Morning. Welcome to the Capital Markets Day of DSV. My name is Stig Frederiksen. I'm heading the Investor Relations team. Pleasure seeing so many people here today, and also behind the screen. I'll do a few housekeeping stuff, and then I'll give the word to Michael. First of all, you can see, and Michael will show, you have a very packed agenda today. You know, like in school, please be back during the breaks, after breaks, so we can start up, you know, productivity, efficiency, keywords. Secondly, there will be Q&A sessions, and I will do them, the stuff here. For you, watching from home, you can always start asking questions already now. You don't have to wait for the Q&A session to start.
You can do it during the presentations, and you can scroll down and put in your name and firm, and then you can write your questions, and then we're gonna pick them up here. If there's any issues with the Wi-Fi, try a couple times, then it should be okay. We also have to do this one, just for good practice. Forward-looking statement, please read it. There are some future statements in our presentation today. With that, I give the word to our CFO, Michael Ebbe.
Thank you, Stig. This also a welcome from my side. It is for sure a day that we have been looking forward. I know that some of you, many of you, have also looked forward to this day, so I hope that you will find the day very beneficial and also it is, as Stig mentioned, a very packed agenda. Good to see you all. We are, for sure, at a very exciting moment in DSV, also defining moment. We are working very hard every day to close and complete the acquisitions and the subsequent integration of our biggest acquisition ever, the Schenker business. As we have said, we are working very hard to do that by the end of the year.
At the same time, it's not a secret that we live our market in a volatile environment that we are working under. All the geopolitical things that happens and changes, and of course, the pace which AI and tech drive and impact our business. It is for sure a moment where I really need to be ready to move to the next steps, which we will come back to later. Today, we will share here our directions and our ambitions for the next phase of DSV that our CEO Jens Lund will come back to in a second. It's also sometimes nice to see what we have achieved so far.
I know you guys, most of you expect what will happen tomorrow and how can we be even better. This is also our ambition, for sure. Sometimes you also need to reflect of what we have done so far. So far, I do believe that we have been able to show strong earnings growth, EPS, with 16% CAGR since 2016. We have excellent M&A record. We have done many integrations, and we've done them very fast. Like you also noticed that this one that we are about to conclude on, also here we are doing quite fast. With all the acquisitions and the organic growth, we now turns out that we are number one size-wise in our logistics industry, with industry-leading margins as well, so we can deliver the profitability.
I do think it's also worth noticing sometimes what we have done so far. Of course, this is foundation for the next steps that we will come back to. As said, we have a very interesting but packed agenda. As Stig mentioned, that is like you have to be back in time, like you sit in school. I don't know where you went to school, but in some cases it took a little bit time to get in after the pause. In a few minutes, Jens Lund, our CEO, will share his thoughts about our strategic directions, followed by AI and the tech section. We will go into a commercial area, where we have the pleasure of welcoming one of our very valued customers, Adidas, who will do a presentation.
After that, we will go into the sections, headed by the divisions, who will present the different strategic priorities, in the respective divisions. Lastly, I will do a sum-up of some of the financials, so housekeeping questions and I guess also share some thoughts around the financial targets. This is the speakers that you will see today. This is just so you have the faces. I know some of you met them yesterday. In a few minutes, Jens will talk us through the team here, so I'll not spend that much time on it in reality. What I will do is that now I will have you to share a moment with us, because we have actually presented and prepared a brand-new brand video that will come on stage right now.
Please take a moment to see this, brand video, and then right after that, Jens will come up and kick the day off with the strategy and priorities. Thank you for being here. Welcome, to all of you.
[Presentation]
Good morning. Good to see you all. Had the pleasure to meet many of you yesterday as well, and looking forward to a good day together with all you here in the room, but also together with everybody online. We have been very excited to have this day and have prepared an extensive agenda for you. We've just seen the movie, and actually I showed some of the people that I was sitting at the table with our humble beginnings yesterday. The former headquarters of DSV, basically a little pavilion next to the founder's home, where we came from. I think it's an amazing journey that the company has been on. This year actually will be 50 years.
If you go up there, you can have a look. There's actually a board and some descriptions of the journey of the company. I think it's fair to say that a lot has happened over the years. I would certainly hope that some of you would also go up and have a look at this as well. The team has prepared well. Somebody asked, "Why do you have this drone there?" It's because we use them for deliveries for some of our customers, and we also have a little truck outside where we can show autonomous driving and how that looks in a truck. We're actually using it and piloting together with Volvo in the U.S. on that as well.
Some of these things that we would like to show you as well. Before we get to that, I will talk a little bit about some of these topics. Where do we come from? How does the market look? What's our plan? Talk a little bit about M&A and an update on the Schenker integration, where we're at. Of course, our customers, very important. I mean, that's the reason why we're here. Operations, this is basically where we come from, operational excellence. Of course also, technology is something that is top of mind right now. We will share some thoughts about that. I actually have the pleasure of inviting Saskia up here also to present on leadership.
Leadership is very important if we wanna deliver on all those topics that we will be talking about today because, of course, the technology is important. It's an enabler, but it's really the people that we have in the company that make the changes and that make it happen. It is a people's business. We always have to remember this. Good. Also, if you go up and look here, I mean, the company was founded in 1976 on the 13th of July. This year we will be 50 years. It was basically founded by some hauliers that had problems finding work, and they really had no resources. Very poor from the beginning. Of course, asset light, basically have tight capital allocation, has been with the company from day one.
I think the other thing that sort of also meant a lot, if there was no work, there was no food on the table for these hauliers. Really a tough start. We've tried to keep this start-up mentality in the company, so that what we do would actually mean something. This culture has stayed with us ever after, with, what can I say, ownership, with transparency, with that we get the things handled and take care of them, so operational excellence. This is where the company comes from. If you look in the bottom, you can see, this is very much an people-driven. On the transparency side, actually way back, you know, very stringent reporting on what happened every week was actually already prepared from day one.
We've of course kept that transparency in many aspects because it empowers the people that take decisions. It's really important for us. We see this every time that we acquire a company, also today, that the allocations, they are not accurate. The management information that they have has, what can I say, less quality than the information that we have. It really empowers our people, so this is a very important part of our culture.
Of course, if we go into the second phase, then, you know, we had, you know, to work a lot with the transparency, but also the productivity we worked on over the years. Now you can see, as I said, the drones way back, DSV was very fast as getting an AS/400 in or having a radio communication with the hauliers at that time when there were no phones. I think as a company, we've always embraced new technology as fast as we could in order to ensure that we're part of the future and that we will not get stuck in the past with, what can I say, legacy technology. We've done a lot on the productivity side when it comes to this.
Of course, the most important part was that we introduced basically the integration platform in the mid zeros, which is still, what can I say, what enables us to do the M&A today. Today, it's being upgraded to something we call the enterprise data platform. We're gonna talk about this a little bit later. It actually provides just more transparency and more productivity than the old way that we did it. The scalability. DSV has also in the zeros and before that been growing quite a bit through M&A. Many audacious moves have been done by the company. I think we've never really doubted that we could figure it out.
I think, you know, we had the courage and also the team and the support from the board and the investors to do all the things that we've done over the years. I think it's very important that you have all this because then you don't spend too much resource thinking and managing your stakeholders. Also when it comes to scalability, it's important that the organization scales so that when the company gets a new size. Yesterday, I got a question. When you acquire Panalpina, what kind of problems did you then encounter? Of course, when the company gets larger, the distance from top to bottom, it gets also larger. We have then to cater for that so that we still keep the ownership and the transparency for everybody.
Of course, the resource allocation, the connection to you as well. It's really important because when we have a platform that scales, we have productivity, we have transparency, and we have a strong team, then we need to deploy the resources. The capital allocation. This is basically then an extended arm of what you're doing. We use the same methodology when we do M&A or when we do internal projects so that we have to hit a certain hurdle rate, otherwise we don't really wanna deploy the capital. This is then now DSV 2.0, basically our the next part of the journey that we're talking about. What is now happening is that we will now go into a phase where there's new technology available. I think many people are focused on the AI.
We call it actually AI and tech because AI, the way we see it can't stand alone. It has to go together with our stack in general so that we can leverage on it. If it's only AI for the sake of AI, then it's really difficult to transform the business, and that's what we wanna do in DSV 3.0, so that we can get the productivity improvements that the technology allows us for to do. We will have even greater transparency, we will have more productivity, and it will be easier for the company to scale when we have this technology introduced all over the company. Of course, if we have all that, then we can do even more efficient resource allocation at the end of the day.
The building blocks on the bottom, the little bit of the story of the company, you can see on this slide. This one, most of you know, so I'll not spend too much time on it. I think even if we are the market leader, it's really interesting that we only cover approximately 6% of the global market. Our industry is very fragmented. It's quite unusual these days that you have industries that are that fragmented. I think it's got something to do with legislation, history, legacy, and how our industry was organized.
It's been consolidating for many years, and it will continue to consolidate for many years because the economies of scale, but also the ability to have a global offering for many customers, where there is a consistent approach to the way we work, global control towers, etc., it's really important for our customers. Of course, the 3 business areas, as you all know, but I also think that it's important, the vertical in-expertise that we have, so that we can serve the customer that has special requirements in the way that they expect. The market, we often talk about the market, and it's very volatile. There's a lot of things going on.
If you look at it in a longer timeline, you can actually see that the market, it evolves in a certain direction over time. It's grown approximately 3% per year since the year 2000. We can say, how steep is the curve? Has the slope, what can I say, flattened a little bit in the end of the curve? Maybe it has, I still think, you know, that there are a lot of companies that benefit a great deal, and also society in general, by this very complex supply chain. Where customers in these days of geopolitical uncertainty have business continuity planning, so they'll have production in multiple countries.
They will want to basically make sure that we have the capacity to be easy to do business with in all those areas. I think they want us to drive basically the way we interact with them through technology. We will talk about customs today. For example, this has been very much in focus for quite a while now and what we can do on this. I think basically, if you look at some of the shifts that we see in how business is conducted, I think it's very clear that being a very large player in a market like this, we can adapt, and we can serve the customers basically in a way where we keep their supply chains flowing.
The last sort of example of this has been in the Middle East, where we unfortunately have seen a significant crisis, but we still managed to keep all the businesses running there as well. I think we are now back to stable operations, not only there, but also for all the impacts that has happened globally. I think all in all, we're gonna see this journey where our industry, it keeps on growing, and there's a lot that speaks to it. If we then look at our own way of running the company, we've updated basically this slide a little bit. But one of the things that we've kept is the foundation. It's basically on change, keeping the supply chains flowing of our customers.
Basically, this business enablement is really crucial for our company. I think basically also when it comes to our vision, sustainable growth, we've had the reason that we should grow all the time, and sustainability has been with the company for many, many years as well. We have to grow, but we have to do it in a way that works for all the stakeholders. Of course, basically operational excellence is, has always been at the core, as I just explained. Basically, the values. We've actually updated our values, but they connect very closely to where we came from, so that we wanna deliver the results. Transparency means the world to us. Of course, the ownership that people, they can count on us, our customers.
We have very important customers that have very high stock valuations. They need to count on us and trust us. When you work and you're here in the long run, we have to win together. We cannot win over our customers or our suppliers because it's not sustainable in the long run. We have to find solutions that work for everybody. If we look at the strategic priorities, I think the customer is always in focus. Vishal will come up on stage and talk a little bit about that. Basically some of the priorities that we have there. Of course, always, how do we handle the volume operations? Really important that we talk about that as well, and there's gonna be a lot of presentation on that, how we drive the productivity going forward. Of course, technology.
We're gonna talk a little bit about technology, and Jesper Riis, our CIO, will definitely say something more about that. Then, of course, leadership. To make all those changes and then run a company like DSV, you need a lot of change capacity. We've spent significant resources on leadership for many years. I think given the agenda that we have, we're gonna continue to evolve and also invest in leadership in the future. Because all the technology is enablers, but it's really our people, our teams. Can you lead yourself? Can you lead your team? Can you lead your country, your cluster, your region, or your division? Whatever it is that you have. This is really important for us. Then, of course, M&A.
It's always been an important part of our history, and we're gonna continue to do that. We think it makes a ton of sense. We will look at some EPS slides a little bit later, so that we can have a good look at that. Of course, our tagline is now called Leverage to Lead. These taglines mean the world both internally and externally for us. We've just had Schenker, and we're gonna finish now that tagline, Winning as One. Combining the company, I actually think we succeeded very well in Winning as One together with the Schenker team. These are our strategic priorities. How are we gonna deliver it? To the right side, you know, we're gonna have the verticals and continue to focus on that.
Basically operations delivering as one, you can say why is that so complicated? Many of our large customers, even if they work with us in many, many countries, have to feel that when they work with DSV, it's like working with one company because we have significant cross-divisional, sort of delivery of services to the customers. This is really important, that they feel it's very easy to do business with us. Basically, products and services that we have a consistent offering. This is very important for the customer, but also that it's easy to hook up to DSV either via API or EDI or any way or form you wanna work with us.
Of course, that we have the coverage that we need, either in our own company or through agents. I would say that we almost cover 100% of our volume in our own structure. Very few places we have JVs where it's necessary, but apart from that, we are in control of the way we produce globally. Of course, the people I already talked about, leadership. This is our core asset. This is basically the people that on an operational level do the job every day or in many other functions, do an exceptionally good job taking care that we move the company forward. Of course, looking after basically our stakeholders and also our sustainability.
We are not a company, it's normal in this part of the world that we try to have a balanced approach to these topics as well, and they've been with us for a long time. Also, this is very important. Yesterday, we had a picture taken of the management team, and I'm very proud just to give you what can I say, a few words to every one of them. Actually, in the management team, we have more than 200 years of experience. I think it's important that we know our business and that we bring a lot of operational experience to the table when we discuss things.
Vishal has been basically more than 25 years in the industry and has been with Schenker for a long time and actually also worked for a company in Denmark that moves freight that lives in the middle of Copenhagen as well. Vishal is also used to the cold weather in Denmark, even if he was born in India. He's been here before. Then we have Frank running the Air & Sea division, more than 35 years in the industry and 13 of them with DSV. Many Air & Sea people actually started in Road, and so did Frank as well. As a Road forward, knowing the business all the way from the local collections and then to all the intercontinental business today.
We have Saskia Blochberger, our CPO, that will come and speak a little bit later. Basically more than 10 years with Schenker and a consultancy background before that. Running leadership and many other P&O topics, very important also in the integration. We have Michael. Michael started as an auditor, state-authorized public accountant it's called in Denmark, with Ernst & Young and was there for many years, but has since joined DSV and been here for more than 20 years. Michael has basically been running finance for all those years. Even if I had the title, he was vice CFO for many years and knows the company inside out and is also the man that guarantees transparency in our reporting, so he empowers all of us. Of course, we have Jesper, our CIO.
Jesper actually is very well educated. He's got a PhD. But on top of that, he has worked for various international companies before he joined DSV as our CIO. Jesper basically is the enabler for many of the technology changes that we are making. I think we have a very solid platform, and that's not least due to Jesper and his team. We have Helmut. More than 40 years of industry experience. Actually, Helmut has grown up at Bregenz, so it's like a border area next to Germany. He's Austrian. So knows the Road business really well, but also knows cross-border traffics and many of these complexities, you know, right from the start of his career. So Helmut runs the Road division.
It's predominantly a European volume, but there's also a lot of activities taking place in other regions as well. We have Brian. Brian has also tried a bit in DSV, now our COO. More than, actually, it's not more than 40 years because I think it's 40 years this summer. That's, we've overstayed it with a plus. You have 40 years of experience, Brian, the way I see it. You've had many different roles now, the COO of the company and, basically, helps to ensure that many of the sort of strategic topics that we have, we move them in the right direction. Also, significant experience when it comes to that. Maciej.
Maciej has been with DSV for, I think it was 13 years as far as I can recall it. Before that, worked at a company in Poland called Raben as well. Now heading up the Contract Logistics division and has significant experience within that sector. I would say that also if you look at some of the combined entity, I think really moves the needle when it comes to driving our contract logistics capacities forward. This is the management team. They're all gonna present to you today, and I know they've prepared really well, and of course, they're also a little bit curious to meet all the investors and see, you know, how is that dialogue gonna pan out.
I'm quite confident that they'll do really well because without this team and their teams, DSV would not be able to do what we are doing. Looking forward to that. Now, another topic. Many people have said that M&A doesn't really work. I hear this from time to time when I meet investors. Actually, we could have taken this slide and gone, let's say, 30 years back. It will still produce a compounded annual growth rate of 16% plus. Now we just took the last 10 years. In reality, we've managed basically to basically achieve economies of scale and capitalize on consolidating our business. Now you can see the compounded annual growth rate of our EPS. We're in it for the long run.
We've always been, and I'm quite sure that with the way we run the business and the way we execute the business, it's been very consistent for many years. I think the planning that we're doing now, it's basically using the same model, the same formula. I feel confident that we're gonna continue this journey. If you go back 15 years or something like this, we were not even on this slide ourself. It's still a fragmented industry. As I said, we have 6% market share. This is the top players in the industry, having 40% market share. Still a long way to go before it's consolidated. I think also now with technology being more prominent, we need to continue to consolidate so that we can take advantage of these technologies.
I think for DSV it's a capability that we have. I think it's also then an obligation to use it and take part in the consolidation. I think most of you know this anyway. If we take Schenker, I'll quickly just go through that. I think we closed the deal on the first of May last year, so we're celebrating just one year anniversary of the largest transaction ever happened in our industry. Also larger than anything else that we ever did before. The first thing we wanna do is to answer the very important question for people: What does this transaction mean for me?
We've set the team on the 1st of May and basically, cascaded a little bit further down until the end of May, that we'd announced top 550 within a month. 250 on day one, and then cascaded a little bit further down. This actually meant that we had a very stable situation with the employees, allowing us to answer the same question for the customers. The customers, they also have this question: Who's my contact person gonna be? Or what's happening? Et cetera. You can't really go and see the customers unless you have set the team. We could also answer that question, what does it mean for me, for the customers? I think that's been very well received by the customers.
They are. At least the positive feedback we've received on it has been really good. The next thing we wanna do is we wanna go live on the country go-lives. First two countries that we integrated, so we merged the two entities together or the entities together in a country. It's like Denmark and the U.S., as always. The first two countries we go live in very flexible labor markets, so easy. Basically picking up the pace, I think we are now have done 45% of the synergies we've now realized in the run rate, so at the end of Q1. It's going really well on that.
Of course, we need to have the customer integrations as well, which we're working on and we've done really many customer integrations, but this is really where we onboard these customers to the DSV platform that we're also going to talk about a little bit more. I think that what we do is that we try to finish the Schenker integration, delivering DKK 9 billion in synergies. I think we're going to have the job done by the end of this year. We've just recently gone live in France, and there's still a few significant countries outstanding. Could, for example, be India or Poland and then countries like this.
Many of the large countries, they are now basically merged, we're in the process of combining the two entities and rightsizing the operations. I think we're all good on the Schenker transaction. We've upgraded our commercial approach a couple of years ago. I think what we did was we got a very clear customer segmentation in place. Not least thanks to Michael and his team that did an excellent job on that. That is basically the anchor for our commercial approach because it drives, you know, the segmentation of the customers, the way we run the verticals, the way we service the customers with what do we do for a very large customer and how do we service a somewhat smaller customer.
Also how we then run our account plans and basically the target setting for those customers, also the vertical competence that we need for those customers. I think this is some of the core elements on the commercial side. Vishal will talk a little bit more about this a little bit later. I'm quite sure that you'll have some good questions for him as well. I think what is important is that we try to enable the business of our customers. It's really important that we have this operational efficiency and that we try to enable them. This is basically our commercial approach. We're gonna keep on driving sales both locally and also basically how we develop the accounts when it comes to the larger ones.
I think an important thing here is that we've actually managed to expand the collaboration with some of the very large Schenker accounts that we acquired. This was a clear target for us when we acquired the company, because historically we've not been too successful at that. I think we can tick that box and say with the efforts that we put in, that actually we did achieve it this time. I think if we look, what can I say, on our network business, this is in reality what we have.
We have a road network, we have an air freight network, an ocean freight network, but also basically a presence in contract logistics that can be also seen as a network business because we have to serve our customers across these networks and deliver consistent services. Frank is gonna talk about how we would like to evolve when it comes to the Air & Sea network. What are we gonna do on air freight? How are we structuring that? What are we gonna do on ocean freight? How are we planning to basically refine this going forward? These are the assets of sort of the operations. Helmut is gonna talk about Road.
Now that we've combined the two operations of DSV and Schenker, there's still another step to go on the network and we're trying to have a very solid approach for that. Then also contract logistics. I think historically, contract logistics was perhaps more seen as a side-by-side operation for certain type of customers. Given the size and the scale of our customers, they don't see it like this. They see standard service catalogs being introduced across geographies and basically regions on an enterprise level. They want a one point of contact as well. It's also for many customers gravitating towards more a network business for them. Maciej will talk more about that, but it's also in technology, for example, that vertical.
It's really moving forward at an unprecedented pace. If we don't have that approach, we can't really follow our customers. At the end of the day, they can't deliver the AI you need. We come to a little bit more complicated slide. Jesper is gonna talk more about it. This architecture that you see up here, it's our enterprise architecture. This was actually a drawing, it looked a little bit different that we made in 2005. Where we've then over time taken all the volume and put onto the platform. On the DSV two point zero, the integration engine in the middle of the light blue that we call the enterprise data platform today, was an enterprise service bus.
Today it's basically connected via APIs or streaming, and then we have databases in the middle for all this data. We will get APIs or APIs data in from the customers. We will then have the chance not only to pass it through to our production system, but actually to have a look at the data, so we create the transparency. We will also then have the chance to do something to the data before it moves on to the production system. This means that we can also drive productivity because when we get, let's say, data in, the quality of the data that we get from the customers is low. Very often it's low. We also from time to time get good data. If I look at the average of it's, it's low. Let's say we get a booking in.
A booking will typically have a completeness between 50% and 60% when you get electronic data. It requires a lot of intervention before you can actually open the file as we call it, or create the bill of lading so that you can move freight. These tasks are very repetitive, and they require millions of hours, for example, the booking area. If we look at all the domains, it's the same. The outcomes that we're looking for, they are finite because they can go into a database. Jesper will talk a little bit more about it, but we believe that the enterprise data platform where we can then use technology such as AI also to enhance the quality of our bookings, not least through inference, for example.
It will allow us to drive the company forward in a way that is more efficient than ever before. We believe that the platform we just saw, we've never seen that thinking in companies we've acquired. We don't know what the other companies they have, but we know how difficult it is to get to. We've had this for many years. This is the reason why we can do the M&A, the consolidated tested landscape. We also then have an enterprise view on it, so that we set the direction and priorities from the top, and then we have the execution power as well. We have the will to do so. This is very important, not least when it comes to the leadership.
What we wanna do with AI and tech, if you look at the right side of the slide, the design, the solving of the problem is very much done on group level, as you can also see with the platform. Of course, we wanna empower the people that sit and do the daily work. We wanna solve for the same problem that you might have, let's say, on a booking where you get a lot of bookings in that have low quality. You wanna take that work away from the forwarder and handle it in the platform as you just saw before it goes into the production system. This is in reality what we're trying to do or what we are doing. This is then where we transform a job that used to be low in the hierarchy.
You lift that up, and then you solve that with technology so that the people they don't have to do this. Many of our jobs, they are then sort of more, will be more monitoring and perhaps not as much keying in, as we've done before. This is then when we transform some of these things, and sort of make a more global solution to some of the problems. We will redesign the workflows so that we transform them, as I said. Our platform here, it really scales. It's very modern architecture, so it can handle basically all the volume that we put on it.
I think basically the visibility we will get commercially, let's say on a quote domain where we have access to all the quotes we give globally, instead of you sit as a local forwarder in a horizontal workflow and know what you know. Of course, we will know much more what goes on in the market. Then I think the whole team, not only the GEC, but we've mobilized also on leadership, quite a bit. The whole company is very engaged and ready, what can I say, to embrace the new technology and basically get going on that. This is something that I think we underestimate a lot, the leadership part. People think I just get an agent and everything's gonna work. It's so important, leadership.
I have the great pleasure then to invite Saskia, who is working next to me all the time when it comes to leadership and training with educating the organization and basically working on leadership. Welcome, Saskia.
Thank you.
You know, thank you very much.
Thank you, Jens. First of all, very warm welcome also from my end. I'm really excited to be here today, and it's a really important day for us. What I would like to do over the course of the next 10 minutes or so is to take you back. Jens said so already. It's the people that are our foundation. We will be talking a lot also today about the advancements in technology, about the changes in our operating model and all of that. At the same time, we have always been and we will always be a people business. That's how we developed our company. We've looked into the legacy we bring.
We looked into the core parameters that made us successful, and this is also what we truly believe will really make the difference when it comes to executing on our strategy ahead. Same as with operations, same as with our approach to technology, we don't wanna leave it by chance. That's why also the metrics you see up here, they are really our leading indicators when it comes to our ability to execute. Something we really take very seriously and really drive also systematic action around. It's all about lastly making sure, and that has been also an area that we very diligently looked into over the past month, is having the right people in the right positions, keeping them healthy, keeping them engaged, and keeping them to stay with us.
If you look into as we stand today, we are a truly global of a workforce. We have a strong representation across all of our regions, with in total 150,000 employees. We employ more than 180 nationalities and also have an increasingly balanced gender ratio. These two things are really important to us. Also when we look into placements, because we really believe that will make the difference also towards our customers, to be as close, to have the proximity, to really understand also the diverse requirements of the market.
We really wanna make sure to also diversify our workforce, to also ensure we have a viability, lastly, in our talent pipeline and a strong succession lined up. One key area of focus in particular over the last year, 'cause we're just being in the middle of an integration, has really been employee satisfaction. I will come to that in a minute, how we've really been driving intense efforts around that. Lastly, something we take very much pride in, if you look into the parameters of turnover of employee engagement, these two things really we managed to remain them stable and really better than benchmark. That is something ultimately we do not take for granted, in particular in times of big change and integration.
That is really something where we see efforts and the invests we made paying out. Talking about the integration, and no need to tell you that, of course, also from a people perspective, has been our biggest priority now over the course of last year, and it still is. The biggest focus we put was lastly bringing our workforce together around a joint direction, and lastly, creating that one shared reality, that one way of working very quickly. It was less about structure only. The things the three principles we focused on very much diligently were really that we acted at speed, that we made sure that we've been transparent without any compromises, and really creating that shared reality, that clear reality right from the beginning.
How we've been doing that, first of all, has been all about communication. Compared to how we've been experiencing things maybe some two years back, we really made sure that this time we had a very frequent, very direct across all layers of the organization, from white collar to frontline, everywhere, really a regular line of exchange. We had regular pulse checks, feedback loops, iterations, so that we could really have a dialogue with the organization and act fast around the learnings and where to mitigate quite quickly. We then secondly looked into equipping our leaders for that change, because in particular now, if you look into the leadership appointments, it's a solid mix of legacy Schenker employees, of legacy Schenker managers and DSV managers.
Really making sure that we equip the newly appointed managers with tools, practical guides, trainings to really onboard their teams at pace, to make sure that our employees, no matter where they come from, really have that same consistent of an experience from day one to day 100. More of that playbook approach also here to make sure that we do not run any risk or inconsistencies here. Overall, we've trained in the first couple of months, more than 10,000 of our managers in really following the same approach to employee onboarding and team development over the first half year. One of the things we also focused on a lot, and that might seem like a hygiene factor, but we really noticed that that is the big, big thing that makes a difference.
Really making sure that we streamline the processes, that we accelerate the access to infrastructure, 'cause it makes a big, big difference also in terms of experience that people act or work in a common reality fast, so that they have the access to the same processes, approvals, systems, internet and all of that. We really made sure that this also happens very rapidly to create also that cohesion in working environment very much quickly. All of this, I think, was very important for us, in particular in times of complexity, to provide as much clarity as possible, and it really paid out.
In addition to having that obviously energy and momentum and having the organization move very much at speed from integration to execution, we also received very positive feedback in the integration pulse survey that we launched end of last year, where we really see a high confidence of our employees in what lies ahead and the entire rationale actually of the acquisition, which was a good endorsement, a good reflection also for us to see that we've really managed to land these messages well and create that confidence in our organization. Jens talked a little bit already into how we look at leadership, because for us, it's nothing that we do on the side. It's really a big part of bringing our strategy lastly now to execution moving forward.
We strongly feel that with the emerging technologies, with really the rapid changes in our industry, we have what it takes to be successful. We have it in our DNA. We've always been prone to change. We've always had environments that were highly complex and with things to figure out. We have that ownership, that drive, resolve, transparency. It's a matter of reinforcing that DNA. At the same time, we do see the necessity to develop different behaviors. Ownership some 50 years back, had a completely different behavior or form. We've been starting to work very much consistently with our leadership now on developing the behaviors that it will take to move towards the future and really make sure that we are prepared for that. We do that by three different angles.
First of all, it's all about really building that right mindset, where we are really mobilizing our leaders a lot around developing curiosity, developing that skill to really listen to signals from the market. We're talking a lot about first principle thinking, AI first mindset. Something we really heavily train on. Then secondly, it's all about the capabilities to also reduce complexity. To making sure that we keep that, taking decisions at pace, making sure that we are able to think in simple terms, that we cut that complexity to really keep the organization moving. Last but not least, it's also about, less about individual skill development, but what the end that is business transformation.
We wanna design an organization that is lean, that doesn't have any double approval layers, that ultimately is set up for success and set up for the organization to act in a simple and an empowered way. Really having the organizational design lining up to our ambition is also a big, big area of focus for us, has been and will be towards the future. How we are doing that? There is a concrete roadmap in place to really make sure that we address it from all these three angles, these leadership shifts. One of the big things we've been doing, we've been investing very heavily now in mobilizing our top leaders just seven weeks after closing.
It was exactly here we brought all of our top 250 newly appointed leaders to just make sure that within the first weeks of their role, they basically were onboarded on the priorities, on the do's and don'ts of the integration, that we set clear targets and expectations. We've been doing the same now in January, where we also reconvened back the top 350 leaders to align them, to rally them on what DSV 3.0 will require, and really have an open and transparent exchange around that. We'll be doing the same again in October to really also make sure that we are prepared for what the roadmap has required from them to drive that also in their areas of responsibility. Acting at speed.
I think we've spoken already into that. One of the key things that we've been focusing on and will continue to focus is that we really appoint fast. In this integration, also just within weeks after closing, we had the top 500+ leaders appointed. Following also here the best athlete principles, so really making sure that we have the assessments done, that we have a confidence level of the managers are fit for the future, and that nicely translated then also into that clarity of accountability. We had the first layer appointed. They appointed their next layer with the same principles, and we really had that strong sense of accountability, of mandate to then also execute on the synergies at pace. That is a big area of focus and will continue to be also towards the future.
How we wanna leverage that into the wider organization is very much around making sure that we speak one language. Jens spoken to, we already relaunched or revamped our values and the corresponding behaviors that come along with it. We did that in a interactive, in an inclusive approach, where we had colleagues from 55 countries basically joining in and developing that shared future together. We will also be embedding our leadership principles, the values in everything we do. Basically in performance management and diagnostics, in our incentive structures, to make sure that we have one consistent way of describing and acting how good looks like as a team.
In short, we are very confident that we have a strong workforce, a strong organization that is highly engaged, that is highly committed, and that we have also the right leaders in the right positions to take us towards the future. We are very confident that lastly, our leadership is nothing we do on the side. It's something that is really actively enabling our strategy towards the future. I think with that, I give it back to you.
Thank you very much, Saskia, for running us through the leadership. It's, as Saskia also says, it's something that we believe a lot in. We have done that for many years, and we're gonna continue to basically have that as a very high priority on our agenda. Now a little bit back to some of the things we're gonna talk about a little bit later in this presentation. We've basically said that we expect, what can I say, some conversion ratios that we've sent out to the market this morning. Some of you had asked if we had a board meeting yesterday. We certainly have.
We've done a lot of work on this plan, where you can see the outcome basically of the plan here. It's done on the same framework that we use when we do M&A. Basically, we have a baseline for the things that we are looking at, and then we have an aspiration, where is it we wanna go. Then we would have a delta. This is then the plan, what is it we need to do. Then we've broken it down in the many different areas, so that we have a clear strategic plan that we're gonna work and execute on until the 2030.
I think if we look at the bottom first, the network optimization, some of you might call that, let's say, a second round of synergies on top of the DB Schenker transaction that many of you have talked about, because many of the things that go in there could also be labeled like this. What would that be? That would be that when you integrate two companies, you create sort of the network that makes sense at that time. Once the dust settles, you refine the network and you can, what can I say, take another step. Of course you can drive the productivity up. That could be one way of looking at it. Of course, the top box is a little bit more significant.
I think the divisions, they're gonna talk about this as well, but much of the foundation is then the production system that you have and how you sort of want to produce. Another part of it is then the enterprise data platform that I just talked about and what productivities can we drive by leveraging on this. These would then lead to a situation where we also on the AI and technology take advantage. For me, it's very important that AI, it cannot stand alone. It's basically when you have a business area, you will have an aspiration, you'll have a certain service catalog, so you need to produce certain things, and then you will have an operating model. In this operating model, you need then to see how do I operate this business in the most efficient way.
Kind of like first principles thinking, where you say, when you have the aspiration, how would you want to do it? You think a little bit outside the box. Then design for the best solutions can be AI, sometimes can be microservices, can be various ways that we make sure that there's as much efficiency as possible when we work with data. I also think Jesper will touch more upon that. Another thing that we then also need to do, and Jesper will come back to that as well, but we need to also then clean up our infrastructure a little bit so that when you have two companies that are merged together, then you'll have many solutions that solve for the same problem. Also this number will actually drive significant savings.
We've done it many times before. Over the years we've really spent significant resource in that. That's all change management because you have to go from one platform to another. The more of this change we can drive, the higher efficiency we get, the higher productivity we get. This is the reason why, coming back again to that it's not only the technology, because in many cases we have the platforms, but we need to move the people onto the new platform, move the customers and drive that change. Yeah. This is the plan that leads to conversion ratios that Michael, he will also talk a little bit about later. You've probably all seen them.
I think the key takeaways is, that I think we are keeping the plan on the Schenker integration. We're very proud of how it's basically progressing. I think we will still keep the competence as being an M&A powerhouse. I think that will stay, and I'm quite certain that this will mean that we will be one of the leading players for many years to come. I think the IT platform is unique. I call it Darwinism, the platform, because it's really, really simple, but it just takes a long time to get to. Then when we work towards that platform, there's a lot of, what can I say, hard work needs to be put in. How much resistance can you take and how much will do you have?
This is in reality what decides the pace that we'll be moving forward at. Then I think the team, it's a people's business. You will now meet the team. You've met Saskia, and you'll meet the rest of the team. I think that we have an excellent team that is well equipped to execute on the strategy. At least tonight my sleep score was 93. You know, I got a little bit too little sleep, but apart from that, I can sleep well because I have got a lot of good colleagues and team members in the GEC that make sure that when we meet all you guys, we have the confidence that we need and that we can stay calm and focused on the task at hand.
Somebody said, "It's really ambitious what you have at hand." There's nothing new. All the aspirations we had ever since I've been part of the company has always been ambitious. We've always over time met the targets. I think with all our colleagues, the whole team, I'm confident that we will do it once again. Thank you very much. Now I think Jesper Riis.
Great to see you all. I'm so pleased to be able to present this for you. The agenda, we will dive into the IT platform. We will talk about consolidation and how we do it. We will talk about, and now it's getting a little technical, on the IT enterprise data platform. I hope that's okay.
We talk about AI, what goes on there. Of course, in general, innovation is the last point. This is some relatively big numbers. If you look at it's actually massive numbers as I see it. This is some of the data that is moved, volumes that is moved on our platform. It's important when we talk about the platform, it is over the years built for scale, it's built for growth. That has been the main focus as well. Profitability is of course on top as well. Transparency. This is not only about tech. Of course, the technical part in it is crucial. At the same time we need to think about leadership, as already mentioned, governance, change management, I could continue. Also consolidation, 'cause consolidation is a core element of having a scalable platform.
Every time, it's been mentioned before, but every time we buy or we do an M&A, we do a full consolidation. It means if you look at the graph here, it means if you don't do it, your complexity will increase dramatically over time. It's more or less exponential, and you will lose your ability to scale, you will lose your ability to be efficient. That's why we always do this consolidation, because that keeps the complexity, the scalability, where it should be, and also the probability. This is so crucial for us. It actually goes long back in the culture of this company, so it's nothing new. I visited the first time when I joined the company 11 years ago.
I was in an interview with Jens, he says to me, "Jesper Riis, can you count to one?" I was like, "I have a PhD degree." You heard that earlier, right? Of course, I can count to one, and I can also count to many, many more. That was the whole idea. I should only count to one. This was, this has been a part of the culture for many, many years. On the other side here, you can see over 6,000 thousands applications has been closed since 16. It's a massive change management we need to do to get all the users out and the right systems in. If you look at data centers, more than 50 data center has been closed over the years.
We also received some from Schenker that we are handling as we speak. This is a part of it. It's important when we talk about, now I mentioned applications and data centers here, but in general, when we do consolidation, it's all the way from processes into your application layer, into your data, also need consolidation, enterprise data platform is a part of that. You need to have your base infrastructure, data centers is also listed there, basically consolidated. It goes the whole way. Right now we have just around 2,000 business applications running. Of course, we have received majority lately on the integration, we have already planned for 1,200 that is set for closure and decommissioning, this is what we're working on.
I believe we get even higher, but this is our target for now. In general, is the importance of consolidation, I cannot emphasize that enough. This is a high-level view of our IT platform. There is different layer, as you can see here. Basically, prior Schenker, we had one integration platform at the bottom, one CRM system, one financial system, and I could continue. One master data system. On Air & Sea, one system globally. Contrary to this is we managed to consolidate 60% of the order lines in one system before. Unfortunately, now we have received more in a good way. Also when you talk about public APIs, EDI setups, again, one system cover it. It's so important and an integrated part of what we do.
Of course, with Schenker now a part of DSV, we have, there's only one DSV now, there's nothing else. High level, we need to come to a position where we need to continue the consolidation. I have a slide, next slide, where I show what will happen, what will be the system target landscape for that part. Before I do that, the enterprise data platform is super important. It is, because that's where we consolidate our operational data and other data in this very unique structure, which I will show you later. Of course, our AI Factory. It's basically a factory producing AI solutions. We created that and started that way before there was something called ChatGPT and all the other things.
As Jens mentioned, we are really visionary when we see these technologies and figure out can they be used. I come back to that under the innovation part as well. This is a overview of the consolidation for the divisions and also for our finance area. If you look at the top one, Air & Sea, and the second one, Road, we have done an analysis of thorough investigation on what would be the right tool for us going forward. The result has been very clear. We will, for Air & Sea, aim for Tango, and we will transition out of CargoWise One over time. The same for Road, we'll consolidate on STAR. Both Tango and STAR is legacy Schenker system that has been coming in with the acquisition.
It's really a strong system, best-in-class, if you ask me, on the TMS part. They are owned by legacy Schenker, thereby DSV, so we have full control over the application end-to-end. This is a big strength for us. Tango is, before the integration, Tango was used broadly across Schenker for Air & Sea, and STAR was also rolled out quite a lot in Schenker, so it's well-proven systems. You can think, of course, in this transition, there is of course some change management needs to be done. That's clear. It also means that we have some We are moving a little bit more out of off-the-shelf solutions and into more own core systems, as we say it.
It definitely has some advantages. One of them is, for example, that now you control it all. Not very often you can have issues on the license part. We can drive the cost down. We also are in a situation we're not dependent on the same level on vendors. It's also a big plus. Last but not least, we are market leaders. When we need features created, we can do it ourselves, and we can roll them out. You're not depending on somebody else's roadmap. There is a lot of benefits in this, and it is really, really strong systems. On contract logistics, contract logistics, we of course need to consult as well. We will use another owned systems, called Pitergo, and then we will have a off-the-shelf solution for the more complex customer later on.
We are investigating which one to go for. Last but not least, on the finance part, we have one financial set up in DSV, and we will stay that way. That means we will close the many instances we have received from legacy Schenker. This is just about getting that consolidation going. Let's dive into the data platform and apologize in advance. Now we'll go a little bit into technique, but you need to understand this way of thinking if you wanna understand how we work with this unique data platform. On the left side, Jens has touched upon it, the enterprise service bus or integration platform.
Earlier, actually, and it's still in use of course, but it was very much supporting all our data exchange around the company. Now we have converted it into the enterprise data platform. As mentioned before, enterprise data platform is where you consolidate your core operational data and other data, and to do it in a little simple way. You can see it says connectivity, APIs, EDIs, and then you name it. This is where we get data in from customers, partners, authorities, you name it. These data are stored. In one place, we put quotes data in. Another place, we put our booking data. A third place, our event data. We have created an enterprise data model that covers all these different areas where we store the data in.
Basically, the booking will be what we call a domain. We use that term many times, and the same for events and the same for the quote part, et cetera. You get extremely high degree of structure, and it's enterprise. It means that it's the same data model behind, no matter if you describe it for Air & Sea, Road, et cetera. It's the same data model. This is, if someone has tried it, try to agree upon a data model across the whole company, it requires a lot of effort. Of course, this has been a big investment for us to do it. Now we're there, and I think this is a huge, huge, unique situation we're in. We have all this data.
We can create the transparency, as Jens has been talking a lot about, data science, BI, et cetera. Being the, when you have the domains, we can put, and we have done it up in the right corner, you can see AI, microservice. We create these tools, and we have created some, and we can create many more. We create what we need. Basically, you put in the AI solutions or the microservice you need to enrich the data before you send it to the back end, to the TMS systems and others. What that brings is, of course, a high degree of productivity because now you come in with a high-quality level of data before you hit the back end. It is enriched before it gets there.
At the same time, when you take the data back from the different systems into, let's say, the events, you know, where's my goods, et cetera, now you can consolidate it, so you have one message to the customers across the whole company. That brings this customer unified experience. This is some of the drivers, transparency and then productivity, unified customer experience, and definitely also the last one is when we have data like the quote and booking and all things, then we can basically scale on it 'cause we have it all in structured format, so we can scale easy. When we do M&As, we can hook it up one time system to this, and then you have the full ecosystem available for you, and you can route it like the places. This is quite unique.
There's been a lot of change management, a lot of discussions, but I think we are in a very, very good position. I hope that explained a little bit about the data platform. It's been mentioned many times, this is really a driver for transparency, productivity and scalability. Of course, AI is a big enabler for the AI activities as well. This is a small example here from on the left side, we receive the bookings. Some of the bookings are, I have to say it, not always in high quality when we receive it. We can also receive from email. We have an AI solution that can convert it automatically, understand it, and making sure it gets into the booking domain in the right way, in the right format.
In the booking domain, we have to build a average validator as an example. We can correct volumes, numbers, put in the right service code and all of the things. Enrich the data, and then it's pushed to the back end, and over time, the perfect booking will arrive. Okay. I think it's important question right out there, and my answer will be that DSV is in a very, very strong position to scale on AI, and it's definitely to harvest the benefits. We have been working with it for many years. We have the right people, we have the right technology, and we have the right leadership, and the capability of doing change management, which is so important. It's not necessarily just tech. Here, and this is some of the reasons.
First of all, our end-to-end network. You need, for your use of AI, you need data. You need to be able to train your models, and you need it in big volumes. We've got network, we've got data from the network, and we got in big volumes, of course, also because of our size. This put us in a really good position. Our consolidated IT landscape is crucial because when you wanna roll out AI solutions, imagine that you have 200, 300 systems you need to integrate to get the data in the right place. If you only have a few, then your ability to do the change and roll it out is much, much stronger. I mentioned the enterprise data platform, core element as well, and then our enterprise approach to implementing AI solutions as well.
I come back to a little bit more of that. Another thing is that you need to be able to create AI solutions fast. You need to fail fast, but also need to be able to maintain them, roll them out in a fast speed. As I said, long before ChatGPT, we created this setup where we have an enterprise operating model on the AI part, the technology, the processes, et cetera. We have also ensured that we make components we can reuse. It sounds simple, but it's not. If you design your AI, so you actually get modules you can reuse, it can be UI, it can be the model itself, then you can speed up dramatically. Later on today, Brian Ejsing will go through our Customs AI solution, high level.
We also have Michael Ebbe presenting an AI on vendor invoice. Basically, they consist of many of the same components, even though they solve different problems. Last but not least, we have created a setup where we have a vendor agnostic. We don't wanna be locked in, that we need to use a certain vendor. We operate with the open source models, and we operate with the big tech giants, but we can choose what fits for what purpose. AI is not like one AI just fits for all. There are different models, different way of training them, et cetera. We have built a pretty strong setup on that. AI drives value across a broad range of areas. Here I listed some of them.
Coming back to one of the slide, again shows where we said enterprise, top level. This is where we start. We don't wanna solve the problem down in the, in the 100 feet or 10 feet or in different regions or in country. We wanna get it up to as high as we can get it. That's what we call the large global processes. This is the 1 we would like to support. This is where the most of the value lies. There are some other places, this is a real driver. We have described, you know, quote, tools, booking. I show you that. Vendor invoice, customs, there will be some presentation of summary today. Also a quote, we will go through it with Frank will present that in his part.
We will not go into details, high level, what it brings of value and where they are in the process. Some has been implemented, some is on the way to be implemented. It's, I look forward to you, that I will present this to you. AI for logistics is definitely also an area. AI for productivity in the office, definitely also. AI for software development. This is also area where that we of course invest in and have a great experience in. Very often it looks very fast. This is technical, it's not. It's taking the, it's getting the right business cases. Make sure you do the change you need in organization.
You need to make sure that it can be a part of the end-to-end process because there's physical movement in between the steps. There's a lot of other activities than just the part you can fix with AI. It needs to play with the full game, the full tech. That's also why we say AI and tech need organization. You processes, you need the physical movement and a lot of other things that you need to account for. It cannot do it all. That's not how the world works. Good. My last area, innovation is really close to our hearts, and this is the innovation radar. It develop all the time. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go through all of them 'cause then we'll be sitting here also during the night.
I would like just to take two out and present. Luckily, it's also related to what we have here today. The way we work with innovation is we make sure that we invest in the right things. We don't want to invest, that you can buy yourself poor if you want to, in technology, but you need to figure out what is it actually drives the value in your company and then invest in that on an enterprise level. I'll take now two. The first one is this drone. You can also see up there. Luckily, we also have Peter Matthiesen standing up there and others that can answer your questions. Overall, this is a drone from Phoenix. It's a service we offer today.
We have already a lot of customers on it. Among others, offshore wind industry in Germany and in Holland are using it for spare parts. The same goes for our data center, remote data center in Norway for also for spare parts. I think drones, they will be more and more important going forward in the future and definitely also in the transport industry. Then last but not least, we have launched the autonomous trucks now in Texas, as Jens also mentioned. This is a picture from it. Soon Stig Frederiksen will give a small introduction for when and how can you talk to the people. There is a truck outside as it's a European version. This is an American version, but nonetheless, the same principle.
We are really proud that this is really something that could drive some change. It can also make sure that if you need the truck drivers, for example, then this will solve the problem over time in some degree. Of course, there is a lot of regulations still in the world, what you're allowed to do, but now this is live. It's really exciting. I hope that you enjoy the view out there if you go out and see it. To round it up, an IT platform designed for scale, designed for growth. We focus a lot on this consolidation, and it's also a part of the success for where we are today, that we have focused so much on consolidation as well.
We're moving a little bit away from some of the off-the-shelf system over time. That's why we will introduce and roll out Tango and Star. Again, you will get some more insight on that on the later presentations. The data platform has been mentioned multiple times. I think that is clear. Last but not least, we are in a pretty strong position to utilize AI in a good way, scale it and get the benefits. That was it for me, so thank you very much.
Thank you, Jesper. Now it's time for the first Q&A session. Nice to see a lot of hands coming up already. I haven't had a chance to see how we're gonna do it. Of course, we have a question here from the room. I urge you only one question, please, because a lot of people want to ask questions. Of course, also, I can see I've already received the first ones from the outside. Please write questions from there. I think we'll start here, and I have some Yeah. Magnus and Sandra will run on. Let's start here with Lars Heindorff in the front. There'll be a mic.
Yeah. Thank you. Lars Heindorff from Nordea. Very interesting presentation about the savings. I wanted to ask a little bit about the path to the DKK 9 billion. The DKK 3 billion, which I assume you said, Jens, you mentioned it was sort of a, maybe a little bit more on Schenker. I don't know whether they come first and then the other DKK 6 billion. Are they more back-end loaded towards 2030? How much of that will then be outright savings of operating your own in-house systems? How much will be productivity gains from.
Yeah
more, consignment per employee and so forth? The path there, maybe if you, if you share a little bit about that.
I'll say a little bit about it. Michael is going to also in the financial presentation talk a little bit more about it. I think some of these things right now, we're finishing off the Schenker integration. I think that's where the core of the focus is.
We do work on some of the topics. The divisions, they will talk a little bit about what we're introducing right now. It has the same journey as, let's say, a Schenker integration, that you work a lot, and then you get the benefit, you know, once the things they are implemented. Of course, the numbers they then have to be there in 2030, so that we can deliver on them to you guys. Of course, in sort of the first phase, there's a lot of mobilization taking place before you really start to see the benefit of the productivity improvements.
Now I fly in a little bit high, perhaps a little bit too high for you, but also so that I don't steal the thunder of the people that come on stage a little bit later. Michael will touch a little bit more upon it.
Marco?
Hi. Marco Limite from Barclays. You're quantifying today at DKK 6 billion the AI cost benefit. When we think about AI, do you also see risks, and therefore is the DKK 6 billion, let's say, a net number, excluding maybe some pricing dilution, or is that just a cost saving, and therefore maybe we should also think about some negative revenues headwinds towards the DKK 6 billion? Thank you.
If we look at the targets, they are the combination of a lot of parameters that go in there so that we hit above 55% in, for example, in conversion ratio on Air & Sea or 35% on the other divisions. Of course, there's a lot of positive elements in there, but there's also some, what can I say, negative elements in that. I would say, there's some assumptions in that we can always debate if they then are accurate or not, but we've looked at it.
I'll take one from the screen here. We got a question here from Citi regarding the timeline for transitioning from CargoWise to Tango. Jesper, Jens, one of you guys want to take that one?
Yeah. Jesper can take.
From Tango?
Yeah. You can say to Tango from CargoWise.
Yeah. right now we have not defined the end date for it yet, but of course, we are rolling out. I'm sure we would later on come with a more precise timeline. Frank will give some indication on some of it, but that's I think my answer. Maybe you can say some more.
When we have two systems that are well connected in the back end, we're not necessarily in a hurry. We can drive the productivity up on Tango so that we are certain that we can deliver on the productivity aspirations. We will keep both systems running. Frank will say a little bit about how this is going. Some of you are well informed that we are running, let's say in Singapore or Canada and some of the other countries as well on Tango. I think we have a journey, and we don't need to set a specific date right now. We wanna make sure that we don't lose the productivity. This is what is in our planning.
Yeah. I see you have one there. Alexia?
Thank you. Alexia Dogani from JP Morgan. I have one question around kind of what's the plan for 2030. If we look at a very simple bridge of where you started from 2024, we're looking at an EBIT of over DKK 40 billion, all else equals. I guess, what can go wrong on the backdrop that we don't see those numbers by 2030?
I think what can go wrong is that we fail on the execution of the plan at the end of the day. I don't see the way we run the plan or do the things, it's basically the same way we've done this change over the years. It is the same methodology that we're using. We put so much emphasis on leadership here all the time because we need not to drop the ball when we're doing this, and of course, there's a lot of complexity. That's a risk that you have to look into, and your risk management has to be very precise. Your reporting has to be very transparent. Normally we say there's no problem we can't fix, but the later we discover a problem, the harder it is to fix it.
Again, back to basically how we govern it, I think that's the biggest risk. And it is for every company that introduces transformative technologies, that you really have to make sure that you govern this in a good way. We're very used to this because we buy a lot of companies, so it's a muscle that we train, over and over again. But there are really three things in a company that are dangerous. It is the ABC. If we become arrogant, if we become bureaucratic, and if we become complacent. This is the reason why we have the values. We try to prevent that because you can easily say, "Are we the market leader?" Or whatever. We shall never do that. At least not when I'm the CEO. What happens afterwards, nobody can tell.
Yeah. We have one question here for Saskia. Now you come from with a Schenker background, and there's a person who would like to hear, how has it been to move into the DSV world?
Oh, it's been. For, for me personally No, but I think it's representative also to the journey eventually that one or the other colleague coming with the legacy Schenker background has had. And the question I also received quite a bit yesterday was, what are the big differences between the two organizations? I feel the biggest surprise for me personally was still talking logistics industry. It's, it's a lot in the, let's say, DNA that is more, more common. We had in both organizations, and that's also something I found, a big openness. You had a big focus on collaboration, that ownership, that pragmatism that I think the industry overall brings. At the same time, legacy Schenker had been a state-owned company.
You had a lot of the culture being shaped by simply the environment, by having more bulky processes, having more bureaucracy. I feel that at least right now, the intent has always been for us, and that's what I meant earlier, really making sure that our new colleagues joining, including myself, got familiar with the new reality fast. The speedy processes, the approvals, the organizational reality, and then that also made the cultural integration way easier in that sense. That has been also an area of focus for all of us. Really getting people used to the new reality while still focusing on basically some of the cultural elements that unite us.
Yeah. We have one at the background there, Magnus.
Thank you very much. Arthur Truslove from Citi. One for Jesper, please. Obviously, when you think about the enterprise data platform and all the technology that you've just talked about, how much of this have you sort of proved the concept and kinda got it up and running? How much of it, kind of remains to be seen in terms of, you know, proving it and rolling it all out? Thank you.
Yeah. Again, I have to say AI and tech 'cause they often always go together. Overall, some of the illustrations are here. We have AI solutions with tech as well rolled out for globally in some cases. Michael Ebbe will present the vendor invoice application. We have customs. There's also customs declarations they can handle. Rolled out a lot. Brian will come back to that. I will not go into detail with that. We are in a mature state, but we have enormous potential in front of us. There are so many processes that we have not started on that have a huge potential. We are underway. I think we have a good foundation to move forward.
We have the right skills, et cetera, but there's a lot to do yet.
Let me see. Yeah. Right in the front.
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. One also for Jesper, please. If you think about the AI that you're deploying in the business over the next few years, how much is AI with a deterministic logic versus AI with a probabilistic logic? Where it's probabilistic, where does the accountability sit? If something goes wrong, if there's some hallucination, how do you guard against the risk of that?
Yeah. At least I can start with the last one. We always make sure that it's top management, you know, that decides the direction and what we do. Then all the GEC members are a part of ensuring in their areas that it's implemented in the right way. It's not like I sit and dictate everything, or Jens does, but it starts in the top management. We drive it out, and this is the only way we get this enterprise and make sure we can, we can scale it broadly. Your other question, I'm not 100% sure what you meant, to be honest.
Essentially deterministic being agentic and probabilistic being more like an LLM, more like a generative AI.
Okay. I get it.
With hallucination.
Yeah, we use the term AI because it's I hear very often, everything is in agent AI or sensing AI, and in reality, it's typically just a mix of machine learning or generative AI set up, taken, and into responsibility of a process, right? We just use the common term AI, but we cater for all the things you mentioned in our setup.
Yeah. I'll take one from here, and that's to Jens. When will we be able to do the next M&A transaction?
Well, when you look at it's not always something that we decide ourself. It's also when those things come to market, at the end of the day. Of course, then our ability to create value on M&A and then perhaps have a more forceful approach, will be enhanced the higher conversion rates for that we have, because the more value we can create. At the end of the day, it's resource allocation. It's a more value then for us in driving this agenda. It's significant numbers. At a certain point in time, the business cases, they're gonna look better when you make, the returns, you know, also for the acquired company and put this into your business plan.
I think if we look at it from a company point of view, we will have completed the Schenker work. Not all detail work will probably happen, some of it in 2027. There's still some cleanup to be done on the application consolidation, on some integrations, et cetera. Once we've done that, I think it's the company is in reality ready to do so. If there's an opportunity that makes sense, we will probably have a good look at it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks. Jacob Lacks, Wolfe Research. Can you help us think about the opportunity within the DKK 9 billion of savings breaking out by division? Is there one segment where you see a bigger opportunity from AI implementation relative to the others?
I think if you look at the conversion rate, I think that it gives a little bit itself, most of it, how it's gonna be spread out and what we are gonna aspire to. I think you will have, what can I say, with the growth numbers, you will be able to do your engineering. I already heard that from Alexia that was possible. I think we will stick to that. It's clear if you take the overall pockets, then I think for every division, AI and tech is significant.
Depending on how much infrastructure you have, of course, there might be a little bit less to achieve in the Air & Sea area because you sit on less infrastructure, somewhat more on Road, and then even more in the CL side because you sit on more infrastructure. If you apply that logic, then I think you will be in a good spot.
Cedar.
Thanks very much. Cedar Ekblom from Morgan Stanley. I've got a question probably for Jens. We're talking about consolidating your sort of mission-critical production systems at the same time as integrating the largest deal you've ever done, and also talking about massive productivity savings and changing the way you work. It's a lot on your plate. What I wanna try and understand is, what are you seeing in the business today as it relates to hurdles to migrating from CargoWise to Tango? Because I would assume that that's already happening. You know, help us get comfort around this integration that we're not gonna have a 12-18 month slippage and what that might mean for your customer interactions. You know, it's a lot that you're talking about.
Already today, basically what Jesper has created together with the teams, for example, between the two systems, is what we call a bridge. We can exchange the data in the two systems so at origin you can take a booking on one platform, and at destination you can handle it at the other one. These, what can I say, productivity consequences, they are already in our numbers today. Of course, when you do these things, you want to do things at a certain pace so that you get finite outcomes. That let's say, for example, the customer integration part. We want to finish the customer integration part so that we take all the same integrations and move them onto our integration platform. You are in control of the data.
You can route them wherever you like, and the systems stay back for each other. Now, when we have it on our platform, we can then start to work with technology if we are not already have it in place, so we can enhance the quality of the data. In the forwarder, basically, they are isolated from this work because they will then get better data. You have to basically isolate some of these tasks in the process so that you don't have somebody that has to do the whole thing at the same time. Basically, this is also then how we organize the company in domains, so that you keep the problem within a certain area so that it doesn't spiral out of control.
When you do these things, when you run a company, you make your plans, then often it will happen that you have to say, "Well, I got this assumption a little bit wrong. I have to change my plan a little bit." Risk management then has to ensure that we don't get it too wrong so that we have to talk to you guys about it. On the other hand, when you have a plan, this plan says we would like to win the world championship. At least I've spoken to a lot of sports people. They say they get no medals if they say, "I'm going to be the last in the league." What we're gonna say is we're gonna stay industry-leading, and we have the aspiration. We don't think about failing, but of course, from time to time, we may slip.
We'll get up and continue running as we've always done and just focus on winning. That's the only thing that matters.
Muneeba Kayani.
Muneeba Kayani, Bank of America. I wanted to talk about customer retention. When you had first announced the DKK 9 billion synergies, you said that assumed a 5% churn. Where are you on that now? Jens, you talked about expanded collaboration with some of your big customers at Schenker. Where have you had the successes? Where have you lost? Your competitors have talked about some Schenker salespeople customers having moved to them. What do you say to that?
Maybe remember we have Vishal coming on the commercial part, he will definitely go more in deep to that. Jens, still, if you have some comments.
What Stig is saying, don't steal his thunder.
Yeah.
You know, when you do M&As, it's quite common that, you know, certain people, they leave the company. I'm also personally very happy about the competition focusing so much on us. I mean, we focus on our own plan, which is where I think you create the value. Having said all that, I think we've been through this tender season on the large accounts, with more volume, been awarded more volume than we already had. On the significant ones, the very large accounts that I think they're referring to. How much volume these other companies have acquired, I'm not sure, but we're very satisfied with this. Of course, you can measure, you know, basically our success in multiple ways, either in TEUs and tons or in GP.
I think after one year, we've managed to lift the Schenker GP up to the GP level of DSV. It's true, let's say there's been some low-yielding volumes in certain areas that we're not basically producing anymore. I would say the customers that we want, the segmentation, I think we basically managed to keep relations to all the important customers. If I look specifically at two top 250, I would say there's probably one that has left way down the list, but not more than that. If we look at the smaller countries or customers in the countries, there can have been some down-trading because that often happens until you know who's the new contact person and all these things.
Frank will come back to what it means for growth and also for these customers a little bit later. Vishal Sharma will talk more to the other stuff. I think actually that we've delivered, what can I say, on the plan that we had, at least from a GP perspective, which is also the way that we plotted it.
There was a question from Ulrik over there.
Ulrik Bak, Danske Bank. Just a question on AI and the Road division. You have 25 plus TMS systems in the Road division currently, and you said it requires a consolidated IT set up landscape. What is the timeline of rolling out the Star system, and how do you see the AI benefits during that process?
Yeah. First of all, we are rolling out right now, and we'll do that in the coming years. Overall, the good part is we have When you roll out a standard system, you only need to hook up your services one time with, and then you roll it out together with in the countries, right? Together with the system. I think we're in a good position on the rollout, and it is a very strong system, a very modern system. My tech colleagues, they love to be a part of that project 'cause it's one of the really exciting ones, right? I do hope that answers the question in some degree.
No, but I think we could say a little bit more to it. How many countries do we have on it now, Jens?
We have at least 16 or something like that.
Some in the rollout.
Some in the rollout.
Just to give you some color, so it's not like-
Also bigger countries.
Kristian?
Thank you. Kristian Godiksen from SEB. Thanks for breaking down the DKK 9 billion in 6, 2, 6 and 3. Just if we can double-click on the DKK 6 billion from AI, STAR, and Tango. To my math, it doesn't leave much for AI, if we assume the AI is DKK 1 billion from the license savings from CargoWise, and then DKK 3 billion from STAR based on the 3 percentage point EBIT margin uplift you have spoken about earlier. Hence, this only leaves DKK 2 billion for AI. Is that, Yeah, how do you compute that? Is that based on your word about the efficiency from AI, that you How much you can keep?
I think, if we take a look at this, there's probably also a bit of baselining you need to do. Because in the baseline, how much real value, how much volume is on Tango right now and how much is on CargoWise. I think your number, the cost avoidance or the benefit at the end of the day is gonna be that number, but it needs to be in the baseline. Otherwise, you're not gonna get it. It's a cost avoidance. I think if you look at the presentation, I think it's also very important to say that it says greater than. The way we go about it is that we would like to present something to you that we have a high degree of certainty we can deliver.
As always, let's say we get better at it. I've been part of increasing the financial aspirations for our Air & Sea division for many times over the years. Can be also some of the other divisions where we have to adjust our aspirations. For now, we would like to have a strategy that has ambitions, but also where we can be motivated and deliver on it.
Marcus, did you have a question? Okay. We go to Andy.
It's Andy Chu from Deutsche Bank. Question for Jens, please. When you look at the history of the company, it's been pretty flawless execution. You know, beat and raise, beat and raise in terms of market expectations. The last 12 months have been maybe, as you alluded to, Jens, a bit of a slip. Could it take a bit of time now to get back on your feet? Something that you mentioned. Do you think therefore that your delivery could be more back-end loaded to 2030?
I think I wouldn't really buy into the thing that the company is not delivering, what can I say, important outcomes. It's a very difficult situation if I compare to the peers. I don't actually think that it stands comparison to any of them, what we're doing. Anyway, there's a lot of things happening in the market, in, in the world. There's a lot of things happening in our company. Of course, what we try to do, if you look at this, it's hard work every day, where you do fundamental change that allows you to transform the business. Of course, we have to hit our numbers every quarter. I think we are also doing so. If you take the last quarter, we had an FX headwind of DKK 160 million.
If we'd had that, we would have hit exactly what you have. Of course, either you hit it or you don't hit it. It's binary at the end of the day, the perception. It's this fine balance then, you know, managing the stakeholders like the shareholders, but also being able to run the company with a long-term planning and a long-term grind, where you then as top management have to take a little bit of the pressure off so that people they can run it internally and then also, of course, maintain the support from you guys. I think over time, when we've delivered on the targets, I think it's always been appreciated by the market. Our journey there has always been a little bit, what can I say?
Sometimes a little bit above, sometimes a little bit below. Most of the times, actually, I think we've delivered outcomes that we had set to the market. You have to remember that if you look at the comparisons also for industry, we are delivering outcomes that are exceeding their outcomes by a vast distance. As you say, deliver on the quarters and the share price is gonna explode. I think Stig has made a note.
I take it. That was the end of the first Q&A session. There will be more. Now we'll be back in around 15 minutes. Over there will be refreshments, and coffee and so. Look forward to see you all back here when we start up the commercial discussions. See you.
Thank you.
Hello. We need to start again? It seems so. I think we are ready to start again. Let's get Jens. Perfect. Now you heard a lot about the tech M&A, a lot of important stuff. Now comes at least the same importance, maybe even more, our commercial approach, how we want to grow organically. I know a lot of you still see DSV as a powerhouse for M&A, doubt maybe a bit our ability to grow organically. That's why we have the pleasure today to have Vishal, our CCO, who will do the commercial introduction on how we do our commercial approach. Vishal, welcome.
All right. This is how you put DKK 1 trillion in about 30, 35 sq m. Now I know how to do that. It's my distinct pleasure to be with you and talk to you about our commercial approach and how we intend to drive organic growth in DSV. The agenda, we will cover our commercial goals, the DSV commercial approach, how we are driving a very disciplined growth agenda in the organization. We will do some light dives in the customer segmentation that Jens has spoken about as the foundation for whatever we do. We will talk about the opportunities in verticals, how we focus on vertical expertise, and how we bring products to life to service our customers. Some opportunities on cross-selling. Then, of course, there were some questions around retention. How are we doing? What are the integration proof points?
We will talk also about the integration proof points. Something has changed since we bought Schenker. The commercial conversation with our customers is at a different level than it was a year ago. The scale, the relevance, the product capability that we bring to the table is completely different, and it has changed the commercial conversation that we are having with our customers. I wanna give you analogy and explain why that is happening. Perhaps many of you have been to China or attended a Chinese banquet, and you might know that where you are placed in the table matters. It's just not that you have a seat at the table, but it matters that you have the right seat at the table. We believe that we now have the right seat at the table. There's also some industry math behind this.
If you remember the slide around the industry leadership, the revenue and ranking. The two separate companies were about similar size, number three, number four. The distance between the number three now and the number four is almost 75%, 80% by revenue. That matters a lot. When you're a supply chain officer in a large corporation thinking about how your supply chains should be organized, who do you trust, and what is the risk in introducing different players? It matters. That difference has started to matter more and more. That's something to keep in mind.
The other thing that has changed is that the combination of the two companies, the scale, the breadth of products, whether the strength of Schenker and contract logistics in Asia, or DSV's strength in United States and Latin America, or the two companies combining the European networks, combining FTL, LTL with the groupage network. When we look at the product combinations, it's at a completely different scale. The range and breadth of products, there are no obvious holes in the product portfolio. That also matters when companies are looking for partnership, and they are looking for resilience, and they are looking for the breadth of services that you can offer. That's the second thing that has changed. The third thing that is different is the disciplined commercial approach that we are taking.
The very deliberate and thoughtful commercial approach, which Jens alluded to, which was started in a couple of years ago. We have been building on that. I will elaborate as we go along in the presentation. Our commercial goals are stated simply is retention of our key customers. Why is that? Because retention matters. Again, the math of losing a large customer is totally against If you have to make up the loss of a large customer through small and medium-sized customers based on the sales cycles, it's nearly impossible to do that in the short term. Our first priority has been to retain our key customers. That was. We started with retention. We said, we have vertical expertise. There are growth opportunities that we need to exploit within some high-growth verticals. We need to bring specialized products.
That's what we are doing, and I will explain that when we do the deep dive. We recognize that, as I said, the seat at the table gives you a different conversation about the share of wallet in the with the customers. We believe that we have an ability to increase our share of wallet with our large customers and actually across the entire customer portfolio. We also see cross-selling opportunities across divisions, and I will also present some data to talk about that. Of course, leveraging our global scale and capabilities, we wanna make sure that we are winning new business scopes. I hope this lays out, and we will unpack this slowly. This is the disciplined commercial approach that we are using to drive our commercial agenda.
It's a way of thinking, and if some of you are engineers in the audience, think a little bit in terms of system thinking, that levers are interlocking, and they have a lot of self-enforcing feedback loops built into them. We will talk about. In the deep dive, I will take you through in the customer segmentation and on the vertical expertise. Let me talk a little bit about, for instance, the sales excellence piece and what we are doing. What we have been doing is really being disciplined about pipeline management, having a common definition of pipelines, the rigor in managing those pipelines. It's just not about what the number of the pipelines is showing, but it's really about sales rigor and sales discipline. The pipeline management is a bit like, you know, your blood pressure or any indicator.
What are the pipelines telling you, and how can we use pipelines to steer our business to drive the growth agenda? That's being driven in a very disciplined and a systematic way, cascading from myself to the division CEOs into the countries. We have a, what we call like a operating system, if you might want to use that term, disciplined cadence about the reviews. That's where we started. Talent management. We know that our global account directors, the account managers who are working with the largest accounts, make a big difference. We recently completed an exercise evaluating around 200 of our account managers, looking at how the distribution curve comes out. This is important because when we look at a distribution curve, the ones on the right, we know are self-driven, performing. They know what to do.
The ones who are not performing, we know we need to performance manage them out. We need to make sure that we replace. It's the middle that we really matters. The important thing that we want to do is to make sure that we shift the middle. How do you do that? It's through the sales enablement that we are doing, making sure that we are investing in training, development, and again, the cadence around pipeline management. What we say is that if a salesperson is not performing, it's the sales manager whose responsibility is to coach. Our attention is not just on the sales people, but also on the sales management and how they drive that. We've invested in new training material that allows and trains. The concept of feedback loops.
When we know that something is not working, we know what we need to change. If I then come to, for instance, the value proposition, please. When the two companies were separate, we were traveling to different events. It was not really well coordinated. We sat down and said, "Which events, fairs, exhibitions, customer events do we need to be? Which fits with our vertical focus? Which are the focus areas that we wanna be?" We sat down with our marketing teams to say, "All right, social media engagement should be before, during, and after. We wanna measure how the engagement has been." Then we take one step further to say, "Did we generate commercial leads? Are we able to convert the business?" We're very disciplined about taking that whole value proposition.
If I say when I'm sitting in front of customers, and this is the feedback that we get from customers. There has been a lot of anticipation and excitement that you're in the middle of this integration, so what does it mean? How does the new company, what's its combined value proposition? I know that Frank will talk about it, that when you combine the networks, it's really incredible to see the value that is being unlocked in being able to give a much broader product portfolio. That's what customers want. We revamped our entire value proposition and messaging cadence. We just released new material. We are staying inside the wheel, making sure that whatever we do is supporting our aspirations in a very disciplined manner. We've made a lot of success on segmentations, on sales excellence.
We just rolled out new material and new ways of managing the value proposition and where we are appearing. I will unpack a little bit on the customer segmentation part and also on the vertical expertise. Segmentation is really the foundation for how we go about our business. Jens alluded to this. It's a way to make sure that we allocate the right resources, the right attention to the different segments of the customers. This does not reflect that any segment is less important than the other. It's just different ways of managing those relationships. It's just different ways of ensuring that you have the right products that are being sold. Customers have different needs in different segments. We wanna make sure that we are addressing that. This is the structure of the customer portfolio.
As you can see, when we say the top 650, the globally managed customers, we are taking a very systematic global approach in managing the approach to them with respect to having account plans. Obviously, the top 250 have much more detailed account planning. As we go down the line, the account planning needs are slightly different, but the same principles apply. We use the same global approach. We take a global view of the customer's business. We wanna make sure that if you are servicing them in one country, and if that customer is giving us business in other countries, then that ownership is globally managed, whether the customer is owned in a certain country.
In fact, again, talking of feedback loops and how we use that, we've expanded that scope of the top 275 recently to include now the top 650 because we saw a lot of success with that approach in making sure that we are very disciplined about the account relationships and how we service them. This is an exercise that we will take around once a year to really see how we are performing, how is that approach, where the customers are moving up and down, what do we need to do. Again, there's a very disciplined data-driven, and also a lot of thoughtful discussions and going all the way at the gate level on how we need to do this. In fact, I'll give you an example.
We have customers which you could say are in the next 3, 4, 3,000 customers. You know, it sounds, you know, they might be a small customer. Actually, they're not. The interesting thing is that post the acquisition, customers who might be falling in the next 3,000 customer list for us are actually really large customers for medium-sized companies or maybe the number 4 or 5 players in the industry. They are used to attention from senior stakeholders. I can give you a couple of great examples. Without naming customers, we actually, believe it or not, we have some customers that we don't do business with in the world, and they are high growth customers. We probably have very little.
Jens himself has met them twice in the last year in order to try and break because we know that that customer is a large account for one of our competitors. Similarly, Frank, one of our healthcare customers, for instance, he's been, you know, traveling to the U.S. several times in meetings to try and break into. We've had success with both, where we are starting to see the relationship evolve. The important point I wanna make here is that we're not dogmatic. We look at where the opportunities might lie, and we assign the resources. Of course, as CCO, my job is a lot easier when my colleagues themselves are driving in the sales engagement. That's actually a really important part of it.
The senior level engagement and access post the acquisition has been just exemplary. You will see that result also when we talk about the retention numbers. The other thing I wanna make here is that when we look at the 20%, or what we call the remaining customers, again, it depends on who the customers are and what the approach will be, whether it's globally, we dive in and take. Also leveraging from what Jesper and Jens have talked about earlier around how can we use more technology to digitize the customer experience at that end of the spectrum, how can we drive that? Certainly, that's gonna be part of our playbook to make sure that we have a very, very strong digital offering for customers who may just want to engage with us.
What we want to be is really a full suite provider with different approaches aimed at different segments, being very deliberate, disciplined, data-driven, and thoughtful about how we engage and how we drive resources into the customer segmentation. Hopefully that gives you an idea. The last point, and this is also an important point, is that this drives accountability. It drives clear accountability in different parts of the organization, because we know who's driving accountability for the top 650. We know who's driving accountability for the next 3,000 and then where the accountability lies. It makes for a very transparent discussion between Group Commercials, between Divisions, between Regions and countries. We all like to, let's say, to have a healthy competition and drive that.
That's really why this is designed in this manner. I hope it gives you a better flavor on how disciplined and thoughtful we are being. On the vertical side of it, this is how our GP composition looks. It's arranged alphabetically, so don't read too much into the order. As you can see that two of our biggest verticals are consumer and industrials, reflecting the legacy business models. The technology business is one of our fastest-growing verticals. Of course, we see growth in aerospace and defense. No prizes for guessing why in the geopolitical environment. Of course, healthcare, which is a secular growth area that we see and where we see ourselves still as a challenger brand. We've done some simulation.
We obviously look at a lot of market data and research to see, you know, what's the expected growth and what should our approach be. In our aspirations, we look then in the high growth verticals where we believe that the verticals will outgrow the market. Our clear ambition is to outperform the market. We wanna take market share in the high growth verticals, make sure. In automotive, it's a turnaround. Of course, the whole industry has been challenged, and we have very specific plans to drive that turnaround. In the other verticals where we believe that this is at least minimum growth with the market, and as I said, if you go back to the segmentation, depending on where the opportunities lie, we will not be shy in going and trying to take more share.
Again, coming back to the original point I made about the different conversation, the commercial conversations are different. We believe that we are really poised to grow our share of market in all segments. These initiatives are a sampling of some of the initiatives that we do, and I will take you through one of the verticals and explain how we actually do that. The initiatives are very vertical specific. They inform the product development choices that we are making and based on customer needs and how we bring those services to the market. Again, it's very thoughtful. We're building product service catalogs to make sure that when we are presenting and bringing products into the market in complementing our divisions and working very closely with the divisions, we wanna make sure that they are addressing a need in the market.
Let me take you through a little bit of a deep dive in this if you just follow my chain of thought. You look at technology. Within technology, we look at subverticals, semiconductors, cloud computing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics. Within cloud computing, we look at the customer scenarios. What are their pain points? What are they trying to solve within that subvertical? Of course, this is based on research and talking to the customers, and there's a, you know, tremendous amount of feedback loops that we have, and there's a lot of organizational knowledge that sits. When we go inside that, we do a light dive in white glove delivery.
If I took you through all the verticals and all, we would be here till the end of the day. Just to give you an idea of how we do this. Technology, cloud computing, we go into the white glove delivery. What is a white glove delivery? It's essentially when the server racks are being delivered into the data centers, they need to be handled in a very specific and precise manner. As compute capacity or they're becoming denser because more compute capacity is being packed, they're becoming heavier. Obviously, you know that an uptime or downtime in a data center can cost DKK millions. Companies really want to make sure that you have expertise, you have a globally consistent way of servicing, you have the expertise to handle this very heavy, precious cargo.
There's, you know, there's SOPs on how you handle that. I won't go into all of that, but it's a very specific way. We sat down with our customers and said, "Right, where do you expect the demand?" Of course, AI centers typically tend to follow electricity, where electricity is abundant or where they are able to secure. We map the countries, so that's why you see many countries in Asia where these data centers are coming. We built a map, and then the conversation was: How can you scale your service globally in a consistent manner? We built now an organization which is owned or DSV own expertise. We've brought that in-house.
We have a consistent approach, which is supported by control towers that basically, like if you think about flight controlling, you know, control towers that see what's going on. We wanna make sure that no matter whether a rack is being delivered in Zaragoza or in Sydney or in Dallas, it is being done in a consistent manner. We've gone one step further, where we've said, not all customers want similar service. They have different scenarios. Some customers just want you to deliver it, the rest they will take care. Some customers want you to bring it in, plug the racks, make sure that they are working. We have a full suite of services that we can offer.
This approach, if you sort of go back to the pre-present, the previous slide, we are using the same logic to go through the difference of verticals, looking at the customer scenarios, the needs, what are the products and service catalogs that we need to build, and within that, what are the actual tiers of service. Again, very deliberate, very disciplined, very thoughtful, in very close collaboration with the divisions. Frank Sobotka and Helmut and Maciej Walenda will talk more about this, I'm sure. Right. I promised you some data on cross-selling opportunities. When we look at this Venn diagram, we can just start with the 41%. The 41% represents the number of customers in our top portfolio that buy all three services.
The first question is that how Of course, as you can imagine, the first question will be, how can we increase this to 60 or 70 or whatever? That's, of course, our goal that we need to drive that. The important thing, and what is that it proves a very interesting thing, that customers actually want to buy across the Divisions from us. They see value already in buying all the three products from us. What we have done is actually we've kept the threshold a bit higher to say if we have meaningful share of wallet. This 41% then leads to a different conversation that, okay, we have business with 41% of the customers, but what's our share of wallet in the, in the individual products and Divisions?
That's the next conversation with the account managers, with the executives who are involved. That's again, a very data-driven exercise which is also fed into the target. We did that for the first 250 last year as we integrated. We will roll that out and increase that into the next, or to the rest of the top 650 program to make sure that that reflects in the target setting and also in the incentives. Again, going back to the wheel, we will then look at how the performance monitoring and how the incentives within the organization are set up. Are we ensuring that there is enough incentives in the organization to drive this cross-selling? Yesterday, Charles, you asked me that question and whether we align, and the answer is absolutely.
If you see the combination between Contract Logistics and Road, only 5%. Of course, we know that if cargo is sitting inside a warehouse, it actually has to move out. There's a real opportunity. Also we see that air freight and Contract Logistics actually are very natural complements. Air freight and Road, logically, if product arrives, it needs to go. What we are doing is really making sure, coming back to the point of transparency, that our organization and our sales organization understands it's then reflected in the pipeline. Do we see this in the pipeline? Who's driving that? The conversation becomes much more richer. Yes, you have a large share of business in Air & Sea, as an example, but what about, you know, Road and Contract Logistics?
That's why we wanna make sure that we capture and we mine our customer relationships to really drive this. Right. You've probably been waiting for this slide. I thought I'll save it for the last because you probably won't wanna hear anything else. No. I think it's a statement to the customer approach, and I would also absolutely like to acknowledge the efforts of all the senior management, you know, led by Jens himself and everybody in the GEC, to really be in front of the customers in the first initial phase when we started and, you know, after. In the first when we started in the process, we had integrated. We looked at the largest accounts. We had segmented right on day 1. We had assigned the account managers, again, following the best athlete principle.
Sometimes we had both the account managers in a very transparent manner, explaining to the customer that, "Look, only one of us will lead, but we wanna make sure that you understand that this is a fair and transparent process and to give continuity." We were in front of the customers in the first 30, 60. We had real milestones, tracking whether those meetings had been done, whether they were virtual, whether it was in person. Everybody down from senior management had their accounts that had been mapped out, we really followed up to make sure that that was actually done. We tracked the first 60-day intact, first 90 days, to make sure that initial period of anxiety, apprehension that customers might feel that they didn't feel so that they didn't miss a beat in dealing with DSV.
Of course, the numbers then tell the story that we have managed to retain 99% of our largest global customers. Our NPS scores have been solid across the divisions, which is also a real strong testimony to all our organizations all over the world who are doing their best to make sure that we service our customers. Of course, DSV's legacy is built on operational excellence, and it's also in our mission statement. Still, we don't take anything for granted, and we know we have to earn our keep with the customers. Right. I don't know if there's a formula for success, but this is close to what we think might drive that.
Increasing share of wallet, scaling verticals through expertise and really focused products, as I explained to you, increasing cross-selling, and of course, retention. It's not mentioned here because we believe now with the experience that is something we've understood how to do that and something that was, let's say, a question mark in the previous acquisitions. We believe that if we do this right, we can drive sustainable, above-market growth. Key takeaways, we have a different conversation. The commercial conversation has changed. We have the right seat at the table. The range of products and services we offer are unmatched. There are no gaps, obvious gaps in our product portfolio, when we sit in front of our customers.
We have proof points on customer integration and NPS, and we are super disciplined and deliberate about our commercial approach, and we have tremendous buy-in from all levels of leadership to drive the commercial agenda. I hope that gives you an idea of all the different levers that we can pull to drive organic growth. Now it is my distinct pleasure to invite Dima, the Chief Supply Chain Officer for Adidas, on stage to give you a customer perspective. Dima.
[Presentation]
Thank you very much. It is my pleasure to be here today, and I wouldn't be myself if I would not have started with a brand video. Of course, that's what we do in Adidas. Jens, Vishal, thank you for inviting. Vishal, you spoke about the importance of customers. I think the fact that DSV invited the customer on stage, that does speak to the fact. Equally for us, it's important to have strong supply chain partners, because without those, the company cannot achieve its growth ambitions. Very quickly, short introductions. My name is Dima. I'm heading global supply chain for Adidas for the last six years. Similar to your introduction, Jens, on your management team, I'm in Adidas for more than 25 years.
Yeah, my pleasure to be here. I'm going to share today the story of growth and volatility. We are enjoying very strong, you know, moments in Adidas at the moment. We are growing above the industry at the moment. Yeah, this is what we shared with capital markets in March. These are regional growth results. We're growing in all of the regions across, yeah, across the world. You could also see that this is, you know, the third consecutive year of growth. However, life is never easy. It does come with volatility. We did have internal volatility. Of course, some of you are also, you know, participating in CMD for Adidas.
You know, we had tough times three years ago when we had declines. Also if I'm showing the profit results, we also had close to breakeven, which is a, you know, a disgrace for a large company like ours, and the last years have been the years of growth. Why I'm talking about all of that, because to grow, business is expecting from us strong support from supply chain perspective. Growth is what everybody wants, but at the same time, volatility is what we all deal with. This is where we need to work with, you know, as I said at the beginning, the strong partners who can support. I'll share today what are the important parameters for us when we work with our partners.
Many of you know, and those who are in the supply chain logistics world, this is just a small example of disruptions that were hitting us in the last years. The very recent one, the Middle East war, of course, big disruption. Not long time ago, also India and Pakistan conflict. To give you, to give you an idea, Pakistan for Adidas is a very big origin to produce balls. We are the sponsor for the World Cup and of course, all of the balls are coming from us. Exactly at the point when the war or the conflict between Pakistan and India started, we had our CFS stations or origin warehouses full of World Cup balls because of course we have pre-produced.
At that point in time, there was a big question, what do we do? Do we push it out into the markets or we keep it in origin? This is just the example how those disruptions impact us. I'll give a little bit of numbers from our supply chain and I will start showing what is it really important for us as a customer. On the top left side, you see the availability KPI. I'm very happy that despite all of the volatilities, we are trending very, very strong. 90% is something that we are really aspiring to, and we are there, as I said, despite the conflict and thanks to, you know, strong collaboration with our partners.
Availability, in other words, reliability is the number one parameter that we require from our partners. I'm very happy also to say that, you know, working with DSV, they absolutely support us in that availability. I also mentioned the World Cup here, 53 million balls, that's the volume that we have produced for the World Cup. Just to give you an idea, it's five times more than the normal annual number of balls. Why I'm saying five times more, because it just describes another important thing that we need from our partners. It's tough for them, but that's what we need. It's flexibility. one year, we need capacities to deliver and warehouse 10 million balls. That year, we need five times more.
For us in supply chain was a two-year project to also work with our partners to develop our supply chain in a way that we would be ready to deliver that amount of balls on time in full. Why I'm talking about balls and not jerseys, because jerseys is easy. They're very small cubic. Balls is a much bigger cubic. Unfortunately, our product managers think that some of the balls need to be transported inflated. Logistics people don't like it. Container fill rate, 93%. Why I mentioned that? Here I talk about a third important parameter for us. It's cost. Yes, we all want good P&Ls, and we all want cost efficiency.
Of course, with partners with whom, you know, we work on origin consolidation, DSV is one of our big partners to do the origin consolidation business. The container fill rate is something very, very important for us as to drive our cost efficiency. Yes, maybe right now the market with container rates, good for us, is prices are lower than they were some years ago. Especially at times when prices were very high, this container fill rate is something that is very, very important. Reliability, agility, flexibility, and cost is something that is very, very important for us as a customer when we work with our partners. To give you a glimpse of, you know, call it supply chain, 1-pager in Adidas. This is the real document, much shorter version than the internal one.
Agility, for us, consumer centricity is also equally important and innovation. Inside that you see things like supply chain planning, inbound revolution, network for the future. This is, this is all what is relevant for us at times when the world is changing and at times when company is growing, like I have described to you at the very beginning. Sorry, maybe it's a boring value chain slide, but this is to show, you know, our entire value chain and supply chain. With green, you can see where we partner with DSV. Vishal, I hope we are in this 41%, because we are, you know, doing business with you across the board. Yes, the biggest part of our business is more on the, you know, at the beginning, the upstream of our supply chain.
We have very big business in inbound logistics, as we say, and we also have very big business in origin consolidation. At the very same time, as I said, we have, we are represented across the entire value chain. I want to give you today a couple of examples. By the way, before I give those examples, I must give kudos whether you believe it or not as capital markets, but I was surprised that investor relations team did not, you know, check my presentation or align my presentation or, it's purely those examples are purely coming from me. Three examples on origin, transit, and DC operations. What is important for us and maybe some of the, you know, joint working together, and some recent examples.
Origin, as I said, DSV owns a significant share of our origin consolidation business. That's everything that happens between, you know, when we release goods from the factory until goods are on anyone's vessel. The second part is transit. That's exactly from, as we call it, from port to port. Again, here, DSV is also our very big partner with whom we work on the transit, be it ocean or air. We do both businesses. DC operations, I think it's obvious, it's clear by itself. Let's go into one by one. First origin. Things that are important for us. Cost efficiency, pool-based supply chain, and also I will give some examples of security and risk management, which becomes more and more important.
I think cost efficiency, I already gave the example of container fill rates. Any partner with whom we work, it is very, very important that they do good business in terms of how they manage the origin and how they manage their container fill rates. And that's where, again, I'm very happy to see very strong results that we have with our partner. Pool-based supply chain and Middle East crisis, that was again a very good example of agility and flexibility. When the war started, our factories kept on producing. There was no impact on them. But our entities in Dubai and Saudi Arabia and DSV is actually our both ocean and origin service provider into those markets. What happened, factories keep on producing. Demand is kind of not there.
Transit is yet unclear. We basically, over time, had to build up quite significantly and quite fast the storage capabilities and the storage capacities at our origins as to warehouse products that were produced. We were not yet able to deliver into places like Dubai or Saudi Arabia ports for known reasons. I'm very happy about, you know, how our partner and how quick the support was and how fast the ramp up was. That was a very, very good example. Another one, security and risk mitigation. Going back to my World Cup example of balls, we also had an unfortunate situation that we felt with delivering Mexican jerseys, which are partly produced in Mexico into the U.S. U.S. is the biggest market to buy those jerseys.
We know Mexico is a corrupt place, and we know Mexico is a dangerous place. What happened, our trucks were attacked. One of our trucks unfortunately disappeared. It disappeared with exactly the jersey that was yet secretive to the market. Long story short, we had to adjust very, very quickly. Again, partnership with DSV, who are doing this business for us. The road logistics from Mexico to U.S. is with DSV. They were very quick to implement solutions, special security tracking. Thank God, since then, we had no cases. Transit. Well, I think I say the obvious. We work both with forwarders and also directly with carriers.
I can compare the pros and cons, and each way has pros and cons. Okay? I wouldn't hide the fact. Working with a freight forwarding company like DSV, what we get and what is very beneficial for us as a customer is flexibility and agility. On the one hand side, I deal with one company. On the other hand side, there are very many carriers behind. Yeah. Hence, it is very important for us to have strong partnerships, and we do have a very strong partnership with DSV in the area of both ocean and air business. I think this is since many years, we are partners there. I'll go to the last point, network design and optimization.
I think this speaks, Vishal, to your point of consumer centricity, 'cause several years ago, we asked ourselves, okay, we have certain structure of our partners. We have certain network on how we deliver from very, very many places in Asia into multiple ports in U.S. We sit down with DSV, and at that time, DSV was neither doing origin business, nor ocean business into U.S. In a way, there was no commercial business at that point in time. Nevertheless, the consulting unit of DSV helped us a lot, and we were working for some time together, where the partner helped us to design and optimize our network.
Since then, and yeah, including the recent results of ocean tender, DSV is right now the biggest, largest service provider for Adidas when it comes to delivering to U.S. Not the only one, there are others, but from no business into becoming the largest. That was the example of consumer centricity. There was no benefit, direct benefit involved. Probably there was strategic intent involved. Also at that point in time, it was, you know, cost for DSV to do this work for us, but it's resulted in also increasing jointly the business together. Also, I'm very happy about how we partner up in different routing and lead time optimizations.
Couple of years ago, the whole notion of responsiveness, building a faster and more responsive supply chain was a big deal for Adidas. We partnered up with DSV on very, very many routes, where typically, you know, we delivered, I don't know, by ocean from point A to point B. Then we were again sitting together and, you know, peeling the onion. Yes, maybe the price became a little bit more expensive, but we now do road and ocean. Yes, we pay the uplift because there is no road element there, but we win two weeks, yeah, or three weeks. This is the trade-off that is very important for us. The reason I'm giving those examples because for me it's all about dialogue, and it's all about partnership, working together.
Yes, maybe a company like us is not necessarily the easiest customer because we have high demands and we also sometimes want tailored customer solutions. This is what helps for the service providers to win the business if they're offering tailored customer solutions. Last but not least, we do not have big business on contract logistics, but we do have a number of warehouses that are run by DSV. They're also not the largest, but they're still a single DC in the country where we do business. The way how we run our business in bigger countries versus smaller countries is somewhat different because we have much more resources in bigger countries and many things we do ourselves.
When I come to some smaller countries, and that is the example which I give here, you know, we are pretty happy that, you know, we don't need to deal on each and every step of supply chain, where, while DSV is taking care of contract logistics only, so managing the warehouse, but at the same time, you know, managing the inbound, connecting the dots for us, where we keep a very lean organization in the respective country. This is again, the benefit of the synergy across multiple businesses. Probably to conclude, for me the most important thing when we work with a partner is collaboration and partnership. We've been together, you know, since I could say almost 25 years, so half of your 50-year history.
You know, since the last years, we also have partner summits, partner events where we invite all of our supply chain partners. Every year, DSV has been getting one or another award. The most important one for me is, you know, the best account management, and this is what our teams decided across the board. Here I would say, it's not you judge the company when things and times are good. Happy flows, everybody can manage well. What defines for me partnership and what defines for me collaboration when things are not working all right. Let's be honest, we did have some hiccups.
We did have some challenging moments in the history of our relationships. I very well remember where back in the days, Jens personally was involved in some of those, finding resolutions and finding solutions and bringing topics to the end. My pleasure today to share examples and I'm done by now. Thank you very much. Thanks again for inviting. Hope it was meaningful for you. I think there are questions, right?
Thanks a lot. Hope you got a bit of insight into the commercial approach and our customer relationship. Now before lunch we do a quick Q&A session. Let's start. Ooh, a lot of hands already. Let's start with Ulrik over there.
Yeah. Ulrik Bak, Danske Bank. Just on the retained 99% of the largest customers through the Schenker integration, is that metric measured in volumes or gross profit? Just to be sure. Also, what's the number for the smaller segment that you outlined please?
The number represents an amount of customers. As Jens mentioned, we focus on the gross profit metric as the key one to cover. Ulrik, hopefully that answers your question. Yeah. The second part of the question, I don't have that metric at the top of my head, but we'll make sure that we get back to you on that one.
Let's take Marco up front here.
Hi, Marco Limite from Barclays. Your strategy is to grow above market growth rate. Can you give some indication about around timing? Is there an ambition for 2027 or the second half of 2026 already? If I can seek another one, how do you incentivize your local sales force to grow ahead of the market by also being diligent on pricing, so not diluting pricing while still growing above market? Thank you.
Maybe I take the second one first. On the incentive structures, we're very clear that the incentive structures incentivize gross profit, gross profit growth, in the way they are structured. There's always an element of awareness that it's the growth, the net growth that matters. That's what the incentive structure does. That ensures that what we are chasing is not unprofitable volume. Of course, gross profit growth is a function of volume growth and the margins. We wanna make sure that that is incentivized. That's how we do that. Then, I think we've in terms of the organic, I mean, the above market growth, of course, that is the, our, medium-term ambition.
We are obviously in the middle of integration and the markets, you know, obviously can be volatile. I think Michael has what we have reiterated in the guidance is what we will, we will stick to that.
I have one question here for you. The question is, where do you see technology helping deeper or broader integration between DSV and Adidas?
That's a good question. Well, Jens, we just spoke partly about it. Well, I think technology could help in very many places. For me, it's mainly the data exchange. Also, for example, in the area of ocean, having reliable ETAs, so estimated time of arrival. That's very, very important for us. At the moment, we are not happy about it. In general, it's how the industry works. Here technology could help us a lot. Purchase order management, that's another example where technology could help us a lot.
Of course, we are sometimes looking at, you know, what can we do in-house or versus what we can buy. Thanks.
Yeah. Down there.
Thank you very much. Arthur Truslove from Citi. You showed the slide that had 41% of global customers using all three divisions. Do those customers tend to deliver higher gross profit per unit, for example, in Air & Sea? Also, how would that 41% number compare with what it would've been, say, three, five years ago?
I don't have the number on hand of what it was three or five years ago, but I think the blended gross profit margin is reflected in our annual results. I think when you look at across the divisions, it sticks to that. When we look at the margin profiles in the biggest customers and in different segments, they are quite similar. Yeah. That's what I would say.
Just in front. Yeah.
Hey, it's Marc Zeck from Kepler Cheuvreux.
AI is a big topic for us, and we are looking at very many solutions. Both solutions that are offered by, you know, big companies. Solutions that are offered by classical tech, companies. But also we are looking at options where we can in-house some of the solutions. This is, to be honest, inside our company, currently the biggest debate or conversation that we're having. How much we want to buy those solutions, no matter from whom. That's not the big discussion, where we buy them from. The biggest discussion we have, what we buy as solutions versus what we develop ourselves. The answer, the more commoditized solution is, and the faster we can get benefits ourselves, the more chances we will, we will buy, we will buy.
I have one more question here, and that's also for you. There's been a lot of discussion about, you know, technology forwarders, or purely, tech-driven forwarders. Do you see Adidas, you know, moving to these AI-based tech guys, instead of using more traditional forwarders?
Well, not at the moment. I think there are multiple factors. One thing is technology-driven forwarding, at the same time, for us, as I said, the years of reliability, the speed of service, the quality of service, but also partnership. We are a big company, and for us, stability is also very important. Especially when disruptions are happening, we need to make sure we have trusted partners. That's why at the moment, it may change in two years, but at the moment it's rather staying with those with who we are.
Yeah. Let's take Alexia Dogani down here.
Thank you. Alexia Dogani from JP Morgan. I have the same question for both, if that's okay. Amazon Supply Chain Services has now proposed a new kind of packaged offering to maximize the current infrastructure they have. I guess, for Adidas, what would you consider kind of moving to that platform? Are they a credible competitor? Similarly for Vishal, Amazon is a customer of DSV, maybe kind of under different acronym. How do you manage that customer relationship when they're publicly suggesting they want to enter your market?
To you first, maybe.
Well, it's not necessarily always easy. You mentioned Amazon. We have multiple relationships with Amazon. On the one hand side they are our tech provider. On the other hand side they are in U.S. In particular, they are our commercial customer. The third part, they have their own supply chain, and they also, while being our customer, they're trying to sell or sometimes push their supply chain services. There's no one size fits all. Yes, it's Amazons of the world, Zalandos of the world. It's always finding the right balance. Also sometimes we are also trying to have separate conversations. I know it's not easy, but in those large companies, they do, in a way, have Chinese walls between different divisions. We are trying not to mix it up.
I don't know if it answers your question.
From my side, I can just say that like any other company, Amazon looks at their own capacity, what they produce, what their own demands are. What's the strategic rationale for using own capacity or using outsourcing, or where they are strong, where they are not strong. We have tremendous strengths in Asia, in China, in a lot of places in Europe where perhaps they may not necessarily have that in the U.S. They may have in other divisions. I think it's not a positive, it's not a tension as such. Because they're growing really fast. To Dima's point, you saw the complex services that we offer in and around the world and the range of products that we offer.
There's always room for us to, you know, collaborate and grow our share of business with them, even though there may be some areas where we may compete. Given the fact that the industry is so vast, you know, given the size of the industry, there's plenty of opportunities for both companies to collaborate or, you know, compete in different markets. You know, that's how we see it. That's also playing out. You know, we still see a lot of demand on all sides from them.
Last one. Lars Heindorff.
Lars Heindorff, Nordea. For Vishal. Historically, DSV's claim to fame has been growth with the SMEs.
Growth-
With the SMEs.
Oh, growth with SMEs.
Yeah.
Yes.
This strategy, which is now a couple of years old, I think maybe two, three years old. In that process, where have you seen the biggest growth in GP coming from? I think that's a SME, I would say typically carries higher GP margins compared to some of the bigger ones.
I would say that's two things. Obviously you saw the retention rates. That's an important proof point. The other point that I made around the customer conversation having changed in we have the right seat at the table. If you're more relevant to your customers and you're solving more problems, it's a false narrative to think that larger customers that you should have your margin structure lower than the SMEs. It depends on the relationship, the leverage, and the value that you're bringing. I believe that as we go forward and as this plays out, you will see that it won't be a narrative about the SMEs have more margins.
I think we will also start to see that what we do for our large customers also has a profitable and even better profitable outcome for us because of the value that we bring. It's not a 1 versus the other. It's how you approach and how you service and how disciplined you are about the value that you're bringing, and whether you're selling with confidence. Because the commercial conversation has changed, and that's what we are trying to drive, that we are not a challenger, we are an industry leader, and we need to, with respect, with humility, sell with confidence. I think that's what we will see playing out.
I think that was the last one. Now it's time for lunch. Lunch will be served. You go down there and then across. You can see signs where to go. I just want to emphasize that in the lunch break, you have about an hour now, there will be opportunity to go over there, where Volvo is, will have a presentation. They will do two presentations, one right away and then, one after 1:00P.M. Maybe split up. Some go to lunch, some go and see this autonomous truck, and see how what that can change the Road market in the long run at a time where we are lacking drivers and so. Good lunch and back in an hour. 1:20 P.M. Getting ready for the next session.
Now we move from strategy, technology, customers, commercial into the real stuff, the operations. Where we'll go through the first one from A to B, and then we'll take the divisions one by one. To do the first presentation, we have the honor to invite Brian Ejsing on stage, who will take you through the physical network from A to B. Welcome.
Good afternoon. It was my job to keep you awake after lunch. Let's hope that it will be successful. I'm Brian Ejsing, I'm the Group COO, and been, as Jens said, 40 years in the company. He told me they have no idea how actually a shipment is moving, could you please tell them a little about this? I will do that. First, the agenda, the global disruptions. Dima just talked about it, I will elaborate a little extra on this. The shipment journey, how we perform this. two strategic terms for us, the DSV control tower and the Customs AI. A little wrap up on AI and technology.
Our mission is to keep supply chain flowing in an ever-changing world. I think that it's fair to say that was a good statement we made when we made the mission statement. The world is ever-changing and has been very demanding for us over the last years. I do not have the Indian-Pakistani war on my list as Adid as had, but in principle, we have quite a lot of disruptions over the last five years, and perhaps we could just rail on a couple of them, like the COVID-19. What happened for us when we did COVID-19, a large surge in need for warehousing space. Suddenly, all governments need to store PPE materials.
We had warehouses over here completely filled up with PPE material from the Danish state. All over the world, huge demand overnight for extra warehousing spaces which we had to apply for. 2022, the Ukrainian war, political decision for us to close out our business in Russia, is to sell it off, to stop all transport through Russia. Of course, we have to do that in conjunction with our customers, helping our customers to find other solutions. Quite a project for us to do this. In April 2025, U.S. liberated themselves for the second time and wanted to introduce tariffs to the world.
Huge surge in demand for air freight and sea freight to get products in before or to create a U-turn solution so we could get down to Mexico and up again, which was exempted. Huge change in the supply chain and a surge to get things in there. Now, here in February, we have to reverse it all again. That's going to be good fun when we have to claim back the duty which was paid. I'll come back to the Hormuz Strait later. Quite a lot of things we have to adapt to all the time. There, of course, you need a strong infrastructure and a strong organization.
She said, They have no idea how a shipment actually is traveling in the world. I'll try to do this for you. We took the shipment. It could have been an Adidas shipment, where we, in principle, move it from Shenzhen to Aarhus. It's a journey of 25,000 kilometers. It takes 30 to 40 days on the sea. Why is it not 32 days? It's something called port congestion. Perhaps the ship cannot get in when it's supposed to get in, perhaps it doesn't depart when it's supposed to depart. It is not a perfect delivery time, meaning that also the events which we publish to our customers all the way through is a very large importance to them.
I think Dimas also said that he needs the ETA. The ETA for him was super important. This is one of the reasons why, because we do not know exactly when it's supposed to be. We will pass three choke points on the way. The first thing we do here, hopefully, our customers have gone into MyDSV and have clicked on the quote and book and has received a electronic quote from us, and they can just click on the on the bottom, and then they have traced the booking. Of course, at that stage, the we all recapture the order in the platform, and we trigger some automation, automated order management. What is an automated order management?
It means that we automatically, in our systems, ask the Road division to go and pick it up. Of course, there are some risks in this. Incorrect Incoterms, yes, we talked about it, you know. Creating the perfect bookings is for us very important. Otherwise, we will have to adjust this later or a mistake follows all the way through in the chain. We will go and pick it up. It's 450 kilometers of road freight, so you can see China is a big country. We have to bring it back to our CFS station, as it's called, where we consolidate the containers. Here, of course, we have a problem. If we miss this deadline in the port, five-seven days delays before the next ships comes in, Dimas is not very happy.
This is of course, for us, very important. What we do, we activate the milestone, so our systems will all the time tell the customers and ourselves, our people, where we are in the journey. We have to perform export clearances. This is the first time we dispose this shipment to our Customs AI. I will come back later, the Customs AI and what advantages it brings to us. We activate our Customs AI to create the export custom clearance, where we will perform the export custom clearance, and we can leave China. It's important to understand for you, very many different rules in a lot of countries. It's not a unified process at all around the globe.
Here we need specialists in every single country to be able to actually get the shipment out of the country. We start our journey, the ocean freight from Yantian in South China to Port of Hamburg. It will pass, or it should have passed three chokepoints in the journey. One of them is by Singapore. It's not really a chokepoint, but it's, if you've ever been to Singapore, you will see thousands and thousands of ships lying in the bay. It's only a strait of only 2.5 km, 2.7 km wide, and it handles 30% of the global trade is passing this. We've never had narrow strait.
We really wanted to, or our shipping company really wanted to pass the Red Sea into Suez Canal, the Houthis make sure that that's not actually possible. Today we spend 10 day extra to transit it around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Here, we will have visibility all the way through. There will be pings from the ships which goes into our systems, the customers in this respect are able to see how far we are on the journey. We here also activate our DSV control tower. Adidas as an example, will be using this control tower for us. What is it the control tower do? I think this is a very clear picture. It takes out the complexity for the customers.
The customers, such as Adidas or other larger accounts, will have multiple countries to multiple co-point of contacts if they didn't have the control tower. They will have to deal with several IT systems. The customers' IT systems, we will have to deal with. A lot of customers even have various IT systems themselves. A lot of documentations, which is very much different, and there are no end-to-end visibility in general. Our control tower will consolidate all of this and create a kind of a cockpit, both for the customers but also for our operator. We will dedicate people in the control tower, which in principle are looking after all the transports globally, all three divisions on a specific customer.
They will receive this one entry point, for, let's just say for everything, but in principle it's a one point contact. What is the advantage? We believe that we have a, or we do have a leading control tower concept and footprint in our industry, recovering every mode and every geography. It For us, it provides a cost reduction of around 20% in how we operate this customer. We, and this is an example of a customer. We handle around 100,000 shipments across 35 countries for this specific country, through one single control tower system.
We are able to change the mode of transports that demanding on the demands of the customers, so we are able to create a visibility and make changes on the way, so they get able to deliver the balls to the FIFA World Cup as an example. As Adidas talked about, we perform continuous improvement. We find the continuous improvement to lower the cost for the complete supply chain for the customers. Through this, we are able to, let's just say, take the customers on a much more professional and longer journey with us. It's when you're into the control tower, it's very, very seldom that they really want to break out and use other carriers.
Our journey continues, through, from the port of Hamburg. We have to truck it up to Horsens, which is a small city on the other side of Denmark. There has to be performed here customs documents to pass the border. In reality, we activate our Customs AI once again. Let me go through what the Customs AI do for us. We are scaling the Customs AI across all markets in the world. It is a unique once file system where we reuse data from the export customs clearance into the import customs clearance. Per tradition, you would perform an export customs clearance somewhere, and you would perform an import customs somewhere, and you would not reuse the data.
You would not use machine learning and to generate the import customs clearance or the export customs clearance based on the number of transactions you've done. We have created the Customs AI, which are able to use machine learning to do this, and that is a one file system. It actually do a couple of things. First of all, it of course decrease the unit cost. It gives us a much higher, or much lower production cost, but it also increase the service quality towards the customers. They see less mistakes. Strangely enough, AI and machine learning creates less mistakes than the human, which is actually a little worrying. This is the case.
It gives both a quality a quality boost, but it also give a productivity boost. We are able to plug this system into all our systems. We are rolling it out at the moment. We are on 47% in March or after Q1. Out of 100, we will roll it out on the remaining 100%. What we've done as well is that we have created a special department or group called DSV Customs. We are extracting customs employee team members from all part of the organizations into the DSV Customs, and in this sense, create a specialism or special department which are able to perform customs worldwide, also as a broker.
We have also put some of the expected efficiency gains up, so we are able to perform an export custom clearance, which is the start, approximately 30% more efficient than we were before, based on machine learning and OCR. And on the import, up to 50-60% less manpower on the import custom clearance based on the one file system and of course, once again, machine learning. You have to remember that we perform the same custom clearance many times for the same customer. They have the same suppliers, they have the same importer. The invoice looks the same, which has to be the base documentation for the customs. It's actually an easy machine learning exercise. As we said, organic growth.
We are now developing DSV Customs also to become a broker, but also to become advisor, also to become a cockpit like the control towers, where the customers actually can get a one view on the customs facilities. Here we actually also able to deliver a type of a 4PL service. If a customer has another customer broker in Latin America, they can upload the data in and we can create this one cockpit. We feel this is a reasonably unique offering that we are bringing to market. We continue the journey after we've done the custom clearance. It goes into our logistic facility in Horsens, just on Horsens. It's a new facility, 225 2,000 sq m of warehouse space, the largest warehouse we have in DSV.
The transport center is supposed to be the largest in Europe with another 50,000 sq m of cross dock. Handles 1,200 trucks in and out per day. The customer here, let's say it's Adidas, it's not because we don't have warehousing for Adidas in Horsens. It goes into our warehouse, so seamlessly it moves from the TMS system, Tango, if we talk about the future, into our WMS system, and will be stored there until the customer actually calls it off. Eventually, he wants it delivered to Horsens or sorry, to Aarhus. We are here using, as Jesper alluded to, AI to do our transport planning, to actually tell the customer when will I arrive. Will I arrive at 10:00 A.M., 12:00 P.M., 2:00 P.M. at your facility, so the ETA will be updated.
The customer eventually, of course, will see it in the visibility platform, but also will eventually also get an invoice from us. This is of course important. We'd like to be paid for this. This is a little journey. I counted the number of updates we do, and we have between 17 and 23 updates for customers on a journey like this. Of course it demands a lot of systems talking together. It's a seamless transfer of data from the Road system into the Sea system, into the Road system, into the warehousing system, and into the Road system again, and then into the Customs, all as a background all the way through.
Quite a lot of complex data transfers and visibilities are needed for this one transport, which we confirm, and we perform millions of every single month. The essence of what I'm trying to say is that the AI, yes, the Customs AI, is just the lever, and never the solution itself. Of course, you need to have a clear strategy of what it is you want to do, how you want to perform it, where you have your infrastructure placed, and how you want to seamlessly work together. Secondly, of course, you need to have the technology and have that developed. We have an in-house development here of the AI, of the Customs AI.
We are believing, and Jens also alluded to it, we want to organize ourselves around these domains or around this technology to be able to harvest the synergies, but also to be able to create specialism and new products. All of these three things, if we can get them all to play together, that's when we create value. Just the key takeaway from me, I can see I have 26 seconds left. The global network is designed to operate through structural disruptions.
We are able to operate when it gets warm and there's panic on through the actual many stations we have and through the systems which we have set up to cater for this. We have a market-leading control tower solutions which brings a lot of value to ourselves, but also to our customers. We're actually transforming customs into a powerhouse like a couple of our competitors also will report separately. We will not report separately, but it's it's a powerhouse we believe is a very important market. Logistics remains a people business, so technology scales it. As an example, I just wanna say when it's a people business, we have 5,000 people in Middle East, which has been under scrutiny for the last for the last 2 months.
There, it really has proven to us it's not a matter of just having technology. It's actually a matter of having the right people and the right DSV DNA in place. Also Adidas was here telling us that we've done a very good job on this. This concludes my 20-minute presentation on how a journey actually goes through our systems. I hope you enjoyed it. I will now leave the podium to Frank Sobotka.
Thank you, Brian. You have taken us on a wonderful journey of Freight Forwarding. You have well explained all what we do in our business day to day, so actually I could go home. No, no. I am very pleased to stand in front of you and discuss a little bit of Air & Sea, provide an update. Yeah. The agenda, Air & Sea at glance, where we are from the major KPI perspective, market perspective, manage the uncertainty. Actually, we have a lot of discussion with our clients, and one of the top arguments is always be flexible and manage the uncertainty. Whatever comes up, find solutions, be flexible. Strategic focus areas, of course, always important matter to challenge ourselves and to aim for the better. We constantly drive a pull-through mentality, so that is one of those things. Networks and services, I think Jens alluded to.
I'll share some ideas and some updates on that. Volume and yield performance, I think this is one of the topics you are most eager to listen in. Of course, this is a constant KPI we monitor almost every day, and we are discussing in the organization and for aiming to improve those items. Last but not least, lifeline has always been systems, TMSs, typewriters. Back then, when I started my apprenticeship in freight forwarder, there was no PC, no transport management system. It was letters and typewriters and Telex machines. Telefax came. Wow, what a deal. Now we talk AI and technology. What are we now? We are happy to handle 3.7 million TUs globally on behalf of many, many different clients in all kind of segments. I think also Vishal mentioned it, how they are structured somewhat.
We are managing 2 million freight tons, air freight. This translates into permanently having 68-80 full freighter 747-8s flying around only for DSV every day, to give you a little bit of a relation. We are active in 90 countries. We have 36,000 employees, we have a huge workforce. We're very, very proud of that we managed that. We captured 850 tenders. If you compare from the legacy DSV, now integrating Schenker, we have almost doubled the tender work. Meaning in reflection that the clients do need and want us at the table. We had not expected that. I would have expected an uptick of 20%, 30%, not almost doubling. The clients kept us busy in that.
From a regional coverage, I think we have a second-to-none network. Very, very much balanced. Surely, with all the history from Europe. Europe, logically, is one of the largest areas we operate in. Please also take a look on APAC, where we generate 27% of our activity. North America, 9%. LATAM and MEA. I do believe it's a good balance. Over time, also considering the macroeconomics and the GDP trends, I would say other regions rather than the old economies such as Europe and U.S. will come on stronger. That means Asia, Southeast Asia, we have seen a lot of positive trend over there, but also LATAM, constantly increasing and MEA and African continent will be a topic for the next 10, 20, 30 years, right? This will balance out.
The good thing is we are in all these markets with a foot on ground to help our clients. One of the most delightful things in our book of business is that our share in Air & Sea almost equally strong. If you have observed the freight forwarding market in Air & Sea, you will always say there are some more ocean freight times than there's more air freight times. It's a little bit of a shift between the modes, actually. We can always well balance it, so we are not depending on one core product, right? Of course, we listen in to many, many discussions with our clients, air to ocean, preventing high cost of transportation, preventing sustainable CO2 emissions. Overall, you can see in our balances stays quite balanced. We are well-positioned from that angle.
Stronger than ever with Schenker, just some highlights. We have really now become the true global player. As I alluded to earlier, I think we have a very, very solid network in all corners of this planet Earth. Again, perhaps not covering Africa in all countries, but there are also some places you do not want to be these days. We can really work with preferred partners to cover our needs. Once the timing is right, based on the African strategy I have agreed with Jens, we will then aim for investments also in more legal entities. Market-leading positions in many, many verticals. Vishal, you have shown us that some are my needed turnaround and a downgrade when it comes to the old car manufacturers in Europe and U.S., for instance. We can well balance that out.
Meanwhile, by combining the business and technology, high tech, cloud computing, healthcare, aerospace, and also the luxury segment, which is also facing some tough time, we are able to balance out over overall volumes. The most important thing is really bundling the industry expertise, really being the partner for our clients because they want to talk luxury. They want to talk defense. Why should you talk with a defense specialist about handbags? Most probably he's not that interested in. The hyperscalers with all the speed of building up infrastructure, cloud computing, and what have you. They want to discuss their needs. We have actually pooled the best operators, the best knowledge in control towers and vertical expertise, really being geared to take those talks and understanding the needs and the growth potential in those.
More volume in the sea network by just merging both networks, and it's not finalized yet. We are seeing a huge scale in LCL. We have ramped up, I would say, the largest LCL network comparing with our peers, and we can easily compete even with the co-loaders. That's a good baseline. Is that all finished? Most probably not. I will come back to that later. Of course, stronger connection with the ocean carriers and the airlines. They are super strong partners to us. We need those. We have in both segments, core carrier programs in place, where we discuss about future, where we discuss about budget, volumes, filings, midterm, long-term deals, and also where to position certain capacity. Finally, we're in.
Back then, 15 years ago, we could hardly have those kind of strategic talks because they would say, "Listen, you with your 300,000 TEU. I wouldn't listen." Now, actually, they listen. You will see some more of that later on. Air freight demand continues to grow, not on a super high pace for now, but it's following the GDP expectation of +3%, which is actually a good outlook because there's no downfall and we can build upon increasing volumes. What are the drivers to it? If we look on it from 10,000 feet, it's predominantly high tech cloud computing, which is driving volumes up.
Still it's e-com from Asia, shifting from the Transpacific Corridor with the de minimis which have been implemented after Q1 in the U.S., shifted more into the European markets. I can also rest you assured that there's a lot of traction into Latin Americas meanwhile, or even the Middle East and Africa. The Asian traders are very clever in elaborating new markets. Overall, there had not been a major impact from the trade changes and the tax changes in U.S. While trade lane-wise, yes. The volume have tremendously gone down from Asia into U.S. while they have shifted it into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Looking in the aircraft manufacturing market, most Airbus ongoing are having a huge order book where they cannot really fulfill. There's hardly any full freighter capacity coming in.
The announcement when this new A350 should be released is postponed. Boeing is postponing the full freighter version. What does it mean? That capacity is somewhat under control for the next years. There's hardly any new full freighter coming in. Belly capacity, yes. If we talk about wide-body and passenger aircraft, then you can also put in some lower deck ULDs without any doubt. To move larger volumes need also full freighters, and this capacity is quite limited due to the fact that the manufacturers are really not gearing up or cannot satisfy the market. The capacity is under control. Remember that because next slide will tell a little different story on ocean freight. Then, of course, we have said manage the uncertainties. What's up tomorrow? Sometimes we really do not know.
Now with the Middle East crisis, where one large part of the air freight cost is fuels, fuel surcharges raising like no tomorrow. We have never seen such a peak since 1990, which is a huge driver of cost in the overall calculation. It makes 40%-50% of the overall cost and attaining a routing, depending of course, on the jet fuel price, but it has huge, huge impact. We have also seen the announcement from some airlines to downscale. Lufthansa, SAS, KLM, Air France to downscale certain routes, right? Even on passenger flights. For ocean freight, we expect a growth say of 2%, a little less compared to air freight. Still a growth, which is good. It's not really balanced everywhere, but we see certain trade patterns.
In comparison to air freight, the order book of the ocean carrier is the highest ever. In the next two, three years, you will have a deployment of almost 24% of the global existing capacity on top. There's hardly any scrapping, or if there's scrapping, it's only limited. The years to follow, if you calculate in all that, there are 35% of orders outstanding with the shipyards. 35%. That means we will most probably have a surge in capacity. We definitely need to grow off the market and keep this under balance. Structural congestion. We've discussed about that. Not everything is perfect in supply chain management. This is therefore we are in with all the tools and the flexibility, boots on grounds.
The schedule reliability from the ocean carriers sometimes reaches 55% to 60%. You will actually not sail with a container ship if you know that there's a chance of 40% to arrive on time. This is reality. On top, you have some fundamental infrastructural problem in the ocean freight ports. You see this in North America, U.S., permanent congestion. You have same congestion on the Northwest Continent port. Rotterdam, Hamburg are always congested waiting times. Especially now with the shift India subcontinent, Mediterranean ports are all saturated. We need to balance in and factor in a certain waiting period until the ship can berth, unload and load containers.
Again, Middle East carriers have stopped sailing into the final destination when it's in the crisis area, so they will most probably offload cargo in a next possible port. Again, we are there to manage the containers from that angle and truck them over with road or other service providers to the final destination. We are there to help, but it's of course, manage the uncertainty. Air & Sea focus areas. We are leading across the full service offering. What that means also now with the integration, contract logistics, very experienced in many areas of our verticals, such as the hyperscalers, technology, contract logistics, road, white glove services. We really can bundle our strengths across divisions to make it work.
We always aim for the end-to-end service portfolio and service catalog while we are then the one in the middle operating the long haul by air and ocean. I think we can create very and co-cover very complex demands. This is actually the driver also trying to expand on the individual verticals. Every vertical has a different demand. Talking about pharmaceutical, you have all the temperature-controlled GDP-compliant topics you really need to ramp up in the network. There is no failure allowed. Well, if you fail too often, then you're out most probably. Still true light to our asset-light model. Of course, we are sealing some long-term deals in our air charter program, but we are a true believer in the asset-light model. There's no reason to invest in own ships.
We actually question quite a lot, why shouldn't we deploy own vessels? Not really. It's not good for the balance sheet. Air freight, then we prefer to go out for long-term commitments and charter agreements, rather than buying an aircraft. Nobody knows. Then enhancing our air product services resilience and flexibility. We have a tiered approach when it comes to air freight. I will allude to in the next slide. Then optimizing the door-door delivery service. My best partner in servicing us together is Helmut with the Road organization. They are managing all the pickups and all the deliveries. All is almost all, not 100%, because there are some special cases where it does not work.
the aim is of course, to reach 80%-85% of coverage through our own Road network. giving the full transparency also from a system landscape. strategically investing in Tango, where we'll come back to later. This is a key approach what I try to or allude to now on air freight. We call it the three plus model. we have the global tendering of all our air freights. We are actually the only one in that size going for bid to all the airlines. it's an official tender we are running. we're awarding a business once for the summer flight schedule and one for the winter flight schedule.
It's half-year deals where you then lock in hard binding terms, hard block and soft block agreements with the airlines covering 45% of our volumes. You have a regional consolidation where certain countries and regions work closely together to convey another 30%. You always need some re-regional partners and airlines. Not every airline is covering the world. Don't forget, manage the uncertainty, be flexible. We still have 15% of spot buys, meaning the freight forwarder really getting a call saying, "Now it's urgent." Air freight is always urgent, we are told, so we're happy to convey that. That the operator really needs to reach out to the different airlines saying, "I have 500 kilos here and there. They need to be in wherever, Dallas, tomorrow.
Can you make it work?" Then you really need to deal and wheel and find solutions quick. Then where we are necessarily proud of is the AIR Direct is 10% of our volumes where we operate an own flight schedule, which is displayed on the next page here. We are actually connecting all major hot locations from a trade perspective and from a client perspective. The nice thing is, this is, we are in control of the capacity. We design how the aircrafts should connect, how they should fly. If the client comes and say, "Listen, I have shifted my buying pattern from whatever, China to Vietnam or from Vietnam into India," it takes us a couple of days, sometimes weeks to get the license so we can reposition our capacities in those markets.
This is a really good value prop to the large-sized clients who are really in need of constant sustainable capacity. Also talking with the pharmaceutical clients or aerospace and defense. We have created a hub and spoke system. You can see it for yourself. We are really connecting the dots and then there are some feeder flights into it. That's quite nice. If you like to smell jet fuel and kerosene, then it's exactly the right spot to be in. It's very dynamic. That's really a good value prop and I think Vishal, you can confirm that when talking to the clients. Strong balance in the ocean freight business we have organized in core carriers, we are pooling with a handful of our core carriers. Group number one, actually 76% of our volumes.
Why? Because we want to have the pull-through and procurement and be relevant to those carriers. We have group two where we consolidate 13% and then some niche carriers in group three, they conduct 6%. Most importantly is that we pool on the higher level with the strategic partners where we come together, can have a joint mission and the strategy understanding. Not the ones who are trying to pull our leg and stealing our business most probably, right? We are in very good control meanwhile from a very diversified landscape and legacy DSV to a more controlled capacity managed entity in Air & Sea. We have learned our lessons. Of course, it needs to be said that we know there has been a lot of consolidation in the air ocean carrier market.
Actually, there's only three relevant alliances left. We also need to make sure that we are well-positioned in all of those 3 because they have all a different service pattern. We have managed that well. Then talking about scale and leverage and procurement and what have you. Don't forget they are our partners, but we will also want to have a say on the table. These deals range from 25,000 TUs, which you could say, well, that's not really changing the needle, but it goes up to 800,000 TUs-850,000 TUs a year. If you multiply with the average U.S. dollar fee, you can well imagine how big the bill is and how big the partnership is. We are definitely a valued partner to all of those.
Of course it goes along with key account management, C-suite meetings and what have you. LCL, 72% of all our LCL shipments are ending up in own boxes. Well, is that good enough? Most probably not. We are never satisfied. I mentioned it to you guys yesterday during the dinner, I think. We will never be satisfied in DSV. We always aim for the better. Logically we have a higher ambition. It should be 80%-85%. However, you also have certain markets where are not so mature and where you unfortunately have not enough cargo to really fill it up. Therefore, we have still some good partnerships with some of the co-loaders. Nevertheless, we are running a network of 700+ services. Services means port-port, direct port-port connections.
On the globe, I think this is second to none. By integrating Schenker, we got additionally 300. We have really leveraged it up. Now, what the mission still is, both in air freight and LCL, is really going to the drawing board first way of thinking, saying is, where are our hubs? Are they still needed where they are or can be even consolidated, and I do believe we'll see some leverage also on that. We have started that mission, it's not finalized. You can well imagine that some rental contracts are taking longer to escape and what have you. Anyway, we are really planning and simulating the second to none LCL and air freight gateway setup. Gateways meaning concentration of cargo.
Of course, a very, very strong setup and value prop to all our clients utilizing the road capabilities, mainly across Europe. We also have some pockets in U.S. We have a very, very strong cooperation in Asia and Near Middle East, South Africa anyway. You could say they are one of our largest preferred partners in working closely together. We target sustainable growth and of course above the market volume growth. Reality sometimes hurt. As you can see, I got also the message or the questions last night. Doing an integration, of course, there's a lot of focus getting the mission started, getting the teams nominated, getting system landscapes, the bridges working between the system.
I would not necessarily say the focus shifts away from the client, but you have many, many other priorities and focus areas. Gladly, we have not lost any major client from the larger size accounts. We have, unfortunately, also a certain set of downtrenders, as alluded to, automotive, for instance. All our larger automotive clients are lagging volumes in general. I'm especially talking about the European and the U.S. manufacturers, just to name a few. If you compare those slides, we are always following the market, and there are some peaks, and we recover. Doing integration, there's almost a little bit more churn. Not churn, but decline in volumes. Sometimes there's also risk mitigation. For certain clients, they say, "Hey, we will not award you more business," or, "We will downscale.
We want to see how you operate the integration." This will bounce back. You can clearly see in air freight, it's, let's say, 1.5 handful of clients we also decided to divest due to yieldings. There's no real value in handling and deploying a lot of investment and human resources to handle lost files. I do believe this is the most stupid we can do. Sometimes you need to do it. You need to buy then the apple, the bitter. In the long run, it does not make sense. After negotiation, if you find out no willingness from the counterpart to say, "Okay, we'll change some tariffs and turn it positive," why not then saying, "Okay, then for the time being divorced." Then logically it might have a value impact.
Ocean freight is more diversified. We've of course worked on the client portfolio, and there are a couple of downtrenders where we have not lost the business. I do believe it's a matter of time when the business rebounds. We are actually very satisfied with our performance. Can always be better. What has satisfied? We are never satisfied in reality. We would like that. I can also say that the tender season extremely well for us. I think Jens and Vishal also mentioned. The tender ratio and the winning ratio, defense ratio is extremely well done. I'm very much looking forward to it. Then, of course, you have disruption Near Middle East impact where volumes have slowed down and so on.
There's many, many angles on the volume development as such. Yields. As explained, we need to distinguish the rate yields. Air freight including fuel as 1 part of our income stream, and then you have all the value add, where you might also say side charges. Everything else except for the rate and the fuel. The balance is a bit different. In air and ocean, you can see it for yourself. Air freight, where the largest part is actually a freight rate mark-up, fuel and rate, and then you have shy of 40% in value add, while in ocean freight is the other way around.
The outlook, of course, is that we will increase over time the value-added part, which is the most stable part because the tariffs are not, you know, a dock handling fee, customer service, customs clearance fee does not change like the air freight and the ocean freight would do. This is more the stable incoming part. We will drive that up over time. We will phase in more and more. Of course, we need to adhere and respect the existing client contracts. Over time, you can expect an increase of that. Then you have this kind of more fluctuating part of freight rates and fuels. Fuels we cannot really, you know, influence, as you can see.
Rates is of course power procurement, but also a little bit the market trend, so it's very much different from trade to trade. I think air freight, we have a very stable outlook from the future. Also taking into consideration that the capacity is not really coming into the market. Ocean freight is little trending down. I would say it will also stabilize and bottom out. If you compare the lifeline from 2008 and 2009, and actually there's still a little bit of a buffer on the ocean freight years. Again, with our strong network and our procurement teams engaged, we will be well geared and driving up the value-added part is another important topic to us. Tango.
Yes, don't forget Tango works nowadays already as a freight forwarding system. You can easily manage all air freight and auto freight bookings. We do expect leverage after some more investment in the technology. It's future-proof, it's scalable. It also allow embedding certain AI tools. It fits well in the IDP setup. I do believe this will create a value, and it gives us the possibility to create our own USP, not depending on any third vendor. Don't get me wrong, CargoWise have been a very strong partner to us, a lifeline.
I think after 15 years when the first rollout was done with CargoWise actually, perhaps also time to change a little bit gears and we are getting a good system in our hands to further develop and enhance with the knowledge of both legacy Schenker and DSV. We are creating a think tank. We will take both of the best of both. We are repositioning some investments into further enhancing Tango to really scale it and to make it even more productive than CargoWise was ever was.
At least this is the mission I got from Jens and my boss saying is, "You need to create the strongest transportation management system in A&C" I gladly had said, "Yes, yes, this is a nice challenge." There's no doubt this will create a lot of value going forward. We are handling 25% of our business nowadays on Tango, so it works, right? I'm running out of time, I know. I will speed up. AI use cases, virtual operator, customer service is in the planning, is in the making. I think, Brian, you mentioned, then we, clients are reaching out, "Where's the packing list? No, I do not want to look in MyDSV." This can all be handled in AI, providing first-hand customer service feedback.
What is actually under production is the booking via AI. We have managed 300,000 bookings, meaning receiving bookings all angles, not API, not EDI, where in total we have 55%, but still 45% is manual. These will all be directed in booking enricher, putting additional data to it, feed into TMS so that the operator does not need to do this kind of silly manual data keying in. Of course, very important, we are working on spot quotation, spot quotation enhancements. We are receiving about 3 million-3.5 million spot quotations a year. You can imagine how much persons are busy in creating spot quotations. We are deploying a tool, I can tell you this is a second to none.
We can speed up all the processes and on spot reply to clients within 30 seconds. I have a small film on that.
[Presentation]
Isn't that cool? I like it very much. The good thing is once the client accepts, we can transfer that as a booking. We have the booking in our system, here we go. Very exciting times and a good way of showcasing how AI can work. Key takeaways. Schenker. Global market position leading. We will defend that. Count on ANC. Extensive, own-controlled LCL and air freight network leveraging the needs of our clients and creating sustainable solutions. Tango integration rollout will create another very valuable USP for us in the midterm. Indeed, we have a rollout plan already. It's not signed off, I can tell it to you. There always need to be an end date to certain action we do pull through.
Use case how to embed AI to enhance and enrich the day-to-day work. Thank you very much. Now I hand over to Helmut.
Frank took you up in the sky high, deep to the sea. Let us come back to solid ground. Let's talk about Road and our division. There's a brighter tender. Even more slides I've seen. We passed 100. I make it very simple in structure for you. We are talking. I'm talking mainly about the best of two worlds. That is what is coming from the legacies, DSV and Schenker. That is all about our business case and synergies we are going for. Secondly, I'm talking about a Star by definition. That is our TMS, which is the key enabler for us in terms of harmonizing processes. It's also a key enabler for us in terms of going into new technology and AI. Let's set the scene who we are. We are the largest Road division by size and division. Look at the revenue.
Look at the 50,000 trucks we have on the road each and every day. Driving through Denmark is, for me, really a pleasure, yeah. You see in front of you blue, behind of you blue, and sometimes also crossing the bridge, and some guys are smiling here, obviously Danish. That is unbelievable. We are doing 50 million of shipments a year. We are doing that in our two products when it comes to groupage and also to direct. I will explain it then later on, what does that mean in terms of our production. I was hiding even another 50 million because we are also in the parcel business, very much in the Nordics, but also in North Africa where we are the leading force. We are doing that in more than 50 countries with more than 40,000 dedicated people.
Being a Danish company, being a Scandinavian company, that is important for us. It's sustainability, even knowing and being in a hard carbon industry. What I release now, look at not at me, look at the slide on the right side. It is the first time we are releasing our product split. We're talking about revenues on the left side. It's our direct business, which is by nature bigger in terms of the average shipment sizes. That's also why the revenue is higher. We have very good balance also on the groupage side with 45% talking about the whole portfolio. Like Frank, you see that we are a real global player, having in mind that DSV Road was very much a European player.
We are putting now our forces together, and that is also what we have done already with the Schenker legacy, extremely strong in Asia-Pacific, and it is the combined volumes we are doing in MEA and also Americas. The beauty of that is, and Frank mentioned that, we are getting critical mass without having any sales rep on the road outside of Europe because of the volumes we are getting from ANC, my biggest customer, and also contract logistics. There we are getting critical mass to offer to the market services. Just to give one example, the hyperscalers are in our portfolios, and we're doing businesses for them in all these regions, also outside Europe.
Important to say, when I was coming into these doors the very first time, a bit more than a year ago, we were sitting in the boardroom and talking about the customer portfolio, putting the customers and doing the segmentations of legacy Schenker and DSV together. It was, for me, mind-blowing. It is unbelievable on what kind of treasure we are sitting and we are having. That makes us also very positive in terms of growing outside of Europe because we have the access to the markets, and we have also access to these customers worldwide. These are the global ones. These are very much also the Europeans. They are relying on us, which are prominent in our customer base. Let's talk about the market to set the scene before we are going further into the value creation.
We are in a modest market environment. This is very clear. The growth rates in Europe are not that much exciting. That is also why our strategy is in Road to grow outside of Europe. Bigger markets, more agile markets. Yes, modest market means also excess of capacity. It means also that we have a pressure on the rates. That is the case. It is not an easy ride. At the same time, we are doing integration, moving quite big building blocks together. We have also some structural challenges when it comes to driver and their resource, which is in the meantime, very limited. Not a problem today, but it's structural, as I said, and the answer is very clear. Not always technology, but in this case, definitely technology.
The proof you see outside is this Volvo truck, which is already in the U.S., the American version, driving commercially on route in Texas. We are like DSV as an enterprise in a very fragmented market when we are talking about our and my division. We are at around 4%-5%, we have intense competition and very much also local competition. On the way forward, I see the advantage definitely on our side. It is a scale business. Size matters, it's also business where investments and the means are important on the way forward to develop. To really take an uplift and improve when it comes to AI and also technology.
I believe future will tell if I'm right, that the local ones will have also some challenges to really keep up the pace in terms of investing the means, what they need to compete with the bigger ones in our industry. Size matters, definitely. Size matters, and we are stronger than ever when we are talking about DSV growth. We are the leading European force. I mentioned it already, 4%-5% market share. That is important, and you can also look into our peers' pages and size. We are three times bigger than the second on the list. We are a European player with global reach, important. On the right side, you see what our integrated network really means and what kind of advantages we have.
It's a bit the other way around what Frank showed in terms of the size, Schenker versus DSV. DSV legacy in here, and we're talking just about the international business in Europe and the linehauls we are driving and the connections in Europe. Schenker is coming in, Schenker legacy with 2.5 times more direct departures each and every day. That is counting up to 1,200 daily linehauls to our international business. That is second to none, that is definitely what I could call a competitive advantage. Size matters, scale matters in this business. Just to give you one point, if you're bundling our volumes, that means also that we have higher departures and we coming also to the final end destination closer than everybody else, and that is also an advantage for our customers.
Quite a busy slide. What is it all about? We are building nothing else than a scalable, cost-efficient platform for growth. What is our internal motto? That is here in the bottom. We do not want to be only the biggest one. We want really to set the industry's standards. That is important to stay ahead and stay above the curve. I was talking very much about expanding our reach when it comes to other regions and markets which are more agile and more on the growth path in Americas and APAC and in MEA. A good example is the crisis in the Middle East, where Road was from one day to the other, the fallback solution. Now it's even for many flows, the number one solutions in that part of the world.
We are doing a full-service product catalog. That was, for me, important in the beginning already and setting the priorities to have a product service catalog which is ready to go. Why? Because if you're driving such a big network, it is essential that you are very clear what you are offering to the market and to our customers and what you have to produce in your production machine. That is also different to many other businesses we are producing ourselves. I still have the pictures in mind. We already have done that last year in July when I was on holiday with my family in southern France. The kids and the wife was at the beach, and I was doing and finalizing with the team our product and service catalog.
We are setting priorities, and it's not everything done in the last minute. That is important that we have in this large integration, in this big process, we are moving forward, having things under control. Control tower, and also SMEs. It is important to understand that Road is different in terms of the customer portfolio than all the other divisions. That is quite similar in, I would say, also with our peers. We have 25% big accounts, P&G accounts, which we are following worldwide, and where we have the business on the control tower set up. 75% is on SMEs. And these 25%, we are doing very much in the control towers. I'm not going into details. Brian showed that with a very good example.
It was for me also when I was driving the first time to Rotterdam, it was extremely impressive in terms of the whole infrastructure and the size of these terminals, but it was even more impressive when the team showed me what DSV is doing in the control towers. That is really different and second to none. I can tell that being with Schenker for more than 30 years, we had a lot of control towers. We had a lot of good relationships with our customers, but that we did not have in place. That is really a power and is really powerful on our way forward to grow our business in Road, but not only. On the SME part, we learned from other industries, we are not pushing our customers into the digital channel. We see they're more a pull effect.
Customers by themselves are going to our platform and keying in and getting instant quoting and getting all the services. It is very much built, 100% built on standards, but also the small and medium-sized customer can pick and choose from a menu and have standard tailor-made solution. The proof was on Monday when a friend was texting me. He's doing a bit of wine distribution in Vienna, and he said, "Helmut, thanks. pallet was from France in time delivered. I was very astonished and surprised because I was always booking on the Schenker platform. Now everything is in blue." It is all DSV now. The proof is done. This is also executed by this week. The magic comes with the two last points.
We are consolidating a big network and we are increasing efficiency and of course, increasing utilization. That is done on a very high volume. Now it comes. For the very first time, we announce that we are reducing our footprint in Road substantially. That gives us a lot of cost advantages and takes out a lot of complexity. That is all part of our business case. We are going down from 400 terminals, and we count last year May to 280 terminals. I will show you then also examples later on. What does that mean for us? I would not say it means to the world because it's in Europe, but it means a lot.
If you just have in mind that our cost base and how we are doing each and every day, our networks with the Line-Hauls and the CoDi trucks, that is massive. At the same time, Star comes in. We are harmonizing our processes. That is also coming a bit later. What also on the cost side is essential, and Jesper mentioned that already, we are decommissioning more than 25 systems. That is really a pain when we are doing the integrations on our way forward. We have to be very clear. Before we're doing the next merchant acquisitions, we have that put in place because that is then much easier. Combine one TMS with the EDP, that is doing the magic big times. I was not here in 2022 when the last Capital Markets Day was.
I think most of you, some of you, were here. I do not want to hide away. Yeah. What we promised in 2022, what we are delivering today. What I can say, I think it's very positive, not so exciting. Still, the initiatives, the strategy remains the same. It's in Road about 1 TMS. It's about one product and service catalog, which is important for the customers and how we produce our services and of course, the network. At that time, you can anyway see it is commence rollout fragmented in terms of the product and service catalog. The network was under establishment very clear because DSV Road was part of an alliance and had not an own fully fledged network.
Today, talking about Star, the equivalent of 60% of that shipment of legacy DSV is on Star. Talking about product and service catalogs, South of France, Côte d'Azur, it's done. Network, full-fledged European network. We are doing most and the best services with most of the CoDi trucks, most of the line hauls, and unmatched by each and everybody in the market. On our way, 2000, 2030, of course, we want to be full on with 100% on our TMS and Star. We further develop and innovate, of course, our service catalog. We will not stand still. Also very clear, we will optimize and right-size even further.
What is in the future, in the near future, from 400 and 280, we still think if we're doing the right things, and we will do, then there's a further optimization possible. I was asked also to explain a bit how do we distinct between our two products. We have a product organization involved like A and C has with A and C, and we have it with groupage and direct. I can only imagine if someone is listening to us outside Europe, he or she will ask, "What the hell do they mean with groupage?" Groupage is very much a European setup and a European product, and it comes because of the characteristics of our industry in Europe. It is everything between or beyond, above a parcel up to 200, 500 kilos.
We are talking about direct, part load and a full load, which is then from 2,500 kilos up to a full load. What is the characteristics of groupage? It is a network business. We are collecting and delivering each and every day hundred thousands of shipments from various consignees and delivering that to our consignees in a consolidated way. We are doing that always via terminals. In a certain terminal, infrastructure is paramount for us because it's also an entry career for most of the guys which are not in the business or only in a limited size. It is extremely difficult to build that naturally because the big global networks, they are more or less done and established.
Schenker was the last one on that size, which was on the market and not already in one of the listed companies. The magic comes also in the future with 1,500 international lines with 6,500 domestic lines we are doing. We are consolidating these volumes together, that means also that we have an advantage. We are not going anymore via hubs. We are not going anymore via platforms or however you want to call them. We are going to a very far extent direct, which is a competitive advantage also in terms of reducing our lead times, which is a benefit to the customers. That is very much coming the best of two worlds. I mentioned that from Schenker, not only.
I showed you also the legacy numbers of DSV and Schenker. What is really best of class, I would say, in our industry that is coming from the blue side, from the DSV side, when it goes to direct drops, trucks and round trips, we are doing here more than 10,000 trucks a day. Also explaining that it's a business where we are doing here from one consignor to the consignee, always on wheels. We are not touching in that product a terminal. Where it's very exciting and also in terms of much more profitable, because it's a bit complex when we are doing collections on wheels from more than one consignor and deliveries to more than one consignor. That is our LTL setup.
I promised to show you our network, and I have to excuse myself already because on the right side, that is an illustrative map. AI says it's 162 dots. You know that we have 400 dots. We will go to 280 dots. I was mentioning the 6,500 linehauls for domestic and 1,500 linehauls on international. If you would have pictured all the linehauls and all the data dots on Europe, you could not see the European map anymore. That is the size of our network we are doing each and every day. What are three strategic pillars? It is the consolidation. I mentioned that, to drive efficiency and also take out costs, right-sizing, and much nicer wording, and we have to improve and with that our ROIC.
We are controlling key infrastructure that in the future is 280 terminals. That is paramount and important for us to control really the network, but also to control what we have in customer context and providing our services. On the way forward, we will reduce our risk here also for the remote areas, and we will further outsource here some of the remote branches and terminals. We are using AI, and I'll show you afterwards an example, better matching the capacity and the volumes. The outcome of that is very clear. I have to look at my cheat sheet. Better utilization. We are reducing the fixed cost. We are lightening our balance sheet, and we are controlling 95% of our business. Synergies between the two products because overflows and some of the lines and long distances we are doing by direct.
In the future setup, AIR Direct will be responsible for setting the scene and organizing all the linehauls we are doing in terms of and also including the procurement. Our Star, one TMS systems, and I showed you in terms of the Capital Markets Day what we are doing already now. We have 20% of the shipments and the volumes currently on Star. There was a question to yesterday in terms of the countries. We are not anymore counting the countries. It is more about the transactions we're having on Star. It's 20%, and we will double that also this year. First phase, rolling out Star until 2028. We want to be on a good place, have that really done because it's so important for us.
In the next phase, we want to harvest the efficiency gains. That is where we are getting the transparency. With one systems, one file system, having an increased productivity, and finally, of course, can scale much easier than what we are doing today. For the future, it's also very clear we want to gain in terms of the productivity and whole nine yards. Star enables us having transparency through one system and database and is the foundation. We are coming to AI. When others are writing very nice white papers, we are not so good in producing white papers, yeah? Obviously it has an effect when we are looking into the share prices and the markets. What we are really good in, and we are doing this engineering each and every day.
We are producing that by ourselves with our intelligence, with our people. You see here on the right side the number of CoDi trucks that are collection and delivery trucks, which are doing the first and the last mile each and every day in each and every terminal. The color codes on the left-hand says you the trucks. It says you, when the gray color for instance, the truck has arrived at the terminal, the truck is loaded, the truck is on its way, doing collection, doing deliveries and coming back to the terminals. Cutting a long story short, we are optimizing here each and every day in each and every terminal the number of trucks. What is the aim? To having more stops and more shipments on a truck.
Having that, of course, economies of scale, getting out with a lower cost base per truck and per transaction. That is what we are doing for first and last miles, but not only. Still also having in mind, when DSV after acquiring Schenker was in Frankfurt and looking at our screen, they will see all the moving docks that we are steering the whole network. There is a lot of technology already in our division. There's a lot of technology we are already using. There's nothing we have to wait for. Of course, as I say now many times, we need Star to really utilize all the synergies and benefiting from AI and tech. We are not waiting, and I'm not repeating everything what anyway was already said by Frank. Spot quote is for us, essentially.
Just having in mind 75% SME business, yeah? C and D accounts, they are going by themselves on their platform. The easier it is on this platform, the better the utilization is and the more successfully. It's about speed and not very much about price. We have already 50%, if you're talking about former DSV portfolio on spot quoting. I don't have to tell you a lot because it was said already in terms of the EDP, what we are expecting in terms of the e-booking domain, and of course, that comes also to customer service. For us, the touchpoints with the customers are important. We are investing here also.
We are educating our people, and that is in the integration extremely important that we have here, all eyes and all hands on deck to be always with the best information when it comes to quite a complex situation and moving two companies together and working on different several systems. Coming to the end. We are the leading force when it comes to Europe with global reach. We have a scalable Star TMS platform, which enables us on our way forwards to further optimize with AI and technology. We are optimizing our network and our infrastructure, leading definitely to a structural lower cost base, which gives us, in the end of the day, what I am aiming for with my team, the best cost ratio per shipment.
We have a clear path on our way forward to be profitable and enlarge and increase our margins. Thanks for your attention. Maciej, let's talk about the engineering when it comes to contract logistics.
Good afternoon. My part is about the logistic footprint. I have a pleasure to guide you through some key takeaways and elements from the contract logistics division and what we are doing inside of those warehouses that you probably seen during the way here, and some elements that we do inside. The plan and agenda, key facts about our business, market perspective, what we are trying to create as a strategic approach and some network services, what we do to scale our operations. Finally, oft mentioned and many times mentioned, AI. Those are the main figures of our division. We are operating on 17 million sq m, massive scale globally, massive operations.
Sometimes if you imagine how many locations we have and how many square fields of football fields we have, this is really, really impressive. I have a pleasure to cooperate with over 60,000 colleagues and the teams that are running the business. Split by a region is also connected with what we were doing historically. We are a company that has grown from Europe and our share in Europe is still the largest, but we are very, very much developing in other markets, especially Schenker, but also technology sector that is just pushing our divisions forward is something that changes this shift for North America and APAC.
Verticals. It's also worth to mention that our shift in the portfolio of the product has a bit changed because we have significant share in consumer. The technology and cloud is growing significantly. When I was looking back some maybe 10 years ago, I had never thought that I will be in the middle of the technology and cloud game in logistics. We are thinking, okay, we are moving some pallets, boxes, something that is maybe very obvious. Suddenly we are in the middle of the technology game, in the middle of the cloud computing journey. This is something that we spent a lot of time on, and I will explain later how we developed this one.
Gross profit you've seen in all the reports. Those are our 20/25 numbers. This is I assume clear. Stronger than ever with Schenker. What has happened after acquisition? Main element is what I've mentioned, strengthening our position on those two markets that boosted our presence. I think it's something that we also experienced during the historical M&As. We were always getting some more business in some continents or getting some expertise, which was bringing us to the broader scale of customers, broader scale of locations. Expertise in verticals technology. This is something that we are right now spending a lot of time on. Schenker was already starting this journey, and we've boosted it with our approach.
Also something that is less on this list is the approach to the large customers. We've decided to create some sort of framework that will support those massive hyperscalers, but not only, but all the customers that are expecting the global approach, global scale and allowing them to be serviced in one way globally. If you imagine the customer that is thinking about various locations on the map, and sometimes like hyperscaler, is thinking, "Okay, we need to follow this trend," or, "We have a fantastic location," or, "We have the access to the power grid in this location." They would like to have the service immediately. It's not planning, it's not the creation of some fancy strategies. We need to be there where the customers need us.
The only element that will allow us to do it is to have a structure, to have a system, to have the one standard that will allow us to get this service up and running. About the market. It's it's a very maybe general overview how the market is shifting, saying, but this is mid-single digits, mid-single digit growth. You know how the market is developing. Contract logistics is at a very stable pace, and we are getting more and more every year demands. What is interesting is this resilience. Recently we had a very difficult moment in last two, three years that we needed to service the markets where we're impacted by various factors, recent developments in some areas around the globe.
I'm super proud by the teams that were constantly delivering the service to our customers. There were no disruptions even though that, you know, that sometimes buildings are quite obvious points to be attacked. We are supporting the customers not only from this perspective, but also warehouses are the locations that the goods are waiting for the customer. We were ready. We were providing the service continuously, and this is a huge credit also to our colleagues in the organization. Consolidation on the market is happening. It's an obvious element. Not only the M&As, but also consolidation to larger hubs. This is something that we see on the market. Finally, a very interesting topic.
I was also having some questions even today. What's going on with the trends, with the journey. The complexity of the solutions is getting more and more. Customers are moving more their needs for the production, for some services towards the companies like DSV, just to make configurations, just to have a final assembly. This is something that I see as a also element that is changing throughout the years. We enable simplicity. This is very important because there are two different views. Contract logistics is a very sophisticated service, even if you think that it's just putting the pallets on the racks. We are doing tons of transactions. We have multiple connections with our customers.
The automotive production, for example, it requires tons of messages exchanged during the course of the day to monitor the availability of the product, but also the elements that are connecting multiple stakeholders. You have production, you have customers, you have cutoffs, you have elements that are triggering the complexity. We would like to create the very simple environment for the growth of the customers. The customers can get simple setup, one system, one platform. They can do it everywhere globally and this is what the customers expect from us. This is the element that I will explore on the second half of the presentation.
We would like to grow organically with all the verticals, and we would like to fulfill those so sophisticated customer requirements. One of the key elements is to optimize the footprint. We are not necessary looking for the multiple locations and growing with the scale just for the footprint. We would like to look for the locations that will be the most effective. They will be bringing us proper ROIC, EBIT, and just to make sure that we are also consolidating all the projects under one roof. This is our strategy and, of course, next element is consolidation of the IT.
Jesper was mentioning the counting to one, and this is the journey that we also have with warehousing operations. If we have one platform, one system, and the customer can think about us as a partner that will globally cover all the needs and can easily deploy the operations anywhere in the world, this is where we wanna and we can win and this is where we are currently really heavily benefiting from this approach. Aforementioned hyperscalers, we are having hundreds literally of operations for those customers globally. Only thanks to one standard, one and also approach to the customer.
Taking care in the same way, having the same experience, having the same quality approach gives those customers confidence that if they would like to have new projects, they will give it to us. Those are extremely important elements. AI as a cherry on the top to boost our effectiveness and the element is obvious supporter for this journey. Coming back to hyperscalers. This is this very interesting sector that is growing with tech. You can call it tech, you can call it cloud. It grows an unprecedented pace and this is something that we are really proud to be a leader in the industry to support all those hyperscalers globally with the warehousing operations with very sophisticated services.
It's not just a pure storage, but also getting in touch with data centers that they do operate. This is our also huge benefit and contributor to our growth. What's important is that we do not want to focus on hyperscalers only. We have other sectors and other verticals. We have aerospace and defense. I think the obvious candidate right now. Unfortunately, and opportunities with EVs and automotive sector that is also shifting a bit recently. The main point is the connection with the customers. Contract logistics creates the stickiness. We are inside the processes. We are close. We are long-term runners.
We are creating the partnerships and it's really important for the customers that when they relocate the goods or when they put the goods in the facility of the 3PL, they are well taken care of and this is what we are focusing on. This is why we have created something that we called Global Customer Management. We have created a team of experts that is extremely focused on particular accounts. We have selected some top customers of our division that they have special care. They have teams that are responsible for implementations. There are teams responsible for engineering. There are teams responsible for even compliance and contractual aspects. Thanks to that, this team is able to understand the customer needs, address them very fast.
As you can see, something that I'm very proud of in point number two. We have at the beginning of the year, we're able to launch the 100,000 sq m facility in eight weeks. Something that in the normal contract logistics environment is sounds like a bit irrational. It was the need, it was the requirement. Thanks to those elements, system, standards and the proper customer approach, we were able to deliver the solution for our customer. The consistency. I've touched this one also before. That the customers do not want to engage in a local discussions with particular countries. The dynamics are so high that they would like to be sure that they have the same service everywhere, and this is what we provide.
This team is taking care of also visibility and global exposure and global programs that those customers do require. We are very proud that the team is working on all those elements so effectively. Here you can see the global footprint and those 17 million square meters are current state. You can see on the right side that we are trying to find the best one of those. We are reviewing the portfolio and trying to find where the synergies comes and where can we consolidate the projects under one roof.
Technology is also allowing us to do it, so we can sometimes put the goods in the much higher facilities. 15 years ago, the buildings were around 10 meters high. Now, if you put the goods in a 15 meter high warehouse, you can put more pallets, you can use the automation that has also become much more effective. All those elements are leading to the plan that I have with my team. We are basically consolidating around 2 million square meters of this 17 million square meters, just to make sure that we are generating the most effective ROIC, that we are generating the most effective EBIT results. It doesn't mean that this number will drop.
The magnitude of the growth is so fast that the lower part is showing that we will be adding a lot to the portfolio. It will be just a new, purely new demand coming from the customers. We see it right now. This project we're launching in eight weeks was just an example. I think this year we have launched, I would say hundreds of thousands of operations for multiple customers that are just adding more to our portfolio. In the same time, we need to clean up those that maybe are not contributing that well in the overall plan. Consolidation of IT. This is not only the element connected with the infrastructure and scaling down, but also to make one platform for the customers.
Jesper Riis was mentioning this one, Helmut was mentioning this one, Frank Sobotka was telling a lot about the systems. One of the elements of the M&As is obviously the additional WMS systems or warehouse management systems that are added to the entire portfolio. We would like to cut them. This is the plan. You can see that we have already decommissioned 15 systems, we are planning to decommission 25%, this is next step. We will be lowering the number of systems and also making sure that the one that will be operating for our customers will have one standard.
This will give us the another advantage that we will be able to easily link all the new technologies. I don't want to mention again AI, but this will be exactly this element, that if you have one platform, customers can benefit globally from one system, one platform and all the technologies that are happening around it. The scalability is the key, that we have one system allowing the customers to operate everywhere, and this will be the solid foundation for AI and also IT cost base. Some examples for the AI implementations that we have in contract logistics. We have autonomous drones. This is not the one, this is the transport one.
I'm also very proud of those drones because we sometimes ship the goods from our warehouse to the hospitals. Which, when you look at the business from the perspective of typical transactions, sometimes we are really saving lives with our drones. Autonomous drones are the ones that we are using globally for the inventory counting. If you can imagine those millions of square meters with the goods before, some persons were spending hours on counting each pallet, making some notes, and verifying what's there on the stock. Right now we have drones. We have deployed this in multiple locations. We send them out at night.
They are flying, counting, all the inventory and also, creating reports for the customers what's available and what's not. We have customer service management. Typical element that probably you are all using, contacting some hotlines or some contact points that is responding, "Where is my shipment? What is the status of the shipment?" The last one is very interesting, that in contract logistics we are focusing on planning of the resources. You perfectly know that in warehouse, resources are extremely important to be aligned with the volumes that are flowing. We are predicting not only based on the historical data, but also external factor, macro economical factors. What's going on with the flow of the goods?
How those goods will be required, in what way, how can we plan it more effectively? Our colleague AI is also helping us with this one significantly. Key takeaways, contract logistics is a super strong platform for organic growth. We are supporting other divisions also. You've heard the stories from Helmut and Frank, how the goods are sometimes entering our warehouses, how the goods are leaving our warehouses. Of course, we are the point where this collection or delivery is happening. Global approach to the customers that are from multiple sectors and most recent enormous development on the hyperscalers.
Consolidation, that is a must, that will bring us much more effective results and bring us much more focus on what's important and how to grow the business even further. IT streamlining, something that will make our business even more scalable and easy to access globally for our customers. Thank you very much. Now the part for Q&A.
Super. Nearly on time. We'll catch up. Again, if there's any questions online, feel free to write them. Else we start here from the scene. Lars, take the first one.
Lars Heindorff from Nordea. A question for Frank. You talked a lot about the share of LCL and the development there. Could you just give us a feel for what has been the trajectory, and in the past couple of years, and what do you expect? I mean, the share of LCL will continue to grow, given the initiatives that you have started.
We started to focus on LCL 10 years ago, operating our first CFSs and consolidating our LCL cargo and owned boxes. I think we have come a long way, and now we got a positive injection from the Schenker volumes, which almost doubled the size of all our transaction in owned boxes. It is an essential part of the ocean freight product, right? It contributes nicely to the GP because on average you can count 7-12 shipments per console box, and then you can multiply with the GP margin. It gives you a higher revenue and income stream compared to full container load. Actually, the yields are much more prominent and higher. Also, with the change in pattern of buying things, there's a lot of more small-sized shipments moving around. I think the outlook is very prominent.
It's, let us say, I don't have the exact number, but I would say it's 12%-13% of the overall ocean freight contribution. You could say it's only a minor part, but with the outlook, a promising outlook, because we will outperform on that one. It's based on the foundation of a very widespread network. If you can offer that, then you will also have a higher way of winning additional business into those boxes.
Patrick, down there.
Patrick Hussey, Goldman Sachs. Brian, with your 40 years experience, you know what's coming.
Yeah, I know what's coming.
When thinking about the disruptive potential of AI, on a scale of zero to 10, how worried or unworried are you, and why? As an add-on, if someone gave you a wonderful tech platform and unlimited CapEx budget, how long would it take to replicate DSV's physical networks? Thank you.
We have to decide what is one, what is 10. But in principle, disruption factor at this moment in time, we do not deem very high. If you say one to 10, let's give it a two, which is for me, very low. Your second part of your question was, how long term does it take to build a network? We have present in 30 countries. We have infrastructure, which is 17 million sq m, plus several CFS stations and 450 terminals, which you wanna reduce to 280. I said to you yesterday and you wanted it out here, I would have said at least 10 years it will take to build something like this, even though you had unlimited CapEx. It's just my personal guess, of course.
It is very, very difficult to build infrastructure like what we have achieved to have.
Yeah. James.
Thanks very much. It's James Hollins from BNP Paribas. Question for you, Frank. It's interesting what you were talking about, barely being able to focus on market share gains when you're focusing on integration. Did I read that right? If I did, is the market share gains already coming from H2 this year? Is it the 2027 tender season that gets a bit more exciting on that growth side? While I have you, maybe your reaction to delivering above 55% conversion ratio by 2030. Thanks.
I should start with the conversion ratio first. This is one of the leading KPIs, always have driven us to improvements. It's based, as Jens alluded to, on a framework we have developed to calculate major impacts in our business. I do believe it's somehow ambitious, but achievable, of course. We do not want to lose any of our operators where they all need to pull through and believe in it. With AI and reorganization really closing down the integration work, also consolidating all activities, driving loading factors up, we will be in a good spot to do so. Of course, the market, as such, also takes a prominent role in that. Where are the overall markets heading up?
Is there a slack season in ocean freight where the volumes even further drop, meaning also the rates even take a lower level. You have listened in to Adidas, they are benefiting from relatively low rates. They might even drop further. It's a bit of the balance we need to find between VAS income and the freight rate markup. I do believe we are well geared to pull through and to achieve the 55% by 2030. The first question you had was on the market shares. I think always in an integration, you run with the job first, really getting the teams combined to create one set of service offering, which takes a lot of energy from all the managers and all involved parties.
Of course, the competitors necessarily are also shouting, "Hoorah, now hunt for the business of DSV." Yeah. Okay. We have seen this and observed this. Luckily, we could, in the highest degree, defend our business. Of course, there are certain downtrends, as I mentioned. Also, we have divested in certain business. I do believe this will turn into positive soon. I have a very good outlook, and I'm not being arrogant, but, you know, I have a very strong team in place. It's very strong service catalog, a very strong executional level, which then in the end counts when we are faced with disruptions like the Near Middle East crisis and what have you. We'll do it.
Yeah. Next.
Thank you very much. Cristian Nedelcu from UBS. Can I ask you, Frank, two quick ones? In the first quarter, the gross profit is up DKK 1.7 billion year-over-year. There's some synergies. The EBIT is down DKK 300 million year-over-year. Can you explain a bit more why do we have this development? Second, if you allow me, the gross profit is around DKK 34 billion-DKK 35 billion this year. How do you think about 2030? Where is that number? You talked about growing VAS. Can you elaborate a bit more, please?
In all the integration work, you will have a certain delay in realizing the cost savings. I think, in the Q1 reporting, you got all the transparency, what has happened and what not in Q1. We are on a good mission of integration. I think the Air & Sea division also proved that we are running a little bit in front of our own initial plans. We are reducing and adjusting our cost structure, while there's always a little delay until it really drops, and it's been obvious in the P&L. Therefore, I think Somebody talked about backloaded. I would not say backloaded, it will come over the year because we are executing on a synergy plan. I have no doubts that we'll meet our own target. Of course, market is also out there.
As I alluded to, Near Middle East crisis, volumes are down. Near Middle East, all of a sudden, you have planned with and so on and so. There are many, many angles to the business, it's not that black and white. Overall, we can balance it out, we have still a mission to accomplish during the year.
I'm quite positive and have a good outlook.
A question to you, Helmut, coming from an About consolidation network, what risk of customer losses should we assume from reducing the network by almost a third?
Look, that is a difficult question, yeah. Of course, we all wish for the best and that we are not losing customers. What Frank was already mentioned and that we are seeing not only in AMC that our existing customer base is down-trending, yeah. It's not even about losing customers. Also being very frank here, this year, especially in the first couple of months when we were starting on a certain peak, especially with the big countries, it was not a walk in the park, yeah. We all know, and we have the same calendar, but this winter was stronger than ever. We know from the business that strong winters, especially in the groupage network, coming in with not a high demand.
Volumes are lower. In big winter times, you have, of course, delays in terms of many parts of the network. For instance, France, we closed for a couple of days during the whole day, the highways. That has an impact on us. Luckily in France, we were not going live. We were just last month going live, but we were going live in January in Germany. That is our single biggest country organization with 43 terminals. That was a big challenge.
Of course, on the way forward, if you're doing these big steps, then there will be the one or other customers which says, "Maybe I'm going somewhere else." We are deeply connecting the networks and moving terminals and also rolling out new systems, yeah. That we cannot avoid, but we are doing everything. Of course, we are learning on our way forward each and every day. For instance, I didn't mention that, I've mentioned it now, we were going live with Star in the U.K. in very big terminals on Monday, and things are working out quite well. Yeah.
Good to hear. Ulrik?
Yeah. Ulrik Bak, Danske Bank. Just a question on the footprint reduction in Road. What will that mean for your invested capital? If I may also for contract logistics, you also mentioned something about consolidating but also adding some new ones. So what will the net impact be there?
What I can tell you now for roads, that is according to the business case, when we are going down from 400 and 280 terminals, I would say being careful now, but that has additional potential. You have seen our numbers in Q1, and you will see very soon when Michael is coming on the stage, what we have on our figures in terms of the conversion rate and the whole nine yards, and then you can do your math.
From contract logistics side, you can see also the development of the ROIC parameters that are just showing how the consolidation is bringing some effects compared to last year and the results. This is the trend, I would say.
Kristian?
Thank you. I think it's a question for all the gentlemen. Sorry, Kristian Godiksen , SEB. Just on you all mentioned all these efficiency gains from AI. Just wondering on your comfortable level on not this ending up to clients, both from your side and the competitors in terms of pricing.
What was the last one? Hardly to hear on, 'cause the acoustics.
All the AI efficiency gains, just the worry on that not being passed on pricing to customers.
I can.
You can start, Brian.
I can answer this. Of course, if everybody were able to do this at the same pace and have the same advantages, through competitiveness, would be taken away. I think we explained earlier today that we feel that we're in reasonably better conditions than some of our competitors to be able to harvest these gains quicker. At this moment in time, I would say that we are reasonably comfortable that there will not be a large erosion in the turnover or the GP. I will just tip into what Helmut said before. Those, the third of the terminals which are going from 400 and something to 280 is largely duplicated terminals.
Meaning in principle that we're serving the same customer base from the same from this terminal. It's it is not that we are going away from some areas. I would have said that the question is that we do not believe that a lot of customers will leave because of the reduction.
The last one. Take it there. Yeah.
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. A two-parter for Helmut, please. You talked in your presentation about the advantage of scale in road a couple of times. Now, up until now, air has been the main consolidation story, M&A story for DSV. Is there an opportunity in road? Is there a lot that's worth buying in this fragmented market, or does your growth have to be more organic? Second part of the question, you talked about a 35% plus conversion margin for 2030. There's clearly an underlying business mix change between full truckload, LTL, and groupage. What does that feel like on an EBIT margin basis, please?
The second one is easy to answer. It's what I already answered, yeah. You know our first Q1 results, and you will hear very soon from Michael what our conversion rate will look like. Jens then anyway mentioned that we're going towards 35%, so you can do your math. What was the first one? The acoustics from my side is very bad.
M&A in room.
M&A opportunities.
Anything worth buying to.
Look, Jens also tackled that when he said, it is of course, our ambition. That is the muscle DSV has trained for many, many years, go back in history. I think it's an outcome and very logical that the Schenker deal will not, what I know, not be the last one. I mentioned that also that counts for DSV, but also on the Road division. We are talking about market leading in Europe and have a market share of 4%-5%, yeah. There are not a lot big ones anymore out there, yeah. I do not know what the strategy of Jens and the group is, and I cannot answer that. Definitely, and I mentioned it in various times in my presentation, we need Star.
We need one TMS, yeah, where we have the transparency, where we get the productivity, and then we can scale, yeah. What we are doing now is heavy lifting, yeah.
I think we'll stop there. A short break. We'll be back, 35. Some refreshments over there.
Thank you.
Yes. Sorry. We have to start off again. I need a Something. It's 5 :30P.M . We need to start again. My next job. Hello. It's time now. Guys, get back. Now we're up for the final presentation on finance before we of course go to closing remarks. Of course there will be some opportunities afterwards, half an hour where you can of course also have a chit-chat with the presenters who will be here. Now we will do the financing stuff. To that, I would like to introduce our CFO Michael Ebbe on stage. Michael.
That was a quick video this time. Okay. Thank you. Good to see you all again, you've made it so far. This is the last presentation before, as Stig Frederiksen mentioned, there will be a wrap-up and an opportunity to do some networking. The agenda for today is just a little bit about how we are organized in finance, in global finance. Also now there have been a lot of talks in AI, we are also working with AI in finance organization. A little bit of an update on the Schenker synergies, followed by capital allocation, the financial targets which we also announced this morning. You can say Jens Lund already touched a little bit on earlier today.
It's good that you are still hanging in for the last full presentation here. The role of finance within DSV is, we have four main pillars that we work on. You have heard about us talking about transparency. Transparency is crucial for us and to support the business to be able to run the business. As you can imagine, if you remember the slide earlier today with a number of TMSes that Jesper talked about, a number of ERP systems. This is hard work, especially during an integration. We also have a key role to play during the M&A where we support the business as well.
Obviously, simultaneously, we're working on our own organization to make sure that we have the best efficient, high quality finance operations, because that is also what we need to do. We also need to be best in class in finance, equally as our business is best in class on the respective divisions. Finance, we are around 5,000 people today. We are you can say that we are in reality organized in a domain structure, meaning that it's a full finance team reporting into me, and then we have split the different tasks in different levels. You can say, so we have a global business services where all our main stream processes are handled. We have some regional teams and some local teams.
That means also that we are used to thinking about this enterprise level. Whenever we do changes, in our GBS, our shared service centers, then it's immediately implemented throughout the globe. We've also learned how to count to one. Jesper mentioned that earlier today. It's clear it's where we want to be. We are not quite there yet on the Schenker integration. As Jesper Riis also mentioned, count to one is the foundation for us to deliver the transparency, to deliver the efficiency, and also to be ready to scale. If we do not do that, then we are not able to scale, and you heard Jens talk about M&A, which is still part of our agenda. Of course, we have been talking a lot about AI today.
I also want to touch upon a case that we have in finance. We were actually started with AI, as Jesper mentioned many years ago. I think we were Guinea pig is maybe a wrong word, but we volunteered because we have a lot of flows that are central, so we are obviously a good showcase to start with, and we volunteered to that. This is what we call our AI Factory. I'll have a small deep dive in a couple of minutes. Of course, we also use it, you can say, through the forecasting model. We have some claims handling. We are using it to a certain extent. If you look at where we use it the most, this is when we talk about AI Factory.
This is a little bit similar to what we were talking about on the Customs case. This is actually the front runner for Customs. I don't have a smart video to show. I think we had one back in the days. The process is absolutely similar to what was explained earlier today. We get a lot of input on the left-hand side here. We get a lot of input that can be PDF invoices, that can be electronic invoices, XML files and whatsoever. We read the fields, or the AI read the fields to make sure are they complete, should they be updated, validated. They are converted into our systems, enabling us to actually do the booking in the finance system.
If the accruals is done right from the operation, then it's also automatically booked and sent to payment proposals. It's a very efficient structure. We of course monitor to make sure that we keep the motivation and also to make sure that we deliver on the synergy cases, again, to be the most efficient finance organization globally. Currently, our solution handles 900,000 invoices per month, so it's a huge volume that comes in via this one.
We have managed to improve, an improvement, which you can say to the right-hand side here, of 150% to around 500 invoices to more than 1,200 invoices with the use of our tool, the EDP, that Jesper and his team has that we have built and developed together. I think there was also a comment or question earlier today, whether it's a proven concept that we are working with or whether it's just trial and error. I guess this shows that it is actually a proven concept that we can use in DSV already now. As you have read throughout the day or heard throughout the day, the divisions, they're also embarking heavily on the AI.
Saskia started also today and say, how have we, and together with Jens, how have we started the Schenker integration? We've actually moved ahead back from then, where we announced the leadership, where we did the customer segmentation, and so forth. It's already now one year ago. We have in Q1 around 45% of the integration completed, the legal integration. As you are aware, we have had the first of April since then, first of May. Now we are well above 50. We are on track to complete the integration by the end of this year, as we have also stated earlier. That also means that for the financials, we will have full year impact in 2027. You can see the phasing off here.
I guess, you're used to reading numbers, so I will not repeat all of those. We've also talked a little about the M&A. Again, you can say the way that we organized our infrastructure, our scalability and our simplicity, that is one of the key foundations for us being able to do the M&A. When we talk about the margins and what happens and why can't we see the improvements yet and stuff like that, I think it's important to highlight. We believe we follow the track as always. We follow the plan. We know what we are doing. If you look, start here from the left-hand side, I could actually have taken even further back, but I've just started in 2015 with the UTi integration.
As you would notice in 2015, this is just an example on the EBIT margin of 6%. UTi Worldwide, we acquired them in January. That means that 2016, as always, I think Jens Lund also talked a little bit about that, in order to create value, of course, we need to be more efficient than the one that we acquire. We always go in with the aim to lift the margin of the acquired business to DSV levels. What happens here is after some very hard work in 2016, we actually managed to get the synergy harvested, to realize, to be more productive, you come out on the other side. Not only at the level we went in with, not only on the acquired business, but higher on the total business.
We truly believe this economic scale, we truly believe in our model that we are able to deliver the synergies and the productivity gains that we promise you guys, and latest with the DKK 9 billion of Schenker synergies. That's it on that one. Another housekeeping slide here. We have had, I think it was done even before I started or close to when I started, when we sat down and made a capital allocation policy. It has served us very well throughout many years. Of course, we stick true to that. That means that we were aiming for a gearing ratio of around 2.0, that net interest bank debt compared to EBITDA. In these cases where we are outside that aims target, then we pay back debt.
If we are inside, we look at value-creating investments, M&A or efficiencies gains. If we do not have any, you could say, immediate plans for that, then we allocate the money back to you guys, to our shareholders. You have helped us many times when we do the M&A and when we do share capital increases, which of course we are very happy to that you have been doing and supporting us in that way. Then we work on the business cases and deliver on those. That is how it works. Then we do not have any apparent investments, then we restart the share buybacks. The dividend policy is also, you can read that also yourselves. It is around 10% of the net profit that we aim for and have done so.
Of course, on the right-hand side, you see how we have distributed the capital. You will notice that in 2025 and 2026, there's not much of the black box there, and that's because we did the Schenker integration. Of course, we need to, you could say, use the cash to pay for that. When we are done and inside our range, of course, we will start the share buybacks. Yeah. Also happy that Frank mentioned it as well, you can see it's really embedded, when we say what we do, we do what we say. Frank touched upon the asset-light model. This is a model that has served us very well throughout many years, both when the economic was not that well, but also when the economic environment were very nice.
It's a scalable solutions when we have asset light. We mean that flexibility is actually very good for us, and that is embedded in everything what we do today. There was a question earlier around the capital employed also to 2030. It's more than four and 4.5 years ahead, we have had kind of a made the plan here, you will notice that the capital employed will decline slightly. When you see that number, remember that is including goodwill, which do not decline but stays as is. Another thing of that's just worth mentioning here, we have been over the last year, been talking about some Schenker properties, we have mentioned a number of around EUR 2 billion.
I think when you do the modeling in your, in your sheets, it's very important for us to notice that the majority of those is facilities that we actually are using. We are working to implement the asset light model, meaning that we will dispose the building, and then we will do the leaseback. That is around 75% of the current portfolio. The remaining 25, of course, we can use that to pay off debt, obviously. I think that's. I also received a question earlier about the net working capital. We have said for some years, at least a couple of years, our aim is to have a net working capital lowest possible, obviously, but realistically, around 2%-3% long term.
There can be, I know some focus very much on the quarterly development. There can be some fluctuations if the rates rapidly declines or rapidly increases. Overall, we are in a good place, and we are in control of our net working capital. That's the long-term aim that we work with here. We have also, what we said, truly believe ourselves, a resilient financial structure. It's way back when we had a lot of bank debt at some point in time. It was not that popular to have that. At the same time, it showed that we had the opportunity to issue some bonds. That has really served us well.
We have had the money at a low, very low interest rate for many years, so we've been able to use the cash for the acquisitions and also investments, obviously. I think it's also important here to mention, because we've just been upgraded from one of our rating agencies, Standard & Poor's. They removed the negative outlook on our A- rating, and they did that yesterday. If you have not noticed it, then now I can tell you that that is, of course, a positive thing for us.
We also to have our financial flexibility, we also have good relationship with the banks as we have with the rating agencies, and so we have a lot of more than EUR 1 billion that is committed facilities, so we have the needed flexibility in terms of funding and financing to do our business. Sustainability. I think we, even with the acquisition of Schenker last year, we are very committed still as for legacy Schenker to our sustainability performance and our targets. We have signed up for SBTi science-based targets. We have committed to net zero in 2050. It's a little bit ahead. We also have committed to midterm targets in 2030, 50% reduction on Scope one and two, and 30% reduction on Scope three.
Our business means that the majority of our emissions is, they come from Scope three. If you look at the bottom of this slide, you will notice some of the ratings that we have for the sustainability rating agencies. Maybe you're not that familiar with it, but if you go in and look at it, you will see that we're actually on top of all of them, if you compare to other of our colleagues in the industry. Of course, we are proud of that, and we are still committed to do that. Financial targets. I think this is something that you're very interested in, and it can be that you have some few questions. Of course, you can read the slide.
There's a couple of things that I do believe is very, very important for me to mention here. Firstly, I think in DSV, we always set ambitious targets for ourselves. Of course, I think it was also mentioned earlier today, it also need to be achievable. If we want to stay competitive and have committed people that work a certain part of to deliver, of course, the targets need to be achievable. That is what we have done here. You'll also notice that the targets per division is higher than they were at our last targets, which we withdraw in connection with the Schenker acquisition, in order for us to get familiar with the Schenker business, in order to be able to put up new targets.
Each of the divisions has higher targets today than on the old financial targets. someone could say, "But Michael, 45 is 45." I couldn't agree more about that. now the business split is different. Back in the days, our Air & Sea division with Frank, he had nearly 75% of the total EBIT of the group. With the acquisition of Schenker, we got more diversified. We got a bigger contract logistics and a bigger Road division, which per default have a lower conversion ratio due to a little bit less asset life than Frank business areas. I think that's very, very important to notice on that one. another thing which is new, or it's a reinstatement of the ROIC per division. Last time we had targets, it was a combined.
Before that, way back when, maybe Lars remember that, we actually had ROIC targets per division. We have re-implemented the ROIC target per division. Here also to make it clear that the contract logistics division, there is a little bit more capital employed in that business area, and hence it would not be fair to have a margin, to have a ROIC above 20%. This is our new targets, which is ambitious, achievable, and we are committed to deliver on. You heard my good colleagues in the GEC team, they're very committed. Also, so a question to Frank, and he said, "Yes, of course, we have the plans in place, and we will deliver on." Again, it is, you can say ambitious targets. We believe that they are achievable.
Another thing which also is important for me to highlight on this slide, I know that everybody here around knows it, but sometimes it seems that people have a tendency to forget it. The conversion ratio consists of two parts, right? one part GP and one part EBIT. Of course, in order to deliver on the targets, we also need to have a sustainable business and a, you could say, GP that we have to work with. Otherwise, it does not make sense. In our modeling, and you have your own models, but in our modeling, in order to come to these numbers. We have built in a GDP growth of around 3%.
This is, I think Jens, he showed a slide earlier today where you saw that long term, we do follow, the cargo do follow, the GDP growth. That's why we have done that. Of course, if that do not pan out as expected, then of course we have to look at again. Currently, this is the assumption for our targets that we have. For the tax rate, just also another housekeeping information here. The tax rate that we have right now is, as I remember, around 28%. Tax rate will always be impacted on the integration. There's a lot of cost that is not deductible, so of course, our tax rate will be higher.
It's a reflection of the speed that we have done the integration with, that we have a high tax rate. Our long-term expectations is that we have a normalized tax rate of around 25% going forward. This is on the combined business that we have. If we take a moment just to go through the financial targets for the division. Here, if you look at Air & Sea, GDP growth, we talk about that. Of course, we also, like Vishal Sharma mentioned, work very hard to deliver profitable market share gains. It's not the volume game for us. We need to grow absolute GP. Then the absolute GP, we need to convert to EBIT by being most productive and efficient in the industry.
We need to convert that into cash so we can go back to our capital allocation model, and we follow that, and then we do the pay off debts, value-creating investments or share buybacks. I think that the building blocks you have seen those. Frank went through some of the cases, Schenker integration, LCL network, and also some of the AI cases that he feels committed to deliver on that one. Same if we go to Road. Also here, as said before, we need to have some GP to work with to deliver on those targets, obviously. Also here, again, market share gains, which is the plan for us to get back in.
Helmut talked about STAR implementation, AI implementation, and that's of course the building blocks for us to deliver on that one above 35% for Helmut. Someone would say it's a high number, but we know that we can do it. We expect that we can do it. We have good plans in place, and of course, that's also what is reflected in this one. For contract logistics, we also expect growth on GP, profitable market share gains, and all the synergies of course for Schenker, the consolidation, and also AI to a less extent than the other divisions here.
The numbers that most likely you will ask me about in a second that was put on earlier today, you have to bear in mind that the consolidation part is bigger in contract logistics and Road than Air & Sea and vice versa for that. I think we have a good plan. We have ambitious targets on our conversion ratio. We have delivered well since 2016. I think Jens mentioned that we could go even further back. It's still impressive. We have delivered a CAGR of 16% on average from 2016 to 2025. Of course, we expect that we will be back on track, and we have also, in connection with the Schenker integration, we talked about being EPS accretive in 2026, and we truly believe that we will be able to be there on that one.
The key takeaways here, Schenker synergies, we are on track. We are committed to deliver, conclude the integrational work in the end of 2026. Additional productivity gains of around DKK 9 billion in 2030. We have continued to have our solid capital structure in place. We remain true to our capital allocation policy. The targets that we have set, I think we're in reality much more transparent than many of our competitors when we lean out and have these targets here. They are industry-leading, they are again ambitious but achievable. We are on track to continue to deliver our double-digit EPS growth. I think that was my key takeaways. I think we caught up maybe a little bit on the agenda.
I know that we were slightly behind before.
Thanks for that, Michael.
Welcome.
Now we can do the final Q&A session.
At least the official one.
Cedar?
Thanks, Michael. Just a confirmation. If I take the invested capital number, I take a 20% return, and then I look at a 45% conversion margin. Back of the envelope maps, I'm sort of backing out about 3% annualized growth in GP to 2030, which is in line with GDP, and you're talking about share gains. Maybe you could just give us a bit of color in terms of how you think about the yield part of that equation, particularly with your team talking about more value-add services, et cetera.
Yeah.
Just so we can sort of bridge why the CAGR in GB, GP is not ahead of the sort of GDP picture.
Yeah. I think, when we talk about the yield, I know that we have mentioned some numbers back in the days, and that has not served us that well. I think for the yield part, obviously, Frank and the team work every day to have as high yields as possible. We are implementing the Schenker business, legacy Schenker business into the DSV business. I believe that in our forecast models here, that we have more or less stable yields throughout the period. We don't really know how that will pan out. We do know that we work on having the best yield that we can. The prices are given in a competitive environment, it has also to do that we need to produce everything, you could say efficiently.
We have more or less stable yields. I think that's what we will stick to right now.
Yeah. Let's see. Go for it, sir.
Thank you. Kristian Godiksen from SEB. Thank you for the ROIC targets on divisional level. A question on why is that not higher for Air & Sea compared to Road? I guess based on both the current level of the ROIC and also the efficiency gains coming into Air & Sea. Then obviously also the significantly higher incremental ROIC in that business. Obviously aware both targets are open-end then.
Yeah.
I'm surprised by that.
Yeah. I think one thing that you have to bear in mind, when you look at the acquisitions that we have done, which predominantly has been in Air & Sea, we have a lot of goodwill deployed in the Air & Sea division. That is where we have the biggest portion of the goodwill allocated. Of course, that's what you can call a drag that we have to work with. That's why we have it as we have.
We take Lars first, yeah.
Lars Heindorff, Nordea. A follow-up on some of the earlier ones on the invested capital. You have a comment on one of your slides that you expect to reduce invested capital by, I think it was DKK 3 billion in Road and contract logistics. Will there be something beyond the plan, which is to the consolidation in Road and to sell off some of the, those assets in Schenker? Also, will there be something more in Air & Sea as well?
I'm so happy that we put them up, and immediately you start asking what's more to come. We have 4.5 years to the 2030 target, and I think that we will start working on the things that we have right now on our working table. I know there was also a question earlier, how do you deal with all these projects that we have on hand? I think in order for us to stay firm to deliver, I think we start work with what we have and the things that we have communicated right now on the ROIC per division, on the conversion ratio per division, synergies of Schenker, AI that we have, and consolidation of the network. I think that's what we will work with for now.
Of course, as time go by, we might be able to help a little bit more to get the last, you can say, fields in your Excel sheet, filled out. Right now, we stick to what we have. Yeah. I hope it's okay.
We can take Christian down there.
Christian Nedelcu. Yes. Could I kind of ask you the DKK 6 and the DKK 3 billion incremental? Can I convince you to commit to a 2027 number? How should we think about the realization of that?
I think Jens also touched a little bit on it, and I think you can also hear it during the divisional presentation. We have to do the work first on the different initiatives, and then we can harvest the synergies. If we work fast and hard, the synergies will come faster and to the level that we have disclosed right now. It's clear that for the phasing part, we start with the Schenker synergies in full year 2027, sorry, and the additional ones coming into to 2026. We will slowly start to have the synergies of the AI and the consolidation from 2027 and onwards. There was also a slide from Helmut about the Star integration, where you can also follow that track.
I think for 2026 and 2027, the biggest part will be the Schenker integration. You have to model it in, I guess, somehow linear for the AI, from 26, from 27, not necessarily Q1. Of course, we need to start seeing some impact on that one as well in 27.
One question here for you, Michael, online, about the share buyback program. How comfortable are you and about when to start a new share buyback program?
It's a very good question. Believe me, I would like to go there as fast as I can. It's, it's of course a combination, because we have the rating agencies, we have issued a lot of bonds. We have a good relationship both with our bondholders but also with our shareholders, so it's a matter of finding the right balance. Of course, it's good that we now have removed the negative outlook from Standard & Poor's. It's positive for us. Then we will follow as from next quarter our normal way of thinking, meaning then we will look at the quarter that has just passed. We look at the projected cash flow for the next couple of quarters, and then we will assess when we can start to do a share buyback.
I'm maybe equally as impatient as you guys are. Maybe.
First, yeah?
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. It's a very related question to the share buyback, but from a slightly different angle. You haven't changed your leverage target of less than two times, which has been in place for several years. Since then, you have become a higher margin company. You've become a much larger company through the acquisitions of even Panalpina and now DB Schenker. Would it be right to think about increasing that leverage target at some point?
It's a very good question. Now we started, based on the relations and the dialogue that we have with the rating agencies, we have said all along that we will work with them. It's clear that when we talk to the rating agencies, you have a very fair point, because we believe that our business model, we are now diversified. We are not only depending on Air & Sea, we have diversified from a geographical point of view. In reality, if the rating agencies, they follow their model to the point, of course, not of course, but they will be able to have a higher target. Right now, we stick with the two, it's a constant dialogue that we have with the rating agencies.
Of course, what's important for us is also that we have the trust from them. As long as we can show a way how we can be deleveraged, then it can be that maybe we can have a quarter or two where we have more or less stable. Again, it's very important for us that we can show that we have everything under control, which I do believe that we have. We are working on it.
Thank you very much. Arthur from Citi. two, if I can please. The first one I had was around the gross profit yields again. I just wondered if you could say where the Schenker gross profit per unit yields are relative to those of the DSV mothership. And is there any good reason why you can't converge those? Second question, obviously, really impressive long-term targets today. But on a sort of shorter term basis, it sort of looks like you've got another sort of DKK 300 million-DKK 400 million of synergies in Q2 versus Q1. Does that sort of point to sort of DKK 6 billion of EBIT or slightly more in the second quarter? Thank you.
Yes. Let's take the last question first. You're right. If you look at our guidance, we guide between DKK 23 billion to DKK 25.5 billion. We have delivered DKK 4.9 billion in Q1. That means then on average, for the remaining three quarters, we need to have DKK 6 billion on EBIT. You're right, the significant part of that should of course come from the synergies. That's very well received, and we are perfectly aware and working on it. On the yield question, I think we have said over the years that legacy Schenker yields were roughly 30% lower than the DSV yields. We've also said that we work a little bit differently from what the legacy Schenker.
We measure it in our CargoWise One. We measure, we focus, we have the value add share and the freight pass-through share. We discuss it with the business, with Frank, and we follow up, and we do the initiatives on that. Legacy Schenker business do not have the same focus on that area. That means that in line, of course, we are working on to get it in the legacy Schenker system, so we can have the same visibility and transparency going forward.
That also means that in line, when we get to work with the volume, when we get it embedded into, you can say the way that we produce it, on the LCL part, on the gateways and in Frank's air charter network, then and get the contracts aligned, then you can say the yield will increase also on the acquired volume. That's a measurement and it's focus, and then it's put into the way that we produce the things that will help us to get to the DSV legacy DSV level. Mm-hmm.
Alexia?
Thank you. Just a short follow-up on the share buyback or return of cash to shareholders. Is this a decision you evaluate quarterly? Secondly, would you ever consider returning cash through a different avenue, perhaps, through a transaction with one of your, kind of, main shareholders?
No, I think again, the model that we have used have served us well. We've received a lot of positive feedback. The investors know where we are, so they know how we treat the cash when you get it. I think that credibility and trust, I think we will stay true to that. Yeah.
I just got one here, Michael. Oh, that's a tough one.
There's a lot of questions.
It's a tough one. Regarding EPS, that DSV will deliver an EPS about DKK 100 within two-three years.
I have heard that before, actually. I think I'll stick to the fact that maybe not this year or next year, but if you look at our CAGR and double-digit growth, then I think we're on the right track to do it. Sounds like a high number, but it's also a big business, and we really do deliver on a lot of stuff. Yeah, I'll be happy to announce that when we get to that.
Great. I think we have Andy down there.
It's Andy Chu from Deutsche Bank. Just in terms of M&A, do you believe you have the right balance of businesses today in terms of air, sea, road, contract logistics? In terms of the M&A pipeline, could you comment on if there's anything that's, you know, live or in play? Do you think that because there doesn't seem to be any large obvious targets there, that we may see deals a bit like GIL, which was carved out of Agility? Thank you.
Yeah. I think we normally do not comment on our potential targets or pipeline and stuff like that. Right now, we focus on concluding the integration. I think Jens also touched upon it earlier. Maybe the question has been better answered by Jens, but he said that we of course are starting to get ready to it. We don't have anything in the pipeline. I think it could be a little bit of everything. If you look at it, again, coming back to the very fragmented market where we have a market share of around, you can say, 6%, right? Top 40, sorry, top 20 have 40%.
There's still a lot of potential good targets of a size that could make sense for us. Right now we don't discuss the pipeline. We focus on getting things done. It's a good observation.
Yeah. Last question before we get Jens back on stage.
Yeah. Thank you. Ulrik Bak, Danske Bank. Considering that you're rolling out two new TMS systems, so the trajectory in your conversion ratio between now and 2030, do you see that as a straight line, or should we see a flattening of productivity as you roll out these TMS systems, or will AI offset that impact?
I Let me put it another way. I think that Q1 was a trial, right? Of course we should increase productivity over time. Whether it's straight line, it depends a little bit about the, you could say, the which countries that we roll out in. I don't have the exact roadmap. I know we have one. I guess overall, I think it will be more or less a straight line. Right now, it will come in, you can say, more or less linear. Maybe slightly back-end loaded if you talk about, remember what we talked about before. We have to do the work before we can have the synergies. We talked about that from we have rollout system or country, it takes 3 to 6 months before we are full up to speed again.
We have to bear in mind, it's not a paper exercise. You have to align processes, systems. People need to be educated and get familiar with the new system, and so forth. It does take a little bit of a time. Overall, I think, we also said that we are live now in 18 or 16 countries, so of course we need to be able to start. I think it was in 2027 that Helmut mentioned that we will in 2028 and 2029 we will start to see the real impact.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was the last question. Thank you for that. Before I get Jens back on stage, just remember again, if any of you didn't have a chance to meet the Volvo guys, there will still be a presentation here, after, just after Jens' presentation. Have a watch.
Can you take a turn in that or is it?
Maybe. Not you.
Oh, okay.
I would like to invite Jens back to do the closing remark.
Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I think it's been a long day. I can see that we had to get a bit of fresh air in here a couple of times. There was a ton of information for you. I think it's been a very good day and a lot of engagement, of course, from my colleagues presenting, but certainly also with a lot of interesting questions. Somebody had said to me that basically there's much more interest this time than we, when we did it in 2022. I think there's a good explanation for that because, of course, the value of the company has grown significantly.
We are almost at DKK 400 billion in market cap, and it carries a lot of responsibility, not only for us in the management, but also for all the people that are in this room. There's a lot at stake when we run the business. I hope that you, when you've seen our management teams, they sit with their individual areas. They take it very seriously to drive business forward. When we run a company, when we have a strategy, it's very important that we can explain what it is that we need to do. There's gonna be a feedback session for you as well, where you will be asked to provide us feedback.
What worked well, what can we improve, and do you have any sort of specific ideas? Because that's part of our journey, is continuous learning, and we're very curious because it's been five years since we had the last Capital Markets Day, and we really value the feedback that you will have. You go to other Capital Markets Days, we don't go to so many, we run our business. Perhaps you could share some of that. If we take basically our tagline and go back to the presentation, I think the tagline, Leverage to Lead, it still rests on us being a part of consolidation in our industry. We think we have fantastic capacity when it comes to that.
You've met many of the people that actually do this work on a daily basis and go out and drive that change. Basically the muscle behind it. I think we've also had a good chance to talk about our commercial approach. Of course, it's always a little bit difficult when you grow inorganically because you get a dip, because we have to divert resources. After all, I think there's also an understanding that once this settles, when the dust settles, our service catalog is very strong, and then we can continue taking share. I think on the technology bit, both on production systems but also on AI, we talk about how we are approaching this. We don't see it as AI as a separate thing. We see it as part of our ecosystem.
Of course, that we harmonize our production systems as well. Here we have great roadmaps where we have systems that are functioning, that are in production. This is very important. Of course, we can enhance here and there, but it's not like will they work? Will they function? It's more like, basically transfer the volumes and make that change. This is something that we're very used to. We do that every time we do M&A. I don't really doubt that our teams, they can figure that out. I think we have a very solid team. I'm very proud of how the team has presented today. Sometimes you think this is a one man band. I get this impression or two men, because you also meet Michael most of the time.
I hope you had the chance to interact with some of our colleagues, that sit in the leadership team, and get comfortable that you know, their business and what they're doing. At least I'm very comfortable with them. Then I think, I mean, you're here because you look after the capital of your investors. We're then here to look after the capital that you deploy into DSV. There's been a lot of talk about the capital allocation model, and we've had it for almost 25 years. We've stuck to it. It served us well. We think we have a good contract with you guys.
Of course, we now need to deliver the outcomes on the Schenker deal so that you know that the last time you trusted us, we repaid that trust by creating the returns that you were also expecting. I think if you look at this, that's really what the team is heavily focused on doing. As it also said, we have a great track record. One time, not so long time ago, Leif Tullberg, who was like one of the founders of the company, he'd sent the first strategy that I wrote for DSV in 2003. It was actually quite interesting because many of the things in this strategy is actually the same today. It's just larger numbers, it's still the same idea.
I would probably also say that the teams that produced the slides today, they were a little bit better at it than I was at that time. Apart from that, it is really, in a way, an evolution of a company that where we now are at a new position, market leading, and then with technology available that we can embrace and we can bring into the company and continue basically the journey that we've been on for many years. We look forward to delivering on the financial targets. We don't want to let ourselves down, and we don't really want to let you down either. We'll now go back to work. I'm sure you will as well, and there will be a lot of interesting dialogue.
There's many topics to pick up after this capital markets day, and you will hold us accountable. You have to know that this is very important for our performance culture, that you ask us to step up our game all the time. The energy you give to us, we take that into the company and use that to apply pressure. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you for holding us accountable. Look forward to catching up with you bilaterally when we see each other on road shows and other venues. Safe travels back home. There's a little bit of a refreshment over here for those that have the time. Otherwise, we really appreciate your interest in the company and thank you for coming, and safe travels. Thank you.