Welcome. Welcome to ISS Capital Markets Day 2022. My name is Jacob Johansen, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. A warm welcome to all of you here in the room. As this day is also being live webcasted, a warm welcome to everyone listening in on the web. There will be a replay of this day made public on our corporate website afterwards. As always in ISS, we start with a safety moment. In case of an emergency situations, there are four exits in this room, two to the right and two to the left. Please leave the room the same way you came in, so it is through the lobby and down the stairs. Our gathering point is across the street opposite to the hotel.
There are no planned fire alarm drills for today, so if you hear an alarm, please follow the just mentioned instructions. Let's start the presentation, and we'll start out with a short video highlighting the importance of our people, the Placemakers.
At ISS, we believe that people make places, and places make people. People are at the heart of all we do. People from diverse backgrounds ready to serve a diverse society, delivering the highest standards to our customers. We connect people to places, both within our own workplaces around the world and at places where we serve customers. From a smile at the door to inspiring the customers we work with, our people bring heart and soul to wherever they work. Without people who care, a hospital is just a building. An airport is just a terminal. A business is just an office. Our people bring places to life, and in return, these places shape the people who use them. They make people happy, increase productivity, and support a healthy lifestyle. Great experiences happen when people meet great places.
Whether it's hospitals healing patients, businesses increasing potential, airports running smoothly, or manufacturing sites boosting productivity, our people are there to help because we understand the relationship between people and places, and we create the connection that creates the magic.
Excellent. Thank you, Jacob. It's also a great honor to welcome all of you on my behalf and on behalf of the entire management team to a day that we have truly looked forward to. Because today marks the next step in a journey that we as a management team laid out in the middle of 2020, in the middle of what felt like a bit of a perfect storm. It's a journey that has had a dual purpose. Firstly, creating a decisive and rapid financial turnaround, but secondly, at the same time, investing in building a truly differentiated global leader in this industry fit for purpose in a world post-COVID. What we call OneISS, moving from a peer group of many to a peer group of few. I'm incredibly excited about what we achieved over the last two and a half years.
The strength, the resilience, the robustness of the franchise, coupled with the great capacity and capability of this team, has really created a true platform that we can take the next step of the journey on. You also know this team very well by now. You know that it's, for us, all about keeping our nose to the ground, plowing ahead, being very, very humble around not being arrogant around what lies ahead, but every single day delivering execution, execution. Every single day. That's the promise we make to you in terms of our owners, that we are fully cognizant of the many potential issues that lies ahead, and it's for us all about continuing the strong execution we've shown over the last two and a half years. Today, we'll take you through our belief that our equity story evolves.
It evolves from that financial turnaround into a story of superior growth at attractive margins. We'll demonstrate to you that we believe that the marketplace remains incredibly attractive. Not the same marketplace that it used to be with changing customer demands, changing customer needs, but also customer needs that our fit-for-purpose model that we built over the last couple of years is addressing, staying as relevant as ever. At the same time, we'll be talking about our operating model, how we built a resilient business model, an enhanced operating model that gives us the platform for us to deliver the new and enhanced service products, technologies, capabilities on top as building blocks on top of an improved platform. All of that, we believe, will lead to a significant financial performance in the coming years. A profit generation that leads to high.
A highly cash-generative business, which will develop into a capital allocation story. Kasper, as you would expect, will spend a lot of time on that later today, but I can guarantee you one thing, and that is that the only purpose we have as a management team is to be incredibly stringent around creating value to you as owners. That also means that we recognize from day one, as we've always said that the capital we generate is your capital, and we'll be very, very stringent around how we allocate it and how we use it. All of this leads to a new financial ambition that we've laid out in the material you just received, which is that we believe from 2024 and onwards, we have the capacity to deliver 4%-6% organic growth on an annual basis, and that's before any positive impact from M&A.
We also believe that from 2024 we'll be delivering operating margins above 5%, and we also see a longer-term potential beyond that. You'll see a cash conversion that is in line with what we delivered in the past, which is above 60% cash conversion. All of that, hopefully, stands very clearly when we are done with discussing today's agenda. Which leads me to today's agenda. I'll in a second talk about the journey so far, and then Liz Benison, our CEO of U.K. and Ireland, sitting over here, will replace me on stage and talk about a specific element of the turnaround over the last two and a half years, i.e., the U.K. and Ireland turnaround. Then I'll be back and talk about the journey from here.
Before we have a brief Q&A and a break, moving into the key enablers of that growth, being Troels, Markus, and Margot talking about and double-clicking and unfolding a number of those enablers. Before the master of numbers, Kasper, arrives and puts it all into context and what that actually means in terms of our financial expectations and how we see that play out. We'll follow that with a longer Q&A. I say the Q&A part also because I am 100% sure that we'll struggle for time in the brief Q&As, but save those questions for the last Q&A where we have more time. Jacob will keep the timing all day and will beat us in the head if we're struggling for time. These are the six presenters you'll be meeting today.
Most of you know, myself and Kasper quite well. Liz Benison, our CEO of U.K. and Ireland, will be on shortly, and then Troels, our COO, Markus, our CIDO, Chief Information and Digital Officer, and, Margot, our Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, will be on the stage. A cracking team, of course. Let's talk about our journey. To understand our journey, you need to understand the DNA of ISS. This is truly a people company. There's a lot of companies out there that talk about people and people are important, et cetera. This is truly a people company. This is a company that is built on a belief that people make places. By educating and developing and respecting those people, we not only create value for them in their individual lives, we're also part of creating a fairer and more diverse and inclusive society.
That's the essence of our DNA, and that's what makes all of us so proud of working for ISS. Those people impact millions of lives every single day. They impact lives at our 40,000+ customers globally. There is 360,000 of them, our Placemakers, every single day going to work making a difference, going above and beyond. They represent 200 nationalities, and they speak more than 130 languages. We do that across the world in more than 60 countries, of which 30 of them are what we call our core countries, where we do true self-delivery. We're still developing the people agenda despite 121 years. We're still developing a number of aspects, especially around D&I, which Margot will come back on.
As an example on gender, today, half of the global revenue of ISS is led by female EGM members. Two years ago, that number was zero. The platform that these amazing people deliver on is a global platform. It's a global operating platform that operates across the world, but also operates as a prerequisite in an IFS fashion. What is IFS to us? Integrated Facility Services is the combination, the synergistic combination of us delivering our services with our placemakers doing self-delivery, both giving the synergies of working across services, but also giving the human touch of people that are developed, trained in the same way across the globe. We operate across all of these service lines, and yes, cleaning is our core. It's half of our business.
Our mindset is always around delivering the integrated service, because that's where we clearly see that we have a USP. That's where we clearly see that we make a difference. Now, going into a day like today, your mind is very focused on the last couple of years, the COVID period. It's an important reminder that this company has been incredibly stable and resilient throughout the years, and COVID truly was a very, very different experience. If you look at the last 20 years pre-COVID, we've had a very stable performance. We've had an average operating margin of 5.2%, including restructuring. I say including restructuring because that's how we report things now, post-2020. We've had a growth, an average growth of around 3% throughout that period.
You'll also notice that you have to look a little bit hard to find when the global recessions were. Of course, I point that out because that's one of the key topics at the moment. That is, how does a business like ours react in a tough economic environment? We're obviously humbled by the fact as a management team that you can never use any historic data to guarantee that, how future performance will be, but it's a pretty decent indication of the resilience and robustness of this operating model. COVID was very special. Absolutely no doubt about that. What is it we've achieved since 2020 when we talk about the financial turnaround? As an institution, we have delivered on the short-term hard work around delivering on our operational hotspots.
As we announced to you last week, we two out of four hotspots are completely closed, and we can see that as we speak right now, the others are hitting the targets that we expect. Some are clearly ahead, some are slightly behind. As a whole, they have delivered as expected. At the same time, we have reshaped the portfolio the way we set out to make sure that our portfolio fits with the strategic direction of ISS. That means disposing the countries and the business units that didn't fit within the strategic frame. It also means regaining our financial strength significantly over the last couple of years, moving from a leverage level that was not acceptable to now being back where we want to be.
At the same time, we have improved our risk management, both from an operational perspective, but especially also from a commercial perspective, which is something I'll come back to. While doing all of that, there's been a tremendous amount of work put into our operating model. The way we operate our services, the platforms we create in terms of delivering our services and products, tools. We'll be double-clicking on that later, but we're very proud in terms of where the platform is. Are we done yet? Of course not. We moved from a multi-local, more disparate operating model towards a global matrix model with aligned processes, systems and infrastructure and ways of working.
All of that to leverage the global scale of ISS, because that is where the missing piece has been if we look over the last years, truly leveraging the global scale of a global company. To do that, part of the change over the last 2.5 years has also been on the management side. If you look at the top 400 of ISS, around 200 of them are new. Half of them internal promotes and the other half external hires. That's a significant change in capacity and capability as a team, but we also see the effects in terms of the outcomes of that work. So where are we? We believe that we now have a structural, structurally attractive business model and operating platform that sets us up to deliver on the growth that is in front of us. Last week was an interesting week.
Of course, if you're a CEO and you're reporting numbers, but there was a beauty around being able to finally put green tick marks around our financial turnaround targets for 2022. We set those out back in 2020 at a point in time where it was looking pretty bleak out there. We have, as a new management team, now delivered 9 quarters to you as owners. We've delivered everything we said we would deliver in terms of our guidance. We have delivered on the financial turnaround targets, and in five of those nine quarters, we've also upgraded expectations. We're happy with that, but it's just another stepping stone in terms of taking us to the next level. This is the new team.
There's absolutely no way we could deliver what we're delivering at the moment and deliver what we will deliver in the coming years without a significantly strengthened team as well. We've created a high-powered, high-performing, very diverse organization led by an EGM team that truly represents that. The capacities that have come in from external competitors and from other industries in terms of bringing specific functional expertise in has been tremendous, and that's part of the power we're seeing right now and the momentum we're seeing in a number of places. Liz, in a second, is a great example, driving a fantastic turnaround of the U.K. together with her new and enhanced team. Wherever you go at ISS, you'll see these five. As we laid out in 2020, the One ISS strategy, these five strategic pillars became the pillars of our strategy execution everywhere in the firm.
It means that every single must-win, every single resource allocation, everything that goes on in ISS has to some way or the other link in to the five strategic priorities. That's commercial momentum and segment leadership. It's brilliant operating basics. It's service products built on leading technology platforms. It's environmental sustainability, and it's safe, diverse and inclusive workplaces. Everything we do at the firm links to those five, and everything we will do in the next couple of years will link to those five. Everything you see today at this Capital Markets Day will link to those five. That's the consistency in the execution that is needed for us to truly mobilize a global company and make real change. In essence and in summary, when we look back at the last couple of years, it's a green tick mark.
We're happy, we're excited about what we've achieved, but we're also very excited about what's in front of us. That turnaround has been delivered in a setting of truly a perfect storm, an evolving perfect storm, by the way, because 12 months ago, it started becoming an inflationary storm as well, geopolitical risks, et cetera, et cetera, but we still delivered. The rest of today we'll be spending on what lies ahead. But before we do that, we will do one double-click, one case study to exemplify what has been going on over the last couple of years, and that is on the U.K.. Therefore, I'll bring Liz up to take us through the, a double-click on what we did in the U.K. as part of the turnaround. Over to you, Liz.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Jacob. I'm Liz Benison, and I have the privilege of running the ISS business here in the U.K. and Ireland. I've been with ISS about 18 months now. The U.K. and Ireland is the biggest business in the portfolio, and historically, it occupied the position of the lighthouse within the group. What do I mean by the lighthouse? Firstly, we were margin accretive to the group, but also just as importantly as that, we were also the source of a lot of talent for the group. People joined in the U.K. and went on to global careers. We were the source of a lot of the IP, and also a lot of our global accounts started their life here in the U.K. before becoming global.
It's a very important role that we occupied within the group. Unfortunately, in 2020, a number of factors came together, culminating in us becoming a loss-making business. What were those factors? Well, obviously, the first and foremost of those was COVID-19. As you're all very well aware, COVID-19 in the U.K. was massive. We had the blessing, I guess, of having a portfolio that had a substantial amount of healthcare in our portfolio. We were able to mitigate some of the impact because our healthcare business ran at full speed throughout that period. Generally, COVID-19 did have a fairly devastating impact on the business. Alongside that, though, we'd also lost a number of quite lucrative contracts in the years leading up to 2020.
In 2020, we saw the full force of that, the full year impact of that on the business. In reaction to that, or partially in reaction to that, a number of cost-saving moves were taken, not all that well-executed. On top of that, we had the malware attack and rushed through some system improvements. The net result, I think, of those cost initiatives and those system changes was that for a period of time, we lost visibility of the business and to a degree, we lost control. I think that was underpinned by the way that the business had been run up until that point, was as a series of businesses, a series of small businesses under the umbrella of the U.K. and Ireland.
While that had stood us in good stead for a number of years, it actually made it very difficult to sort of pivot and make decisions quickly in that environment. Therefore, 2020, we became loss-making. What have we been doing about that over the last two years? Put at its simplest form, what we have been doing is we've been implementing that strategy that Jacob just talked about. We've taken the OneISS strategy, and we've taken the blueprint, which is the target operating model, and we've implemented them here in the U.K. business. What does that actually mean? What does that feel like? Well, job one for me when I started 18 months ago was to rebuild that country leadership team.
In doing so, what we've managed to do, I think, is create a really strong leadership team. We've got some people who are ISS tenured. They know how to get things done here, and they play a vital role in that team. We've also gone to the market, and we found new people who've brought segment depth, so in areas like government, for example, but they've also brought real sort of deep functional expertise onto the team as well. We're diverse, and it is my true pleasure to sit on a management team that is 50/50 gender balance for the first time in my career, and it's really exciting. We've also particularly recruited for mindset.
We've picked people who understand what it's like to operate in a matrix, to make that matrix work, but also embrace being part of the greater enterprise as well. That's been really important. We then took those criteria that we'd used for the country leadership team, and we looked at the next 50 down. The key people who really run the business here, and we've applied exactly the same criteria to those. We've looked at everyone in that tier and decided, did they have the right skill set and expertise, and did they have the right mindset? Quite uncompromisingly, where we didn't think that was the case, we've gone out to market. That's allowed us to bring some really interesting competitive talent into the business.
Having set that, we then started to work on professionalizing and centralizing our functions, and we're underway on a journey on that, and that will take us some time. What that has done is already yield a whole load of better insight and information into how the business is running and allowed us to put in place a really strict management cadence that allows us to really check progress and performance within the business. We've had to spend a lot of time rebuilding trust. You know, when you come into a business that's had a sort of devastating year like 2020 was here, you have to really rebuild that trust, and that's on a number of different levels. That's with our colleagues and our Placemakers. That's been to a degree with some of our customers.
It's certainly been to our sort of market stakeholders. For example, we're a strategic supplier to the government here in the U.K. We've had to rebuild some of that reputation. Importantly, we've had to really regain that trust with group as well, both with my EGM colleagues, but also to a degree with the board. All of that we've done quite relentlessly managed as a program. That's been really important to us that we could prove and demonstrate that we were doing exactly what we said we were gonna do throughout that journey. Really importantly, though, we haven't done this in isolation. I didn't sort of go back to the U.K. and sort of do all of this under our own steam. This has been done absolutely in lockstep with the group.
What we've done is take a number of things that have been designed at the EGM level, at the group level, and deployed them into the U.K.. Troels will talk much more about the OneISS organization, the target operating model. We have pretty much taken the global blueprint and put it into operation here in the U.K. with very few compromises. We then use group tools to really analyze our portfolio and to work out which segments, which services, which customers really generate value for us, and that's allowed us to reorient our resources to really focus in on those areas where we really create value. We've inherited a lot of tools from the group that help us to really drive contract performance and even site-level performance and get real visibility over that as well.
Supply chain's been a really interesting area for us in the last couple of years as well. Working with the group supply chain team, we've got far better processes, insight, far better control over our entire spend, and much deeper partnerships with the companies that we have chosen to work with. That has borne huge fruit for us this year when we've had the ugly word inflation back into the language again, and that's really, really helped us. In terms of operations performance, we're now part of a global community that really understand what we're doing out on our sites. The way I could sum that up probably the best is to say, if there's a piece of best practice out there anywhere in the world now, I can get it in front of my customers really, really rapidly.
You cannot underestimate the power of that. Nothing brings to life the power of big ISS rather than saying, "Here's something that we're doing in Australia, would you like to see it?" Really, really powerful. All of that is wrapped around with much better standardized reporting and analysis that we share with Kasper and the team rigorously every month, sometimes in a quite challenging way, always in a very open and transparent way, and that makes a massive difference too. I think what I would hate for you to go away from this thinking is that we are done yet. We are partway through a journey to transform. We've kind of done the turnaround stage, but we're now really into a transformation of the U.K. business, and we desperately want to regain that lighthouse position within the group.
As Jacob said, we have five priorities at the group level. Three of these are fundamental to what we're doing here in the U.K. at the moment, and the other two are kind of built into everything that we do. In terms of commercial momentum and segment leadership, we have leading positions in the U.K. in banking and healthcare, and we see great opportunity there for organic growth within those two sectors, but we also see some really interesting white space too in those as well. We have a really enviable position in government at the moment here in the U.K. through the relationships that we've developed over the last couple of years. The U.K. government is about to embark on a really exciting outsourcing cycle, and we intend to be at the forefront of that cycle.
Then we have a number of sectors at the moment that we believe are. They're adjacent sectors to what we do in the banking space and into office, and we believe we can develop those into being other core markets for us going forward. In terms of brilliant operating basics, we've started on the journey there, but what we want to build is a really tight, efficient back office that we can then leverage and scale as we grow the business over time. We do see that as the source of future efficiencies. In terms of service products and embedding leading technology into what we do, I'd talk to a couple of examples. Again, you'll hear much more about this from Troels later on. Two examples that are really doing it for us here in the U.K. at the moment.
The workplace work that we've done, really creating excitement around workplace experience, that's something that really can delight our customers and really cement our position as an innovator and a thought leader. Then on the efficiency side, we're doing work, and again, you'll see it later, in daily office cleaning with the Pure Space product, and that's allowing us to drive site-level efficiencies consistently across our estate. Really important. To summarize, I'd really say three key takeaways from this. The first one is that we have made significant progress in the last two years to recovering the U.K. business. We've set the conditions for success going forward with the new leadership team, the new operating model, and the new control over the business. Going forward, commercial momentum is gonna mean absolutely everything to us.
It's commercial momentum, really, really important over the next couple of years. I wanna leave you in no doubt that this is a very ambitious team, and we absolutely want to regain that position of the lighthouse, not only in the group, but also in the U.K. market. Thank you.
Thank you, Liz. Excellent. We say also thank you for driving a reverse Brexit in terms of reintegrating U.K. to Europe, which we have really appreciated. That reverse Brexit has truly led to a reintegration of the U.K. into our operating model, so thank you for that. As we now exit the initial turnaround phase, it's all about moving into growth mode. By the way, you will be back for questions in 15 minutes, if anyone has any burning questions on the U.K. In terms of moving into growth mode, it's around the right risk-managed, long-term sustainable growth at attractive margins. Basically around the right quality growth.
In this section, I'm gonna open up around the components to deliver that quality growth. In essence, it's around creating the platform for us to do three things: increase our win rates with existing customers, yes, on the retention side. It's around driving higher new sales, and it's around being better at selling to those existing customers. Upselling, new wins, and retention, three key components of everything we do. When we talk about growth, that's what it has to lead to. This will then, after the break, be followed by Troels and Markus and Margot, double-clicking on a number of those components and unfolding, especially around the operating model, around technology, around sustainability.
The essence of our message today is basically that we see an uplift in our ability to grow, driven by the changes and the investments we have been doing and will be doing in the coming years. It all starts with the strategic prioritization. Our strategic focus that we set out in December 2020, in terms of the OneISS direction, is unchanged. Why is this important? It's important because any resource allocation, any direction of initiatives, any development of service products, any technology development has to fit within our segment focus. We don't wanna be everything to everyone. We want to be everything to our prioritized segments. Our segment focus is clear, it's unchanged, it's office-based, production-based, and healthcare. Within office-based and production-based, clear segments below, as you see.
We talk about service focus and four key service lines, but they're all wrapped into the notion and the value proposition around integrated facility services. Of course, it's cleaning technical services, food, and workplace that is the essence of the services we deliver. We're hammering home the point because one of the things that is different in terms of how we've been operating the last couple of years and how we are continuing to operate is the segment focus. It's playing where we have a higher likelihood of winning, where our value proposition makes a bigger difference, and where we know we can add real value to the customers. If we start with the market, so is it an attractive market? Well, when we look at integrated facility services, we have, over the years, seen the integrated part grow faster than the rest of the FM market.
Grow faster than the rest of our portfolio and the rest of the market if you look at it on a weighted basis. When we look at external estimates, that's also what is expected in the coming years, that IFS will grow faster than the market and at a very decent clip. As that becomes a bigger proportion of our business, of course, that is relevant. If we double-click on what that means from a customer perspective and what it is we're seeing from our customers, we're seeing three specific needs stand out in every single conversation. Whether we are having conversations in Mumbai, San Francisco, Oslo, wherever it is, it's those three things that we talk about. The one in the middle is pretty clear, and it's been a key theme throughout this industry, operational efficiency. The notion has changed.
Operational efficiency now very much is also seen in the context of the world post-COVID, but also in a world that is facing a potential economic downturn. You're much better at predicting that than we are, I'm sure, but there's no doubt that we are in for tougher times than what we've experienced in the last couple years. As we see that, what we've seen historically and what we're seeing play out right now in front of us, is that companies are looking at ways of reducing their cost basis, and one of them is to do more outsourcing. It is to drive these types of services that we deliver from an in-house to an outside capability. The two other elements that are important here are new. Sustainability, we'll talk a lot about later today, so I'm not gonna double-click on it.
If anyone here has any doubt as to whether sustainability is important for companies, then you probably wanna go out and read up on it. So let me not spend too much time on it, but there's no doubt that we've seen an explosion in the demand for sustainability services, both on the advisory side for specific products, but also in terms of co-creating new solutions. Five years ago, sustainability requirements in a bidding process, in a tender process, was something that was pretty esoteric, and it had to be a company that really had a specific purpose around sustainability. Now, you don't qualify for the pre-bidding process if you don't have strong sustainability credentials. We'll get back to that.
The big theme, of course, and also a lot of the questioning that we get, not just from investors, but also from other stakeholders, is around workplace experience. That has exploded in terms of importance, and it's the big theme. When I became CEO in 2020, workplace experience was starting to be a theme that was bubbling in the conversations, but no one actually fully knew what it meant. At that point, people were still debating as to whether or not they were gonna be needing their offices going forward. A lot of our clients were seeing fantastic efficiency and engagement from people working from home.
The same type of people right now are at the forefront of discussing workplace experience with us because they are seeing a significant drop in innovation power, in efficiency, but also in engagement, in cultural affinity to the company, and that's where workplace experience comes in. I'll speak to that in a second. What you'll see after the break in the different presentations all plays into these customer needs because we don't develop in a isolated lab and what we think that clients may need. No, our focus is on what are the emerging customer needs? The emerging customer needs, that's what we need to be able to deliver to. Those three needs do not require one specific service or one specific product.
They require an ecosystem of solutions from ISS because there's not one single customer out there that needs the same solution to deal with those three demands. That's why we build it on a platform based on leading technology that Markus will be talking about across all three of these. We add the components on top, whether that is sustainability, it's specific service products like daily office cleaning or whatever it is, but it's a focus on creating ecosystems across. That's why when we talk about customer needs and the excitement and the attractiveness of this market, it's also because we can see that what we delivered, what we built over the last couple of years, and which we will exemplify to you in the later sessions, is very much directed at those new customer needs. It's a new set of needs.
It's new services that people are looking for, something that plays into what we've been investing in. We'll talk operational efficiency a lot. Troels is great at that. We need to stop him at some point later today. We'll talk sustainability a lot as well, but let me double-click a little bit on workplace experience. Many of you will have seen our ongoing ISS Pulse. It's the biggest workplace survey you see out there. We survey customers with more than 1 million employees on what their needs are, what their thoughts are, and what they plan to change. When I had the initial conversations back in 2020, I can guarantee you that it was dramatic predictions from many large customers around how they were gonna take 50%-60% of their footprints away.
When we look at it now, there's absolutely no doubt that the office is here to stay. The majority of our clients are not gonna change their footprints. Some of them are actually gonna increase them to enable them to be able to deliver on the engagement and the innovation, the collaboration space that is needed. Of course, there is a tilt towards reducing square meters, but we knew that, and that's what we've been saying for years, and that's also what has played out in front of us and what is in our financial performance. That's all in the guidance. Those numbers were completely different two years ago, and the only thing we have seen over the last two and a half years is that the proportion that expects to reduce square meters significantly constantly is going down. Why?
Because they see an evolving need to still have an attractive workplace. It needs to be much more flexible. The purpose of the workplace changes. It needs to accommodate a hybrid workplace and real flexibility, but that also means that more than 60% of our customers are looking at changing and investing in their workplace. They do that both in terms of the physical surroundings, but also in terms of the services they need, the palette that they expect to be able to deliver engagement. Why do they do that? They do that to create real innovation power. In the beginning, no one talked about innovation. Now 2.5, three years into it, people are starting to realize the loss they're seeing, and they're seeing a lack of belonging. What do we mean by that?
The average global company has an annual turnover, employee turnover around 8%. That also means that most global companies at this stage have 20-25% of their employees that actually never went to the office and experienced how it used to be working in that company. That means that all the automatic stabilizers in an organization, because we have worked together for the last 10 years, being online doesn't matter, they are disappearing. That's why when we have the C-suite conversations, wherever they are, it's the same conversation every single time. It's getting pretty damn urgent getting people back to the office. What we've seen over the last 6-9 months is that last year it was continental Europe really starting coming back, and there was a lot of investments there.
Now we're seeing other parts of the world, we're seeing a real return to office as well. We're sitting right now in, or standing right now in the middle of the one geography where it's the slowest. Greater London and Greater New York are the slowest places in terms of return to office, but we're seeing a real return to office. What does that mean for us? I'll give you a case study. This is a case study of a professional services company, one of our customers, and it's a very, very good example of what we're experiencing across the board with many of our customers. This is a company that operates in a number of countries and has a number of sites all managed by ISS, and they were struggling big time to get people back to the office, and it was starting to impact their business performance.
What we did with them is we started by redesigning. We brought in our senior architects, our anthropologists redesigned the purpose of the workplace. Our capital projects teams did the actual fit outs, the physical changing of the offices, and then our excellent service teams set up the touch point and service journey throughout the new workplaces, including the experience hosts, which is something that we're seeing a lot of clients opt for, which is creating a much more curated concierge type of service in your workplace. The outcomes are pretty clear. I'm not gonna go through the numbers, but it's a classic case study of what we're seeing a lot of right now. It's back to the stat on the page before, which is people may be reducing square meters, but they're taking those savings and investing them back into the workplace.
What we're basically saying is that the enhanced operating model, a more scalable operating model, the sharper segment focus and the investments that we've been doing in technology, sustainability and our service products and will continue to do, combined with the improved capacity and capability of our commercial organization, that will lead to increased win rates, it will lead to higher retention rates, and it will lead to stronger cross-sell to existing customers. Let me just double-click on that. Starting with the first component, the new sales. We are already now starting to see the effects on the new sales from the work we've been doing. We're starting to see win rates go up, and we also see win rates go up the most, the bigger the deal is. What does that mean?
It plays into what I said earlier, which is we are trying to move our value proposition away from a commoditized value proposition to a sharply focused segment value proposition, where we move from a peer group of many to a peer group of few. It is classic when an industry goes through significant change, the way that our industry is going through due to COVID and the pandemic and the future workplace needs, that the big players that can actually invest. They move away from the rest of the pack. That's what we're starting to see, and of course, we expect that trend to continue.
Part of this beyond the things we'll double-click on is what we've been doing in the commercial organization, creating an enterprise mindset, moving away, removing the silos and constantly allocating our resources from a commercial perspective on the opportunities that matters the most for the enterprise. What are the enterprise opportunities out there commercially that we need to allocate the real resources to, the right resources to? One example last year was Equinor in Norway, which we announced and which was the biggest FM deal in the Norwegian market. It's a fantastic partnership. We created an enterprise team from all over the world that worked on the partnership with Equinor. It was successful, and as we stand here today, six months into the execution of the contract, it's a great partnership for both sides.
We brought something unique to the table in that situation because we could bring in subject matter experts from all over the world to that specific situation versus local competitors. I flipped past that when I talk about capacity and capabilities, a lot of people focus on what we've been doing in terms of our group commercial organizations, and you know that our new Group Chief Commercial Officer, Agostino, starts in a little bit more than a month, which we're very excited about. We've also done an upgrade of our Chief Commercial Officers in a number of key jurisdictions. 10 of our country CCOs are new, including in a number of the most important countries, and we're seeing the impact from that. The other impact on new sales is the way we work with our bidding process.
The governance is aligned, the taxonomy is aligned, the processes are aligned. It's a risk management for us to start with, but it's also very much driving a significantly different mindset around the ways of working. It's around bringing the right SMEs to the table in a structured way, bringing functional experts into the commercial bidding processes very early, making sure that there's a strong ownership throughout the value chain, and most importantly also in terms of the risk management part, from day one, laying out a structured bid to operations process. That means once we win something, we also know exactly how we will execute until it's up and running at the business plan, and that's important. Retention. The second element of this.
We have, over the last 2 years, become much more structured and intentional around how we drive customer life cycle management leading to retention. When we look at the coming years, what we will also be seeing is another uplift in this as we move our customer for life mentality from the largest customers to the broad key account set of customers. That's also why when we look at our retention rates today, they are the highest ever recorded, but we are setting out a midterm target of taking it from the 93% we're at right now to 95%. That will drive, in an all things equal world, of course, a higher structural growth rate. Third and last element is the upselling to existing customers.
We have had a couple of years with very, very strong COVID above base. I've talked to many of you around that theme, so has Kasper. What we've seen this year is an ability to take a lot of that above base and convert that into other types of above base. What is going on is that we are seeing the first initial results of the work we've been doing in terms of working with our key account managers, incentivizing in the right way, educating our people in terms of the opportunity set, working with account development plans across our key accounts, but also making sure that we provide the right reporting and transparency to our key account managers so they can actually go and grab those opportunities. This is an emerging theme for us.
There's absolutely no doubt that there's a lot of upside in the coming years if we get this right. It would be naive of me to stand here and say that this works perfectly, but we're seeing the first results of the structured and intentional work we have on this. With that, we will be double-clicking a lot on the components after the break. For me, it's clear that the enhanced operating model creates scalability in terms of our commercial processes and the offerings that we can lay out in front of our clients. With that platform and that operating model, we've added new components due to the investments we've been doing over the last couple years and that we continue to do.
If you take that value proposition towards clients and you combine it with the fact that everything we do is centered on the segmentation, it also means that our value proposition becomes much more relevant to the right customers, the customers that we want to partner with. We're seeing the effect coming through, both in terms of new sales, in terms of retention, and the emerging effect on our ability to upsell to existing clients.
That's why we believe that there's a real uplift in front of us. That's why we believe that structurally we can enhance our growth rates. That's why we also say that the data over the last couple of years truly also underpins that. With that, I'm gonna hold here and invite my good friend, Liz Benison, up here together with Jacob Johansen, our Head of IR, and then we'll open up for some Q&A. Jacob, your show. Thank you.
Yeah. If people in the room would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. We have microphones walking around. Please state your name and your company for the webcast. If anyone on the webcast would like to ask a question, please do that. There is a chat function, and the questions will be forwarded to me, so I'll read them aloud. If anyone here in the room would like to kick off right here in the front.
Hi. Good afternoon. This is Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley. Just a question on the U.K. and the white space you mentioned. I think banking and the work you're doing, and especially the opportunity around the government, which you seem pretty excited about. If you can elaborate on that a bit more, that would be really great.
Yeah. Absolutely. We have leading positions in banking and in healthcare. We're number one in healthcare. In revenue terms, we're number two in banking. But our portfolio is better. It's more balanced portfolio than our competitors. Where we see the white space is in banking. There's still a couple of the big banks that we don't work with. What we've also discovered is the smaller banks, the sort of round about DKK 10 million revenue for us, is a really interesting segment for us, and there's a number of those that we would love to partner with going forward. Healthcare, again, really successful segment for us. We are the market leader.
There is definitely white space in healthcare in that we have traditionally not been a hard services provider into healthcare, so that's an easy cross-sell for us into our soft services customers. There's also quite an exciting program around U.K. hospitals starting to develop, and we're very well poised for that. Government's an interesting one. They have backed up, so they've extended a number of contracts. Because of COVID, they've done sort of 1-year extensions successively for the last few years.
Actually they're coming to market with a huge amount of work over the next sort of 18 months, tw years. We're working very closely with our sponsors in government, and we are really picking the opportunities that we like, we really like the look of. We think for all the reasons Jacob talked about, we are very well positioned to be successful in those ones. We are pretty excited about that. Hope that helps.
If I just ask as a follow-up on that. To capture that white space, can you do that organically, or you would need to sort of acquire more?
No. Absolutely. You know, all of our current plan is organic. We'll talk about M&A later, but you know, I'd love to do some M&A in the U.K., but it's a way off.
Did you agree this? Or was that a teed off? No.
No, that's very clear. Thank you.
Anyone else? Jesper, down here.
Hi. It's Jesper Hansen from
Quite amazing to see how we've dealt with inflation in the U.K., how the team has grabbed that operationally and priced through across a very diverse client base as well. Also having retained on average, I guess, five-year contracts, retained a third of your business this year, and literally the size of a big European country for us as you retained that today or this year. It's quite phenomenal to see.
I'll jump in with a question from the web. It's from Michael Hvidtfeldt from Danske Bank. Can you please talk about the risk on organic growth in 2023? I assume you will not be able to reach 4%-6% given your communication today.
Thanks, Michael. I don't know where you are. You are there behind the screen. First of all, let's just be very clear. We believe that we will deliver good growth in 2023. Full stop. We have not put a number on it for 2023 for the simple reason that we are standing here in the beginning of November. Given that growth has more external components to it than margin, it didn't make sense for us to stand in the beginning of November and give a firm growth number for 2023.
We don't think that would be serious. We can do it on the margin side, and Kasper will get into the details later because a lot of that is driven by our internal programs, our internal self-help. There's much less variance on the margin trajectory. Everything we're looking into, 2023 will be a good growth year for ISS, but at this stage we don't wanna put a number on it.
Anyone else here?
It looks like a break.
Looks like a break.
Yep.
We'll be back at 1:45 P.M., so around 15 minutes coffee break. Please enjoy. The sun don't ever shine. The sky ain't ever blue. I'm looking out for you. I'm talking in my sleep. I'm calling out your name. I know it'll always be the same. Ain't got no feet like heaven. I got the blues. Ain't got no feet like heaven. I've got the blues. If everything aligned, I knew what to do to find me. Love me like I love you. Since you've gone away and left me all alone, I've been hanging by a thread. Ain't got no feet like heaven. I've got the blues. Ain't got no feet like heaven. I've got the blues. I know, I know that I'll go on without you. Time will show that.
The science is clear. Climate change is accelerating, and it has catastrophic consequences. At ISS, we're determined to minimize our carbon impact and to do so fast. From our Scope 1 emissions that are within our direct control, like reducing our energy use and transitioning to electric vehicles worldwide, to our indirect Scope 2 emissions and the Scope 3 emissions produced by our supply chains, we are tackling the problem from every angle. The governments of the United States and the European Union have pledged to reach net zero by 2050. At ISS, we will achieve net zero for Scope 1 and 2 by 2030, and for the entire global supply chain by 2040. It's not going to be an easy journey, but it's the right thing to do for our people, our customers, and our partners, and of course, for our planet.
There is only one Earth, and we're ready to lead the way.
Good afternoon, and welcome back from coffee. I'm supposed to click here, I think. Yes, that's me. I'm Troels Bjerg, and I'm the Group COO. I joined ISS in 2009, running regions, first Eastern Europe, then the Nordics, and then Northern Europe, and been the Group COO since 2018. As a central part of our OneISS strategy, we are transforming towards a global and truly scalable operating model. During the last two years, we have made material changes to our operating model, and in this section, I would like to go through how our OneISS operating model will be an enabler for structural growth and structural margin improvement. Our customers' needs are evolving over time.
As large companies are consolidating their supply chains, many of them within facility services, perhaps from suppliers in the hundreds, if not in the thousands, into having a very few, sometimes only one strategic partner. When they do that, they go from managing those services themselves to having this strategic partner managing everything on their behalf, and they are therefore also dependent on that this strategic partner has an operating model that supports that all the service outcomes that they are after in the outsourcing can indeed be delivered across their entire estate. Somebody who on the customer's behalf own the service outcomes. Those service outcomes are around consistency, so the ability to deliver across a large portfolio, whether that is within a country or across countries.
It's very much about transparency, so transparency to performance, transparency to cost, transparency to asset conditions and so forth. As Jacob talked about, it's about operational efficiency, which is not necessarily the lowest cost, but it's the best cost in relation to a given outcome or a given value. It's about workplace experience, so the ability to help customers to attract and retain talents in their workplaces, and it is obviously about sustainability. Sustainability, as Jacob talked about, very quickly becoming hard-coded in the sense of exactly what is the contribution to the customer's ESG agenda in a very measurable way. Finally, it's about risk, or rather the control of risks. It's about the controls being put in place, and it's around compliance.
The OneISS operating model is an enabler of those customer outcomes, while at the same time being a model where we can scale our enterprise synergies. We do that by scaling the investments we do in service products in technology and sustainability across the enterprise. You obviously know that we have a large platform, so spanning the globe, spanning a lot of countries, a lot of employees and a lot of customers. In this context, very importantly, 50,000 customer sites. That is quite important because in our industry, our customer sites are where all service outcomes are delivered or not. That is the moment, if not the place of truth. Most of our international competitors have an FM model where they work with subcontractors.
Third parties and those third parties' employees are indeed delivering the service outcomes on the customer's sites every day. Of course, that makes a global scale at the point of service delivery very difficult. Our operating model, so our sales delivery model, is, in all materiality, very different. It's a very different model. We assess, we vet, we hire, we onboard, we train, we lead, we develop our own people. We do that for those people to become Placemakers. Placemakers who, as part of a site team, own the total service delivery, so all the outcomes delivered to our customers on our customers' sites. When they do that, they do it with ISS service products, with ISS technology, with ISS frameworks, with ISS best practices and benchmarks brought to the site by our operating model.
In essence, the ISS, the OneISS operating model is a valuable position. It's a valuable position to our customers. It's the answer to the question, how exactly are you going to deliver these outcomes that you promised me to my sites across the globe? While it is at the same time a driver of enterprise synergies. We are investing significantly in building group competencies, and we use our OneISS operating model to scale these competencies across the enterprise. There are four big changes we have made to our operating model. The one is about strengthening our commercial capabilities and our bid process. Jacob talked about that, so that is essentially around how do we win more, but in that process, how do we absolutely understand what it is that we win?
How do we know what risks that are involved, and how do we make sure that we are managing those risks so we avoid any surprises downstream? We have developed a complete end-to-end process and put also the governance needed around that, and that is how we then make sure that we are in control. We have also centralized our finance and technology functions. In finance, it's obviously to have line of sight, to have transparency, to have compliance, and to have the financial controls in place across the enterprise. In technology, it's to make sure that when we invest in technology, it is on behalf of the total enterprise and all our customers, and not just within a country. We have standardized our country blueprint, so the organizational layout of all our country operations are today the exact same.
When you double-click on that organizational layout, you will come to roles and responsibilities that are the exact same. Of course, the size is different. In this organization, in ISS U.K., that's a somewhat bigger size than in ISS Poland, but it's the same structure and it's the same roles. That also means that if one of you should apply for a job with us in one of our country organizations, no matter what job you would have, you would always have at least 29 other people across our enterprise that would have the exact same job as you. That is also an operating model feature because it makes it possible for us to scale things across, to share knowledge and to connect dots. Finally, we have established a function that we call operations performance.
That basically is the muscle for synergies across operations and is the highway for how we scale and how we get service products and the outcomes of those service products to our customers' sites. In the OneISS blueprint in our countries, the customer accounts are organized in verticals. In business units designed by the segments, the strategic segments that we have, office-based, production-based, and healthcare. We have functions that go across those segments, those business units, in order to help drive the outcomes we're after. In the middle of that sits operations performance. Operations performance is, Liz also talked about it, a key enabler for getting what we want to get to our customers' sites.
It's of course called operations performance for a purpose. It's called operations because, yes, operations is almost everything we do in ISS, but there are less good ways of operating and there are best ways of operating. With operations performance, we want to get the best ways of operating to everywhere in ISS. It's called performance because at the end of the day, it's about the business performance that we drive with that, and that comes in the categories of quality, productivity, sustainability and compliance, but all with hard-coded KPIs. This function, operations performance, work with the business units with the accounts within the business units in order to get the outcomes on our customers' sites. The way we drive these business outcomes is via what we call service products.
By introducing service products built on leading technology platforms, we can effectively scale and mobilize all the resources, the talent, the investments that we do in building really market-leading service products that we can then scale to our customer sites via our operating model. We call it a product because everybody knows what a product is. It says on the outside of the product what is in it. It says what it does. Customers like it because it's designed to produce the outcomes that meet the needs of those particular customers in creating the results wished for.
We have built a product management organization at group level, and we have designed a product development process which always starts, of course, with the needs of our customers, and again, in a segmented way, so office-based, production-based, and healthcare. We take those needs, we develop a product that will create the outcomes meeting those needs, and when we have done so, we pilot the product in a process that we call site up, and there are two criteria for that product then to go into scaling. The one criteria is that we can see the outcomes coming through, so the business outcomes. The other one is that the product is accepted by our site team. It needs to be a product that the site team can work with.
It needs to be a product where the site team can see the value coming through. When we are happy with that, we scale via the OneISS operating model. Within the operations performance centers in the countries, they take, together with the business units, these products to our customer sites. We then measure the performance because each product comes with some targets, outcomes, performance. We measure that, and we loop that whole thing back into a continuous improvement process to make sure that we learn and that we keep improving. I would like to give you an example of what we mean when we talk about service products. This is a service product called Pure Space Office, and it sits within the category, a very important category for us, that is called daily office cleaning.
Daily office cleaning, the category of daily office cleaning is important for two reasons. The first is that, as you know, half of our revenues or almost half of our revenues in 2021 was with cleaning. Out of that, DKK 25 billion of revenues is within the category of daily office cleaning. Out of that, DKK 17.5 billion are wage costs. Because we did not have the OneISS operating model to scale what we work with, and because we could therefore not work with global benchmarks in terms of productivity, we do see or we do expect that there is quite a difference between lowest and highest productivity in terms of daily office cleaning across our enterprise. Therefore, we also see a clear potential for an upside in working with global productivity benchmarks across the business.
One percentage point of productivity uplift within the category of daily office cleaning equates 25 basis points on the group margin. That's the first reason why it's important. The second reason why it's important is that when we deliver workplace solutions to our large key account customers in an IFS delivery, then we ask the users of those workplaces in our user experience surveys, and in those user experience surveys we can see that cleaning comes out always on top in terms of the single biggest driver of user experience and user satisfaction. That was so before COVID, it was so during COVID, and it is still so after COVID. Within the Pure Space Office product is especially designed to work with those accounts and contracts we have that we call outcome-based or output-based, as opposed to input-based.
In an outcome or output-based contracts, we have an agreement with our customer to deliver a specific outcome in terms of cleanliness or quality of the cleaning. It is in our interest, of course, to use the smallest input possible, and input is in terms of hours. This product comes in at least an imaginary box. Imagine that here's a box with our Pure Space Office product, then it says on the outside, what is in it, and it's always the same that is in it. This product is the same whether it is in Europe, in Americas, or in Asia Pacific, the exact same product. What's in it is always the task instructions. These are how each task should be solved in cleaning.
In daily office cleaning, there would always be the methods, there would be the chemicals that we use, there would be the tools, and there would be the technology. Over time, I of course expect that there will be a bigger and bigger technology element in this. There would be training programs, and there would be a commercial pack, so our teams can go to our customers and sell this product. What will also be there is a complete productivity program. Productivity here is measured in terms of number of square meters we can clean per hour at a given quality outcome. The way we do that is we have now built a planning function at the global level, and we have built a planning function in most now of our operations performance centers in the countries.
Of course, we will end up having it in all countries. Those planning functions, they plan based on global benchmarks for productivity. They plan how many hours we should use on a given customer's site to deliver the outcome we have agreed. Based on that, a team goes to the site, help our site team to get to those hours in terms of the actual hours. We change the rostering, so the number of Placemakers and the number of hours we have on the site, and we keep working until the actual hours are the exact same as the planned hours, and thereby that we have achieved the productivity target. What you see here, the dashboard, it is a dashboard to the right of this slide, facilitating that we can work with our cleaning contracts in a country in a portfolio fashion.
Each of these dots, each of these colored dots is a cleaning contract, and that can be a single service cleaning contract or it can be the cleaning part of an IFS contract. On the Y-axis, you have the margin of that, so the service margin of that particular contract, and on the X-axis, you would have the productivity index up against our global benchmarks. You have the green dots. Those are contracts where we have a high margin, and we have a high productivity. That's the category we like. We have the red category, so low margin, low productivity. We work with those accounts, we work the productivity up, and as we do that, of course, we also work the margin up. So those accounts end up in the green category as well. We have the yellow contracts.
Those would be high margin and low productivity. Those are contracts we could eventually lose because somebody could come in and offer a cheaper solution for cleaning to that particular customer. Therefore, of course, we also work with those contracts to get the productivity up, and then we share some of that uplift with the customer in order to retain the customer and protect our nominal margins. As we do that, they end up in the green category too. Finally, we have the blue category. Those are accounts with low margin and high productivity. We price increase those accounts because we know the productivity is high and therefore that the risk of price increasing is low. We would still be competitive even with a higher price.
You see the logic of working with various contracts in this fashion in making sure that we are doing the right things to protect our top line and to increase our margins. We started the rollout of the Pure Space Office product earlier this year together with the productivity program, and we right now are at 1,100 sites across 22 countries. We have trained 10,000 Placemakers, and we are quite excited by the result we see so far. We see, on average, an uplift in productivity of 10%. We see 90% reduced water consumption, 90% reduced chemical consumption, and very importantly, of course, we see a significantly improved cleanliness.
We actually use few hours, but we get better results with those hours. Finally, we see improved levels of health and safety for the users of our customers' workplaces as well as for our placemakers. With this, we are ticking three of our outcome categories. We tick the quality part, we tick the productivity part, and we tick the sustainability part. Now just a word of caution, of course, nobody in this room would take the spreadsheets and put in 10% on the DKK 17.5 billion worth of wage costs that I showed before. Before anybody outside the room would do that, there are three reasons why that cannot be done in a one-to-one fashion. The first reason is we probably didn't start with the contracts with the highest level of productivity.
Therefore, as we move through our whole portfolio, you should see. Expect to see that the uplift is not necessarily 10% all the way through. The second part is that we will convert some of that uplift to pricing power. That, of course, in turn mean that it should be a growth motor. Then finally, still we have around 25% of our revenues in daily office cleaning category that sits within input-based, where the leverage for this is less. Of course, it's still quite an impressive uplift and a big potential that we definitely are excited to capitalize on. I listed here a number of other service products. These are either in rollout as we speak, or they are being piloted in our site up process.
I can see on the watch here that I don't have time to go through all of them, but some of them we will also talk about in some of our other segments today. I will mention three. The Place concept. That is really about how can we help our customers to attract more people, their people back in the offices. Jacob talked about that. We know from our studies that the single biggest driver in attracting people back to the workplace is food, or rather the whole experience around food. Therefore, that is important, and that is timely.
There is an asset management, or rather an asset life cycle management product where we, based on data that come from our FMS system that Markus will talk about in a minute, can help customers to take good decisions on, based on total cost of ownership, when to maintain and use costs, and when to replace and use CapEx, also with a view to carbon. Then finally, there is a product extension, so the Pure Space Office Plus, which is a product that we developed during COVID, and is a disinfection product where we effectively remove all microorganisms on surfaces in our customers' offices, helping to make safe offices for people to work in during COVID or return to post-COVID.
There will be many more products in our pipeline for 2023, and with that, there is no doubt that, working with market-leading products powered by technology, and brought to our customer site via our operating model is definitely a driver for structural growth and structural margin uplift in future. With that, I would like to hand over to my colleague, Markus Sontheimer, to take you through the technology part of the OneISS strategy.
Thank you. Thanks, Troels. Hello, everybody. Let me quickly start introducing myself. My name is Markus Sontheimer. I'm the Chief Digital and Information Officer of ISS. I'm in this role since June 2021, and since that time, I'm working on the transformation, on the digital transformation, of global ISS. When we met last time in February this year, I talked about the strategy, and all starts in tech with having a right global strategy. We call it the wheel, and the wheel is addressing mainly as well the question, how do you do tech? If you see on the dimension of the wheel, there is one clear dimension which is important, which is the cost focus. IT cost management on global scale.
You can imagine with the more decentralized historical business model that IT was neither purchased in a clever way across the globe consistently, neither did it scale. Cost management was the first area we focused on because we wanted to save money to free up the money to invest in innovation and transformation. That is the funding source of what I'm talking about to you today. We had as well a big focus around government or governance. How do you run a global shop? I go in more detail about what the global IT organization looks all about. We implemented the global governance guideline. We have global reporting lines down to the country, and we really run IT globally as a logical, centralized organism like Troels was saying.
IT, for sure, isn't unable to transport products, and especially information. The key focus areas of the IT strategy is all about building the right applications. Sounds right, yeah. The question is what is the right applications? The right applications are the applications which differentiate us from the competition. There are areas of our business where you can make a big difference to the competitors. We need to build a scalable platform. You see in the center of the wheel, it's all about stable and cybersecure IT operation. Because with the sensitivity of our customer, like Liz was talking about, government customers, we have the biggest bank in the world, part of our portfolio, so cybersecurity is left, right, and center.
If you don't have that lined up properly, you're not even invited to a proper bid, and we change that even becoming a value proposition to our customers. You need to run the IT as a global team which scales. Now, when I talk about cybersecurity, remember that's 2020, ISS really was in trouble with the virus. Since that time, we really grow the cybersecurity muscle. We had in that time around 5 cybersecurity people. We now have 50+ security people who are working 24/7. We have a security operations center. We have a SIEM platform, like a protection where we are attacked permanently by friends, friendly hackers who are checking us out. We have control out there of 50,000 assets.
We have edge agents on our clients to control, to report, to log, and we have exclusive top security people who look at the logs and make our protection in a very intelligent way. We have been as well ISO certified here in the U.K. as an example, which is absolutely important if you wanna embark on some of the segments we talked about. We still spend every year now DKK 100 million in cybersecurity only. Cybersecurity is a key. What is important, you can throw as much money as you want into cybersecurity. The question is what are the outcomes? When we look on that in a rather short time, we achieved now that we are in complex comparable businesses, really on top of the benchmark, how cybersecurity can look like.
Now, I never feel safe, so if you ask myself, what is the only thing which concerns me, it is cybersecurity. Yeah. So that's something which is for a CIO, left, right, and center, your daily job to be done. But I'm really confident, and you see how we develop, how we measure in all areas, how we grow in the maturity of cybersecurity to make it a real differentiator in this industry. Now when you wanna grow in cybersecurity, you need to fix the fundamental underlying infrastructure you have as a global player, especially when you come from a very decentralized set up local-built data centers. That's why we embarked on our strategy in a multi-hybrid global cloud setup. That sounds very techy, but what does this mean? Firstly, we don't wanna put all eggs in one basket. No, we don't go only to one hyperscaler.
We always make sure we have two because we are a low-margin business, and we need to compete with suppliers that we get the better, best deal out there. Hybrid means there are apps which are not running properly in the cloud or they're too expensive. That's stuff we can still run in edge technology on-site. We have now already moved this week the third country, which is Italy, and we will move the fourth country this year, which is Indonesia, to the cloud, and we will continue this journey. It provides stability, it provides security levels, and it gives us cost saving as well. All of that in a way that we talked about a scalable platform and to be scalable in the underneath kind of technology is absolutely key on that journey.
Now, when you wanna do that and when you wanna become a technology leader in this industry, and that's our ambition. Right down in the Strategy 2020, we wanna become technology leader. What do you really need? You need to have a muscle, and you need to have competence. What we did in that time now already in 2022, we grew by 150 in-house experts. Here we really talk about cybersecurity people. We talk about architects. We talk about infrastructure people, service manager people. A real muscle, which is mainly based out of Warsaw, Copenhagen, and a lot of people in Germany. To grow in that area further and building even coding. Really starting to implement coding capabilities.
We opened up a tech center in Porto last month, which will grow into nearly 100 software developers end of next year. Now, this is quite important because if you wanna act properly and you wanna act swiftly, you have to have access to coding capability. You need to integrate systems with customer systems. You need to integrate your own ecosystem we talked about. That means capabilities of delivering code in a real agile way is absolutely key to make a difference in this industry. In addition to being able to code, we have secured the IP on software ourselves. That is important because then the competition can't go to the next shop and buy the same software and copy what you're doing. If you own the code, it's your code, and the intellectual property is in it.
We have our own food stack front of the house. That's really when food meets the workplace. Troels talked about the customer journey, and if you can plug in your food app into your workflow app, which you have on a workplace, that's a different customer experience, and I'll show you some examples of how cool software we can build. We have as well our own workplace experience app. We benchmarked it with the market what we wanna do, and that's for us as well a differentiator in the market. Other components like an IoT platform looking towards a digital twin of the building is something we built in-house as well. Now, it's easy to talk about PowerPoint. Let me show you some of our first developments, which we did, in the last 12 months. Let me start from the left-hand side.
The first big app, which is gonna be a big differentiator, is an app called MyISS. Now, MyISS is an app which we wanna roll out to 360,000 employees. Now that's a big app. The key difference is it will be the first time in history that ISS can digitally talk to the front line. It is an app people can download to their private phones, and suddenly we are out there and have 360,000 data points. Now as bankers, you can imagine what you can do if you have data and you have data points. You can start optimizing how you run your business. You suddenly can find out how many plumbers do I have in Denmark, where did they work, and how can I optimize the uses of these key resources, in the future?
You can communicate with your employees so that they feel at home, so they can talk to you can talk to them, and it's in a secure way based on a Microsoft ID, so it's a real safe application on a big scale. It is live. We have now, since this week, 13,000 users already. Next year, we wanna go towards 50,000-100,000 users with this application. The second app is ISS takeaway app. That's nothing else than a kind of a food channel to sell takeaway food. That's an app to show you can even increase top line if you use tech. So a sales channel for our canteens, for our food, and we increased and doubled particularly the top line of takeaway food in these customers. We use it.
It's live in 6 customers in 9 sites, and it's on its journey to the world. The third application is. I call it digital helpers. It's an outdoor app, so what that does in the end, when you have MyISS and you are out there, let's say you make a winter cleaning service. With the outdoor app, you can simply document before or after. It's timestamping, it's geotagging, and it stores the whole data in the back end, who makes billing easier, and it makes our front liners more efficient. The last one is about ISS Workplace app. That's really a differentiator in the market. That's the app on the employee's phone of our customer. This is kind of like a B to B to C platform you can use. We have our own app built.
We have 60,000 users on the platform, and it's really used in global key account, and it's working very well, and it can be really developed into the future as a portal, for us, in the area of our customers. Now, if you put that all together, it's all about an ecosystem. Jacob talked about this ecosystem which lies behind our offerings on the business side. The ecosystem is, in the end, the technical foundation for this scalable platform. You see here how these components are working together. They finally end up in a data lake where you then can report. We ultimately are heading towards, a building on a page for our customers, the real estate managers, to have different lenses on their portfolio, of their assets. You know, what is the consumption on CO2?
What do I spend in food? How much food do I waste? This comes all together in a data lake and information the customer needs. But this is only possible if you have linked the sensors, which are apps, IoT, into this kind of ecosystem, which we do with very strong cloud-based middle layers. Again, a key technical component to enable this kind of efficiency. The key point is because it's cloud first, it scales. That's exactly how we are transporting the best practice on a digital way. Some of the examples around that is to how we use the data to improve decision making. You see on the left-hand side, we are building at the moment an app for based on the Danish market on waste management. So how do our customer manage the containers, the waste?
This kind of waste management platform again generates data and gives the customer insights to optimize their waste production, which ultimately falls into their CO2 balance as well. It all starts with a proper app in the first place. Then we are supporting as well with the Workplace app and the IoT platforms we are offering, you know, occupancy rate. How full is my office really? You know, everybody has the feeling of a lot of people in the office are not. The question is, do you have real data to optimize your portfolio in that area? Again, a key kind of data point for our customers to optimize their footprint. Now, the key takeaway around the technology journey and the strategy we are driving is a little bit around that.
Firstly, I tried to explain that we are moving the platform into the cloud. We move into the cloud because we wanna be scalable, and we wanna become even more secure than we are. It's much easier to protect a multi-cloud setup than to protect 30 or 40 data centers for sure. It pays back as well, but it makes us scalable very easily, and that's quite important. Secondly, we're really growing our technology team. We are now 800 in-house technology people. We will grow next year by another 100 technicians. That's really coders, mainly based in Portugal, which makes a big difference from attracting talent, but it makes as well a big difference when it comes to the cost position.
The whole innovation, which I talked to you up to now, is financed by cost savings in the way how we did IT before. The potential we have been able to lift out of that was exactly the money we shifted into these investments, which normally the CFO pretty much likes. We are really trying to build and deliver growth with this platform. The whole idea of IT, apart from optimizing our operations as well later on with mathematics, with RPA, is support the growth strategy of the company.
I have a lot of discussions with customers, and the key question is about, let me talk to your CIO. We have a lot of technology because in the end, you can only optimize what you see. To optimize what you see, you need data. The tech backbone of ISS is providing this ability to optimize the in-house operation, but as well our customers. With that, I would give back to Troels. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Markus. We will talk about environmental sustainability. Our ambition is to champion sustainable workplaces. Of course, our own workplaces, but much more importantly, our customers' workplaces. We want to become the sustainability leader in our industry. Sustainability is an integral part of what we do in ISS and who we are, and it has been for 121 years. In a moment, you will see my colleague, Margot Slattery, come up and talk about our social sustainability agenda. Our environmental sustainability agenda is really an agenda about reducing carbon and getting to net zero for our customers. It is around how we help reducing energy, how we help reducing waste, how we help reducing the use of certain types of materials on our customers' sites.
That agenda is, of course, right now, I know everybody knows, but, fueled by the skyrocketing prices on energy and also in some countries, the sheer availability of energy and that starting to become a business continuity issue. We are integrating carbon reduction in our contribution to our customers' net zero plans in everything we do in ISS and in the way we deliver our services. You know that we set our net zero targets earlier this year, so net zero for Scope 1 and 2 by 2030, and for the full scope in 2040. That is actually a very ambitious target.
It's ambitious because that 95% of all our emissions sit in the Scope 3, and the vast majority of that sits with our supply chain. If you think about that, we have 50,000 suppliers plus, and we have 40,000 customers plus. There are a lot of dots we need to connect in order to make sure that we, on our own behalf, but more importantly, on our customers' behalf, drive down energy, drive down emissions in carbon. We are very well on our way. We are handing in our Science Based Targets at the end of this year. We are working with the various technology solutions. One of them you will see in a film in just a minute, and the other one is about carbon tracking.
For us to, of course, report on our Science Based Targets, but also to make sure that we can evidence to our customers the exact impact that we have on their net zero journeys. We are integrating carbon management in all service products. Every development of a service product would have an element in it of how exactly we are, in a measurable way, going to help reduce carbon. You saw the Pure Space Office product I presented before. There was in there a reduction of 90% of chemicals. Of course, there is a reduction of carbon coming out of that. We are engaging our site teams to, on behalf of our customers, to really own those sites in terms of reducing energy and reducing carbon. We also said that we would electrify our fleet.
We have around 20,000 vehicles across the globe by 2030. Again, that is quite ambitious agenda because a big part of that fleet would be in countries or in areas where the infrastructure is not there yet or where the accessibility of renewable energy is not there. We have made a strategic partnership with LeasePlan. LeasePlan is the fleet manager for our entire fleet, and we are both incentivized to drive down emissions and make sure that we electrify our fleet at speed. We will have 1,500 vehicles electrified this year. As soon as the supply chains for electric vehicles are opening up, which I expect that they will at some point, then we will also be able to accelerate that.
We said we would reduce greenhouse gases from food by 25% by 2030 and reduce food waste by 50% by 2027. Also here, we are making really good progress in terms of menu planning, in terms of sustainable food sourcing of food material sourcing, and in terms of food waste, which you will also see in just a minute. For our customers, the use of their buildings represents a significant part of their carbon emissions, particularly, of course, the buildings' heating, the cooling, the ventilation, and the electrical systems. In our IFS offering, we are touching all of those systems. Also food and food waste are important contributors to emissions and also part of our scope.
With the integrated facility services offering we deliver and energy optimization, space optimization, and workplace offering that we have are all critical for our customers in their net zero roadmaps. We believe that we are quite uniquely placed to support our customers on their net zero journeys for three reasons. The first is our IFS solution. We can take a holistic view. Our customers are outsourcing to us the responsibility on their behalf to in their buildings make sure that we do everything we can to help reduce energy consumption and emissions. When you then think about that food, technical services, and the associated capital projects are all the biggest drivers of emission reductions and are all part of our IFS offering, then it adds up.
Finally, and to us, that's the most important part, that is that we have our teams on site. We have 360,000 Placemakers around the site, the eyes, the ears and the minds of those in order to help customers on a daily basis, being there all the time, helping out. I would suggest we take a look at a film for, that we have for, one of our very large global banking customers. We help them to reduce energy consumption, and we do that with technology. We also do it by applying engineering competency, and that is the on-site competence as well as the off-site competence from our operations performance. We do it with our workplace offering, and we tie all of that together in our IFS offering.
Let's have a look at the film. Pressures on energy supply and the urgent need for carbon reduction have never been greater. The implications on organizations that utilize the built environment are profound. Trapped by volatile energy markets and rocketing costs, their ability to forecast and make key commercial decisions is at serious risk. Reducing consumption is imperative. Using best-of-breed technology, ISS uses its vast knowledge and experience of how a multitude of workplaces operate day to day and its ability to deliver change on site every day to help organizations reduce their energy consumption. Since January this year, our energy optimization process developed, honed, and proven with customers, has saved a global bank over 4 GWh.
That's enough to power 30,000 laptops or 1,379 homes for over a year, saving a global bank GBP 487,000 and preventing 770 tons of CO2 emissions in just 10 months. That's for just one of our many customers worldwide. From initial assessment to gathering and validating data, from building systems and our own workspace app, we can not only analyze and identify opportunities to reduce consumption, optimize spaces, and change behaviors, but also act upon them diligently on-site every day. We then measure and verify our successes and factor them in to forecast, monitor, and manage even greater savings again and again. Energy optimization from IFS. Focusing energy on saving energy. As I mentioned, the IFS model in combination with the self-delivery model.
The fact that our teams are on site every single day on our customers' sites is a very, very big muscle to have to help customers to reduce energy and to reduce emissions. Our site teams are not alone. We have in the operations performance centers that we discussed before in each of our countries, we would have teams of specialists. For example, teams within capital projects. We would have teams within energy optimization. We would have teams within specialties in technical services and in space optimization. You can read it yourself, but I brought some examples of where our operations performance teams come out, help our site teams to achieve bigger projects and bigger targets for our customers than the site team would be able to do themselves.
Also in food, I mentioned food. About a third of all greenhouse gas emissions in this world are coming from food. And therefore, working with menu planning, with sustainable food procurement, and with waste management in food is key. Let's see a film on how we work across our enterprise utilizing AI technology in all our kitchens. Please. A product of ISS Open Innovation Program, Winnow is transforming the way ISS handles food waste. The global food system accounts for approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. ISS takes food waste really seriously. Winnow is an AI food waste management system. We've used it to help us manage food waste across our global business.
We utilize the data that we get from the Winnow system, carbon and greenhouse gas equivalents, meal equivalents that we save, and of course, cost, to make sure that we can report consistently across our global business. The data is also critically important for our Placemakers. We can show them images of the food that they've actually been producing and working with, what's been wasted, when it's been wasted. This allows us to re-engineer menus, to work with Placemakers to really help them change their behavior on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis. One of our large mining clients asked us to provide a specific menu structure for their on-site employees. When we started to analyze what was being wasted, we identified that what the client was asking us to provide wasn't actually what their customers wanted.
We took that data to the client, and then we collectively worked together to change the menu structure. This allowed us to generate less waste, get happier customers, and of course, drive a cost efficiency and saving. As a management team.
We have the ability to look across the locations where we've got Winnow deployed. We use the carbon data to report to our clients at monthly joint reviews and quarterly business reviews to make sure we can support their net zero ambitions as well. The Winnow system allows us to manage costs, share great management information around sustainability with our clients, and really change the behaviors of our Placemakers across the organization.
Winnow. Informed, intelligent food waste reduction.
We are fully committed to help our customers achieve their net zero targets. What we do and how we do it does have a decisive impact on that journey that our customers are laying out. We are developing products, we are developing technology solutions, and we are engaging our teams to that end. Again, the operating model that we have is helping us to get all of that to our customer's site. Environmental sustainability is a big part of who we are in ISS, but it is also an enabler for structural growth and margin. With that, I would like to leave it over to my colleague, Margot Slattery, who is in a very big way has been leading our social sustainability agenda across ISS. Margot, please.
Thank you, Troels. Thanks, everybody. My name is Margot Slattery, as Troels just said, and I have the honor and pleasure to lead global diversity and inclusion and belonging at ISS. I've been at ISS, like Liz, for just about 18 months now, and I must say that's flown. I have a long history in the FM industry, working in operations and in diversity and inclusion, and I'm delighted to be doing this work. It really is quite something. Today, I wanna tell you a story. A little bit of a different track. I wanna tell you a story, take you on a journey. In fact, if you think about ISS, and you know, it's been mentioned at many, many occasions already today, we've been around for over 120 years.
Over those 100 years, we have done something quite special. We've actually looked after people. Like we do in health and safety and wellbeing, we've put people at the very heart and the center of what we're actually about. Over those 100 years, we've helped lift people out of poverty, give them their very first job, and in some cases, give people a new opportunity, an opportunity to do something really different and to give them their dignity back. Now as we progress this work in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, we wanna really build that to rise up, to make it more tangible, and to put some more, I suppose, backbone behind that. We have a big cultural ambition, and I want today to unpack that with you and to tell you about it.
That ambition is to become the global company of belonging. You heard Jacob speak a little bit earlier on about the fact that as people are coming back to workplace or not coming back to workplace, one of the biggest challenges is making people feel they belong. I'm sure we all experience it. I've spent months working from the back of my laptop and not actually meeting anybody. When you come and you meet your colleagues, it's such a different experience. We wanna really understand how do we make that tangible in what we do every day? Because as an employer of 360,000 people in 30 countries with 40,000 customers, this is really something that we can make an impact on. One of the ways we articulate that is through our employee value proposition.
Again, if you haven't seen it, let me talk you through it. It is our promise. It's about a place to be you. I think this is quite special. First of all, it says, "You can be who you are." Whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever your background, your race, your ethnicity, your ability, your disability, whatever that may be, you can be who you are at ISS. You can become what you want to be. I think that's quite special because you can either, you know, want to be Jacob, you can want to be in our sites. You can be whatever you wanna be. We can offer people careers and amazing careers in our industry. Lastly, you can be part of something bigger. Giving purpose to people and really giving purpose to what we do every day.
This is not just about, you know, the right thing to do because quite often we hear talk out there in the workplace about diversity, inclusion, and belonging. People say it's the right thing to do. It's not just about the right thing to do. This is actually about good business. This is putting the S into the ESG and actually walking that talk. From our perspective, when we think about how we do it every day, we've the opportunity to bring approximately 125,000 people into work, starting and giving this opportunity. Sometimes they're migrants. They're, as I said, starting out again. We do that, and we realize that in our organization. We also realize it for our clients, for our customers.
When they've got ambitions around this, we're able to help them to fulfill their social obligations and to make it real. Just to give you a little bit of background here. When I started, and as I think my colleagues have all talked to, we've been doing this work a long time. What we needed to do was put a frame around what we were doing and actually making sure that we had an orientation. We thought about this, and we focused this around five key areas, and we wanted to make a big change and really make a change because we wanted to create opportunities. Like all of you, me, everybody here, we want to give people an opportunity to do something different. The areas that we looked at, firstly and foremost, was the generations and age.
We have, at the moment, five generations in our workplace and soon to be perhaps six. We have people from all cultures, race, and ethnicity, and we express that in different ways. One of the things we've recently done is work with the NGO Tent, where we are actually mentoring women refugees across Europe to help them to find their way into society. We're also, and you may have seen, that we've made a pledge in the Americas to hire over 1,000 refugees, and we will continue to build on that. From Pride, as a member of the LGBT community myself, this is really important. From a Pride perspective, we're building safe spaces for people in the countries that we actually operate. With abilities, we think of people with disabilities, and we think about how do we make workplaces more accessible.
We've had some great success with that in our headquarters in Warsaw because we were involved in the design of the building from the first part, and we actually have now achieved platinum status. We're doing that in many ways and working with partners to do that for our customers. Lastly, but by no means least, gender balance. Again, Jacob talked at the very beginning around the fact how much of our revenue has now been gender balanced, but we're looking at that across all of our business. Out there in the world, I guess the figure that, you know, is spoken about when we talk about gender balance is a 40/60% ratio. That's where we get it right. Some countries it's 40, sometimes it's 60. Depends on that between women and men.
Obviously, we think wider in gender, but I'm speaking really today on that fact. When we look at our business, we look at the fact that we are making progress. We've expressed a wish to, by 2025, to have a 40% gender balance towards females. If we look at our board, we've 33%, at the moment, females in our business. In our EGM, so that's in Jacob's team, we've got 31%. In our corporate leadership, which is from our management trainees right up to our EGM, we've got 32%. Why does that matter? It matters because that is the frame in which we're bringing in and doing the work we do. Now I want to unpack that global ambition. We've talked about it, but we want to do more than just talk the talk.
We actually want to walk the walk. What are we pledging? We are today, and I want to talk about three very bold objectives. Very, I think, impactful objectives. We first of all want to make sure that we are working together with policymakers and our customers and suppliers to implement living wage across our industry. There's never been bigger challenge than right now around the cost of living, so this is a bold move. We commit to giving 100,000 Placemakers and/or their family members a recognized qualification by 2025. Think about the impact of that. Again, if you haven't had the opportunity for education or a recognized qualification, how can we help you? We can do that for our people.
Lastly, we will partner with all of our stakeholders, our customers, and the people we do business to demonstrate the value of Placemakers and the value they bring to our workplaces, striving for recognition and respect. We all remember during COVID, you know, clap for our Placemakers, clap for people who do frontline work. Well, we don't want that to just happen there. This is something we want to see ongoing, and that's why we make those three bold objectives. You may say, "Are we doing that already?" Yes, we are doing that in some places and in some parts of the world, but we want to make sure that we do that wherever we operate. How are we going to do that?
Again, trying to make this a little bit simple, and as you can probably imagine, there's a huge amount of work behind this. The first and foremost way of looking at it is to think about it as a circle. We start with paying people well, making sure they have a living wage, that they've moved away from just surviving to actually thriving, helping people to have an opportunity to grow and making sure we recognize them. We partner with partners who are in collaboration with us and help us in our objective to deliver great service to our customers, to make sure that wherever ISS is experienced on a daily basis, it's a great service. Therefore, those services and those customers feel they can recommend us and that we can grow that business.
Hopefully, for our investors, we become more profitable and deliver ongoing returns. All along through part of that and everything we do, it's also good for society. It's good business. I want to just take you through a very quick case study, and I won't go too long on it. In India, we have many Placemakers. I don't know if you're aware or not, but most of the people who work in frontline in India are earning the minimum wage. That's around INR 9,500 per month. The living wage, as expressed in India, is INR 18,000 per month. We had an opportunity to collaborate with a key account and to make a difference here. What we actually did was move from that INR 9,500 to INR 20,000 per month.
That's a significant difference. The outcome was that we saw a big, big change. We saw increased retention. We moved from 68% up to 81%. Big, big reduction in absenteeism. I struggle with that word, absenteeism. Again, came right down and really moving to zero is, as such. Most importantly, we got exceptional feedback from our customers because they saw the difference of those engaged Placemakers. We had year-on-year margin improvement. Again, we top that off with the fact that the people who work for us, those people who work every day, actually saw a difference in their lives, and their lives were affecting their communities and their families. We made a difference in their communities. As I come to the last couple of slides, how will we know when we get there?
Going back to when I started this conversation, I talked about the fact that we don't want to just talk the talk, we wanna make sure this is something we do over the next number of years. One thing I've learned working with this great organization over the couple years, we get measured. We challenge ourselves on numbers. We need to measure and make sure we're actually doing this. Three core ways that we wanna do that. First of all, we want to have an engagement score, 'cause when we talk about diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity, we wanna make sure it starts with what really matters. Do people feel they belong in our organization?
We're going to challenge ourselves to really raise the bar on that, and we've looked at what is the target out there, what's the highest quartile, and we're saying 80%. That's what great places to work look at as a number. We are challenging ourselves to achieve that number. With those engaged staff, because we are going to do it, then with those engaged and happy staff, we want, we wanna challenge ourselves around retention, because if we've really got people who feel they belong, then they will stay with us. Again, we want to put a challenging number there, and again, we've looked at that top quartile, and we say that's 70%. Again, looking at what great places to work and companies do. Having that number really challenges us as well. Then obviously, Jacob Aarup-Andersen and Kasper Fangel speak about the growth number.
That makes for a great place to be and a place to be you. As I conclude, I just wanna kind of take us back. I started in the beginning. What's our history and what's our heritage? What have we been doing well? We've done health and safety, made people feel they belong, a place for wellness and a place where you can be you. We know that's really challenging in today's world. What are we doing? We're really unpacking this idea of becoming the global company of belonging. We're doing that with three signature objectives, and I've talked to those who are living wage everywhere we work, educating people, and then having ongoing conversations to make sure we build recognition into what we do every day and respecting the people who work for us.
Again, I can testify to this because I'm somebody who started my working life in a scenario where I wasn't able to, I suppose, have third-level education because economically my parents couldn't afford it when I was starting out. I had the opportunity to go back to college and have it funded through my workplace and to have continuous education. I know how important that is. I, along with the team, wanna make that difference for what we do in ISS for our people every day. With 360,000 placemakers, we have a big footprint, and we can make a big difference. Lastly, I want you to know, it's ISS, a place to be you. Watch this short video. Thank you.
Thank you, Michael.
You're welcome. All yours.
I think I'm being joined by Troels and Markus and Jacob, because this is the. Over here. Thank you. This is the 15 minutes Q&A before the break. As always, we'll let the expert run the Q&A. Yeah. We'll do it the same way as we did last time. If you have a question, please raise your hand and we have microphones. Please state your name and your company, and then we will make sure that it's recorded. For the people on the web, please write the questions in the chat function. I think if we start out here in the room, anyone likes to kick off with the first question? Then I...
Actually, I have one.
You have? Sorry. Anvesh here. Right in front.
Hi, this is Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley again. Just a question on technology side. Seems there's a lot of emphasis on developing it in-house rather than using a modular off-the-shelf approach and realizing ISS is not something like when technology changes every day, you are more of a service organization rather than a tech organization. What's driving the decision to do it really in-house and the risk with ever-changing tech landscape?
Thank you for the question. Quite an important one. It all started with setting the strategy in 2020 that we want to be and have to be technology leader in the industry to ultimately deliver the growth. Now the question is how do you become technology leader when you don't know how technology works? That's in the end one of the driving factors. You need the skills to ultimately make it different, and that starts with architects who really understand that. Because you can't just buy an FMS system and that's it, yeah? You need to configure it. You need to make it part of an ecosystem with APIs, needs to talk to each other. It's quite a complex architecture work in the background, and you need as well the coding in the detail to ultimately make that all secure.
The driver is if you decide you wanna be Formula One and not a dispatcher of suppliers, then you need to build this muscle. That was the job given to me by Jacob, really to say to build this muscle. This muscle includes being able to code software in a DevOps way. That makes you just faster because you can deploy on a daily basis changes into the production environment. I can tell you out of the feedback I have with customers, if you can't do that, then you're out.
Mm.
You need to integrate into different use cases because even our customers have existing infrastructure. Now you need to have the technical skills to not say, "I have my package. I come with a standard package." No, you need to be able to adapt your approaches to the customer, especially in the key account area. That's the reason why we believe without the competence in-house, we will not make a difference. If it's in-house, it can be not stolen by others, because everybody can buy from a supplier, so that's the big differentiator.
Maybe just adding to that, Markus, of course, fully agree. I think there's also an element here that if you look at the uniqueness of the operating model that we are and also that Troels just went through a second ago, et cetera, you don't find any other animals like that on the savanna, right? That also means that relying purely on people, on external suppliers of developing software that fits exactly with our delivery model and the complexity of ISS, that's a pretty big bet to take. If you look at
If you do the forensics around some of the issues we've had with technology in the past, some of that is also simply driven by the fact that we were trying to make external solutions fit to an operating model that wasn't fit for purpose compared to the software we're bringing in. There's an element here of making sure that we can also get the uniqueness of our operating model reflected, and otherwise we cannot drive scalability with off-the-shelf software across the board. Of course, we still use off-the-shelf software.
Yeah.
That's not the point. In those core parts of our operations, we need to make sure it truly fits with the operating model.
Maybe if I can add, especially.
We'll do a ping-pong in the next 15 minutes.
But even if you use standard software, the level of investment to customize, if this is now an FMS system, if this is an ERP system or an HR system, is heavily. The question, if you anyway wanna use it for 10 years, why do you pay external rates and not like we do go to Porto, which is even 30%, cheaper than Poland? The question is really about cost in a low-margin business, and IT is a big factor here, and that's why we need to do it right. If you look on the life cycle of software assets, it's just a business case to get the right level in-sourced, and that's the driver. You need to have the leadership who can do that. We need real senior coders. You know, it's easily said, you know, you code software.
You have to build the capabilities in the management team, which we built now in the last 12 months. We are very proud about the people we have been able to motivate to join us.
Maybe if I can ask one more on the quadrant you presented with the contracts that are sitting with high margin but low productivity. I mean, that seems like a blue sky scenario for a very competitive business. Which sort of countries or region you got that the most? And if you can give us any idea in what the scale of that as a overall proportion of the revenue, that would be great.
Yeah, that's a big one. Now this was a mock-up. I would like that we would have had more of those contracts, so it's not that a quarter of all our contracts are sitting in that category. I guess that it's also just showing that it's not always a perfect market. I have learned that by experience. One of the things by being with ISS for quite some time since 2009 is also that those will be, if you don't do anything about it will be potentially contracts that you could lose. The whole idea is you cannot just follow up on margin. You need to follow up on margin and productivity.
That's the secret sauce here, and that's what we are rolling out to across the enterprise, and that gives us a competitive advantage because we understand that relationship. I think, I hope it was clear from the dashboard that it gives us deep insight that we can then build our portfolio management on.
We will not name and shame countries that are not.
No.
Productive. No? Okay, fine.
You're not gonna give the proportion of those contracts as well?
I think that's a detail, we'll take it for another day.
Thank you.
Next question here in the room. In the back here.
All right. Jesper from Nordea. Just to follow up on the first question there, I was just curious whether your M&A strategy also down the line potentially could include technology company investments? If not, maybe, you know, on a minority investment level. Is that something that's also on the agenda down the line, potentially?
Yeah, let me take that. Kasper will speak to M&A later. We're not ruling out technology as a potential M&A target. You should not expect us to, if we at some point go down that line, that to be significant amounts. It would be around supplementing our existing technology teams with specific technology that we think, where we think we can accelerate the operating model development within certain verticals. You shouldn't expect that to be big amounts if we go down that line. It will be, as you say, probably minority stakes with these types of things. We're not about to announce anything, we're not ruling out the technology. There will be areas where we can accelerate our performance.
Sure. Thanks.
I have one question from the webcast. It's again from Michael Hvidtfeldt from Danske Bank. It's a question for Markus. Will you have to supply some staff with smartphones in some lower income markets? And what kind of CapEx would this add up to?
The answer is no. Because I think that was one of the key ideas of the concept. You have to start about what is the user group, you know, and can this company afford 350,000 smartphones? For sure not. Do you want to manage that? For sure not. It's too complicated. Now, the question around smartphones is pretty much depending on the labor law in different countries. In some countries, we have smartphones like Finland, so the infrastructure is there. But the whole concept we have is about having independent app which can be downloaded to low-cost devices. Now, we can't afford to buy 40,000 smartphones in India, and anyway, in India, they have mainly smartphones because they're needed for their daily life.
The only thing they have to do is go to the App Store and download the ISS app, yeah, and then it works. The whole concept was a low-cost concept as well. The idea is low-cost because it needs to scale and fixed costs, as we all know, are absolutely key, and we're not gonna generate a lot of fixed costs. That makes no sense for us as a business.
Right here in the middle. Christian.
Christian from SEB. Does it work? Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Now it does.
What is the number of competitors that can compete on the tech side? Are any of your competitors rejected when you bid for contracts based on lack of tech skills?
That's a detailed question I can't answer because I wasn't there. What I just can give you the feedback is when I talked to different big customers, and I can tell you, we do full day tech workshops with the big key accounts, and even if they are not our customers, it's all about the question about the tech capabilities. You have the head of IT from the customer talking to us directly, how what kind of tech we use in interfacing the platforms to their interfaces. I think the big difference in concept, what we do to competitors, and for sure we analyze what the competitors do, is like Jacob said, we didn't buy now stuff, yeah. Our focus is about the integration and making the difference where we need.
We own the IP of all of our configuration of our FMS system. We own the IP on the apps I showed you today, and we own the IP of the IoT we build. We believe that this is the demand. The question is some customers, they have an IoT system, they have sensors. For sure, we have a different level of how we integrate with these customers. The demand is massive, and I think without tech you will not win these big deals. That's definitely, I would say, what we saw in the last six months. The feedback we get in these bids is, "You're technically ahead." We're not that great in marketing yet because we are very south German. We first build, and then we talk. That's what we are doing.
It feels well, you know.
If we build it, they will come. Maybe just adding, sitting in on many of our commercial situations, I think it's the right question to ask. I think what we're seeing is if you look at the truly global competitors, they're also doing a lot in technology. There's no doubt about that. But we do see that the midsize and the local players are struggling on the technology side in the same way as they're doing on sustainability. It's back to a comment I made earlier today, which is we can see now that there's a differentiation going on with who has the muscle to invest in these things in order to deliver future workplace experience and who doesn't.
At this stage, it also means that we very often end up in the larger situations of being a very small handful of competitors that are competing again and again. A lot of people fall out in the early stages of that. Of course, the long-term ambition is to race completely ahead of also the other global competitors, but we have a lot of respect for the fact that they're also developing, they're also investing, and there's a lot of market for all of us here also, to be clear.
Maybe just a small follow-up on that. Also on the retention side, who owns the data? I guess, does this put you in a more pole position in regards to extension of existing contracts?
Who owns the data from a pure IT perspective? That's a fluid answer depending on the situation. Of course, when you look at the banking players and you know we are big in banking, we service 19 of the world's 30 largest banks. In banking, there is one element around who owns the data. Other industries which are less regulated, there's another element around that. As we build our own IP and as it's run in-house, we also control a much larger portion of the data compared to what we did before. No doubt about that.
I think the importance here is as well, that's why I talked about the hybrid cloud. In some countries, you have to be on site with the data. You can't even get the data out of the country. Your infrastructure needs to cater as well with that. Just think about China. You know, you have to have a cloud possibility in China, otherwise you can't scale. I think that's in the concept we have, you know, and especially in banking, for sure, the customer, it's the customer data. That's clear, and that's strict, and that's, you know, with Chinese walls separated because I said security and stability is number one, two, and three. There is no compromise of that because that would just kill our brand. There is no question about that.
Our own data, that's the ecosystem, right? Our people, our data points, our mathematics, and the assets in the building, that's our data, and that's where we can add value with the data of this asset.
Any other questions? Otherwise, I think we can go out to our great coffee outside. Let's be back at 3:30 P.M., so around 20 minutes break. Thank you. Yeah.
Okay. Welcome back, everyone. Also good afternoon from my side. I have met most of you before, but not all of you before. To those of you that I've not met, my name is Kasper Fangel, and I've been the Group CFO since November 2020. I've been in ISS in almost 15 years in many different finance roles. I've been in traditional finance roles within HQ, and then I've also been our country CFO for our operations in the U.S. The last role gave me a very good and different perspective of the business and taught me about what is going on in our operations. I would like to take you through 3 themes in my presentation today.
The first thing is that, I would like to give you a good understanding of where we are with the current financial performance. The second thing is that, I would like to present our capital allocation policy, new capital allocation policy, and also our considerations around M&A. I would like to present our future financial targets. Basically, with everything you have heard from the team today, how does that convert into how we see the financial performance in the years ahead of us? If we take a step back to 2020, then, I think Jacob described it pretty well. 2020 was a perfect storm for the enterprise. That was the year where the IT malware hit us. At the same time, we had the global pandemic that started to impact everywhere in the world and of course, also impacted ISS negatively.
At the same time, we were fighting severe operational issues. That also converted into very disappointing financial results for ISS. Our business went backwards from a growth perspective. Operating margins was barely above breakeven, and we posted a significant negative free cash flow. Our response to that situation was the OneISS strategy, and the OneISS strategy was set up to deliver the turnaround targets that many of you are familiar with. In summary, to take the operating margins from about breakeven to greater than 4% at the end of this year, it was to delever the business to below 3 times at the end of this year, and it was to secure net divestment proceeds of at least DKK 2 billion. The roadmap to deliver on that was clear. There were three things that needed to be true.
The first thing was to get our arms around what we call the four operational hotspots and see some real traction and recovery in that part of the business. The second thing was an acknowledgement around that this company has underinvested in critical activities and areas for many years. IT, as you heard Markus spoke about, is a very good example of that. The third thing that we did was a complete review of the portfolio of the business, which led to quite a comprehensive divestment program of divesting non-core assets, but also us exiting a number of contracts and business units over the course of last year and this year. Common for all of these things was that this was entirely actions that were within our own control.
Therefore, it's also pleasing to confirm that we have reached our turnaround targets for the three KPIs that we identified. If I'm just to double-click on the operating margins, then U.K. is ahead of plan. France is behind plan. The Deutsche Telekom contract will deliver breakeven as an exit position of this year, and we have exited the Danish defense contract, so it's fully exited from the portfolio in the month of May this year. Last week, we disclosed our Q3 trading update. In summary, the business is growing significantly in the Q3. Our estimated operating margin is slightly above 4%. What's behind the significant growth of 8.1% is basically two components.
The first part is the price increases that we are passing on to our customers as a consequence of the increased increases we are seeing in our cost structure. The second thing is the benefit that we are seeing from the return to office programs that has ramped up in local markets over the course of this year. We also updated our financial outlook for this year, and we are now expecting the business to grow around 6.5%. We are expecting the reported operating margins to be around 3.8%, and we are expecting the free cash flow to be around DKK 1.5 billion. The stronger than expected organic growth is yielding additional operating profit.
It's offset by the incremental mobilization costs that we are currently incurring on the contract that we're mobilizing as we speak in North America. On free cash flow, the stronger than expected top line is also impacting our free cash flow. Before we expected an inflow from working capital this year, we're now expecting our working capital to be neutral this year. The financial health of our balance sheet has improved a lot since 2020. At the first half of this year, our leverage is 3.0x, and that will reduce further over the course of the second half as we're going to see increased EBITDA and consequently also improved free cash flow. In summary, our balance sheet is in much better shape, much healthier compared to 2020, which of course is important for the next exciting chapters that are ahead of us.
Before we talk about the next exciting chapters, then I would like to spend a bit of time on our finance operating model, because a lot of things has happened over the last two years. I would like to highlight a few of them. First of all, since this new management team took charge in 2020, we have been driving an absolutely laser focus on free cash flow. I'm not talking about just talking to country teams about free cash flow. I'm talking about driving it throughout the organization, through business units, all the way down to site level. Today, we have a process and a mechanism in place where we are tracking and getting a reported free cash flow on a daily basis from our countries. Why is that important?
Well, that's important because we use that on a monthly basis to do a proper quality of earnings assessment. In a low margin business like ours, there's one thing that is absolutely crucial, and that is to spot if there's smoke coming out of the business somewhere, in a business unit or on a contract. If you can jump on the problem proactively and early before it becomes a fire, then it is much more efficient. If it evolves into a fire, then it's very burdensome to fix it afterwards. The second thing that we did was that we changed the reporting lines for our country CFOs. They used to report solid line into the managing director, so the local managing director, and we've changed that so that the solid line is into group finance.
I have to say that has given a significantly better transparency. It is also giving much more alignment, and the right conversations are taking place much earlier compared to what was the case just three years ago. We've also invested into business partnering, and I'd like to spend a little bit of time on that so that you have a good understanding of that. Because obviously in our business, where we're making our money is at site level. But it's not necessarily the case that an operator, a site responsible person, is finance savvy.
That person, that operator, needs support from finance, a strong link between operation and finance, making sure that we understand what is the run rate on the site, what financial performance do we deliver as of today, and how can that performance be improved, and putting that action plan together so it can be tracked accordingly. That's the strong link between operation and finance, and that is exactly what is yielding additional profit. We have also started a journey on process alignment, and of course, the target for that is to do back-office consolidation also through automation. There are a number of things that we will be able to automate in terms of generic processes, and there are a number of things, as Markus mentioned, that we'll also be able to centralize and harvest the benefits from reduced overhead structure going forward.
I'll come back to that later on. The last thing that I would like to mention is that we have spent in the last two years a lot of time on building a strong community. A community where best practice is traveling fast across the organization. A community where people speak their minds, where nobody is shying away from an honest conversation, a frank conversation, as long as it's in the best interest of the company. Also an organization that is flexible and agile, where talents can easily move around where there is a need for them. That's also super important in the war for talents. Like any other Danish company or foreign company for that sake, we are of course depending on attracting capable people in our local markets.
Leveraging the scale of being a global company and giving people global opportunities is one of the differentiating factors that we're benefiting from today. In terms of capital allocation, then, it's important for us to have a rigid and crisp framework that, where it's clear to shareholders and other stakeholders how we are allocating our cash. It's not only important for external purposes, it's also important for internal purposes, because that creates alignment around the direction of travel, and it creates the right behavior internally. Therefore, I would also like to spend a little bit of time on taking you through our considerations that we have been through in designing the new capital allocation policy. First of all, investment grade is important to us. It's important for two reasons.
First of all, it's expected by us from many of our customers that we're investment grade, and it's important to drive commercial momentum because future potential customers are expecting us to have that rating as well. We also know, obviously, all of us, that investment grade is important for the cost of funding. In terms of M&A, we are ready for M&A, and we can deliver value with M&A as long as we do it in the right way. We operate in a very fragmented industry. We know that scalability and that scale matters. We can see that customers are moving towards significant and global sizable companies. In addition, as both Troels and Jacob mentioned, we have come a long way with our operating model over the last two years.
Today, we have an operating model that is scalable, and we have many countries that are able to take volume on board, inorganic volume on board, without having to increase their overhead costs accordingly. We can also carry financial leverage. We are a resilient business. We are cash generative. Of course, we are not shying away from the fact that the macroeconomics and the uncertainties are high globally. We're not shying away from the fact that we're seeing interest rates increasing significantly at a global scale. We believe that with our strong cash flow, we should also commit to a dividend that is being paid out to our shareholders. On top of that, we will distribute excess cash to shareholders through share buyback programs. Our new financial leverage target is 2.0-2.5 times, and that will support investment grade rating.
It will also give us the necessary flexibility to make sure that we can make the right decisions when good opportunities are surfacing in the marketplace. The 2.0-2.5 is a reduced leverage compared to the previous leverage target that we had at 2.8x. We believe that this new leverage target is the right combination between the ambitions that we have, but also acknowledging the uncertainties that exist from a macroeconomic perspective. The anchor of our new capital allocation policy is obviously our leverage target. As I said before, we firmly believe that our leverage target will support investment grade rating.
We had a leverage at first half, which was 3x, and that is going to delever quickly so that we are getting down to our leverage target of between 2.0 and 2.5. Therefore, we are also going to propose to the annual general meeting that we are paying out a dividend payout of 20% of our net profit for 2022 to be paid out in 2023. We have a clear ambition that the dividend will steadily increase over time. In terms of M&A, I'll come back to that. We have a few slides on that, so I'll not drill more on that at this point in time. I'll just mention that one of the considerations that we've been through around dividends, we used to have a payout ratio of 50%.
We've reduced that to between 20%-40% so that we have an opportunity to also make share buy programs in the future. As I said before, M&A is a good way for us to create value. We are operating, as I said, in a very fragmented market, and scale is a competitive advantage for us. Coming back to the talent program again, there's also no doubt about the bigger you are, the more opportunities you can give to your best people, so an advantage in that regard as well. We're also acutely aware that M&A is not a new thing for this company. It's a chapter that has been opened before, and I'll come back to that shortly. This time, we want to do it differently. As you can see from this chart, the company acquired more than 100 companies years ago.
At that point in time, the focus was on valuation arbitrage and not so much on integration. That created a company that was very decentralized, and it created a lot of complexity. We want to do it differently this time, and we want to make sure that when we are acquiring a company, that it's properly integrated into the ISS platform. To make sure that happens, we have created three non-negotiable parameters that will be assessed for every single acquisition opportunity. The first thing that is non-negotiable is that it needs to be a strong strategic fit. It needs to fit the OneISS strategy. We also want to ensure that we're not adding volume to a platform where we aren't able to cope with the volume. What do I mean by that?
We will only add volume to countries where we have a stable operations, efficient operations, and where we have a strong local management team in place that are experienced and has the expertise to handle it. There are three place that we will be looking at in terms of M&A. We'll be looking at bolt-on acquisitions within service lines that we are operating today. We'll be looking at adding new capabilities to ISS, and we'll be looking at innovation, and that could be within tech. At the moment, and I wanna make that very clear, then the focus is on low risk and low complexity. The second thing that is, non-negotiable is also self-explanatory, and that is that it needs to obviously be financially attractive and accretive.
We'll be looking at acquiring companies that are not only margin accretive to the local business, but also margin accretive to group average margins. Of course, we'll only acquire companies where the return on invested capital is greater than the cost of capital. We will also be totally rigid with the integration. We wanna make sure that when we acquire a company, that it's properly integrated, as I said before. What does that mean? That means it operates with ISS standards and procedures, both from an operational point of view for all support functions, including finance, and it operates on the systems, the IT tools that we have in place within the enterprise. To ensure that that happens, because it's not gonna happen if you put that on top on people's day job.
To make sure that happens, we'll have a dedicated team under my responsibility in group finance that will make sure that that is in collaboration with the countries happening, and at the same time, making sure that the synergies that we have signed up to in the business case, together with the countries, is also coming nicely through into the numbers in the P&L. A very good example of what I just went through is the acquisition in Switzerland that we also announced in accordance with our trading update last week. That is an acquisition that clearly is a great fit to our strategy. We are acquiring key accounts. We're doing it in Switzerland, where we have a very strong operations, very strong platform. We have a country management team that are very experienced and has proven themselves over a long period of time.
At the same time, it's clearly accretive, financially accretive, the volume that we are taking on board. Of course, it's something that is adding margin, a margin accretive locally, but also to group average margins. All of what you have heard today from the team, how is that then converting into our financial targets in the next years ahead of us? Well, first of all, as I said before, we are a resilient business, and that goes, Jacob mentioned it as well, both for our organic growth and for operating margin, with the exception, of course, of the perfect storm year in 2020 that I spoke about. It also goes for cash flow.
We are generating resilient, from a cash flow perspective, and generating a strong cash flow and have done that over the last many years. What I would like to point your attention to on this slide is the cash conversion definition. Because going forward, our new definition for cash conversion is going to be free cash flow divided with operating profit. I know that there are many different definition of cash conversion with the competition. We believe that this is the purest and the simplest way of defining cash conversion. It's also a very good measure because it gives you a direct link between how much of the operating profit is converted into free cash flow.
In summary, for the years ahead of us, we will grow the business with a higher rate than what we have done historically. We'll continue to be cash generative, both at the short term, midterm, and long term. We have a sharpened capital allocation policy that is predictable, but also that gives us the flexibility to make the right decisions when good opportunities are coming up. Lastly, we will make sure that we continue to build on being a resilient business and a cash generative asset. With that, we expect the organic growth from 2024 and onwards to be between 4%-6%. We expect operating margins to be greater than 5%, and we expect cash conversion to be greater than 60%. Historically, we have grown the business with 3% approximately.
Going forward, we expect that the benefits from our investments is of course going to yield benefits. The increased customer retention that Jacob spoke about is going to be a growth component for us going forward. I fully appreciate that the retention target of 95 that Jacob spoke about, what we put in our forecast is lower than that. In terms of increased win rates, we expect that the investments that we're doing into our operating model, into technology, into sustainability, that is going, and commercial for that sake, that is going to yield a higher win rate. We're assuming between 0.5% and 1%. Lastly, on price increases, we are seeing an uptick of between 0-1%. It's important for me to stress that that last pillar of price increases is not only related to higher than expected inflation.
It's also related to how we are working with our operating model today. Because an embedded part of what Troels went through with the operating model is also that our site managers has the ability to spot if there's scope creep in at site level, and we are passing that on to our customers. In other words, we agree to do additional work, which is over and beyond what we're getting paid for. Well, clearly that needs to be passed through as price increases to our customers. In terms of operating margins, then, we expect that to be greater than 5% from 2024 and onwards. We expect to see further improvements on U.K., France, and Denmark.
Our assumption in 2024 is that France and DTAG are making profit, but it's still lower, so it's margin dilutive to group average margins. We are assuming that U.K. is in line with group average margins. Troels spoke about the operating model and the efficiency programs that we are working with. Clearly, that is going to yield benefits. We expect that already to happen in 2023, but to a greater extent in 2024. The things that I mentioned around process optimization and back office consolidation is also an initiative that sits as a benefit in that bucket. Lastly, we have a number of local and regional initiatives that are also expected to yield profit uptick from 2024 and onwards.
The last part is also related to our operating model, because what we have seen and what we are confident about is that we can add additional volume to the top line without having to add incremental overhead costs. That does not only come from new wins, it also comes from all the other components that I went through when we went through the growth bridge. Of course, an important milestone to 2024 is next year, so 2023. We expect to deliver operating margins in a range between 4.25%-4.75%. The drivers are actually the same, as I said, as I just went through in 2024.
We are expecting improvements to come through from further recovery on DTAC and the U.K., and to a lesser extent with France. We also expect the rest of the portfolio to improve year-over-year. As Jacob also mentioned in the question from Danske Bank, Michael, we expect a strong growth next year, which again will give us a margin uptick because we will not add overhead costs. That margin will obviously be an uptick compared to this year. In terms of our expectations for cash conversion, we expect a slight negative from working capital as we grow the business between 4 and 6%. Obviously that is caused by the fact that when you recognize revenue, then your receivables is gonna increase accordingly.
As our cost base is 70% wages and 30% supplier and subcontractor cost, then the payables doesn't increase proportionally with the receivables, and that is putting a slight negative into working capital. We expect net interest to be at the same level as we are currently running at. We expect a tax rate and ETR of approximately 25%, so similar to what we have today. Then we expect that our CapEx level will equal our depreciations, which takes us to a cash conversion which is greater than the 60%. With that, I hope that you have a better understanding of our current financial performance.
I hope that you understand our new capital allocation policy and also the reflections and the discussions that we have been through in the design of that policy. I hope you have a view of our M&A approach. Lastly, I hope you have a better understanding of how we are expecting all the good things that the team, not only in the center in Copenhagen, but globally are doing, and how that is expecting to improve the financial performance from the years ahead of us, already starting from next year. With that, I would like to hand the word back to Jacob for some final remarks.
Thanks, Kasper. If I can get the one you are leaving behind there. Thank you. It's very kind of you. Super. Don't go too far away because you'll join me in a second. Let me just. There we are. Let's just reflect and summarize on what you heard today, and hopefully there will not be any surprises when we go through this, and then we'll do a Q&A afterwards. I hope we've left you with a clear impression that we're pretty excited about this. When we look at the analysis, when we look at the end markets that we operate through, when we look at the end customer demands that we are seeing on a daily basis on sites, in discussions all over the world, we're seeing an attractive market.
We're seeing an attractive market that has had a jolt from COVID, a changed perception of work, what the workplace is going forward, but it remains an attractive marketplace for us to operate. We also believe that the operating model that we have created, and that we've enhanced over the last couple years, and will continue to enhance and invest in in the coming years, that operating model will drive our ability to take an outsized share of that market growth we're looking at. That makes us pretty excited. It makes us excited because it's a platform that gives us a modularity upon which we can deliver products and services as building blocks to cater to the needs of our customers.
Because there's one thing that's clear, we need strategic optionality also in how we run our operations in the coming years, given the uncertainties, both in terms of the environment we operate in, but also in terms of what our customer demands will be in the future workplace. All of that makes us pretty excited. It means that you, as owners, will also see that ending up generating a pretty strong profit generation in the coming years, converting into strong cashflow, which we as a management team have a very, very clear focus on making sure that we allocate in a proper way, creating real value for you as owners with a humbleness around the fact that it's your money, it's your capital. We'll be very, very disciplined around how we allocate that. We're excited about that.
Our starting point is a strong and resilient global portfolio of customers, some of the best names you can have in a customer portfolio anywhere. They're being serviced every single day by 360,000 incredible people. We refer to them as placemakers, because they truly do make places. They now operate on a platform which we are proud of, but also a platform where we have clear plans to enhance that platform in the coming years, because we are by no means done. There's no naivety for us as a team that suddenly everything has been changed with a magic wand. We can see that the initial work we've been doing over the last couple years, the investments we've been doing, the very decisive actions we've taken on the operating model, also means that the path is clear.
We will continue to improve that model in the coming years, and that will continue to drive the right results. Now that makes us excited. Therefore, it's a more resilient and a more robust ISS that then meets the next part of the journey. With that, I'm gonna invite Kasper back up. I think Jacob, will you join us? Yes, you will. Okay.
I'm on my way.
With that, we'll do the final Q&A and let you run that.
As previously, please raise your hand. We'll have a microphone going around. Please state your company and your name. Here we have Simona.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. That's Simona Sarli from Bank of America. I have three questions. First of all, going back to your medium-term targets, what are the underlying macro assumptions for your 2024 financial targets? Secondly, on M&A, do you have roughly any indication of the investments that you're looking to make per annum? And if there is any specific geography and solution that you would like to focus on. Thirdly, considering all the work that you have done, results achieved so far, you said ISS is today more resilient than in the past. In case of a severe recession scenario, how would you expect ISS to perform today peak to trough compared to the past? Thank you.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
Do you wanna start on the macro or?
Yeah, but I just wanna start on the assumptions. I think, you know, that a good way to look at it is. I guess you want me to elaborate on the operating margins, right? Yeah. On the operating margins, you know, let's take this year, the 3.8% as the starting point, and the journey to the greater than 5% in 2024. One thing that is important to understand is that the run rate is already at 4%. The reported is 3.8%, but the run rate is already at 4%. Then we have the three components. Actually, you know, the benefits are actually equally spread almost between the three components.
We are expecting some further improvements in the U.K. and on DTAG and, of course, also in France in 2024. I think what Troels mentioned, it's important to understand that that's not just a PowerPoint exercise. It's obviously wrapped around business cases that goes into specific sites and specific business units, so we can track that these things are coming through. If it's not coming through, then we know about it early so that we can take the necessary actions.
The third one in terms of of growth, I'm very pleased to see how we, over the last two years, have added volume and not like in the past, had to add incremental overhead cost accordingly. I also feel very comfortable about that one. Maybe on the third pillar, if you do the back of an envelope calculation and say, okay, in 2024, we have an expected organic growth of between 4%-6%. In 2023, we're not giving any specific guidance, but we are saying that we expect a strong growth. Well, then you have the volume, and then you can obviously calculate what sort of margins that needs to come through, and it's well below double-digit margins.
It's something that I feel comfortable with because it's moderate. It's not an aspiration that is put in there. Yeah.
Maybe I heard you ask about the macroeconomic situation.
You also asked about the bridge, didn't you? Sorry. From the 3.8 to the 5.0.
Yes. That's correct.
Okay, good. Because I guess, just broader macro.
Yeah.
We are, of course, looking into the same scenarios that you're looking into. We're not taking a heroic view on how the macroeconomic environment will develop in the coming years. We are looking at a recessional environment, there's no doubt about that. On the M&A side, we're not gonna stand here, and I know there's a couple of bankers in the room, so sorry about that, but we're not gonna put out numbers in terms of what we expect to use in terms of M&A. We're very stringent around not having a target around wanting to allocate X amount of money to M&A. It has to be really tremendous opportunities that lives up to everything that Kasper went through, and then we will assess it up against the benchmark of other uses of capital, including giving it back to shareholders.
We're not gonna commit to any specific spend. We could end up in a situation where we do absolutely no M&A, and we can end up in a situation where we do quite a lot of M&A. It really depends on the opportunity set and the attractiveness versus other means of allocating our capital. Hence, also why we will not commit to specific geographies or specific service lines. That's just way too early for us.
Sorry, as a follow-up, there was the third question.
On the resilience, one of the things that we like to be pretty humble around, not charting a very strict course around how we see things play out from a macroeconomic perspective. When we look at, both Kasper and I have had this 20-year chart up there with the margins and with the growth. We think that's a pretty good guidance that shows that this business model is resilient in macroeconomic turmoil. For us to commit to where the peaks and troughs in a recession is, we're not gonna do that. We do see this business as being very attractive.
There is an inherent momentum in the way that we develop in the coming years from the recovery from the COVID period. You can say this entire industry is having a different type of momentum going into a potential recession. We believe that brings resilience, but we're humble enough to not predict that we just slide through without any issues whatsoever. Jesper, at the back.
Thank you. Hi. A couple of questions here. The first one is on the 4%-6% growth in the medium term. I'm just trying to understand, you know, the inflationary environment has obviously gone from near zero to now double digits in some countries. Is it fair to assess that that is based on a sort of through the cycle inflation level, given that you started at 3% on your slide, Kasper?
Yes, that's fair to say, because we've already seen inflation in the last 20 years, so there's already a component around inflation in the 3%, which was the starting point. I think that is a fair assumption. In the third pillar, as you remember, where I spoke about inflation, the 0%-1%, I mean, that's both if we at that point in time in 2024 and onwards still have a higher inflation rate compared to what we've seen historically. Also the other component, which is, you know, the benefits of the operating model, where you're finding things, scope increases, cost increases that needs to be passed through as price increases to the customer.
Sure. Then, second question on margins. I remember when you did your turnaround targets, you talked about the margin above 4% being more or less independent of revenue, basically momentum during that time. Would you be comfortable saying the same thing about the 2023 margin target?
Yeah, I think it's important to understand, though.
Sorry, the 2023 or the 2024? 2023 target.
The 4, a quarter to three-quarters target. Is that virtually independent of the revenue, as the turnaround target was?
We are expecting, as we have said several times now, a strong growth in 2023. I'm confident that a strong growth will come through. Therefore, you know, we have visibility to that, and therefore, of course, there's also an assumption in the margin target for 2023. You know, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't have a high top line in 2023, so therefore it is more a theoretical question than what is going to be reality.
Okay. Fair enough. The last one is on M&A. I think I'll phrase it differently. Have you thought about updating your KPIs for managers? Because obviously we're talking organic growth, we're talking margins and cash flow. Given that you now add on the M&A component, is that an incentive to basically buy high growth, high margin companies, because that sort of is how you measure it at the end of the day? Because obviously for where we're sitting, we cannot see the return on invested capital. We don't know what sort of cost of capital you imply. We see the other two in your reports.
In terms of changing the incentives around M&A, we haven't at this stage done that. Every time an M&A opportunity occurs, over the last 12-18 months, there's been a lot of M&A opportunities in front of us, it's being assessed very rigidly by our M&A organization together with the local country. When we then do potential deals, of course, we set up incentives around that and make sure that people are incentivized to deliver on the business case.
I can guarantee you that we're tracking the return on invested capital on those deals versus the cost of capital, and everything is linked to that. There's absolutely no doubt in terms of the cascading of our incentives into delivering on the targets that we're setting up there. We're not gonna go out and change the overall incentive structure across the company to literally incentivize the entire organization to start finding M&A opportunities. That cannot be the case.
No, I'm just thinking whether there's an implicit incentive to basically buy high growth, high margin.
Expensive companies, because thereby you hit your KPIs.
Well, there is an incentive to buy high margin and high growth, yes, which in most instances will also be a high return on invested capital. It depends on what we pay for those assets, of course.
Exactly, yeah.
In the end, those two things, if they correlate, then it's creating value for our shareholders. In the end the two things do not separate. The value of the asset will of course always be the key component when we look at M&A opportunities. I hear you, but we would rather prefer that. Everything is measured on a post-synergy basis as well, of course. It doesn't have to be an outright high margin asset that we look at initially, but the Swiss case is a very good example, which is very highly synergistic.
Mm.
Pre-deal margins are significantly lower than the ones we deliver now post-deal.
Okay. Thank you.
We have Anders up here at the front. You're getting by easily, Christian, huh?
I've got three as well. First, just continuing the discussion around the M&A, have you got any internal hurdle rates that you look at? Because while the more than 10% ROIC on the recent deal sounds fantastic, it's not really great considering the cost of capital continues to go up in the external world. Do you look at the hurdle rate because high ROIC, I mean, the high growth and high margin, but then it looks like you get you need to pay a higher multiple when the returns are only 10% of that. That's the first one, really.
Maybe if I can start on that. We have differentiated hurdle rates, and the hurdle rates are also continuing to evolve, so it's not a static decision that we put out a fixed number. It also has to reflect the local cost of capital. Doing a deal in, let's take an example, doing a deal in Turkey versus doing a deal in Switzerland has different hurdle rates for us as a company as well. That's a key component. There's nothing static around that, and of course it has to reflect the environment we're in. We hope we are there now in terms of where interest rate expectations will go from here, but it's a dynamic process.
Then just second one, your question, or sorry, your comments around strong growth for next year. Is that based on the price negotiations that you already locked in for next year or just the commercial momentum gives you that visibility? Just like, obviously we are still in an inflationary world, you're gonna have the price increases.
Yeah.
That's what drives that strong growth or is it really the volume?
Yeah.
Yeah. That's one component. We also expect a contribution to growth from price increase next year, exactly to your point around that we are still in a high inflationary environment. That's not the only thing. There are two other components. Obviously we'll get the full year impact from the contract wins that we've had this year and we've started in the second half of this year, so you get the full year impact from that. Additionally, COVID-19 or return to office has ramped throughout the year, so there's a full year impact from that as well. Then I think it's also fair to say that we have a lucrative pipeline.
There are some interesting prospects out there that, of course, we are not only targeting, but we're also confident that is going to convert into new wins that hopefully will start relatively early next year.
Finally, just more of a clarity around how do you define excess cash and when we think about the buybacks in long term. Is it when you're sort of below 2 times, and then whatever gap is, that is excess cash? Or even if you are at 2 times, you can sort of lever it up to, let's say, 2.3-
Yeah.
You can do buybacks?
Yeah. I wanna be very careful on that one because it is a board decision. So, you know, I just wanna come back to our consideration around that, the reason why the dividend payout policy has been changed is exactly to have the opportunity to do share buyback programs. Ultimately, that will be up to the board to decide that.
Christian here in the middle.
Christian from SEB. First of all, on the margin, when bidding for new contracts, what is the target operating margin?
Well.
It go-
No, I hope we say the same.
Yeah.
There is not one margin out there.
Yeah. No, exactly.
No. Because there's many aspects to that. It really depends on what business we're talking about, what the risk profile is.
Exactly.
Provide scale in other parts of the business. There's a lot of things around that. I can guarantee you that we don't go for anything that will dilute our overall margin target. There is a difference in terms of whether it provides true scale to other parts of the business, et cetera. It's hard for us to just give you one margin. By the way, with all of our competitors listening in as well, I'm sure we're not gonna give you that number. I appreciate the question.
Going on to the capital allocation part. The target of 2x-2.5x, is that on an LTM basis on each of the quarters, or how to think about that?
I mean, in the trading updates, we report the organic growth number as we have done in the last two years, and we will continue to do that. Of course, you will have it at first half and at full year. At first half it will be on an LTM basis, yes.
On dividend part, on staying on the capital structure part, so the 20%-40%, what will decide whether it will be the 20% or the 40% level at any given year?
Of course, that will depend on the current context, whether there are good opportunities out there to do potential M&A. Again, you know, ultimately that is going to be the decision of the board, but it's the current context that will decide what we're going to do with the capital, obviously.
The board has expressed a perspective that it makes sense to have a gradually growing dividend.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's also one of the reasons you can say we start where we start, so we can grow the dividend over the years.
Also in percentage terms, yes. Then just finally on M&A. What are the key white spots in regards to functionality? I remember back in the days, you had the Guckenheimer acquisition in the U.S. You also had the GS Hall in the U.K. Are there from a functionality perspective where you have some white spots where you don't have self-delivery?
Maybe if I can start and then Kasper jump in. We when we look at M&A as a broader theme, of course scalability is the key component. When we look at specifically around services and capabilities, we talked about tech a second ago, but if you look at our service lines, cleaning being the global leader in cleaning, it's not like we have white spots in cleaning. You can argue that there are countries where technical services, where we could benefit from having more scale in technical services as an example.
That could be an area. It's for us, it's very much around making sure that we're very stringent around the scalability part and the financial acquisition part. We're not gonna nominate specific services or specific areas where we will be focusing our M&A efforts. The one we did in Switzerland is a good example of a pure scale acquisition that just brings instant benefits.
Thank you. Hi there, Ben Andrews from Goldman Sachs. Thanks very much for taking the questions. Three from me. First, just on the margin range for next year, would be really just interested, obviously, given it's a relatively wide range, just to better understand your thinking around that, what would take you to the upper end of it, what would take you to the lower end? That'd be my first question. Second, just to understand the building blocks for the medium term a little bit better, any sense of the timeline to get to the 95% on retention, Jacob? Third and finally, would be really interested to understand your thoughts around the end vision, I suppose, strategically for M&A.
You've obviously talked about bolt-on M&A, adding functionality, adding innovation. What are your thoughts longer term about some kind of strategic or transformational deal, maybe in markets like the US? That'd be really interesting to hear from you. Thanks.
Yeah. Why don't I speak to the retention and the M&A if you wanna talk about the margins for next year.
Sure, sure.
-what is in the upper and, uh-
Sure.
Low and high end. Why don't I start on the retention? Listen, we have on purpose called it a midterm target, because retention is, it's a big animal. It's 40,000 customers. It's a big portfolio business we are running, and it would be arrogant of us to say it's gonna happen exactly that day. By putting out the 95 as a target, we're also, you could say, rallying the entire organization around taking our customer for life approach to the next level. The customer life cycle management approach going from, you could say, the largest key account to our broad key account base across the global footprint. Which means that we will improve it every single year. That has to be the delivery here. I'm not gonna.
You cannot nail me down to whether it's this year or that year, but we have to see improvements towards the 95% every year. On the M&A side, we are not gonna talk transformational M&A in these things. We knew it was gonna be an interesting topic today because we brought it back on the agenda. It starts with this management team being very focused on driving a business. In a very fragmented marketplace, there will be opportunities occurring that are just simply too good for us to not look at. But our minds are around driving a fantastic operational business with a strong operational delivery.
At this stage, we will not be speculating in transformational stuff and these types of things. We have a phenomenal pipeline. We have a phenomenal organic opportunity in front of us. M&A for us is something that will, you could say, add to that instead of completely transforming the company. We are at a stage where there's so much value we can create without that.
Yeah. On the range of the margins next year, I appreciate it's a significantly wider range compared to what we've done previously. If you ask me, one of the mistakes that we've done in ISS previously is that we've guided on 0.1 and 0.2 because it simply just doesn't drive the right behavior. We want to have the flexibility to do what is right for the company and make the right decisions. Of course, what will take us to the upper end, I mean, it's the three building blocks really. You can double-click on the three building blocks and of course there are numerous of actions and listings under each of them. What Troels spoke about, it's a massive opportunity for us.
The back office consolidation, also a massive opportunity for us. Which can accelerate, and that can go faster than what we expected, obviously. I would say that's probably the one I will point at that that can take us fastest to the upper range, if you will. Don't expect us going forward to come out with a narrow guidance of a tenth or two tenth. It's one of the things that has pushed us historically up into a corner and simply been driving the wrong behavior internally and no one is interested in that.
I have from the web, I have two questions from Yisi Long from Bryan Garnier. I'll take them one by one. The first question is in catering business. Here it says, "ISS peers is focused on catering, and they are investing into new food models. As catering is not a core business to ISS, how does ISS plan to compete with these peers, and how will this impact both CapEx and profitability?
That's a new.
Yeah.
In fact. I thought I had it on the slide, but. Sorry, catering is definitely core to this business. There's absolutely no doubt about that. Let's just kill that argument. Of course, I can see where Brian is coming from. In terms of saying, we are not the size of those specific global players that we're talking about, I guess we have a couple of food competitors that have bigger scale than we have, no doubt about it. The whole point is that we have strong scale in the markets where we do operate food businesses. When we look at it, we do not struggle to compete in the markets where we offer food.
Many of the markets that we operate, we do not offer food, but the markets where we do operate food, we have local scale, and we see that again and again. If you look at, I think, Ben, you mentioned the Guggenheimer business as an example in the US. ISS Guckenheimer is growing very strongly. I think you saw seen the numbers, and we do not struggle to compete.
Mm.
We do not see a changed focus here. We are aware that one of our competitors have stated something along the lines of focusing more on food and less on FM. That's of course good for the FM side of things, but we're not seeing a changed competitive landscape from that. In the areas where we are head-on competing or against larger scale players like the US, we have a bespoke, a premium brand which is growing significantly, so we don't see that as an issue. Is that fair, Kasper?
I think it's absolutely fair.
The second question is, are there any niche sub-sectors where ISS wish to grow in or further into, in order to fuel growth rates and margins?
I think the quick answer is probably no. I think what everything you've seen here today is around us focusing, actually more on specific segments and specific services, and, there are no specific niches that I can think of. I don't know if I missed anything.
No, I think, I mean, if you take it a little bit broader, I think also in terms of geographies, I mean, a big part of why the significant divestment program was launched was that we made a mistake, if you ask me, had entered into some markets where, you know, management was wasting time on discussing all sorts of compliance issues and these sort of things. I think in terms of geographies, we are where we need to be to fuel the key account strategy going forward. I can also not think of any other market where we would enter into.
Otherwise, I have a couple of questions here on my screen.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I have a question from Johan Eliason from Kepler. How are management incentives aligned to the new targets?
I think the quick version is that we do incentives once a year. The 2023 targets that we just announced will of course be what we incentivize people for in terms of the short-term incentive plans for 2023. In the same way, we will do that for 2024 and onwards. That's the short-term incentives, which is a significant lever for all of our managers. On top of that, everyone has a long-term incentive plan at the top management layer. That's, as everyone knows, available on the website. That's driven by our absolute earnings performance and our relative share price performance versus our competitors.
The key here is the STIP, so the short-term incentive plan, and that is always aligned to the targets we give externally, of course. No doubt about that.
We have a question from Peter Straume from ABG. I believe you said 0.1 percentage point added from retention, but was based on a retention rate below 95%. What assumption have you used for your targets?
Yeah. What we have assumed for our target is the current retention rate today, so the 93.5%, and hence my comment around why it's lower than what Jacob mentioned as our ambition.
The second question is, so the components of the cash conversion equation, has there anything changed or what has changed that you're now saying 60% instead of the historical average of around 70-65%?
Yeah. I think, I mean, first of all, we're not saying 60%, we're saying greater than 60%. I think that's the first point that is important to clarify. I mean, the component that has changed compared to this year, if you take the DKK 1.5 billion in free cash flow this year, and you strip out the negative outflow of the DKK 500 million from exceptionals, then you're getting to a cash conversion with a new definition of approximately 67%. The one component that has changed in our 2024 guidance compared to that is on working capital. We are seeing a negative, as I mentioned, a negative impact from working capital from the growth.
However, as I've mentioned several times before, we are harvesting some low-hanging fruits that are giving a net benefit, and that's why it's neutral this year, but negative from 2024 and onwards, slightly negative.
Otherwise, I can actually continue here. We have some active listening on the webcast.
Yeah.
That's great.
It's good to know that it works.
Now it's from Allen Sheridan from Jefferies. Can you help us understand what substantially above 5% margin target means? In this strategy aimed at ISS, is this strategy aimed at ISS getting back to historical 5.5%-6.1% margin from level from 2024? Or are you suggesting there are structural shifts to higher margins for the group as a whole? Just to clarify specifically for Alan.
I'm not sure we said substantially above 5% in 2024. We said above 5-
Yeah.
in 2024. What we said is above 5% in 2024 and then 4.25%-4.75% next year. I think it's a stretch to start talking about 5.5% in 2024, and at least if you read the guidance. What we said is that we believe over time that there is upside to that. We're not gonna commit to a number because then we would have committed to a number in the slide. What we said is that we will go above 5% in 2024, and that is basically it. In terms of starting to commit to what the end level is for our margins, there's a reason why we're not doing that.
This management team has, over the last two and a half years, been focused on giving you, as our owners, measurable targets within the near term and constantly delivering on that. Now we're giving 2023 and 2024 targets, and that's what we focus on. We do not believe in giving long-term aspirational targets because they are literally, from our perspective, worthless. It's around how you drive the business and the intent of that, and the intent of our 2023 and 2024 targets, I think are quite clear.
Sure.
I have Peter Søsted here with two more questions.
He's back, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Two more questions. You have previously stated that you see the US as a particularly important region in terms of opportunities. Could you please provide more flavor on the opportunities you see for the US market?
U.S., yeah, let me take that. I think that's unchanged. If you look at the last, I guess a bit more than 12 months, we've announced two major wins in the U.S. that both of them equated to around 1% of group revenue. That tells you something around the opportunities that we see over there. On top of that, there's been a lot of commercial activity below those thresholds as well. I think over time we have built a much cleaner key account-focused business. As you know, we divested last year our core specialized business, which was the more single service cleaning type of business, direct multi-site business. Now we are focused on larger key accounts, real premium business, integrated facility services.
There's a real reception in the US market also around the self-delivery model. Because the US market, and Kasper can attest to that, having been a CFO over there, has been very focused on a best of breed model and subcontracting model. What we're seeing now post-COVID is that there's a much larger focus in the US market on workplace experience, which I also double-clicked on early on the presentation. Workplace experience, there is just a growing understanding that in a self-delivery model, you are able to impact engagement in the workplace in a much more direct way. We see that in the US and that's one of the reasons why we see the pipeline building so well. We remain very excited about the US, no doubt about that.
Maybe one quick add one related to the U.S. and also obviously from personal experience when I was a CFO over there. It's clear that the thinking around facility management is starting to change from the customer's point of view. Because the model where you liaise with a partner that then is performing the services with many smaller suppliers and subcontractors just cannot generate consistency. It's very hard as a company to communicate to your employees post-COVID-19 that if you visit a site on the West Coast, you can be absolutely comfortable that it's safe. However, if you visit a site in the central part of the U.S., it's not the same because you can't ensure that the consistency is there in the service delivery.
That is one of the things that that is of course the core of the discussions that we are having with the potential new customers, our operating model and the fact that we are self-delivering our services.
Peter from APG has. Could you please add more flavor on the margin contribution embedded in your margin target given the previous comments on France margins being dependent on growth within the Q3 statement, and also highlighting the difficult negotiations with DTAC?
I mean, as I was very clear about is that in 2024, we do not assume in these numbers that France and DACH is in line with group average margins. They are making a profit, but it's still dilutive to group average margins. In terms of DACH and
No, I think that we leave it there because we're not gonna give specific guidance on how we see each of them perform. I think what you're saying is spot on.
Mm-hmm.
We see an improvement in 2023 and 2024, no doubt about that.
Yeah.
We made it very clear that we want to see commercial momentum in France, as Peter is also pointing out.
Yeah.
We also made it very clear that's not a prerequisite for any improvement in the margin.
Mm-hmm.
It's a prerequisite for us getting back to long-term margins. The same thing on DITAC. There's a lot of hard work going on that. We talk about that every quarter in terms of the strong gap closing momentum on that, which also brings us to run rate break even here at the end of the year. Still, there's a long journey before we are at a point where we are satisfied with the financial performance of that contract.
Jesper?
Yeah. Thank you. Just a couple of follow-ons on M&A. Firstly, I was just curious, how do you envisage structuring the deals? Is it like a multiple year earn-out, or how do you structure the deals, the acquisition?
That really depends on the deal.
Exactly.
Yeah. No, but it's you know that, Jesper.
Sure.
Yeah.
Maybe like rule of thumb that you can.
No, we like an element of earn-out because we want skin in the game from the seller as well.
When you say for example-
Often there's a management team that has been running the business. We want them to continue to run parts of the business, et cetera. It really depends on the asset.
Sure. Maybe we ruled out transformational acquisitions. Is there sort of a size limit and would you consider also paying insurance, for example?
Should I take that?
Yeah, that's okay.
Yeah. We will very soon announce. No, just kidding. I can guarantee you that if there is one thing that would take a tremendous amount of conviction, it would be to issue equity. Like we have a firm view that diluting our existing shareholders is a massive decision to take. At this stage with where we are, also in terms of how we are valued, but also in terms of where we are in terms of our operational journey, doing such transformational deals that we need to issue equity, I think that's highly unlikely at this stage.
I think also, Jesper, I mean, we obviously humbled about what we are presenting around M&A today, and we need to earn our credibility and need to prove for, you know, ourself internally in the organization, but also externally, that what we are talking about and the prerequisites that I went through, that it's coming through. You know, nobody in ISS is shying away from the fact or from the past and, you know, the acquisitions that was done in the past, which created, you know, just a lot of complexity. You know, a lot of that is also what has been, you know, divested over the last couple of years.
I think we're looking at, you know, a journey here where we as a management team, you know, wants to do it right, wants to have the time to do it right. We will build the credibility, which will then take us on to the next part of the journey.
What we said is also that for the right situation.
Yeah.
We would go beyond our leverage target if we can see that there's a rapid deleveraging afterwards. That is significantly more attractive than issuing equity for our shareholders.
Yeah. Well, I'd say that's very clear. This is the final one. Can we get you to talk about multiples at all when it comes to acquisitions?
No.
Ranges?
Depends on the asset. If you tell me the asset, we can have a conversation.
It is a good asset.
That's fine.
Okay. That's fine. Thank you.
It's a good try. I like it.
Okay.
It seems like we or you have answered all the good questions that we have here. I think there's no further questions from the webcast. Super. Well, thank you. Just on behalf of the entire team here, thank you for showing up. By the way, this is a phenomenal sight standing up here because it also tells us something about the world is actually returning to normal, which is good for our business as well. I really appreciate that. Thanks for taking the time.
We know it's a big commitment for all of you to spend what is probably effectively becoming a full day together with us. Hopefully it's been useful. We are fully available, as you know, always available, and especially the IR team is available 24/7. Do reach out if there's anything. Really wanna thank you for your interest and do follow up. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you so much.