
It is at least we're very proud of the platform. We can improve things, yes, of course, we have a long journey ahead of us, but it's certainly massive numbers, volumes we're talking about. The focus for today is mainly innovation, but you feel free to ask questions in other areas as well. Innovation is a big thing for us. Before we start with innovation, again, I would like to say a few words about our consolidated IT platform, and then we dive into how we work with innovation in DSV, 'cause don't underestimate that. We need to invest in the IT as well like everybody else. Technology radar, just a small peek of how we see the world, and finally, some use cases.
Sorry, they might get a little bit technical, but I hope you will join it, enjoy it anyway. This is a high-level view of our IT platform. You can see it in the middle here. In the lower part, you see some of the basic principles that we developed the platform on. At the very top of this, you can see some of the benefits. If you look at the left corner, at the bottom of the lower part, standardization, you will hear that all the way around. You also heard it from most of the presentations. We want to standardize as much as we can on the platforms. Today, for example, we have standardized, for example, on the Air and Sea, it's one system covering the world or consolidated.
If you look at our global master data, it's the same. If you look at CRM system, one system globally, HR system, one globally, and I could continue for quite a few areas. Then we do have areas like on the road where we still are working on some, and there's also on the solutions, we have standardized a lot, but there's still some to go. When we acquire new companies, there's more work to do. That's how it works. Standardization, for example, we standardize processes, infrastructure, applications, and by doing so, we can reduce complexity. If we look at applications, we only want one process, one application. Since at the beginning of 2016, we have closed over 3,800 applications. Imagine we even have not done that, we will have a massive amount.
If we do our consolidation, we already addressed it. We try to consolidate as much as we can on a global level and get the benefit of operating the same way in all countries. We also consolidate on the data centers. We have not consolidated data centers just seven years back, we would add like 30 or something. Today, we just received some new ones that we are closing, hopefully before September, but nonetheless, we'll be down to four data centers, again. That is the plan to consolidation. The good part is that if the business is out of the data centers where we acquired from GIL, they will get a bill, as we call it.
There is a huge cost to be the last one leaving the data center, then you get the full cost for everything. It could be a very expensive applications. Standardization, consolidation, reduce dependencies, so we can execute on our strategy. I think you put it in the right way. If you have a consolidated platform, you also support security 'cause if you have endless applications, you also have much more entry points to your security. If you consolidate it's easier to protect. In the center here, you see some global master data, something Jens invented together with the team way before my time. We really utilize this, so customers come from one place in our master data repository and push out to the different systems. There is a lot of good elements in this.
On the top integration part, we need to be even more flexible when it comes to integration than we are today. We do have a lot of EDIs, as you saw and heard. We want to move even more on API, but it is a journey that is ongoing. With the platform, at least we enable the business needs more or less. Sean is still complaining a little bit, so we're working on that. We can scale for more on the applications, and we can grow in it. I think the number speaks for itself, you saw in the beginning. Be cost efficient and of course, execute on DSV strategy. It is, of course, to make this more perfect, rolling out the Road Way Forward is an important parameter.
The last bullet here to come back to innovation. Innovation is also easier to implement if you have a consolidated infrastructure. For example, if you need to add something to Carsten's setup on A&S, if you implement or integrate into the existing TMS system, it will be available globally just after. Again, if you have a very distributed and non-consolidated infrastructure, it's more difficult to roll out innovation. Innovation is certainly high on our agenda. Innovation happens everywhere, and it's not only IT and innovation, process innovation, you name it. Innovation goes on everywhere in DSV.
We have decided to have what we call an innovation hub with a strategic approach to innovation from a central point of view, and it is a place where all employees, managers, customers, et cetera, can hand in ideas to the innovation group. In here, you will get support to try out prototyping. There is a roadmap, so we make sure that it is prioritized, and that is done by Bjørn and Jens Lund and Michael Ebbe in the executive management. Then it's put on the roadmaps and rolled out. Do we fail? Yes, that's a part of doing innovation, but it is a place where we can at least ensure that these ideas get a chance to be evaluated and rolled out. It can be incremental ideas, it can be more radical ideas, new business, they all count.
Some of these has already been addressed, but when we do innovation and have a strategic approach to it also needs to meet some of the, market trends and responsiveness and resilience. It's normally been addressed today. What would that require? The complexity we talked about, more visibility. I have a small showcase later on, what we are working on, what we actually have rolled out for in some places for visibility. It's also about dynamic planning to improve that area. Another focus area for the innovation group is, of course, green logistics. This is getting more and more important. So any way we can calculate the carbon footprint in a better way, more precise way is in focus. Also using, for example, AI in this case to predict better or the greenest route is also, a focus area.
When it comes to automation, we call it accelerating use of data and AI. It's we will all see more on that. We actually have developed a lot defined. We have a full group only working on AI now, and I think that is a technology that will certainly make a difference in the future. But the focus for automation here is very often on the labor intensive tasks, and I have one showcase that I would like to show you later on. Technology radar. We use the radar mainly for communicating, both to you, but also internally. We use it for, you know, what kind of technologies are in focus, what is that we should prioritize.
At the same time, it's also show what we don't prioritize, and it also shows, what kind of technologies do we believe will be more important for our business in the future, and which one do we deselect. If we look into the technology radar, this is how it looks now. Technologies that's been implemented for quite some time and rolled out, they will no longer be on this overview. It's not relevant anymore. It's implemented fully. The way this is, structured is in the inner circle in the middle. Sorry, at the bottom here, the inner circle, you will find things that is adopted. It's been through the innovation process. It's been implemented in small or larger degree.
The next circle is more what we are testing or trying out, but we haven't really found the really good business case for it yet, but it might happen. On the assessed part, we move into things that is relevant, and we might see what other is doing and investigating, but we haven't taken on a specific project trying to see what it can do inside DSV. Finally, the track is something that certainly could be relevant. I like that we have added the space axis on it. I think it will be a while before we start moving cargo out there, but it's just to show the extreme view on it. I have a few small cases here I'll go through.
One of them is our artificial intelligence when it comes to something called customs clearance or customs declarations. I also have as example for a digital twin. They're all in the appendix down here. One on Internet of Things, and finally, just a picture of one of our drones for cycle count. That's the four cases, and then I will be done. Let's take the first one. Up here you see what we call a customs declaration. It's something we do a lot. That is also labor-intensive work. We have created a solution where you can automate by use of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is just a way where you get a machine to perform cognitive functions like a human mind.
It's not that dramatic, but it's still complex to start up doing these applications in the beginning, but then the team learn and get better and better. We have invested a lot of time in this, but I do believe it will pay off in the long run. What it basically is doing on the PDF invoice there is a commercial invoice we received from the customers. They will normally have a transport document as well. What the AI engine is doing, it's reading all the documents. It will know the context of the document. It's been trained just like you train a human. It will know what data and where to place it, and then it will automatically fill it into the export declaration where the authorities can approve it.
We have chosen to add something in the middle where the clerk can see the result and do a verification before it shipped off, 'cause it is not 100%, and you will not, probably not get it to 100% in all cases. There is an area where the clerk can verify or make changes if necessary. If they make a change, it will go back into the AI model, and it will not make the same mistake next time. It is a way to remove some labor-intensive work. At the same time, you can increase quality. Potential is big, but it's not easy training the models, and it's not easy to roll it out.
There is a lot of work to be done around it, but it is a technology that I'm sure you will hear more about in the coming years.
Yes. Would it be possible to train this model, handle a DSV model analyzing stocks and-
I think many have tried, but I don't think anybody has succeeded yet.
That will still-
Maybe because the market is unpredictable or there needs to be some kind of pattern here, but I don't know. Good. The next case here is called digital twin. A digital twin, and I think Jens also mentioned it, Jens Lund mentioned in the beginning, it's about to have a digital flow or digital model of the real world, and then you use the digital twin, in this case, to update or improve the real world. This is just one of the examples. Today, when we receive, for example, on a terminal, you will normally receive the goods with a weight and dimension on it. Basically, if you drive the truck, that's used for building then.
If you drive the truck around the frame, then it will automatically scan and give you a 3-D model of the goods. When you have the 3-D models, then you have the dimensions, you can export that to the system and check if the customer did declare it correct or at least put in the right dimension. If not, correct it and then charge the customer according to the agreements. It's just a way to work with a digital world and optimize the real world. That is also something that is happening all around us today, but it will also be more and more because it's a good way to get a place to optimize things before you actually implement in the real world.
In this case, where you simply get the data from the digital world and use them to optimize in the physical world. Internet of Things is another area. Internet of Things just means you connect devices to the Internet, and then you can share a lot of information and data. To come back to the responsiveness and the resilience in the supply chains, which have been mentioned quite a few times, this is one of the tools that we have created. Basically, you can add a sensor to your goods, and then in the system here, you will monitor it, you will be able to see where it is at all time. You can also have sensors with shock or heat and other things in it.
Basically, you'll be able to monitor where the goods is. Did it leave the warehouse as it should. You can also put rules in the system saying that I need some geofencing on this transport. You can see on the right side. There will be an alert if it leaves a certain route or leaves a warehouse. It's just rules you add to the system. This is just an example, at least how to make the supply chain more visible and get more alerts. I think this is also something we'll see more of in the future. Final slide, autonomous drones. It's actually for real. We use these autonomous drones now in a few warehouses doing cycle count.
Of course, this needs to be rolled out before there's a really good business case in it. Nonetheless, it is operational today, and maybe you will see one later today. I don't think it will be flying, but maybe it will be placed in the building where we have the tour later on. Very simple, when the staff go home for the day, then the drones will start flying around. They're autonomous. They find their own locations, they find the pallets, double-check if the pallets is placed according to where it should be, according to what's in the IC system. If not, it get a check mark.
Then in the morning when the staff come in, they have a list of what needs to be corrected 'cause there apparently is a mismatch or, it's not the same in the system compared to the location of the pallet. It's a simple use case, but it is pretty nice seeing these flying around and do the work when everybody else go home. Hopefully, you will see more of that later today, not in the air, as far as I know. To wrap it up, consolidation and scalable IT platform is core in our business, no doubt. We have come far.
We still have way to go, and this will be an ongoing journey, especially when we do acquisitions like with Agility GIL lately, then we have something to clean up again and move it onto our platform. That's how it works. As Jens Lund also mentioned in the beginning, it's all about transparency, productivity, and scalability. Then I showed you a little bit about how we do innovation in DSV, at least the strategic part of it. You saw the innovation radar, technology radar, and finally some use cases. I hope you found them useful. I'm quite sure that in the coming years we will see much, much more of these new technologies coming into our business. That was it from me.
Great. Thank you, Jesper. I think if you push one more, then there's a Q&A slide.
Yes.
That's your cue if you have questions for Jesper. Muneeba?
Come on, Sebastian.
Muneeba Kayani from Bank of America. Do you think your competitors have a similar technology innovation strategy, and how hard is this for others to kind of replicate?
I would say the consolidation part, of course, I don't know what the competitors and details have, but I do believe we are quite far with the consolidation of the platform and how we work with it. I'm not sure that our competitor's that far without knowing all the details, right? When it comes to the innovation part, I'm quite sure they're also working on a lot of these things. I would be surprised if not.
This is one of the places where we sometimes to quote Jens Bjørn, "If conversion ratio shows something about systems, then we must have something that is just about industry-leading.
To ask, you know, we're very proud of the platform, and I do believe we're quite far with it. But again, I don't know all the details as well. I think the most important part is when you invent something is to make sure that you roll it out as broad as you can to get the benefits across all the countries, right? That's if you don't have a consolidated platform, TMS platform, and other things, it makes it very difficult to utilize globally.
Thank you. Alex?
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. Can you please talk about the role of CargoWise within the Air & Sea business? Is that changing? Is that evolving? Is it just static, just being a TMS? Any thoughts on that, please? Thanks.
You're talking about our global TMS platform for air and sea?
Yes.
It's the third-party product, so there is once in a while they will develop new things and add to the platform. We also have a talk with them, but it is a standard platform that we're using. It's like, it's new features coming in all the time, but it's not evolving like changing every quarter or anything, no. We have great.
Can I add to that?
Yeah. Maybe.
Can I add to that? The system itself is one thing. It's also how you use it, correct?
Yeah.
In general, IT systems are used probably 40%, you know, in general, complex systems. CargoWise, we probably use mid-70s% now. We still have room-
Mm-hmm.
For improvement. It also, you know, one thing is to have a plan, another thing is to do it. I think they do involve. Is it everything we want to do necessarily? No. We also do make changes to the system from time to time, which we can do.
There's also related systems, right? For example, in this case, we do a lot of software robotics where we simply go out and grab all the data from the different websites.
Yeah.
From carriers around the world and update into the system. There's a lot of functionalities you can build on this third-party product.
Let's see. Maybe one last question from Satish.
Satish from Citigroup. Just following up on the CargoWise. Initially you started off buying platform off the shelf, right, to customize according to your needs. Now, given where the Road Way Forward is going, is it mainly in-house developed system? Now with the scale of the organization, you see more benefits in terms of developing in-house, or would you still go and look for third-party IT platform externally? Then the second one, like, how much of your time actually goes into BAU versus, say, all this new innovation related tools? Thank you.
To answer your first question, we have a philosophy, buy before make. So if there is a product on the market, we prefer a third-party product, and then we can, if it's needed, adjust it a little bit. But in general, we prefer that. In some cases, we need to develop from the very bottom ourselves, because it's simply not available for us. For Road Way Forward, it's also a third-party product that we have bought and created a partnership where we do the development together with them. To answer the last question, I must say I spent quite a lot of time on basic operation as well. I think that's part of being a CIO also.
I invest a lot of time in the new technologies, meeting, you know, and see what kind of technologies out there, participate in the rollouts of things. I was actually quite involved in the innovation part together with a lot of other people. Also we have a global BSM team. They're also very much involved, so it's. I think for us, it's about getting the right ideas and actually utilize them, get them out there. It sounds easy, but it's not. You need to invest a lot of time in it.
When you say a lot of time, it's more than 40 hours a week or?
Yes, you can say that.
Great. Thank you, Jesper.
Okay. Thank you.
Last but not least, Michael, I can see you are more ready than ever, so.
Thank you.
Here you go.
I noticed on the agenda, Flemming, that this is the only presentations without Q&A.
That's actually correct.
Is it?
Now, there is a Q&A.
Oh, okay. I thought it was put a bit of pressure on the slides that that is chosen to be there. Yes. First of all, congratulations to all of you guys being able to survive an entire day with lots of information and now made it to the last presentation at least here before you can go to the guided tour in Hedehusene just across the street here. I promised Flemming to, since I'm new to this game, give a few words on me. I'm Michael Ebbe. I'm the Group CFO now for this wonderful company. I have been this for eight months, but I'm not new to the DSV world. I've been in DSV for 15 years, more than 15 years.
14 of them, I've reported to Jens Lund, the man who invented FIFO in DSV, so something must be right. Yeah, a little bit about me and what I stand for, what drives me. Obviously, I'm driven by the results, otherwise I would not fit to DSV as well. Another things that I strive to work with and also to my team, that's obviously that we make the work properly, we do it decently, and then we work as one DSV. We need to work as a team in order for us to be able to create the results. Prior to entering the exciting DSV world, where I've been part of this fantastic journey by creating shared service centers, implementing, integrating systems, and so forth, making, doing deals and all that stuff.
I was a state-authorized public accountant for some years, and prior to that, I spent a couple of years in the army as well, so I have tried a few things and during my life so to speak. I have a couple of kids. They are nearly grown up now, 18 and 22, and then been married to the same wife for, yeah, 18 years as well.
I know it's what you think.
Yeah. A few words about my job. Jens mentioned a little bit about this new split of areas of responsibilities. I will not go into details, but the split that we made, it was. The complexity has increased significantly in both the classical CFO role and also like Jens mentioned on the area that he's always been very fond of doing together with Jesper and the divisions. We made this split. Now I'm responsible for, you could say, the classical CFO, I would say classical CFO plus role, and Jens, it's more than the audit committee. I don't know whether you remember. It's a little bit more than that.
The key things that I strive, together with the team to establish here, it's the same like I have done, the previous 14 years, the transparency. We need to maintain and work on the transparency. People need more data. People need accurate data. When we integrate, we need to be able to provide the business with the right foundation to make the decisions quickly. I can see some of us, some of you guys sometimes ask me what are the difference compared to our competitors? I said, like Carsten and everybody else here, I don't know what the competitors do. I do know that from the companies that we have acquired, I do know how they do things. Compared to those, all of those, we are strong in making the transparency.
We have one version of the truth. We strive to make it available to all the operators, all the departments, so when we follow up on a daily basis, like Carsten also said, for the P&L on monthly basis, lots of KPIs. Another thing that differs compared to some of the companies that we have acquired, we do activity-based costing a couple of times a year. It's not that fun to do because everybody complains when they do the cost when they get the cost. It help us to keep us on the toes, and it help us to measure what does the services that we provide to the customers, what do they cost, so we give the right pricing.
That at least is something from the companies that we acquired that differentiates us compared to them. Another thing, like the divisions in the back office, we also need to make sure that we have an efficient infrastructure. We need to be able to support the business. We need, at all times, to be able to scale, like Jesper and Jens mentioned on the IT platform. Organizationally, we also need to be able to scale. You can see that from every time we do an acquisition, then we need to integrate them. The latest deal, that was 17,000 FTEs that need to be implemented in 160 countries, and that's less than a year ago.
That's also shows that we need to be able to handle these kind of volumes that comes in. Low cost per transaction, it goes without saying that's also something that we need to continue to work on. We do that with some efficient shared services. We have a huge shared service center set up. In combination we have some local ones, regional ones, and also some international ones, so I think that we do have an efficient set up. Obviously, we need to strive to make it better every day in order to deliver best-in-class back office services. Another thing that is also that I will continue to do, that is the clear and constant principles for our capital allocation.
Everything that we do need to be based on a business case, whether it's some internal projects, whether it's Brian Ejsing who need to do some property investments, whether we have to invest in new customers. All companies for that matter, everything is based on a business case, so we make sure that we allocate our capital to the right projects. Of course we follow up that you can say the promised results are being delivered on those business cases that we provide. Also strong support for the M&A and integrations. It also goes without saying. When we do integrations, quite a bit of the synergies are actually related to the back office functions as well, at the same time as we need to help the business. Yeah.
I promised Flemming you have had a lot of information today, so I think that you have most of the input to your spreadsheets. Maybe you miss a few of them, so I promised Flemming that I will flip through some of this, some household slides you can say that is put up here. We have our outlook for 2022. We adjusted it a little bit more than a month ago. That's not something that we normally do in DSV, that we already after Q1 change our guidance, but we have seen a nice quarter, we adjusted the guidance from DKK 18 billion-DKK 20 billion up to DKK 21 billion-DKK 33 billion for the year.
You can say the Q2 has started well as well, so that's we of course hope that it continues. This 2022 outlook now, it's based that we will see some kind of normalization in the second half of 2022, trending towards normalization. Carsten alluded a little bit to it earlier as well. The tax rate also strive to have that as 23%. Then the GIL impact is nearly DKK 2.6 billion in 2022. When fully integrated, I think we said last time it will be a little bit more than DKK 3 billion on a yearly basis, and we are nearly done with that. We promised that we will deliver using the final integrations in Q3.
We await that Jesper can close the shared service center. I think Jens also mentioned that earlier. Reiterating our 2026 financial guidance. Now you sit and think a little bit about Carsten Trolle mentioned something about yields, something about productivity, and so forth. Søren Schmidt mentioned something about the conversion ratio that can go up to a higher level than this. But notice here it says above, so we hope that we are covered. A couple of comments to this slide. It's clear that we still expect that we will gain market shares. We still expect a GDP growth. People talk a lot about recession right now. We still expect that there will be some growth.
It's clear not to the same level that we have seen as the last couple of years. That's what we see. I think what is important here as well, that we talk a lot about normalization and what yields do we have when you come out on the other side, and so forth. With the math and the models that we have seen and the yields that Carsten mentioned for air, respectively sea, I think we do not. We find it difficult to see that we will end below DKK 20 billion. That's how we, when we try to model it, but you have your own spreadsheets and
That's an EBIT number.
Yeah, EBIT. You have your own model, so maybe you can put them in there as well. Our CapEx would be roughly 0.5%-0.75% of the revenue. Net working capital, I will come back to that in a second. Right now, we aim to have it around 3% of our net revenue measured at year-end. That's what we will aim for. Our gearing ratio is still below 2%. The capital allocation and structure, I don't expect that you'll find it as a big surprise that we will stick to that. We have done that for many years. Jens Bjørn also mentioned it in the beginning.
We will repay debt if we are above our guided range, our net debt to EBITA. If we are there, we will invest in value-creating acquisitions. That is number two on our capital allocation policy. Then three, that is the share buyback. Sometimes people ask, "Do you, when you do share buybacks, do you consider the actual share price?" No, we can't go into these kind of considerations. Say, should we buy the share price when it's low and refrain from it when it's high? We don't go into these kind of speculations. We have our strong capital allocation policy. We adhere to that. Then when we do the share buybacks, they are initiated on the, you could say, safe harbor method.
That is the one that we select to do the share buyback. They will actually handle that. What's important for us is that we have sufficient financial flexibility to meet the strategies and all the ambitions that the divisions have, and IT as well, also some investments done in that. That's clear that we need to have that. We also need to have a robust, you can say, funding of it. And then our gearing ratio need to be below 2. We state that it's below 2. It's not 1.9. We aim at 1.75 in that area. Sometimes we are also asked, "What if there is a acquisition coming up?
Will you then be able to be out of that range? The thoughts that we have internally and when we have the dialogue with our rating agencies, we say, "Yeah, we can get out of the grade for a short period of time, but we aim to come back relatively quickly." The dividend policy. We adjusted it a little bit in connection with the year-end annual report. Now we have aim to have 10%-15% of the net profit. Obviously we saw that when our net profit increases, then the dividend would be quite high with the old policy. We try to balance it a little bit.
This is the new policy that we will aim for. Another thing that you can see on this slide, you can obviously see the share buyback that we have announced, which is one of the things that we have. The recent one we have announced is approximately 2% of the share capital that we acquire back. That should help to look Jens Bjørn look good in his EPS slide. That's what we want there. What this also shows is that when we have or when we get acquisition opportunities, we are not afraid to use the share market to get some of it funded.
It's important for me to say that when we do that, obviously, again, it's based on a business case. When we go through this business case, it's very important for us that we will be able to deliver return to you guys, to the investors, as well. That goes without saying for that one. The debt structure ex leasing. We have 78% of our funding currently is with bonds, 22% is with the banks. The banks, obviously, some of them are still here, so just important for me to mention that the banks are still very important for us. They are one quarter of the finance structure is relying on the banks, and we do need the banks to have the flexibility.
What we also learned in the last two-three years is that the bond market has proven to be very well. We have been able to issue some bonds to attractive pricing, which means now that we have a nice duration on our bonds. We pay less than 1% in interest on those, and we have a duration now of 8.9 years. We do have a good funding the way we see it ourselves, at least, in place to meet whatever happens. We are committed to the credit ratings. We are being measured or rated from both Moody's and Standard & Poor's. Yeah, it says here A3 and A-.
That is the ratings that we have so far. They were just recently reconfirmed, so that's also a good thing. From the debt structure and the financings, we are in a good place these days. Net working capital. I was tempted to pass it, but yeah, we can go through it. Net working capital, it's a little bit higher than what we would like to have. You can see the graph there showing the increase. A part of it, big part of it is due to the M&A. It goes without saying we'll get more activity in. That's a big part of it. Another big part of it is the increasing rates is also impacting the net working capital.
It's clear. The payment terms towards the carriers and airliners are very short, and they just say you need to pay within 30 days, otherwise they will not lift and ship the goods. We do that. The customers, we have gotten bigger customers. They require longer payment terms, so that's the market that we need to operate in. We also got stronger A/R. They have a little bit longer payment terms, and lately, MENA region, they also have a little bit different culture. There are no warning signs. There are no red flags. We insure a big part of our portfolio for accounts receivables. They pay in due time. We don't have any significant overdues or something like that.
Hopefully when we turn a little bit back to normal, that will be better as well. Like, yeah, I said before, we aim to have it around 3%, so you can see that there's still something that we need to work on, and we do work on that. Can we get Carsten to invoice a little bit faster? Can we collect a little bit better? That is something that we work with. Right, Carsten?
Thank you. I like that.
Yeah, that's good. I'll follow up that you remember. Yeah. Flemming also asked a little bit about the leases. We talk a lot about being asset light, and we are. Sometimes when you look at the balance sheet after this implementation of IFRS 16, Brian also mentioned it, when you need to put more on the balance sheet, so it can, from the outside, look as, yeah, you are not that asset light because you do have this IFRS 16 assets and liabilities on your balance sheet. You can't say, okay, that you're not that flexible. We are still much more flexible than the pure asset owner. We can get out of the leases. They change constantly.
Most of the leases is related to the properties, to the buildings, to some of Brian's success as part of some of the buildings that we have there. We have around seven years duration outstanding, you could say, on a mixed picture for the buildings on average. Some are a little bit longer, and some are a little bit shorter, so that's what we have in. Then we have some numbers here. You could say that for 2021, we depreciated DKK 3.1 billion, and it's a thing that we need to do. If you look at it, this is what we depreciate.
We'll have some interest for DKK 500 million , and that more or less corresponds to the cash flow. The physical payment of the lease payment, it's nearly the same as the depreciation. The interest rate obviously is the same that we pay. We have DKK 14 billion right-of-use assets and DKK 15 billion in lease liabilities. That was a little bit also to put into your spreadsheet, so you have that information. Finally, now I started to visit you guys, investors and analysts, and we got lots of questions about what now for the next months. Now there's congestion in Tianjin, in Shanghai. Now there's a war. Now there's pandemic. There are many things that are come our way.
It's all right to say, try to look at it in a perspective if you look at it from the outside. If you go back three years, prior to pandemic, prior to everything, in spring of 2019, we signed with Panalpina, and we started to integrate them in August 2019, obviously. That and then we got started, we got traction on that. We went into the first wave of the pandemic, early 2020. We set out here, we did a lot of calculation on how will it look, what will happen. We also kind of started an operational excellence program. We got that under our nails and then moved on. The second wave came. We thought that they were now lifted.
Second wave came with the pandemic, then congestion came up, then we started to deal integration. Now the war in Ukraine. Now Shanghai have been shut down for a period of time. It's opened up again. We have saw that with Mads and Michael. What happens now? Basically, we don't know exactly what will happen every day, every week. But what I can say, seeing from my side, been here for 14 years, I think we have never been stronger as a company. We have never had more complete digital infrastructure. We have never had more global presence, both in terms of regional, but also product-wise, divisional-wise. I think the division showed that, as well. We have never been better organized. We have a flexible business model. We are good to do the integration.
We have worked on the physical infrastructure, which also has been shown today. Seen from my side, and maybe you can say, "Yeah, Michael, you're biased." At least I can say from the last 15 years, I don't think that we have ever been in a better position that we are now to cope with what comes our way. From my side, I think that we are ready to do that. You wanted to have a Q&A, or?
I think we should give these guys just a chance.
It's yeah, fantastic to be part of them.
Great, Michael. If you flip one, then I'm sure there is a Q&A slide.
Oh, it's just only on the agenda. Shit, I thought that.
Yeah. Let's start here with Dan.
Dan Zorkani. In case of a large acquisition, and the right target of 20% + whatever, what is the timeframe where we'd like to see 20%? Would you be willing to stretch it if you can see the potential, you know, let's say in four, five, whatever, six years?
So-
How willing are you to compromise on that 20% return on invested capital target in case of an acquisition, so to say the business case? That's one question. Another question is, how far are you willing to take leverage? Will you be comfortable with the leverage, let's say, about 3x in case of a large acquisition?
I think for the leverage part, we can go above, but I don't think we will be well above 3x. It also depends obviously on the size of the. Also how they want to structure, if you can say a potential target came up. It also kind of rely on how should it be structured in terms of equity and debt, obviously. It has a say in there. In terms of the ROIC, I think that's something that we will investigate when we see to it. We aim for the 20%, and that's what we go out with. That's part of our strategy. Yeah, exactly. That's about it.
You can say if it really makes sense, then obviously we'll be able to stretch it a little bit. It doesn't have to be EPS creative within one year or two year. It can be, if it really makes sense on a more long term, then I think we will look positive on that. But that depends on the specific cases. It's because we need to be able to see that we can get there eventually. That is.
If you look at the transactions we have made, then they don't give 20% in year two.
No.
You need to go out a bit further before you achieve that.
I think when you see, that's also a fun fact or fun part of it. We must have shown some of the graphs where you see that whenever we're doing, like, if this is the starting point, then we get an acquisition, then our profitability or some of the returns will decrease a little bit. Then afterwards, we'll come out a little bit, actually a little bit higher than when we went in. From every acquisitions we have made, the profitability gets a little bit better than when we entered it. We are able to work with it. We are able to create more value out of it than what it seems to when we do the business case. You can say maybe it's a little bit too conservative business.
Lars.
Yeah.
Lars Heindorff from Nordea. A question from one of your comments where you mentioned that, even in the case of a normalization of yields, you don't see EBIT being below DKK 20 billion, which I found very interesting.
Yeah.
If we assume the normalization that Carsten showed us earlier, 8,000 and 4,000 respectively, I assume that will all else equal imply that EBIT will drop well below the DKK 20 billion mark. I assume that you have. I mean, when you can say that comment, you're taking into account some kind of cost out, productivity gains or something else.
I think there are so many moving parts in that actually. I think one of the things, if and when we see a normalization, when we are out of the integration, then in more normal markets, we will assume that we'll be able to. It will be easier for us to gain market shares. We will also be working. I think Carsten mentioned it as well. It takes more time these days to do a shipment. We'll also be able to work more efficiently. These things also need to be thought into that.
It is also just in terms of a model, then we are maybe two years ahead, a couple of years with 4% or 5% growth in Air & Sea. It's not if you just take the numbers on the volume today, it is.
That's 2026.
Yeah.
Great. I think what Jens Bjørn says is that time is up, Michael.
Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Yeah.
Thank you, Michael, and thank you, everybody for staying awake so long. It's been a long day. Some of you even were here yesterday also or at the dinner. Thanks to all the great employees, the fantastic team from DSV who presented today. If these guys and girls are not the best in the industry, I don't know what they are. I'm proud of what you have done today, and I'm proud of what you do in the daily business. You simply rock. We are the best, and we have to continue being the best. We are humble about it. There's a big challenge ahead of us to tackle whatever the market throws at us.
Michael, you said you don't think we have ever been stronger, but allow me to rephrase that. We have never been stronger. I know this, and I have been here 34 years. Thank you also to you, Flemming, and the rest of the IR team. Now, the day is almost over. Now you also need to get out in your gardens and have some fresh air and not sitting in bank holidays, weekends, Sundays, evenings, night, doing PowerPoint presentations. I think this beats most that I've seen in my time. Couple of hundred PowerPoint presentations in a company that doesn't really believe in PowerPoints. We normally say from PowerPoint to P&L, it can sometimes be a long way to travel. We'd rather focus on the P&L and not so much on the PowerPoints.
I hope very, very much that we will see you guys again before 2029, because I cannot imagine what could have happened with our company in a seven-year timeframe. Looking back, it has actually been a good exercise, spending some time preparing for this, saying, "Has this really happened in seven years?" It's unbelievable. To be honest, I don't think we would have dared to believe back then where we are now, should we have guessed about what the developments of our company would have shown back in 2015 when we were with you the last time. I'm not gonna hold a long speech because we are under severe time, not pressure, but instructions from the team. What did I start with? If there's one message I wanna leave you guys with, it is this.
Believe me, it is why we go to work every single day. I think it is actually also where we distinguish ourselves, at least as some said earlier today. For antitrust reasons, we never meet our competitors. I met the CEO of Deutsche Post for the first time in my life last week. We've been CEOs for, I don't know, 10 years. If I met the CEO of Kühne+Nagel on the street, I could probably not recognize him. We have no idea really what happens apart from we have probably less information about our competitors than what you have. What we know is what happens inside our own company. We are a performance company. This is what drives us.
We can of course not promise today that this will continue, but we have a fairly good idea that the fundamentals of our industry, the fundamentals of our company, has not changed. With a bit of luck, this will in some shape or form continue in the future also. This part of the day concludes. You will go into the real world and see some real cargo being moved around. I have understood that we have a small video for some of you visiting us online that they cannot participate. We've just made a small video of what you're going to see, which will be one of the newest and most sophisticated logistics centers in Europe. I hope you will really enjoy what you are seeing.
Brian Ejsing tells me that you should be really looking forward to it. If there's something you don't like over there, you know who to contact. He sits down here on the front row. Let's see the video. With that small snapshot, I just wanna thank you once again for coming, also for you listening at home or wherever you are. We hope to see you around. If you, despite all the massive amounts of information you have received today, still have questions, you know how to find us. Please reach out to your local representative, Flemming Ole Nielsen, or the team, and I'm sure they'll be willing to answer all your questions. With that said, thank you very much.