Good morning, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day 2021. As the CFO of A.P. Moller-Maersk, it is my privilege to open the event, and I thank you all for joining us today. In the next few hours, we look forward to take you through our journey and our ambitions until 2025, as we continue and accelerate our transformations into an integrated logistics company. As you can see from the agenda, we have prepared a rather intensive program for you for the next four and a half hours. Our aim is to share with you where we stand today in our transformation, where are the areas we focused on, and the changes we have achieved in the past, where our focus will be in the coming years, and why we believe that the best part of our transformation still lies ahead of us.
With that, I wish you a captivating morning. I will hand over to Stig Frederiksen, our Head of Investor Relations, who will be your host today and lead you through the sessions. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick, for the start of the day. A warm welcome from my side. We're very happy to be here today, and it's a special day to invite you all for this Capital Markets Day. A few practicalities from my side. First of all, I would like to say that all the material, all the sessions, they are available on our homepage, maersk.com, Investor Relations, so you can download them afterwards. We will also have several Q&A sessions today. Some of you have received a link to call in and will be able to ask questions directly to us in the studio. For all of you, there will be an option to write questions using the text box underneath the screen. With that, let's start the day. For that, I would like to welcome Søren Skou, our CEO.
Søren will start off the day by giving us a strategy update and next step in the strategy. Welcome, Søren.
Thank you, Stig. Let me start by adding my words of welcome to those of Stig and Patrick's. Thank you for your time, thank you for your interest in our company. Almost four and a half years ago, our major shareholder, A.P. Moller Holding, and the board of directors, initiated a process that quite quickly led to us kicking off a massive multidimensional transformation of A.P. Moller-Maersk. In the past four years, we have transformed our business model, we have radically changed the strategy of our core business, we are in the middle of transforming the culture of the company and our technology platform. We have also set out on an ambitious journey to decarbonize Maersk.
Moving from an oil-based business model where we were drilling for oil, we were producing oil, selling oil, transporting oil, and consuming oil in large quantities, to a future where we are a global and integrated logistics company with a target to be completely decarbonized by 2050. The objective of our transformation, the transformation of A.P. Moller-Maersk, is to become a profitable growth company again, and a company that can deliver much better outcomes for our customers, our employees, society at large, and not least for our investors. Today, we have gained execution momentum on our journey to become a truly global integrated logistics company, a company that can offer our customers end-to-end logistics services and solutions that help them manage their global supply chains.
We coined the vision of becoming the global integrator of container logistics already back in 2016. We are even more convinced today that that vision is the right vision for Maersk. If anything, the pandemic has shown the importance of having integrated logistics solutions and end-to-end control. In the past four years, we have radically improved the fundamentals of our Ocean business. We have built a powerful growth engine in Logistics. Our Terminals business is once again delivering strong returns. Over the last couple of years, we have built a record of strongly improved financial performance, delivering returns on invested capital above our target. We are not done. The coming quarters, the coming years, will be about achieving superior performance for our customers. It will be about delivering high and profitable growth, particularly in logistics, to finish our technology and cultural transformation.
Not long ago, we were a conglomerate with quite diversified business interests. It's been truly exciting and interesting journey to get to where we are today. When I look back at all the things that we have done, the restructuring, the divestments, the acquisitions, as well as all the headwinds we have faced, the cyber attack, the trade sanctions, the slow trade growth, IMO 2020 implementation, and last year, volume losses because of the pandemic, and we still delivered progress, makes me very confident that we're on the right track. We are achieving the objectives of our ambitions, of our transformation, in terms of being a profitable growth company again, and delivering better outcomes for our customers, our employees, society at large, and not least for our investors. Our Ocean business is at the center of the new Maersk.
We will only succeed as a company long term if our Ocean business can deliver stable and resilient earnings at scale. We are very pleased with the progress that we have made in Ocean over the last few years, and we will talk much more about that later. Our Terminals business is again on the way to become a world-class ports business, as we have focused on becoming a better operator of our portfolio of terminals. In Logistics, we have built a well-managed logistics business, which is growing fast with solid margins. The secret sauce of Maersk is the strong and very tangible synergies between our Ocean business and Logistics, and between Ocean and Terminals. In Logistics, we are tapping into 70,000 customers we have in Ocean.
The long relationships in Ocean, the Maersk brand, the combined sales force, the boots on the ground in almost every relevant market in the world, and the operational control, truly enables us to provide integrated logistics solutions and significantly grow in logistics, both organically, but also be successful when we acquire companies. In Terminals, the close collaboration between Ocean and Terminals has driven volumes and terminal utilization up. It has improved productivity and increased nameplate capacity in our existing terminals. Of course, it has also de-risked our investments in new terminals. We tie all of this together with technology, and we are strong believers that in today's digital world, technology can drive competitive advantage. With this framework for value creation, as we have here, we are confident that we can continue to deliver shareholder returns that are value generating above 7.5% return on invested capital.
For the next years, returns averaging above 12%, given the very strong starting point of 2021. Technology drives competitive advantage for Maersk in several ways. Our customers are increasingly consuming digital products on our platforms, such as maersk.com and twill.net. We are able to display more of our products on maersk.com to facilitate upselling of inland transport, of custom solutions, of insurance products, and so on, when our customers book their Ocean containers with us. Our customers are increasingly connecting with us digitally through APIs and through EDI solutions, so that we can allow data to flow freely between our companies when they buy supply chain management services and other lead logistics products. In other words, digital capabilities are foundational for providing integrated logistics. For our industry, the pandemic has accelerated everything digital.
Gone are the days where our customers wanted to engage with us via email or via phone and accepted to wait hours or days to get price quotes and booking confirmations. With the digital solutions we have today, we deliver a much better customer experience, instant and 24/7, and we will continue to drive further improvements of the customer journeys. Technology also helps run the company better, and the assets better, and more efficiently. We are using technology to automate container terminals, to improve fuel efficiency, to track containers and deliver data from them. We are using technology to standardize and automate internal processes for better efficiency. To build competitive advantage through technology, we have taken control of our technology agenda. We are rapidly moving from what used to be an almost 100% outsourced IT model to building a technology powerhouse.
In the last few years, we have hired more than 2,500 technologists in Maersk, and we have many more to come in the coming years. We are building an insourced software company that works agile and that can deliver the digital products that we need in close collaboration with the product and process owners in the business. Now let me talk about our businesses. The work we have done in Ocean over the last five years has improved the business fundamentally. The acquisition of Hamburg Süd brought scale and cost synergies. Other carriers have consolidated as well. More than a decade ago, during the financial crisis, we had 20 carriers that were global. Today, there are seven. The 2M Alliance and other business sharing agreements have lowered our cost base, and it has helped us be more agile in capacity management due to the larger networks.
Our CapEx discipline and focus on total capacity deployed has enabled us to keep a constant high utilization of our network. Most importantly, the focus on serving customers better by offering a differentiated product and unique product and value propositions, has, together with more long-term contracts, stabilized the business. We are no longer only selling a commodity product. As I speak, we have a lot of tailwind in the market, a tailwind which will disappear again with time. That does not change the fact that already before this tailwind came last year, we were on a very good trajectory in Ocean.
Our implementation of the needed freight rate increases due to increasing oil prices from IMO 2020, as well as our agile capacity management during the second quarter last year, which enabled us to keep stable pricing despite large drops in demand, are two very important proof points, which enables us to with confidence say that once the situation has normalized, our Ocean business can deliver EBIT margins above 6%, which is well above past historical lows. Being able to sell more logistics products and services to our customers in Ocean is a cornerstone of the strategy. The opportunity is huge. For our largest customers in Ocean, our top 200, we estimate that our share of their total logistics wallet or spend today is only a very, very small fraction. You will hear more about this when you hear from one of our customers, PUMA, later today.
We have a strong value proposition in integrated Logistics built on the strong customer relationships we have from Ocean, our brand, our digital capabilities, our team on the ground, and not least, our operational control. The customers are responding very favorably. As we already reported last week, we grew 68% in Logistics services with our top 200 Ocean customers in the first quarter this year. We continue to build on our product portfolio. More than 3,800 Logistics experts across the world have decided to join our journey in the last couple of years because they believe in the vision that we have. We're confident that we now have a powerful growth engine in Logistics, and we are targeting to grow in Logistics more than 10% per year organically in the next five years, at an EBIT margin above 6%.
On top of that, we of course expect to continue to make some good acquisitions. Being able to deliver superior returns, and by that we mean higher than the average returns in the port industry, driven by the synergies with Ocean and our operator capabilities, is another cornerstone of the strategy. We are getting there. With the improvements we have already done over the last four years, delivering and doubling the EBITDA, our operating earnings margins, since 2017. These improvements are driven by strong collaboration with Ocean, as well as strong improvements in our ability to run our terminals portfolio more efficiently, with lower cost and higher productivity.
When combined with a disciplined approach to growth investments and a lot less focus on new greenfield projects, we are seeing strong improvements in the return on invested capital in terminals, and we are confident today to set a target above 9% ROIC for our Terminals business. We are pleased with the progress in Maersk Container Industry, MCI, over the last four years. The business has just delivered a record quarter with $25 million EBITDA in the first quarter on around $200 million of turnover. The management team has done a really excellent job in reshaping the business in recent years. MCI has focused its business on refrigerated containers and refrigeration units. It has gotten out of the manufacturing of dry containers and simplified the factory footprint.
The company today serves a diverse customer base, selling reefer boxes and refrigeration units. In addition, MCI is building an attractive service and parts business as the installed base of MCI containers is increasing every day. MCI is the second largest reefer brand in the world, and the only brand that actually provides an integrated reefer container. Given the strength of the business, we have found it prudent to look at the strategic options for MCI, and we have initiated that process. On Maersk Supply Service, the management team is doing a good job under very difficult circumstances. We are optimizing the business as much as we can, and we are increasingly focusing Maersk Supply Service on new opportunities in floating wind. It will take some time, but we will continue to strengthen the business until such time we can divest it.
We have come far on the transformation journey of A.P. Moller-Maersk, we are not yet done. So far that we are confident that we can continue to deliver value-generating returns above 7.5% return on invested capital, and for the five-year period, 2021- 2025, at an average above 12%. Over the next years, our focus is on stabilizing the earnings in Ocean at value-generating levels by continuing to strengthen the business and ensuring a soft landing from the current elevated freight rate levels. In Logistics, we want to maintain EBIT margins above 6% while we grow revenue fast, organically as well as inorganically. In Terminals, we want to consistently hit our 9% ROIC target. We want to complete the review of the strategic options for MCI this year. Finally, we are accelerating on the decarbonization agenda in the coming years.
Decarbonization has moved from being a compliance and sustainability issue to being a core strategic issue for us and for our customers. We need to find solutions for ourselves and to support our customers in their quest to deliver on their CO2 targets to stay relevant as a supplier. We have been leaders in the industry when it comes to energy efficiency for a long time. We have worked hard on reducing our fuel consumption over the past decade with solid results. Our emissions per container by the end of last year was down 46% compared to a baseline of 2008, so emissions per container ships. We intend to remain leaders in this space. Already in 2018, we set a target to become CO2 neutral by 2050.
Since then, we have shaped our thinking on exactly how to do that, and we are increasingly confident that we can actually do it, that we can decarbonize Maersk over the coming decades. I have last week signed our commitment to set Science Based Targets for Maersk as soon as possible for all of our emissions across the full value chain. We are planning an ESG Day for our investors in November of this year with a special focus on decarbonization to tell you more about that journey. Given the operational and financial progress achieved over the last years and our strong balance sheet, we are confident to take the next steps in our transformation to become the leading integrated logistics company in the world while delivering strong financial results.
Thank you for listening, and for the rest of the day, we will unfold these key messages, seek to provide detailed perspectives, and we look much forward to answering your questions. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Søren Skou, for the strategic update and the next steps. We will turn to Ocean and Logistics presentation. Before I introduce the speakers from Maersk, I'm very delighted to have here today the CFO of PUMA, Michael Lämmermann. Welcome, Michael.
Thank you.
You have, for many years, been responsible for logistics in PUMA, and we are extremely delighted and honored to have you here today.
It's a pleasure.
Now, we go into Ocean and Logistics business. For that presentation, I have with me here today our CEO, Vincent Clerc, Ocean and Logistics, and also Johan Sigsgaard, our Head of Ocean Products. They will take a much more deeper view on Ocean and Logistics and the strategy and the insight. Vincent?
Thank you. Also from my side, good morning and welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Johan and I have been looking forward to this opportunity to provide you with more details about how we're building the integrator of container logistics here in A.P. Moller-Maersk. As I was reflecting about this presentation, the journey that we've been on, the learnings that we have accumulated over the years, and the work that we still have ahead, I couldn't help but comparing what we're doing with a large construction project. At the beginning, you spend a lot of time on blueprinting the project, understanding the work ahead, the sequencing of the different parts. When you start the construction, you move to laying strong foundation.
In this phase, you invest a lot of time up front so that you can pick up speed and momentum in the execution and the construction of the building later on. During that phase, it is also difficult to assess the exact progress and whether you will be able to finish the project on time and on budget. The investment up front is absolutely necessary for the building to be successful and for the execution to be spotless further on, so that you do not have regrettable work that you need to undo and redo. We have passed the foundational phase here with our global integrator of container logistics. We have some exciting achievements to show for it. You have seen some of them already in our quarterly results, but I will talk about a few more here during the segment together with Johan.
First and foremost, we are at the stage right now in our transformation where it is easier for us to provide you with a view of how the rest of the project will shape up. I don't forget that we are also operating currently on with the background of a very, very special market in ocean and in air transportation. The pandemic is still upon us and has created a completely unheard of or never seen set of circumstances that we are still navigating. We will talk a little bit about how we see the normalization happen, because it will happen, and how we see the business be on the other hand.
More than market vagaries, what we will really focus on is the work that we have been doing and continue to do to build a more resilient business, a business that is adding more value for our customers. Because ultimately, that is what will make us successful, and that is what will make A.P. Moller-Maersk an interesting company for you to invest in. Before we start going into the details, an introduction of our business is in order. We have over the years focused on our world that around our most important assets. The 70,000 customer relationships that we have built globally, the value that we create for them, and the trust that they put in us every day. For them, last year, we transported close to 13 million FFEs, made more than 5 million inland deliveries and pickups.
This constitutes the backbone of what we call Transported by Maersk. Our place in their supply chain is not limited to that. We also process 25 million cubic meters of cargo through our global network of warehouses. We also process 2 million customs declaration and manage 5 million POs. Our presence across the supply chain is quite unique and covers all the different elements that are relevant for our customers. All of these elements are currently growing well above market. The reason for them to do so is not so much what we're doing. On each of the product, a multitude of service providers can offer similar performance. It is about how we're doing this. That is what really sets us apart. Let me explain. In highly simplified terms, this is still how most of the global supply chains of our customers look like today.
They are fragmented in a multitude of products that are carved to be commodities, easily procurable. The vendors are made to be easily switched in and out based on the outcome of the regularly held RFPs. Holding this supply chain together is a powerful orchestration layer that is either insourced by the customer or outsourced to another provider. The role of this orchestration layer is to keep these unrelated pieces closely connected to deal with the unforeseen events. As long as the variance around the planning is fairly small, this is by far the most efficient way to organize a supply chain. Unfortunately, the world that we live in is not like that.
Most of the time, the supply chains are in a state of imbalance, broken because of shocks that are either internally driven, issues with production, change in consumer preferences, or driven from outside, as we're seeing right now with the pandemic, with trade tensions before, or with congestions around infrastructure bottlenecks. Irrespective of the conditions, even if they are most of the time not as extreme as what we witness today. They happen all the time. Customers and logistics managers are dealing with problems and trying to keep this orchestration layer to effectively hold the supply chain together. Many times it is bursting at the seams, causing the cost of the supply chain and the quality of the outcomes that are delivered to their business to be very different from the standard prices and the SLAs that are coming out of the tenders.
This diagnostic is not groundbreaking. It is not new. We've engaged with many of the supply chain directors among our customers, and all of them acknowledge that this is the paradigm that they live in. We can see Mark here on the slide from General Electric, fully acknowledging that this is what he's living in as well. What they say, though, is that there is no viable alternative today for them to build their supply chain differently. There comes our aspiration. Our winning aspiration is about leveraging our unique set of capabilities to bring about a disruptive offering that can change this paradigm. We call it truly integrated logistics. By truly integrated logistics, we mean a logistics that does not only manage the complexity that our customer supply chains are subject to. We mean a logistics that can absorb and eliminate this complexity.
We mean a logistics that can actually take full accountability of the supply chain outcome in terms of quality and total cost of ownership. We do that by working on three capabilities that put together make us unique. The first capability is what we call operational control. It's the ability that we have to directly execute the transportation, the fulfillment, or any of the other needs that our customers have across the supply chain. The advantage is that basically at any time, we can get our hands on the cargo, we can prioritize the access to capacity, change the outcome, affect what is happening for customers in a way that people, that companies, that do not have this direct operational control cannot. The second capability is about a digital-enabled supply chain that is truly tied together, providing one source of the truth end to end.
A data that is so granular and that provides customers with insights they do not have today, more importantly, that can help turn these insights in decision points that get fed back onto the operational layer to affect errors or the outcome based on the needs or what is happening across the supply chain. The third capability is about a modular offering. It's about designing products in a way that are standard but easily combinable, easily integratable across the supply chain based on the needs of the different verticals or the philosophies of different customers, based on the needs for control that they have across their supply chain. As we are today, our operational control across the different parts of the supply chain is unique.
The integration and the digital capabilities, the size of the investments and the ambitions of the investment, the scope that they have across the supply chain is unique. The way we design products in this easily combinable architecture is unique. The way we articulate these three dimensions for better outcomes for customers is unique. That is the reason why we can today grow all of our product offering above market, and that is the reason why also we are certain that we can continue to grow this offering above market. The construction phase of the building has started. We have great momentum. We feel, as Søren mentioned, that the strategy that we have is vindicated because it resonates with customers.
We will continue the journey, accelerating the transformation and the value creation that we have for our customers, accelerating the development of our business by working on three levers. The first lever is about building an Ocean business that is no longer a commodity fixed on where determined by the price of the day, but a value-adding element of the supply chain that is based on differentiated value proposition that are set to meet the different customer needs that there is across the spectrum and are delivered consistently. The second is the continuous fleshing out of our product offering, both in the physical space and in the digital space. The third is the continuous investment that we will make in digital capabilities to support an efficient growth engine of a closer integration with customers and the extension of our product offering.
To introduce the first part and the first lever that I'm talking about here, I'm very pleased to have joining me today, Johan Sigsgaard, our Head of Ocean Products, who's playing a leading role in transforming our Ocean business into a new resilient, value-creating business in our portfolio. Johan, I give you the floor.
Thank you, Vincent, and good morning, everyone. For this next session, I'll take you through three of our key strategic initiatives in Ocean that is basically helping us to remove some of the historical volatility and build a much more resilient business centered around our customers. The three initiatives are agility and capacity management, a differentiated product proposition, and getting to absolute reliability on a shipment level. We know right now that the current market is overshadowing a bit of some of these impacts. As the situation normalizes and we come out on the other side, these are the things that will build a higher quality business. We'll take you through some of the proof points today of what are changing. Of course, we'll come back to at the end what it means for the future.
Let us dive in and start with the first lever around agility and capacity management. Historically, deployed capacity has not been very well aligned to demand, and we have had significant periods over the time where there have been visible gaps between the two. It typically starts with a period where the deployed capacity exceeds the demand, and then followed by a period where demand can easily outgrow capacity because it grows back into the capacity from the previous period. All in all, creating a long period of volatility. Since 2017, we have seen a visible change in this. The lines have come much closer. In the second quarter of last year, we saw an unprecedented change, where we were basically able to swiftly adjust the capacity down in line with the new reality on the demand side. What has changed?
We think it's two things that have changed fundamentally. First of all, on the capacity side, it of course starts with the size and the number of departures that we have available to work with. It goes beyond this. It also involves a much further integration of our networks via the hubs. This basically provides us an opportunity to flex between the markets to better match the actual demand situation of the individual market, and it allows us further opportunities to reroute cargo in case a certain sailing is taken out of that week. Furthermore, we have also in the last round of network designs, we have much further thought in the solutions, the pre-cooked solutions to how we're going to adjust up and down the capacity in case the demand changes.
This brings significant speed to the execution, and the combination of this is what we saw was brought to the full test during 2020 with the extreme volatility we have just been going through. Things have also changed on the demand side. We have introduced new digital products that have enforceability on the booking level. Historically, we have basically been faced with around 30% uncertainty on demand up until the very departure of the ship. With these new products and these new tools, we get a much better view on the forward-looking demand at a time where we can still react to it. The combination of these two things, it's what has built these increased capabilities within agility and capacity management. Perhaps the most important thing that has changed as a consequence of this is how this has allowed us to change the conversation with our customers.
Historically, a logistics manager would have had to devote significant amount of time to the procurement and the yearly tender process. Because of the volatility in pricing that came as a consequence of the gaps between supply and demand, you basically had to do this because it was the only way to ensure you are competitive on the freight cost. With the reduced volatility, we have also seen a shift in this conversation. We have a lot of customers now who are changing and want to talk about long-term partnership and joint value creation. Perhaps the best example of this is how we have been able to increase the number of contracts that are signed for multi-years, so over 24 months and above.
This has now reached a total portfolio of 1 million FFEs. It's actually a number we expect increasing over the coming months because we're in a number of dialogues with customers right now about converting existing 12-month deals into a multi-year framework. A second thing that has changed as a consequence of this is the conversation around differentiated value propositions. Not long ago, we had one Ocean product. Over the last two years, we have been able to increase that portfolio to now be of five different Ocean products. It began in 2019 when we introduced Twill and Maersk Spot, which are two end-to-end digital products for our small and medium-sized BCOs and freight forwarders, respectively. These products have seen massive growth. Today they are our standard product for these two segments. Combined, they have allowed us to address between 40%-50% of the Ocean market.
Towards the end of last year and further into this year, we have launched three additional products that are focusing on the contracting side of this, basically taking us to the full Ocean portfolio. I'd just like to take you through these three products. The first one is Blockspace. This product was essentially co-created with a couple of our large global freight forwarders in a response to a lag they saw from Maersk Spot for their stable, large flows. We came together and we developed Blockspace. The essence of Blockspace is that we make a firm commitment to a fixed weekly volume that is handed over to the forwarders so they can use it as they want. It creates complete clarity between us and the customer, and it actually simplifies the execution quite a lot because it reduces the number of contracts that we have between us.
The second product is our Flex product. This product is for large BCOs, such as our retailers or FMCG companies, and it offers a pre-agreed flexibility to the weekly volume. On top of that, it also offers a seamless transfer to an option to buy more in case that is needed. This basically reduces a lot of the manual forecasting and manual exchanges that typically take place around the contract to make it fit the supply chain, and instead provides instant options for the customers to buy the space when and where it's needed. Lastly, we have our Unlimited product. This is the product for our customers who are looking for exclusive partnership.
As the name suggests, this is basically a product where we commit to take unlimited amount of space, and reserve that for the customer to serve their full supply chain need and their full flows. It goes as an exclusive product, so the customer is also giving us the total book of business on this product. Typically, this product is also sold in conjunction with some of our Logistics & Services products, such as supply chain management, where we help the customer manage their flows on top of this product. One of the things that we are looking at quite carefully as we roll out these products is how does the pricing develop. If we start by looking at the contracting side, then what we have seen is, of course, that the contract rates have come up overall, as a consequence of the strong market.
Perhaps more importantly, when we compare to some of the key benchmarks that are out there, we see that we are able to, as a minimum, get the same rates. In several cases, we're actually able to get a premium over the benchmark reported market. Similarly, on the short term, you have a comparison of Maersk Spot and SCFI. You can also see that Maersk Spot has been doing quite well, particularly here in the last quarters, where the pressure has been tight. What is important here is that we basically take this as a confirmation that traditionally there have been unmet needs from the one-product portfolio. By releasing a more differentiated set of products, we can much better create value for our customers, and this is reflected, of course, in the pricing.
Our ambition is that we will take the full suite of Ocean business to a clearly set of differentiated products. You should expect a couple of things from us going forward. First of all, you should probably expect that we'll launch a couple of more products, because as we unfold the dialogue with our customers around their needs, the product portfolio will probably also have to change a bit. This is part of the evolution. The second thing you should expect is, as we have seen particularly here in the beginning of 2021, is that we will continue during this transition to invest in our strategic partnership with our key customers.
We have significant value to provide to them in terms of flexibility to serve their needs, and we would like to continue to make this deliberate shift of taking some of our very transaction volume and invest that in more recurring partnership business. This takes me to the final lever around reliability. All of the five products that I just took you through come with what we call a two-way committed feature. It basically is enforceability on both sides of the partnership, where the customer has to commit to us at a certain point of the journey, and in return, we commit to the customer to a load promise or delivery promise.
With that, we are trying to reduce a big part of the waste that has been in the existing system, essentially, we're trying to get to a position where we can offer a time-bound promise for all the shipments to the customers. To do this, we need to continue the work in reliability, but we need to change the focus slightly. There are three changes I want to talk about. The first is that we need to move the focus away from schedule reliability and into a shipment-based reliability. First and foremost, because that's actually what matters to the customers at the end, is on the shipment level. Secondly, what we see is that there is a quite differentiated need for reliability when you look at it from a shipment perspective.
Even the same customer will have some shipments that needs to arrive within the hour, and other shipments that can easily be delayed with up to a week. By capturing this up front in the agreement, we actually build flexibility in the delivery machine, and we make it much more likely that we're going to hit the actual need for the individual shipment. The second point is on the network. Of course, all the shipments will sail on the network, and we need to continue the efforts on creating reliable network. One of the key changes we're working on at the moment is a further modularization of how the networks are designed. This basically means that we want to be better at isolating the effects of an external event to that location where it's happening.
In the case of a big port congestion you have, for instance, in L.A. at the moment, we don't want that to have a spillover to a complete other part of the world, which actually has been the case sometimes in the past. By modularizing the network, we will isolate these effects much better going forward. Finally, I come back to the hubs, because the hubs will play an even more important strategic role in creating operational excellence going forward. By connecting the schedules much better to the hub, we provide connectivity between the different systems, and we provide an opportunity to absorb some of the shocks that will happen eventually in the system. Through that, we can connect the shipments back on plan with much more options than when they are not connected in the hubs.
A second feature to the hubs is that we have seen this coming out a lot during the last year because of the volatility, is that the hubs provide a perfect opportunity to help the customers slow down or accelerate certain shipment when that is needed. It's basically a perfect place to store some of the cargo while in transit that still allows connectivity to multiple markets. The hubs will play a key role in creating this. Coming back to our customers, there is no doubt when we talk to them about how we help them, that reliability is one of the key pain points today and one of the key value opportunities. Roughly one out of four containers today arrives three days or more delayed from the plan. What this means is that typically a customer has minimum one week of safety stock as a consequence of this.
If you ship flat screen TVs, then you can translate to about $1,000 per container. This is the value we're looking to address. One of the reason why it has not been possible to address earlier is that no one has been willing to take the full ownership of the outcome. This is what we are looking to do with the new time-bound promises. Let me sum this up and try to project this into the future. We are an exception market right now, and of course, this will come to an end eventually. We believe a number of things have changed in the Ocean business. That means that as it comes to an end, it will normalize at a different level, and we expect that rates will normalize at a level above historic.
The four key reasons for that is, first of all, on the agile capacity management, it has worked very well in the past years, it's within our control, and we basically believe we still have ways to refine this going forward. Secondly, on our long-term business and the multi-year contracts, we have mentioned the 1 million FFEs that are now signed on a time horizon between two and five years. The good thing about this is that we can actually already today, with very high certainty, predict both volume and rates for 2022 on this book of business. It is no longer something that will be dependent on the short-term rates in that specific month of the contract negotiation. Third, on our digital products. First, they build customer preference. They're simply just a better customer experience in our views.
Secondly, they provide this critical insight that we need to respond in an agile fashion to the volatility we face. Finally, on the differentiated set of products, we basically have seen that we can create a whole new set of value for our customers that has nothing to do with the short-term fluctuated under rates. As we have been taking you through here, we have seen some proof points, and we believe this is what's going to continue taking us forward and building a different business model for the Ocean business. What we also see is that these conversation change with the customers are only accelerated when we take our Ocean products and we put them together with some of our growing Logistics & Services capabilities, and we build truly integrated value propositions.
With that, let me hand it back to Vincent to talk about how we do that. Thank you.
The second lever that we have, that builds on the work that is being done in Ocean, as Johan concluded, is the modularization and the fleshing out of our logistics offering. Through a mixture of organic growth and inorganic acquisition, we have been able to really flesh out the offering that we have across the supply chain and across geographies to servicing our customers and making more of a difference, more an impact on their supply chain outcomes. We have also redrawn all of our products into a modular architecture that is easy for us to sell, easy for customers to implement, and easy for them to combine and integrate according to their needs. To get to that, it started by getting the organization right.
Integrating all across Ocean and Logistics into one organization that is not built around the products and what we do, but that is built around our customers and the difference, the value that we create for them. It is about implementing the concept of vertical across the organization. It is about having the right product offering with the adjustments that we made as late as last year, integrating air and LCL into the global offering that we have, because the conversations with our customers were clearly establishing the need for a multimodal offering for their supply chain. It also, given the importance of digital, meant a complete redraw of the way that business and technology would work together so that we can deliver at speed the products and services that our customers expect. It also went into building the right team for the mission.
Over the last three years, 3,800 talented colleagues have joined the journey of building the global integrator of container logistics in A.P. Moller-Maersk. Their contribution has been felt in many ways. They have enriched our culture, enhanced our capabilities on the product front, sharpened the focus that we have on customer value. They have been instrumental in getting us the confidence that we could move on to customers and sell truly integrated logistics with confidence.
We started with our top 200 customers, our global key accounts, and our runway program, establishing dialogue to understand how they were thinking about their supply chain, what were the unmet needs that they had, and how the Maersk offering could help address the value points or the left out value that there was in their supply chain. Today, with many of these accounts, we have multi-year roadmaps and plans for how we want to incorporate truly integrated logistics in their supply chain. This is giving us not only the confidence that we can grow, but that we can build growth momentum organically with these 200 customers, as well as with the rest of the business. Organic growth, as you've been able to see it already shape in the last quarters, is a key element of our strategy.
Because the synergies that we create across, because of the disruptive nature of the offering that we're having, the ability for us to grow and build on this value proposition with our customers organically is absolutely cornerstone to the success of our strategy. This is not about bulking up a logistics business. It is about creating these customer synergies and these differences in outcome. We have, and we will continue to complement this organic growth with inorganic moves wherever and whenever we see that this is necessary. Our growth has been, and will continue to be, an organic first growth agenda, where M&A plays a role of complement in order to give us the platforms that we need to deliver truly integrated logistics to our customers. I will talk a little bit more about M&A in just a second.
Before I do that, I want to spend a couple of minutes just on this organic part of the journey and how much we have achieved over the past few years. Over the last two years, our growth in revenue has been of 42%. Within this number, there is, of course, the acquisitions of Vandegrift, Performance Team, and KGH. There is also the discontinuation of some of the product lines that we saw did not fit with our truly integrated logistics value proposition. We decided to, for instance, stop offering ocean freight forwarding during last year. If you correct for ocean freight forwarding and for the acquisition, the organic growth with our customer base has been of 37% over the last two years.
First and foremost, we can see also because of the roadmaps that we have, because of the multi-year plans that we have established with a lot of our customers, because of the dialogue that we're having with many of them, that we have not only a short burst of growth, but we have a growth that we can sustain in the long run because of the product market fit that there is between the strategy that we have and the needs of our customers. Of course, 37% over two years includes a bit of catch-up effect and noise from the COVID situation. A lot of customers have delayed changes in their supply chain during 2020, as they were waiting to see how the COVID crisis was going to impact their supply chain. There's been a lot of catch-up now for some of these decisions.
There has been decisions that are no longer postponed. We see more decisions being made on restructuring the supply chain now than we will probably see in a steady state. On the basis of what we have achieved and the view that we have of the future, we feel confident to say that we have in our Logistics & Services offering a growth engine for A.P. Moller-Maersk that can deliver organically 10% or above top-line growth. The work that we have done was not only centered on top-line.
We also spent a lot of time, together with the colleagues joining us from outside and our existing organization, really assessing how we're delivering to customers, cleaning up our product offering, redesigning the offering into this modular setup, discontinuing a couple of product lines that were either structurally unprofitable or had no synergetic relationship with the rest of our offering. We sharpened the performance management and increased the insight that we have in our data, thanks to our global data analytics team. As a result, we've been able to progress our margins significantly and sustainably.
Contrary to Ocean, the COVID impact on margin in our business, given the fact that our Ocean business is actually set outside of these numbers and our exposure to air is relatively moderate today, we believe that we are now in position to guide that not only will we grow at 10% or above organically, we will be able to maintain a profitability level for the Logistics & Services business above 6% at EBIT level. On top of this organic growth that we see for the foreseeable future, we will continue to rely on mergers and acquisition whenever it is necessary for us to add capabilities or gain scalable platforms we can flesh out our disruptive offering from. So far, we have had three such acquisitions. Vandegrift in early 2019. In April 2020, we integrated Performance Team and continued in September 2020 with KGH.
I feel that at this moment, it is important for us to really explain and unfold how we're thinking about M&A, what we have done so far, and what you can expect in terms of M&A activities for us in the future. Because our approach is actually quite specific and well thought through in the frame of our strategy. Let me start by looking a little bit at two of the acquisitions that we have done because they provide an excellent illustration of why we're doing M&A. Performance Team was acquired and integrated in April 2020.
The purpose and the strategic rationale was to move from a network that we had, that was essentially based on port side flow logistics, and to move from that flow logistics into omni-channel fulfillment and e-commerce capabilities that we could scale up and meet those needs for our customers with a company that was already operating extremely well. The integration went well. The modularization of the offering, the integration of this offering with our customers, has worked extremely well. We see here two types of synergies that we will see also in the next example. First, the broad customer relationships that Maersk has across the whole world globally has helped flesh out a pipeline and build a growth momentum that is vastly superior to what Performance Team could achieve on its own.
Since the integration, we have signed up for more than $360 million of contract logistics, new business with new customers. At the same time, the functional expertise and capabilities that Performance Team had were leveraged to increase the margins on our existing warehousing and distribution business, thus creating synergies not only on revenue but also on cost. The next phase of the integration is the rapid expansion of the platform that we have now, outside of the footprint that they have today, not only in North America, but also in other geographies. A similar picture emerges when we look at KGH. KGH provided us with a scalable, well-run platform to offer customs services across Europe in one go. Here, too, the integration worked out very well.
The product's integration worked out very well. We can see already in the few months where KGH has been part of the Maersk family, the commercial traction that we're gaining with this asset. More than 900,000 incremental customs declarations have been signed up by the Maersk sales force since the integration. Remember that at the beginning in the slide, I said that last year we had 2 million customs declarations for the year globally. Here, as a synergy, we were able to, in a few months, sign up 900,000 customs declarations in a few months in Europe only. Similar to Performance Team, the capabilities that we acquired with KGH also allowed us to increase the margins that we had on our existing Maersk Customs Services business, which were integrated together.
Here, too, like in Performance Team, we are looking now at a roadmap where the capabilities and scalable platform of KGH will be expanded across customers and segments in Europe, but also outside of its traditional theater of operation. These two examples provide an excellent illustration of how we're thinking about M&A and what we're looking for when we engage into M&A discussions with potential targets. In every cases, we test a potential acquisition with three key factors. The first one being that we have a clearly established customer need within the field where the target operates, so that we know this offering will be synergetic with the rest of our offering. The second is that the company that we're targeting is a scalable, well-run platform on which we can unleash the power of the Maersk sales force and provide accelerated growth.
We are not looking for synergies placed, principally. These are really scalable platforms that need to be an addition to the product offering that we have for our customers and that can be integrated into this truly integrated logistics offering. The last one is that it has a fit with the strategic geographical footprint that we have determined in our priority list. All three of the acquisitions that we have done so far do fit this model, and the acquisitions that we will have in the future will continue to have to live to these three litmus tests.
As we gain a lot of confidence in our ability to leverage those platforms and grow them, as we can see that every time now, we are actually able to create significant synergies, we will move gradually to larger targets in some of the capabilities we still have on our roadmap, so that we can leverage those synergies even broader and deeper than what we have done so far. We have a model here that works for us, creates value, and enables the rapid extension of our offering to our customers. Our Logistics & Services offering is generating a solid and sustainable growth. It is the growth engine of A.P. Moller-Maersk for the years to come. We have the visibility today, having laid the foundation, having blueprinted what we need to achieve.
We have the visibility today to commit to a 10% or above organic growth, while maintaining a 6% EBIT on the bottom line. We will continue to supplement this whenever it is necessary with mergers and acquisition, but we'll stick to our organic first growth model. To do this effectively and not run into diseconomies of scale or issues, we need to continue to invest heavily in our digital capabilities, both from an efficiency perspective, but also from a capability to flesh out the service offering that we have for our customers. Here, too, we have been on a significant journey. Similar to what I described with Logistics & Services, it also started here by building the team and having the right engagement model. Building the team with 2,500 colleagues and leaders from technological companies joining the journey of building the integrator of container logistics.
We will increase that number further by 1,000 in the coming year, so that we have the size and muscle that we need to capture the opportunities ahead. It was also about getting the organization right, adopting the right agile ways of working, organizing around a platform operating model, and having a very layered and close engagement model between the business and the technology. It also implied leveraging data insights and data products to both internally and towards customers to an extent that we hadn't done so far. We have also now been able to start on the basis of these foundational measures, the modernization of our application, moving to a cloud-first agile architecture that will reduce the time to market of our development and allow us to create more customer value and deploy it faster.
The examples of this are already quite important. We will see more of those come in the month and quarter to come. Let me take a few example here to illustrate how this progression is starting to spread across different segments and different parts of the value proposition. Twill is our platform towards small and medium enterprise. Johan mentioned it. It offers an end-to-end offering for small and medium enterprise that have very little business activities, a segment we have historically struggled to serve effectively. Thanks to Twill, we have been able to grow this business significantly, generating over 100,000 FFEs of transport last year, including bundles also with inland deliveries, customs clearance, and insurance whenever the customer wished for it. This was a 13x growth over the previous years. That growth is continuing into this year.
Through Twill, we have a platform we can continue to develop that has a high customer satisfaction, low churn of customer, and that provides us the base to serve effectively a segment of our customer population we have historically struggled to. We will continue to develop Twill, because we can see here the vindication also of the approach that truly integrated and digitally enabled logistics works for customers that are not only the large, sophisticated customers, but also for the small and medium enterprise. The heavy investments that we have made in maersk.com, in developing the different channels through API, EDI, and the normal portal, but also through mobile channels, have shown to be extremely strong.
In the pandemic, the adoption of the mobile channel has been tremendous, and we continue to invest into making sure that the interactions between the different parts of our customer's organization and us is as seamless, as easy, as effective as possible. maersk.com is becoming the single source of truth for what is happening in the supply chains. We can continue to invest on this. We have also seen new products being sent to the market. Maersk Flow is an adaptation of our traditional supply chain management offering to medium enterprise that do not need the level of sophistication that customers like PUMA would need to manage their supply chain, but still need to have a view on how they can manage their POs and their network of vendors. The success of this release, hitting a market that was previously completely uncovered, has been tremendous.
It provides our customers with value, insights that they didn't have before. It provides us also with more insight on demand further down the road, which helps us in our capacity and allocation planning across ocean, air, and the other modes of transport. Our investments in digital capabilities are not limited to Maersk products. Wherever necessary to bring truly integrated logistics, Maersk will invest in global and open platform that will impact the ecosystem and bring about the digitalization of the global supply chain. TradeLens is an excellent example of such an endeavor. After years of work in building up the product and the network, getting adoption across service providers and shipping lines, we are starting to see commercial traction across especially electronic bill of ladings, collaboration across the ecosystem, and documentation.
With TradeLens being right now right on track to generate 100,000 paying bill of lading, we have the first hit in terms of product that we will see build traction across the global logistics market. This is a very interesting proof point for us to see how we can articulate some of the products that are proprietary and some of the more open environment, so that we can make the two of them to fit and work off each other, create insight and value for our customers. The acceleration of all of these digital tracks that we have right now is absolutely key for our future. Thanks to the investments that we're making, we will be able to serve our customers more efficiently.
We will be able to integrate with our customers more effectively, and we will be also able to flesh out the offering and the insights and the capabilities that we can offer to customers to manage their supply chain more effectively. In order to help you follow the journey of how we will progress in this construction project, we have, in the last quarter, started to publish a breakdown of our Logistics & Services business in three sub-segments. I would like to spend just a minute to help you understand how we've built them and how you can use that information going forward. At the bottom of the pyramid, you see the Transported by Maersk. This is an important part because it addresses the need for multimodal global access to multimodal networks for our customers.
This is one of the main reason why we added LCL and Air to our offering in October last year, because of the need that customer have to be able to change speed, routings, and mode for their POs, depending on the needs that they have. The growth in these segments will be important because it fleshes out the capabilities that we have globally, also because it is very aligned with the historical competencies that our sales force has across the transportation networks. The second is Fulfilled by Maersk. Fulfilled by Maersk covers warehousing and distribution capabilities from flow warehouses to cold chain, omni-channel fulfillment, as well as e-commerce. It is important to follow the growth in here because this is the area of Logistics & Services where capital investment will be required to flesh out the network organically.
This is also an extremely high and important and under-penetrated part of the supply chain of our customers today. One of the large growth opportunities that we have ahead. At the top of the pyramid is what we call Managed by Maersk, which really will look at the flow of information, data products, and all the data capabilities that we're putting at the service of our customers. There we will see how data insights and digital capabilities will help tie the customer supply chain together and bring about truly integrated logistics. The truly integrated logistics is the bridge that Managed by Maersk is creating across the different providers, modes, and products that are necessary for our customers to orchestrate their supply chain.
Therefore, given the specificity and the uniqueness of our strategy, being able to follow the progression of Managed by Maersk alone, we feel is a very important proof point for you to keep an eye on. We also communicated the numbers of revenues and growth that we're having across our top 200 customers. Here on this slide, I have it specified in the three sub-segments. In there you can see that the growth is actually well-distributed across the three different sub-segments, showing that the product market fit of truly integrated logistics does not only rely on one product or one feature, but on a holistic approach to supply chain. Through the discussions that we have had with these top 200 customers, we are able to see now how the growth will be generated in the next few years.
We are able also to shape our product development pipeline based on the needs that we are agreeing upon or that we're working on with these customers. We can see the importance that operational control has when we make it bare for customers. We can also see that the digitalization of supply chain is something that is eagerly awaited from our customers. Last but certainly not least, we can see also that the Maersk brand is a powerful ticket to bring to the table. The reputation for quality that we have built over many years is giving us access to customers, is opening up doors and discussions that Damco or other parts of A.P. Moller-Maersk could not before. The global integrator of container logistics has come, and the strategy is really taking off, built on these elements.
The reason why we want to focus on these top 200 customers is because they are the global thought leader when it comes to supply chain logistics. Where they go, eventually, the market will go. For us to have a future-proof strategy, it was important from the get-go that our strategy resonate with these trendsetters. It was important from the get-go that we could see that the products that we were taking to market were fit for the needs that they had, that they had commercial traction across different geographies and verticals. We see the success with these top 200 customers as a lead indicator for the success that our value proposition will have globally. We're seeing a strong product market fit illustrated in the 68% growth that we have seen already now year on year with these top 200 customers.
As I explained before, for the 42% that we have on the overall, the 68% is not the steady part. It is not the steady speed that we will see in the next few years. There is a lot of catch-up effect. There is a lot of readjustment of supply chain. We have sufficient insight in what is going to happen in the coming years that we can guide on saying that half of the growth that we will generate in the coming years will come from these top 200 accounts. That is based on these plans, and that is based on the product market fit that we have. You don't need to take only my word for the fact that truly integrated logistics actually does resonate with customers. We have the benefit of having together with us today, one of these top 200 customers.
To present for PUMA, Michael Lämmermann is joining us today. Michael has been working for PUMA for 28 years. He's been their CFO for the last eight, and over the last years has been their Executive Board Member in charge of Logistics and Supply Chain. Under his leadership, PUMA has completely re-engineered how they think about supply chain and how they want to organize their supply chain. We felt that it was really interesting to have Michael come and talk about, from a customer perspective, where they are seeing the changes, what their expectations are, and why Maersk is a good fit as a partner for PUMA. Michael, it's a pleasure to invite you here to the podium.
Thank you, Vincent. As Vincent mentioned, he asked me to talk today and give you an overview today about our cooperation with Maersk, give you also an overview about our logistical setup and how PUMA is operating on a worldwide basis from a logistic and supply chain perspective. In the spirit of transparency, I would like to mention that I will retire from my board position at the end of this month. I will continue to work for PUMA until the end of the year, and beyond that, I will serve also on several board seats within PUMA, so I will continue to work for PUMA. The gentleman you will see on that slide is our newest addition to our roster of athletes. That's Neymar Jr., for those who have wondered who that is.
At the beginning, I would like to give you an overview on our sourcing volume that we did in 2020. As you can see, we have sourced 270 million units of footwear, apparel, and accessories, and we have done that in 213 different factories. Those factories are not owned by us, neither are they operated by us. They are all third-party operated. This is part of our business setup, and this is something very common in our industry. Nevertheless, all those products that you see, which are mainly sourced in the Asia Pacific region, 96% are sourced there and just a little bit in the Americas, as well as a little bit in Turkey and South Africa.
Again, the majority is coming from Asia, and all that product has to be distributed and shipped to 62 main distributions, distributed all over the world, and from there, the product will be further distributed in all the 170 countries where PUMA is operating and selling products. On the next slide, I would like to give you an overview on our ocean freight volume from last year. We did over 42,000 20-foot equivalents last year. We did that mainly coming from or stemming from five top origin countries. You see on the top, it's Vietnam, which is our main sourcing country for footwear, but also some apparel, followed by China, split footwear and apparel, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. In order to bring that product over to the world in all these distribution centers and countries, then you get into 850 different ocean trade lanes.
The main ocean trade lane, for instance, for the North American market, is from Ho Chi Minh City to the Los Angeles port. Other ones are going then also, of course, to Vancouver, serving Canada and other countries, but also from Phnom Penh, Xiamen. There are trade lines going to North America, but also to Latin America, to Valparaíso, Mexico, and Santos. If we look then on the majority of the European market, you see the majority is going there to Europe, Middle East, Africa. Here, one of our most visited trade lane is Ho Chi Minh City to Bremerhaven. What you can imagine is also that this is quite a complex thing, and in our opinion, a very important part also of our operations.
To give you a little bit more feeling from numbers, at PUMA, we spend approximately 1.5%-2% of our sales in freight. In ingoing freight, which is part of our cost of goods sold, approximately 3.5%-4% in our warehousing expenses, the other big part of our Logistics. If you add that together, it's quite huge numbers. Knowing how difficult it is in today's world to improve operating margins from a niche perspective, Vincent just talked about it, I can assure you we also have a very sharp focus on that area. If we continue, PUMA has decided for an integrated setup with Maersk, what we saw is that the whole Logistics world has changed in the last years. What we saw is that more and more business is done of the work and processes at origin Logistics.
What we are doing here in the integrated setup is that we have three decoupling points, one at the origin, where we do first consolidation and prioritize the purchase orders. We have the second decoupling point, which is the port-to-port leg, where we have another opportunity to monitor the flow of our products. Here we can also still choose between ocean or even air, if necessary, if it's required by our customers. On the destination leg, we still have then the final opportunity really here to optimize what our customers want from us, what products need to leave the ship first. As you can imagine, speed is also very important in our business. We are also very fashion-driven, so the product has to be at our customer at the right time. Very important for us.
What we then saw is that looking into that, where I already mentioned that the landscape has changed, more and more of the work we saw and problems and complexity has been generated in the origins logistics at the port of origin. That was also for us, I think, a logic conclusion then to concentrate and focus that business and partner with one partner, and this is Maersk. I will tell you later why we did that. I think what we are doing here is now that we have now one process owner who can do our agile PO management, then Maersk is enabled to do their dedicated shipment planning.
The execution at the end is in their hands. That will also bring us, I think, a lot of benefits from an economy of scale perspective, because if you see on the left bottom side on that slide, the product is coming from various factories to the port. There, they will be consolidated. Non-priority orders can wait. Priority orders will go directly to the ship. It will help us also to improve our container fill rates. I think that's very beneficial for us. Partnering in that area with one strong partner has proven to help our business also from a speed perspective. Then, as you can see, Maersk is taking care, shipping on their vessels, the product to all the continent and regions in our world.
What I would like to say is we, from a strategic perspective, focus on a long-term business relationship, and I know that Maersk is doing the same. When we started the journey approximately three years ago, we were looking in our whole logistical setup from a global perspective. What we found out is that we were not really happy with a lot of our logistical partners, and I have to say that at that time, that included Maersk, how they were dealing with that, how they were following our requirements, how they managed the PUMA account. In general, we were not very happy. What we then saw of three years ago, I think when Maersk also went through an internal restructuring, Vincent and his team did a great job.
There was a lot of open dialogue, a lot of focus on our requirements, on our needs, on our customer needs, to fulfill those. We also have to say that we also found a very innovative partner that is open for new concepts. Just one Vincent already mentioned is TradeLens is one of these tools, a blockchain-based supply chain management tool, which I will talk a little bit more in a second about. Why did we choose Maersk? I think what we see is that their service reliability has much improved. Their business continuity is clearly there, and that is also enabled because they have their own ships.
Particularly in the recent month, when during the COVID pandemic, we saw how important it is to have a partner who has own ships, who can decide which containers are going on the ship and which containers may stay at the port. This is very important for us, and I think they also provide a very high business transparency to us. As I already mentioned, TradeLens, I would like to take the recent incident that happened in the Suez Canal. We all know about it. It only took three hours for Maersk to provide us with an updated information what's going to happen with our containers. Will they be rerouted? How much will they be delayed because of that? So on and so forth. That was very helpful for us and very important information also for our customers. What we call quick decision making.
Here is also something where I personally would like to thank the Maersk team and the people there, because what happened during the pandemic, PUMA was able to maneuver through the whole pandemic in a very good way. Because we decided at a very early stage, we cannot allow that the supply chain can be broken. What we did, we talked to our suppliers and told them, "We are not canceling orders. You keep the product there. You are producing a little bit slower than normal, but we keep the order there." We also talked then on the other side with our customers and convinced them, "Do not cancel orders. You will need the product at a later stage. We give you better payment conditions. You can pay later. You will get the product later. It will be still fresh product.
Don't worry about that." In the middle of all this was Maersk helping us to really balance this whole supply chain by helping us at the origin logistics port, keeping the product there longer, keeping the product longer on the ship and over then at the destination port. Keep it there, and we were able to stretch it out, balance it, and no break of the supply chain. That helped us a lot, I have to say. Yes, technology-driven framework is there. I think in order to manage our business, you need to have proven and very quick processes and also very high sophisticated IT platforms and so on and so forth. At the end, both of our companies have mutual sustainability goals, which is very important for PUMA. I think we both share our vision in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
I think furthermore, we both cooperate on the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action. I think that's an initiative created by the United Nations. As far as I know, Maersk is the only logistics company that is participating there. That's very important. Last but not least, by doing that, they are also helping us to achieve and reach our own PUMA sustainability goals. That is a 20% reduction of our carbon footprint within our whole supply chain. In order to do that, you need a company which really has a high class of processes, high class of equipment, and I think we are here very much aligned, and with their help, we will be able to achieve our own goals. I think in summary, this is how we operate with Maersk.
I think in this whole integrated setup, allowing us to be very agile from our PO management, and I think that's a very fruitful alliance that we are having here together with Maersk. I think that's all from my side. Would then hand over back to Vincent.
Thank you. Thank you, Michael. It's always inspiring to hear about how PUMA is thinking about supply chain. It's been a journey. It's been a journey with PUMA, as you could hear, a three-year journey to get to the level of partnership and the roadmap that we have together today. It illustrates also well that our strategy is not something that we just come up with. It is actually co-created in conversations with customers to figure out what the needs truly are and how we can develop this modular offering that will actually meet the specific needs that they have in their supply chain. I felt that it was important to see that PUMA example.
Even if PUMA is a little bit ahead of many of the top 200 customers when it comes to rethinking their supply chain, t he themes, the discussions that we have been having with PUMA over the past three years are discussions that we see replicate themselves now with many and ever more of those top 200 customers. In many ways, the ability that we have to see through what is coming and to develop these products ahead will help us to continue to stay relevant and grow the business together with them. After years of building, we have built the momentum. We are in a construction phase, and we can really take confidence in the future and what we can achieve through our strategy. I talked a lot about customers in this presentation because they are the source of our competitive advantage.
Those 70-plus thousand customer relationships, they are the essence of our success. We have built roadmaps with many of them and continue to expand the numbers of customers that we will work with strategically. Truly integrated logistics is resonating with the needs that are here today, and that will continue to develop in the future, and we are uniquely placed to play a leading role in bringing about this change of paradigm I talked about at the beginning of the presentation. At the same time, our Ocean is becoming a resilient business that is not determined by the price of the day, but by the value that it can create for customers in their supply chain. The differentiation of offering the vertical approach, the new products that we're going to keep enriching our offering with will create a more stable, more resilient, and more value accretive business.
We have an organization that is not only fit for growth, but poised for growth. The right team, the right structure, the right Way of Working, and the right focus to take that strategy into the execution. It is on that basis that we feel that we can provide now the following guidance on how the next phases of the construction will look like. Logistics & Services is the growth engine of our strategy. If you look at all of the business that we do with the top 200 customers, including Ocean Transportation and Logistics & Services, we estimate our penetration of the global logistics spends of these 200 customers to be about 2.5%. This illustrates the magnitude of the task, but also the magnitude of the opportunity that we have ahead of us, and how much we will be able to sustain the momentum that we're building.
We feel that we will be able to grow our business on this basis at 10% or above organically every year. We will maintain the profitability of this business while we grow it above 6% at EBIT level. To support this growth, we will invest about $1 billion in capital expenses over the next two years. Mostly to support our organic progression in our Fulfilled by Maersk family product. Our product family. We will continue also to supplement this growth with M&A activities wherever we feel that we have found a target or a company that has the scalable platform, that has the geographical print, and that has the customer synergies that we need in order to continue the journey and accelerate it. This growth engine will continue to rely on Ocean, which is becoming a very strong enabler of our strategy.
You could hear it in the presentation from Michael just before. The management of origin services and PO is intrinsically linked to how we manage the transportation modes further down the supply chain. The differentiation of product offering, how we're going about fulfilling our customer promises on Ocean will play an important role in the success of the strategy. We will continue to grow organically at 1%-2%, but while maintaining a fleet in the 4 million-4.3 million TEU size. We have, with our current size, the lowest production cost we can have. We have the fleet that we need to have, the scale that we need to have, and through VSAs and alliances, we have the reach of the network that we need to have. We will prioritize the growth on efficiency gain, which we feel are still there, and Johan talked about some of them.
We will also grow on prioritizing the strategic partnerships, such as the one that we have with PUMA, to grow within the mix of customers that we have today, to make sure that we have a stronger and stronger alignment between truly integrated Logistics and our entire portfolio of business across Ocean. To support the growth in Ocean, we will increase the CapEx that we're doing to $3 billion over the next two years to include both the renewal of our equipment, the renewal of our fleet, and the investments that are necessary in our hubs, and our decarbonization pledge. This will continue to be the bedrock of what we deliver to customers in the future. As this transformation occur, we will see a business that can deliver above 6% of EBIT in a normalized way.
A normalized way is a way for us to describe the underlying stronger resilience that we have built in the business. The different function that the business is playing into our customers' supply chain. This does not mean that Ocean has become a steady business or a utility. While volatility will be reduced, there will still be some level of volatility in the future. We are not immune to shock to the system, as we can see with the pandemic this year. Some of that may or will still happen in the future, but we are in a completely different positions today to handle those shocks and to reduce the volatility even in extreme cases, thanks to the tools that Johan described before. In summary, we have built a different Ocean business than the one we have known in the past.
These last three years, I've seen an acceleration of the transformation. The building phase is well on its way. The strategy is taking off. Even Michael Lämmermann could come on stage and say that it was very different to dealing with Maersk today than it was three years ago. That's a good illustration that things have changed, and that we are handling those partnerships and developing and creating value across the supply chain in new ways. The fleshing out of our modular Logistics offering will continue to expand and will be our growth engine for the future. There is a strong product market fit between our strategy and the unmet needs that our customers are faced with today. This dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that Michael Lämmermann described was the center of their diagnostic three years ago, is still prevalent in the world today.
The opportunity to come with a disruptive offering and change this paradigm based on the unique set of capabilities that we have, that is the true opportunity that we will capture in the years to come. This will create a business that will deliver more growth, more stability of earnings, and more value to our investors. I hope that the past couple of hours have given you a great insight on how we are building the integrator of container logistics in Maersk, the progress that we have made, the learnings that we have taken on the way, and the ambition that we have for the road ahead. Johan and I and the rest of the team, we are here today with absolute confidence in our ability to deliver on the goals that we put forward.
We are confident in our value proposition, confident in the capabilities of the team, and confident in the relationships that we have built with our customers. Thank you.
Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Johan. Thank you, Vincent, for the presentations. We will now start our first Q&A session. I can see already a lot of people have been dialing in. Just to remind you, maximum two questions per session, please, so we ensure that everyone can get a chance to ask a question. For all of you, remember, you can still write questions to us using the text box underneath. I think I start first, because I think, Vincent, you talked about this normalized conditions for an EBIT margin above 6%. I think a lot of people out there that have followed the shipping industry for many years will say, could you maybe be a bit more precise around what does normalization really mean?
It doesn't mean what we're in today. Today, we are actually outside normalized range, you could say, on the up, but we are outside the normalized range. What we mean with that is that Ocean has been characterized in the past decade, or maybe the past two decades, by both a combination of low profitability and high volatility. What we see going forward is actually the size of the cycles, and our ability to handle those cycles will mean that the business will be less volatile. There will still be some volatility, it will still be subject to unforeseen events like a pandemic, but the volatility will be less.
Not that necessarily it is less in the supply chain, but it is less because we're able to handle it much better, because we've built a business that is not relying on volatility and playing the price of the day game, but actually playing the logistics value chain game. That's why we feel that or we see less volatility. We see also a higher profitability because the background is more benign. There is growth. There is an order book that has certainly grown in the past few weeks or in the past few months. We see also that there is a true acknowledgment that Ocean is not just Ocean, that there is significant unmet needs that have a significant cost. Johan Sigsgaard gave an example for flat-screen TV. I'm sure Michael Lämmermann can give an example for what lost sales can mean for PUMA.
Being able to address this decisively, that will create also a more resilient business. We expect to see a business that is more profitable, that is staying around this field most of the years, but will still be subject to some level of volatility.
Thank you, Vincent. We go to the first question. I can see Neil Glynn is the first one on the line. Please, Neil.
Everybody, can you hear me okay?
Yes, we can.
Great. I'll have two then, please. The first one, just with respect to the defined products. A lot of products in Ocean, I should say. A lot of the focus has been about taking the Ocean relationships and applying those to the Logistics & Services business. To flip that around the other way, because I'd expect a reduced likelihood that customers that are contracting for holistic end-to-end services ultimately defect from Maersk contracted rates to other carriers in, and ultimately, eventually weaker spot market. Do you have an expectation of the percentage of the volume that is in, let's say, the Flex and unlimited contracts that can eventually come from customers that have signed up for Logistics & Services contracts and other non-Ocean services.
The second question, just with respect to you've established the end-to-end structure, it's quite clear in terms of the assets that you have and the strategy that you're implementing. I would think to maximize profitability on this with customers traversing business units, you probably need a 360 view of customer profitability. We've talked about this briefly before, and I think that's still in the pipeline, but I'd love to understand an update on how you think about that and timing in terms of optimizing the management of profitability of your expanding customer base with expanding services.
I can take the first one.
[inaudible]
Yeah. We have actually on the material, we have indicated the expected volume that sits in each of the product of the five we have launched. That actually gives the best view of how much volume we expect to come from the different products. I think what is important here is that as we develop these products, we see them as a module that fits with Logistics & Services product modules as well. The best indication we can give of that volume is actually what we already presented as our view of the addressable market for each of the products.
Maybe Vincent, you can-
On the second. You're absolutely right, Neil. We need to have a real data cube where we can look at the profitability through different lenses. We need to be able to look at it through the lens of the customers, the lens of the product, in some cases, the lens of the sites, and be able to manage this. I mentioned in one of the reasons why our margin has improved is that actually our insight in profitability has greatly improved, and we've been able to really manage the different sites, the different customer relationships, the different value propositions that we had in a way where we have taken cost out and increased margin significantly. You would say the insight is not necessarily at the level that all of us would wish to have it at all the time, but we're making significant headways there.
You can see it in the EBIT improvements that we're delivering, which is really also the result of the strong work that we've been doing following up on those insights.
Thank you, Vincent.
Understood. Just to follow up on the first part of the question or the first question. If I add together using the slide, the flexible and the unlimited contracts, it comes to about 50% of Ocean volume. I assume that 50% of volume, there will be customers there that contract for Ocean only, and there will be customers that you have bigger relationships with. Sorry if I'm missing a point, but do you have any view as to how that ultimately falls out?
I think you should, Okay, if I understand your question correctly, Neil, then I think you should look at it more from the L&S perspective and the tags we're giving for our top 200 customers. That I think, is more looking at our growth rate on the L&S products in terms of that.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you. Next in line, we have Rob Joynson from Exane BNP Paribas. Robert?
Good morning, everybody. A couple of questions from me, please. First of all, on M&A, you've said that you will progressively focus on larger acquisitions, but given that the acquisitions undertaken so far have been relatively small, I guess that doesn't tell us a great deal. Could you possibly elaborate on the upper end of the potential deal size that could be of interest going forward? Are we talking $2 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion? Maybe just a bit more color, in that respect, please. Then maybe a question for Michael, if possible. First of all, thank you for participating today, Michael. It's very interesting to hear your perspective. Can I just ask, going forward, do you expect that PUMA will allocate a greater share of its volume directly to container shipping lines such as Maersk, that can provide an end-to-end service?
Therefore, presumably, if that is the case, a lower share of its volume directly to the freight forwarders. Thank you.
Maybe Mike, you go first.
Okay. I take the second question. No, I think at the moment I'm very happy with the setup and also the portions that we have now allocated with Maersk as our, by far biggest partner in the Ocean freight and also origin Logistics. From that perspective, of course, there are even more, I think, business opportunity beyond ocean freight. I think we talk here also warehouse Logistics and others, where I see Maersk coming very strong, also more in the future.
I think that's also something where I think watching a little bit or looking at the past, that they are now, I think, catching up a lot and I think to have this full integrated setup is very helpful for us because information is very important and to have that out of one hand, rather dealing with different freight forwarders which are not very well connected from a systems perspective, is only, I think, slowing down our business.
Vincent, maybe you can take the first one.
On the first one, what I mentioned is that we will gradually increase the size. We're super concentrated on really first, these three litmus tests there, and then on the ticket size now could you say will increase as we really have gained a lot of confidence in our ability to execute on those integrations and to generate the synergies that we're targeting. The upper bracket is a bit difficult to give you a hard number, given the fact, you know the thing with M&A is that you have to also deal with what is actually on the table in terms of possibilities. Yes, I would say that prices starting with a B in the lower end of that range is probably a good expectations over time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think we take one from one of the questions that just came in here from Marcus Bellander from Nordea. I think it's for you, Johan. In 2020, is that really a good example for you and the industry to see what are the ability to adjust capacity? I imagine that it's easy to cut capacity when volumes are down 10%-20%. What are the chances and how agile are you to make smaller adjustments if volumes are down, let's call it 0%-5%?
You're right that 2020 was certainly exceptional and the changes we had to make were way beyond what we normally have to do. I think the reason why we use that example is that it shows how big a toolbox we can deploy even in very extreme conditions. If you compare the last time we had such an extreme condition, we were not able to react. It took a lot longer time to react. Now we also talked about the period from 2017 up until 2020, because that was a less extreme period, but you saw similar patterns. I think the question is correct that actually the more difficult is to adjust a small increment, but this is exactly where I believe we have built the capability, since 2017 to adjust, as I said in the presentation, with as little as 5% for the individual market.
It comes back to this hub connectivity and pre-cooked plans, because with that, we actually can spread the impact out to the different markets and much more granularly hit where we would like to in line with demand.
Thank you, Johan. We take the next one from the live. I can see it's Parash from HSBC. You have a question?
Yeah. Thanks. Can you hear me well?
Yes, we can.
Okay. My question is more around the integrated offerings and there was a great deal of explanation about the capabilities within the Logistics & Services. Some of your peers have ventured into the air cargo market to offer perhaps a different solution to the different requirements from your customers. How do Maersk see opportunities of different intermodal, be it air, be it rail, and in a grand scheme of things, would that be an area where Maersk Logistics probably will venture into when they think about growing inorganically? Any color around that would be useful.
Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question because as part of Transported by Maersk, actually, the multimodality offering is really important. We already offer two different products of intercontinental rail today, for instance, from China to the U.S. and, from China to Europe, sorry, and both through the Russian ports of Vladivostok, but also directly across overland from China directly into Europe. We've moved more than 15,000 FFEs last year in that corridor. We're also expanding the offering in air. It is clearly our ambition to being able to offer different speeds, different routings, different modes, different alternatives that actually suit the needs of the supply chain.
Sometimes if a customer is really surprised by the demand of a certain PO, that may require an air-sea combination or rail or different types of offering, that will actually result in having, what Michael said, the product on the right place at the right time at the end of the day. One of the offering that we want to continue to flesh out across this Transported by Maersk is this ability to mix and match between the different modes to fit the customer needs.
Thank you, Vincent.
If I may squeeze a very brief question following up on that. When we talk about success of Maersk Spot, can you help us understand? I think it's a great proposition for companies like PUMA, but how would your other stakeholders, such as freight forwarders, will take that initiative? Will there be an overlay of the business where you'll be competing with your customers? What has been your initial feedback from them?
Johan.
Maybe I should try to answer this one. Maersk Spot is actually a product designed for freight forwarders and for traders. We don't see that as a product for PUMA in this case. We have different products for the likes of PUMA. Maersk Spot is a product for freight forwarders, and we actually see the growth as a sentiment that it is working for freight forwarders. It is a much simpler product. It combines the quoting to invoicing essentially into one step, which is working on some of the efficiency problems we have had for years. That product, connection with the box-based product, are designed for freight forwarders and in connection with freight forwarders. We actually don't see that as a problem there.
PUMA is on the unlimited contract, and that's actually the offering that we have for them. We have a very high share of wallet from PUMA, the contracting setup that we have with them is we take everything that they need us to take. It's a very different value proposition. It was the one on the extreme right.
Yes.
Thank you, Vincent. I think we'll take one question more. I can see there's a question here for Michael from Casper Blom from ABG. When trying to leave out the freight rates have increased, have your Logistics expenses increased by moving to a closer relationship with Maersk? If the costs have increased, has that made up for the commercial advantages for PUMA?
No, actually, the costs have not increased. I think when we were negotiating with Maersk, I think the rates we compared, of course, also with other competitors, and I think it was, at the end, a very competitive offer, at least in our eyes. That's why we have chosen really to hand over a lot of our volume to Maersk, and that, I think, is paying off. Of course, as you are all aware, logistical costs are increasing at the moment. I think we all know that the freight rates for sea freight, ocean freight, have gone up dramatically. Of course, here we also are in a very partner agreement with Maersk with regards to those increases. I think we have also looked at other opportunities, and we felt that the offer that we received from Maersk was very fair.
It gives us also a long-term or mid-term security on our rates, on our calculations, which is very important because, as you mentioned, I think logistical costs are going up not only on the freight side. We see it also a lot on the warehouse side that due to, I will take the example, e-commerce, who has gained at the moment the biggest increase in a lot of business, thanks to the pandemic. How important warehousing and efficient warehousing is in the meantime. In order to do that, you need to invest a lot. Labor is getting more and more expensive, what we will see is an increase in logistical costs in the upcoming month and years. We are prepared with that also in our internal calculations.
I think with Maersk also, within the negotiations we had, we felt that was done on a very fair base, and we feel here that we have a security also looking into the next quarters and years to come until there is hopefully a normalization again.
Thank you, Michael. I think we should take the next one from the live, and that will be Dan Togo Jensen from Carnegie. Dan?
Yes, hello. A question here for Michael also. How do you make sure that you, so to say, going forward, get the best service at the right price, so to say? How often will this contract be up for tender? Who, in your view, is the best alternative to Maersk? Is it another carrier, or is it one of the big forwarders? Then maybe one question also for Vincent, maybe. We hear from Michael that it's important that you control the assets. Still, you continue to see a fleet of around these 4 million TEUs. Flat feet and you expect to grow L&S volumes by some 10% per annum organically, 10% per annum. How long can that go on if clients require you to also control the assets?
Maybe take Michael first.
Yeah, I think the contract that we have with Maersk at the moment is, of course, not forever. I think there is a certain time frame, and after that time frame, of course, there will be new negotiations. Whatever the market then is asking or whatever the market rates is, will play, of course, quite an important thing into that. Of course, we look also into alternatives, but I think we have done that, and even I would like to mention it, particularly now in the last year, through all this pandemic and all these volatilities all on the freight market. We saw that some other competitors of Maersk, how should I say, did not behave very professionally in our eyes. I think Maersk did here by far the best job and not really abusing the situation.
This is also something where I mentioned, I think from our side, we see here a long-term relationship, and I forgot to mention during my presentation. We at PUMA, it's our intention to double our business within the next five years. In order to do that, we need a partner who is capable to grow with us. Yes, at the moment we are strongly married with Maersk, but how lives can go. What is two, three, four, five years down the road? Nobody knows. It's our intention that this should be a long-term relationship, beneficial for both sides.
Thank you, Michael. It's up to Vincent Clerc to keep the marriage going.
I will have to keep the marriage going on, yes. I think what is important to understand, I think the example of PUMA is very good. In the year to come, we have about 80% share of wallet with PUMA, and PUMA has the ambition to grow to double the volumes in the next five years. As you mentioned, our fleet, we expect to stay within these 4 million-4.3 million TEUs. It is very clear for us that we are here to serve customers with whom we have the strongest strategic fit with respect to what we do. We have the opportunity still within these 13 million-13.5 million FFEs that we're moving every year.
We have the opportunities to make adjustments on who we give our allocations, who we dedicate our allocations to, so that it is the customers that have the strongest fit, the customers where we can add value, and where our offering is really making a difference that actually get that. I do not foresee for the time horizon, the next five years, that we have a limitation here to support our customers. The other aspect with respect to how long can that go on is actually to realize also the fact that we have about 18% market share in Ocean, and about 2.5% share of wallet across our customers, where that 18% is part of the 2.5%.
I think we can go for a long time before we have the type of relationship across the supply chain with all of these customers to the extent that we have it in Ocean. Truly integrated Logistics is a very disruptive way to look at supply chain. It works extremely well for what PUMA wants, but it does require a mindset shift. PUMA had to make a mindset shift over the last three years. It's been a journey for us. It's also been a journey for PUMA. Not all company will make that mindset shift, and some, it's the essence of having a strategy where you differentiate your products is we will hit certain segments and be better able to serve them and focus on them and make a difference with them, and will not necessarily be able to be the best for everybody out there.
I think that's also some of the choices we need to make along the way. How this is exactly going to shape up is something we will have to see. We're confident in our ability to manage the growth and the support that we need to provide for our strategic partners for the coming years within the fleet that we have. We have tremendous opportunities there still. We will continue also to expand the scope of what we have. If one day, we get to a point where integrated Logistics has so much scale that actually the 4.3 million TEUs is a real cap on our growth, and the business is resilient and all of that good stuff, then I'm sure we'll have a Capital Markets Day in between and then we can talk about that.
I think for the time being, with the horizon that we have, we have what we need to be successful in the coming years.
Thank you, Vincent. I can see we are now running a bit over time here, that will be the last question for this session. Remember, there will be a session also at the end where you'll be able to ask questions also back Ocean and Logistics. For now, it's time for a break, and when we are back, we will start out with the update on our Terminal business. See you back.
[Break]
Welcome back from the break. We will now continue our presentation with Terminals. Before I hand over the word to Morten Engelstoft, the CEO for APM Terminals, I would like to introduce Henriette Hallberg Thygesen. Henriette is CEO for our Fleet & Strategic Brands. Henriette will do the presentation on ESG and sustainability that you also heard Søren talk about earlier. We are very ambitious on that target. Before we get to that, I would like to hand over the word to Morten, who will take us into how to become the global best operator in the world. Morten?
Thank you, Stig. All right. Good morning, everyone. Let me start out by saying that we have made very significant progress in APM Terminals over the last four or five years. We used to be behind our competition on returns, and now we have taken a slight lead. The good thing is that we have a much greater potential to continue these improvements and create a lot more value for our customers and for ourselves. What I'll talk about here today is how have we delivered the progress so far, what are we working on to continue these improvements, and how is a 9% ROIC, or above a 9% ROIC, a realistic and good target for our business in the future.
Before I go into all this, let me just share a few more facts about APM Terminals to give you some context to the things that I'm going to talk about. First of all, in APM Terminals, we have 75 terminals in our portfolio. We manage eight of the global hubs for Maersk. In our portfolio, we manage 67 gateway terminals, mainly focused on the local markets. We have real global presence in our business and in many of the high-growth countries of the world. We have the only main terminal serving these markets, and we also manage terminals that are close to the large number of global and largest metropolitan cities in the world. Currently, we are handling 35 million TEUs of the business, an amount of business that we continue to organically grow every year.
We manage 250 vessel calls for our customers every single day, or one every six minutes, 24/7, 365. My point with this information here is, first of all, to say that whether we do a good job or not, it matters a lot to our customers, and also to say that we are well-positioned in the locations in the world where a lot of the future growth will be delivered. We have two major lines of business. Our shipping line business, where we serve all the global and regional shipping lines in the world, and this is most likely the business that most of you will be thinking about for us. We also handle tens of thousands of land-side customers, so local importers, exporters, port authorities, truckers interacting with our business every single day. 75% of our revenue is made up by shipping line customers.
Maersk Ocean is the largest of our customers, making up 36% of our volume. We serve all our customers. The land-side activities are making up 25% of our business today, and this is most likely the segment with the largest organic growth potential, because especially this segment here are demanding a lot further products and solutions, especially technology-based solutions. I'll give some examples of that here later in the presentation in just a moment. That is the very brief background to our business. Let me move into the five key areas that I want to share some information about here today. First of all, I'll give some details about the progress that we have made so far and our potential.
I'll then talk about how well we serve all our customers, I'll talk about the financial and operational synergies that we have, particularly with Maersk Ocean. I'd say that the relations that we have with Maersk Ocean is one of our two unique differentiators in APM Terminals that no one else has. The second unique differentiator is our approach to operational excellence and our work to become the best-in-class terminal operator, and I'll talk about how we are going to deliver on that. I'll then also talk about the relation between continued margin improvements and selective growth, and I'll explain what selective growth means for us. Finally, I'll talk about our ambition to deliver above 9% ROIC in the future and how we are going to deliver that.
Let me first of all talk about our progress made so far and the potential that we further have. As some of you may remember, four, five years, four years to be exact, we launched a new direction for APM Terminals focused on operational excellence, margin improvements, customer service, and putting in place the building blocks that we need to succeed in the future. At that time, we had a gap to our average competition on ROIC of 3.5% percentage points, and that we have now converted into a slight lead by the end of last year. In the first quarter of this year, we have now taken our performance up on a last 12-month average basis to 7.4%, and we are very likely to continue to build well above that during this year, where we have a lot of extraordinary income, especially in North America.
Over the coming years, we'll continue to build on our normalized returns, and we expect to reach our new targets of above 9% ROIC from 2024, 2025 onwards. It is our intention to leverage our two unique differentiators to deliver consistently a better return than the average in the industry, though we also do expect that the return line for the industry overall will bounce back already from this year as there's more growth coming into the market again, and as we, in the coming years, will see less required investments, as an example, for bigger cranes, for bigger vessels, compared to what we have seen in the past. Let me share also then a few more data on our progress to put that up in this way.
To the left, you will see the developments over the last few years in our EBITDA, our EBIT, and our EBITDA margin, which have significantly improved. I should say, for the sake of good order, that the later years have been impacted by the IFRS 16 changes, giving us some headwinds on EBITDA. The majority of the improvements are our own doing. Actually, just to put that in comparison, also the IFRS 16 changes has cost us one percentage point on ROIC, just to put that in perspective. Let me also point to the lower left part of this illustration here, and to the percentage that our top five terminals are making up of our total earnings.
That has improved from 56% in 2017 to 35%, that will continue as we are lifting the performance of the overall portfolio and thereby being less dependent on only a few terminals. To the right, you see how our overall cash flow generation has developed and improved, you can also see that we have been very capital disciplined, CapEx disciplined, in the last few years. I expect the cash flow generation to continue in a very positive way and will certainly continue to be CapEx disciplined, though we also will, amongst others on automation, have some opportunities with very attractive returns, which I'll talk about later in this presentation here as well. Let me then talk about the work that we do for all our customers, and then zoom in specifically on the relations that we have with Maersk Ocean.
We've invested a lot of efforts into customer focus during the last number of years. What all our customers are telling us is that they have noticed the changes and they like it, as you can see in the customer satisfaction development illustrated here on this slide. What does an improved customer satisfaction mean for us? Well, it, amongst others, means that we, over the last three years, have been winning 66 new services and lost 26, so that's a win ratio of 2.5. The way that we've been delivering on the improved customer satisfaction is from going from freestyle to franchise, so to speak, in terms of how we identify and resolve customer pain points, how we solve problems through Kaizens, and how we are rolling out best practices globally, amongst others, to improve issue resolutions.
A lot of work has been ongoing for all our customers, and they like it. What we also have seen is that we can use this base with our customers to create even more value for all our customers, especially new products and solutions for the customers that we're working closely with on these opportunities. Overall, we do see a large opportunity also to digitize our full customer journey. Let me start out with one example. Our advanced trucking appointment system is one of those examples. Every day we have thousands of truckers interacting with all our terminals globally, picking up or delivering containers, and the trucking appointment system allows our customers to book and change or cancel appointments, making their lives a lot easier and certainly making our operational planning much improved as well.
We have, right now, 26 trucking appointment systems rolled out in our portfolio and will continue to build on that. Trucking appointment systems is an extension of our already existing capabilities regarding online self-service for our customers on apmterminals.com. There we are receiving more than 100,000 visits every day, and where our track and trace functionality was used more than 4 million times last year. This is definitely an area that we can continue to build on as well. Finally, on data and services, we are providing our customers with real-time information as a help in connection with supply chain planning. In that connection, we have developed and launched an industry-first API store with information that can be used in this situation here.
An API store is one of our ways of creating more value for our customers and at the same time also creating additional revenue for ourselves from data usage fees. We have right now 15 terminals where the API stores have been rolled out, and that is something that we'll continue to build on as well. A lot of work has been ongoing for all our customers. However, our unique differentiator is our relation with Maersk Ocean, as illustrated in the value creation logic that Søren Skou and Patrick Jany and Vincent Clerc has spoken about already. These synergies are exemplified amongst others, with the volume support from Maersk Ocean to us in APM Terminals, which has amounted to 1.5 million moves per year, including the Maersk BSA partner volumes.
It's also exemplified by the close collaboration between Ocean and Terminals to improve the productivity in our hub terminals further. The synergies add up now to several hundred millions of dollars in total between Ocean and APM Terminals, and it also is helping us in the gateway terminals to improve our utilization well above the average in the industry. The teams in Ocean and in APM Terminals are continuing to work closely together to identify further opportunities as we move forward. How are these synergies actually created and what do they look like? I brought an example here to illustrate how it looked in our container terminal in Itajaí in Brazil, where the Ocean and Terminal teams work closely together to reconfigure the Asia-South America service back in 2019.
The objective at the time was to improve the overall value proposition for the Ocean customers and at the same time maximize the support to our terminal in Itajaí. The steps that were taken included a rationalization of the port calls on the whole service, especially in the southern part of Brazil, where our terminal has the hinterland and on-dock capabilities and infrastructure to provide very competitive services to especially the whole reefer market there. That is one example of how synergies are created. Similarly, we have continued to build on close collaboration on productivity in the hub terminals, which is now up by more than 40% compared to a few years ago. That means that the hub terminals are now contributing to an efficient vessel network rather than being a part of the problem.
It also means that during a time like this, with a lot of bottlenecks and a lot of disruptions, the hubs, at least to a certain extent, can help absorb some of the shocks to the overall vessel network. This is much more than two teams working closely together. There's an intense and continuous focus on every single part of a port stay and all the waste pockets that can be addressed. The experiences and the learnings that we are having out from this collaboration can also be replicated for us in APM Terminals, in our gateway terminals, benefiting all our customers as well. The first unique differentiator that I just mentioned is the close relations that we have with Maersk Ocean, and the second unique differentiator is our work to become the best-in-class terminal operator.
It will actually take a lot to make it a real differentiator rather than just something that is a good idea to do. This is a multi-year, company-wide transformation program where we now have three years under our belt so far. Let me give a little bit more color on what we have done so far and what is in the scope. The APM Terminals Way of Working, as we call the initiative, is a company-wide, multi-year improvement and transformation program. It is inspired by some of the most successful companies globally, and it impacts all performing parts of the company. It is, let me emphasize that, an absolute cornerstone of our future success and our future culture. Way of Working is our never-ending engine of continuous improvements, and we intend to disrupt the model in the industry by bringing every brain into the game.
All our colleagues are coming to work to help us improve and optimize our business, and we're investing a lot in development and engagement for our colleagues, and we can see how it takes our performance to a different level. Way of Working describes how we'll win with our customers. It describes how we can succeed with every part of the way that we are operating, and it contributes to how we deliver on our key objectives in the company. We kicked APM Terminals Way of Working off three years ago, first in the hub terminals and now as a company-wide initiative. Across all parts of the company, all functions, all geographies, all terminals, and it is impacting our performance in a very positive way. Let me give you three selected examples.
As mentioned already, our customer satisfaction is up significantly over the last few years, amongst others, after us taking a more systemized approach to our engagement with our customers and to the way that we deliver towards the agreements and the commitments that we have with our customers. Another example is our SG&A costs in relation to our revenue. Back in 2017, SG&A costs made up 18.6% of our revenue, whilst best in class is at the 12.5 percentage point. By early this year, we have taken ourselves to the 12.8% level, and within the next year or two, we have taken our SG&A costs in relation to revenue to the best-in-class level of 12.5%. Also, let me share one last example, which is from the market last year, which obviously was severely hit by the pandemic.
There, we managed to increase our overall EBIT by 10%, despite taking a 3.6% volume decrease. This was through sharper execution and planning overall. Way of Working is not something that you just do in one year or something that you could just easily copy. This requires total commitment from all parts of the organization, and it links our overall strategy with a daily execution taking place in every single terminal across our portfolio. In our own operation center and commercial college, we have trained now more than 10,000 of our colleagues who are now going to work solving problems, executing in a different way compared to what we used to do, amongst others, through thousands of Kaizens throughout all parts of the company.
These are efforts that we'll continue to build on, and our Way of Working, as I said, will be a key cornerstone of our future success and continued margin improvement. Another very important part of becoming a best-in-class terminal operator is automation. Automation is critical for us because it helps improve safety. It allows us to deliver better services to our customers. It enables us to make our operations greener. It improves our margins. We have quite a lot of experience in APM Terminals with automation, both a good experience, and frankly, also a not-so-good experience. We're taking all these learnings into the way that we work with automation and into the approach that we are taking. One of the approaches that we have adopted on automation is what we call modular automation.
What that means is that we do not necessarily take a terminal-wide approach to automation, but rather selected parts of our operations. That has the benefits that it reduces risks, it gives faster impact and return, and it allows us to pick out the parts of our operations where the best impact and opportunity is. The way that we are working on automation is the following. As mentioned, we have quite a lot of experience with automation from the last number of years, and we are using this experience to reduce the go live time of the automation projects that we launch and to accelerate the productivity ramp-up as some examples. You can see illustrated here the last three large automation initiatives that we have launched.
If you look at the Tangier Med II terminal, this is the continent's first terminal in Africa, and it was actually put in operations faster and safer than any other automation project anywhere else in the industry so far. We have many other examples of automation across our portfolio. Gate automation is one other example. In one terminal in the U.S.A., we, amongst others, increased truck turnaround time by 25%, which has allowed us to handle more business and also has increased customer satisfaction at the location from -64 in 2019 to +5 here in the early part of this year after the go live of gate automation last year at the terminal. In another terminal in Europe, our customers have been able to bring 21% more moves through our automated gates.
In the third terminal, also in Europe, we've been able to reduce carbon emissions from idle trucks waiting in line, now a shorter line after the gate automation, and we have reduced carbon emissions by 688 tons here in 2020. Over the next five years, we plan to invest in total over the five years, $600 million in new automation initiatives across a number of terminals, and we do expect a very good return on these investments, both in terms of financial and customer returns. Share also one more example where a number of these initiatives that I've spoken about in terms of Way of Working, in terms of automation, is coming together in Port Elizabeth in the U.S.A.
If I start with rail services, then nowadays in Port Elizabeth, cargo destined for the hinterland is now on the trains 24 hours after vessel discharge. That compares with 2-3 days in most other facilities in the port. Customer satisfaction has improved. The terminal has also, this winter, been able to handle three major storms without much disruption, being the first one to open up for normal operations afterwards, amongst others, through sharper execution and planning. Safety has improved. The terminal is now able to handle 20% more volume compared to what we were able to just two years ago. In the end results in Port Elizabeth, our initiatives there have increased capacity and volumes, satisfying customers, controlled costs, improved safety, and has improved returns significantly as well.
Over the last four years, our main focus has been on operational excellence and margin improvement. That will continue. As we go forward, we will also be dosing in growth on a selected basis in APM Terminals. Not growth for the sake of growth, attractive opportunities where we can add special value. Selective means that we'll be carefully picking out opportunities that will be contributing to our continued margin improvement and our above 9% returns for the future. Selectively also means that we will not be repeating the situation that we had five, six years ago, where we had a lot of greenfield projects ongoing at the same time, giving very high costs and limited income for a long period of time. The way that we will be looking at growth opportunities in APM Terminals is the following.
Overall, there are five main categories of growth that we can tap into for organic and inorganic growth. Three of them is where our main focus will be. First of all, we will be looking to tap into organic growth to the maximum extent possible. As an example, selling more products and solutions to our customers. That could be some of the technology-based ones that I gave examples of earlier. Another way of improving organic growth is to improve the capacity of our terminals by improving the productivity and thereby being able to take more business through our facilities. The second category is what we call investments into existing terminals. This is what we, as an example, have been doing in Port Said, in Yokohama, in Aarhus, and what we're doing right now in our terminal in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast.
The benefits with this type of investment is that we have already markets that we have a lot of knowledge about, and we have an existing customer base, and thereby we'll continuously look for good opportunities for us within this category. The last of our focus areas is what then can be called M&A of existing operating terminals already generating income. Here our interest really will be opportunities where we can leverage our two unique differentiators, so either volume from Maersk Ocean or us being a better operator, and thereby being a better owner of the facility. The last category is not really where our focus will be. It includes greenfields.
We may well have very few, so one or two greenfield projects ongoing at the same time, if it creates a lot of value for us, and only with long-term fixed contracts with either Maersk Ocean or another of our large customers. Let me then end by emphasizing our commitment to continued economic profits that I've mentioned earlier. We have three overall goals for us. We'll continue our never-ending delivery of improvements and increased margins through Way of Working, automation, ocean synergies, and delivery towards all our customers. We will selectively identify attractive opportunities for growth, organically and inorganically, and we commit to deliver good returns. We have now improved a lot in recent years, and we'll work towards our new target of above 9% ROIC within the coming years. We expect that we'll be able to make them sustainable from 2024, 2025 onwards.
Overall, we'll continue overall improvements as we go ahead. Thank you for your attention, and I'll be pleased to take questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Morten, for the presentation, and we'll now take the next live Q&A session. Remember, again, dial in. I can see a lot of people already dialed in, but also remember, you can still send questions to us using the text box underneath the screen. Again, Morten, I'll start out with the first one. How do you see the outlook for the industry, the terminal industry as a whole? It has been an industry with decreasing margins as you've shown on the screen. How do you see it for the next five years?
I actually think that the outlook is very good for the industry, and actually better than the last five years, and there's a few reasons for that. First of all, we see growth coming back now in the terminals. Terminal industry is certainly starting from this year after the hit last year. That is increasing utilization and thereby also returns. I think also importantly, as we go forward, I expect less required investments for bigger cranes serving ever bigger vessels, as we look forward for the next five years. Also, I think the industry will be looking at automation as I just talked about, as a way of boosting returns as well. Overall, I think, a good outlook for the industry.
A good starting point for the 9% above. Yeah.
Absolutely.
We'll take the first question, and that's Rob Joynson from Exane BNP Paribas . Rob, you're on.
Good morning, all. Two questions from me, please. First of all, on the portfolio. With respect to the 67 non-hub terminals, in previous years, there was some discussion about potentially doing something creative with those assets from an ownership perspective. Could you just explain what the current thinking is in that respect? Is it simply that the current portfolio and ownership structure is now reasonably optimal, or alternatively, are other options still being considered? The second question on disruption. There's been obviously a huge amount of disruption on the land side in recent months, partly due to COVID restrictions and socially distanced working practices and so on. With the vaccine rollout now progressing quite well, how do you see land side disruptions evolving as 2021 progresses? Do you think that we're past the worst now, or is that not the case? Thank you.
Thank you very much for these good questions. First of all, on our portfolio. The way we look at our portfolio is that we are open both for additions to the portfolio, but also to divestments. Actually, over the years, we have done both. We are not looking to shrink our business. Actually, we do want to grow the business. If we do see opportunities to divest terminals, we certainly are open to do that as we have done in some locations. The way that we are looking at our gateway terminal portfolio really is to add value. It is a business that we would like to grow. Right now, we are looking a lot at generating more value out of those terminals.
That means that whenever we have been receiving good offers to monetize part of our portfolio, we have so far opted to say that we believe that we can create a lot more value in the way that we are running the terminals. Overall, the business will be looked at from a value creation point of view overall, and it's a business that we want to grow, not shrink. In terms of supply chain disruptions, and you're perfectly right, that we've seen in a number of locations, a lot of bottlenecks, a lot of disruption. I think we actually may be a little bit strange right now are seeing developments that are very different dependent on where in the world that you are. You do see some locations where actually, the more efficient handling is more or less up and running right now already.
You definitely see other areas of the world that are worsening at the same time. You can just look at the situation in India that we have right now, where we have two terminals, and clearly, the people and the society there is under a lot of pressure. That, of course, also has an impact on the bottlenecks. Overall, I do expect that the bottlenecks and the disruption will ease, but it'll be at different speed depending on where in the world that we are.
I have a question here received from Parash from HSBC. That's for Morten. Can you share your thoughts around utilization levels across your terminals portfolio, and how much can it go up before you impact on extra CapEx?
First of all, if we go back a few years, our average utilization was to the tune of 60%. By the end of 2019, we had taken that above 80% actually. Due to the pandemic last year, we bounced down just above 70%. Right now, as we speak, our average utilization is around 73%. I expect that to continue to increase towards the high 70% by the end of this year. That's as an outcome of continued, you could say, volume increases. I think ultimately what is the most important is to look at the terminals individually rather than the average utilization levels. Right now I'd say we probably have 10 of our gateway terminals close to full utilization. There, if business, you could say, drives it, we first will look at how can we ease up some of these bottlenecks.
How can we improve the productivity on the quay sides? How can we make the gates faster? Because capacity restraints have many different phases. Long story short, first priority is to attack some of these bottlenecks and barriers through improvements in the way that we operate. Then in some locations, as mentioned, we're investing into existing facilities if there's business enough for it.
Now I have Henriette here, who is in charge of our fleet, and you're also hopefully visiting the hubs and the productivity. How do you see the improvements you've seen and the synergies from having a positive impact on our fleet?
I think there's a very good and constructive dialogue, as Morten also mentioned in his part, there's work across the full chain and looking at where is there waste and how can we optimize it, whether that is in the terminal or in the entrance, or how we are using our towage. Good collaboration and definitely improvement and also best practice sharing across the different hubs.
Thank you. Yeah, we come to an end now with this session. Thank you, Morten. That brings me, of course, to the next one, which will be Henriette. Henriette that will take us through our very ambitious sustainability ESG agenda. Henriette, floor is yours.
Thank you. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to give insights to our ESG and notably our decarbonization efforts. This is the first time we have ESG on Capital Markets Day. Today will only serve as an introduction as we have, as Søren also mentioned earlier, planned for a full day in November, where we will share detailed insights. Being a good corporate citizen has been an ingrained part of the Maersk history, embedded in our values. We will continue to protect and honor this heritage as we are progressing on the ESG agenda. We find that we have a holistic and an ambitious ESG strategy covering all categories.
However, we're also very much aware that this is an area that is developing quickly, also with our key customers, with investors, and the communities we serve, and we need to continue our commitment to responsible business practices now and in the future. Each ESG area is anchored with a member of the executive team, and we are progressing on establishing ambitions and detailed targets for each area. The focus of today will be on climate change and more specifically on decarbonization. This is a topic that's hotly debated these days, and we want to share our position on same. Decarbonization will be a key strategic priority going forward, as this is an area where we can and must move the needle. Let's now take a deeper dive into this topic.
There's currently a step change in the commitment to climate action, as climate change has become a pressing problem for countries, companies, and individuals, a problem that increasingly requires an emergency response. Global transportation is responsible for more than 8 gigatons of carbon emissions per year, equivalent to around 16% of the total emissions. Freight transportation and logistics accounts for around 4 gigatons, primarily driven by road freight of 2.4 gigatons, followed by shipping of 0.8 gigatons. Maersk Scope 1 emissions accumulate to around 34 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year, which is around 1% of the total freight transport emissions. That being said, global supply chains are the backbone of the world economy. They enable business to source, produce, and sell in an effective manner, and they enable people to achieve higher living standards.
Shipping is an effective way of transporting large quantities, and we, as Maersk, have a unique opportunity to create fast and tangible impact to society in the area of decarbonization. Our position is that the time to act and to accelerate our targets is now. Maersk is committed to lead the way on climate change. Fortunately, we are not on this journey alone. We believe that consumers are increasingly unwilling to accept the emissions from the global supply chains. We are engaging with a lot of leading companies within this field, and we are seeing a strong commitment from our customers. Around half of our 200 key customers have already set zero carbon targets, and the number is rapidly increasing. As you can see, acknowledged global companies and customers of Maersk are setting hard targets for the future.
As many of our customers have the majority of their emissions in Scope 3, meaning the part of their value chain driven by their suppliers and partners, we as Maersk have a responsibility and an opportunity to support them in delivering on this position. Our customers and the broader society need us to support them in reducing their supply chain emissions. Let's take a closer look at Maersk emissions. In contrast to many of our customers, we have most of our emissions in Scope 1, our own operations. With around 64% of our total emission, primarily driven by our fleet of around 700 container vessels. Søren mentioned that Maersk announced its first climate targets already back in 2009. We have since then continuously worked and progressed on our targets and ambitions. Each target set at the time has been ambitious and marked our commitment to lead the industry.
The original 2009 ambition has, through significant effort, led to a reduction in our Scope 1 emissions of 46% since 2008. Reducing Scope 1 further will be the immediate priority of the decarbonization agenda, as this is how we can create the fastest and most tangible impact. Addressing Scope 1 alone is, however, not enough. As customers are increasingly relying on us to reduce emissions across their full supply chain, we have expanded our focus and work with suppliers and partners on the full end-to-end scope. Whereas we are already working on this at different levels, as seen, for example, with the recently announced investment in Einride, we will provide specific plans for the full scope of our emissions at the planned ESG Day in the fall. We believe in and we will have science-based targets.
To confirm our commitment, we have signed the UN Global Compact Commitment Letter to a business ambition of 1.5 degrees. The Science Based Targets initiative provides companies with a path to reduce emissions, taking complexities of hard-to-abate sectors into account. The Science Based Targets initiative is still finalizing their approach to shipping overall, and we are in dialogue to as fast as possible set specific science-based targets. Where are we now? In 2018, we set what was a pioneering target back then, an ambition of having net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 and have the first carbon neutral vessel on the water by 2030. Based on the work and insights over the past years, we announced in March an acceleration of these ambitions by announcing our commitment to have the first carbon neutral container vessel already by 2023, seven years earlier than originally anticipated.
In addition, we are also already today providing some products to help our customers in both reducing and measuring emissions. Current interest and traction on these products suggest a clear interest and commitment from our customers to engage further in this space. For our ECO Delivery product, we have tripled the number of customers from 2019- 2020, and we have already contracted the same number of customers in 2021 as in 2020. Contracted customers are typically large multinational key clients, the same clients that are committing to our integrator ambition. We furthermore provide customers with an opportunity to consolidate their emissions data across all transport modes with an industry-leading dashboard, an enabler for our customers to ensure full visibility of their emissions from the transport and logistics.
Going forward, we see a need, and again, an opportunity to develop more products across all modes of transportation to reduce emissions from the full supply chain. It must be end-to-end, aligned with our integrator strategy. Specifically for our fleet, we will use three levers to scale and accelerate our decarbonization commitment. We have initiated our Green Fleet Renewal program with our announcement that all future-owned new builds will be net zero enabled and dual fuel capable. The renewal plan will follow the normal replacement cadence of the existing fleet as per our normal renewal plans, meaning that we will not increase our capacity guidance based on this. It will remain around 4 million-4.3 million TEUs. We have, as earlier mentioned, already obtained significant energy efficiency optimizations over the past decade, and we will continue these efforts.
This is to ensure that all vessels running on fossil fuels are optimized to the furthest extent to both save emissions and costs. The optimization will be done through digital and marine technology. In addition, we will continue optimizing our time charter positions to ensure the most energy efficient vessel portfolio. While this will not get us to zero, it will provide significant impact, and we believe that our charter partners will join us on this transition journey. Finally, fleet retrofitting. We will look for opportunities to retrofit selected vessels and as it makes sense from a financial, practical, and customer perspective. Retrofit is seen as a significant opportunity for Maersk as we see CapEx efficient retrofit, notably for methanol. Our strategy will not impact our capacity targets as we renew and potentially retrofit.
We expect the same ratio between owned and chartered vessels, and we will work with our chartering partners to explore paths ahead. We believe that we have a cost-efficient fleet renewal and retrofit plan. Our current assessment is that it will be possible over time to secure green new building at a premium of around 10%. We see growing and strong commitment from our customers to support us in delivering on our decarbonization ambition, and this provides an opportunity to de-risk from a financial perspective. There has recently been a lot of talk around fuel options, and let me end up with providing some insights into our current thinking around possible future fuels and the related OpEx.
As a starting point, our core thinking is that in order to address climate change effectively, then we need to consider all greenhouse gas emissions, and we need to consider them on a well-to-wheel basis, such that we include the full scope of emissions and slippage during production, transportation, and combustion. Based on the same, we are currently primarily focusing on two carbon-neutral fuel opportunities, green ammonia and green methanol. There are still outstanding questions around both fuels, high level then we currently, from an operational and safety perspective, find methanol to be the best short to medium term solution with proven engine technology already available. For green ammonia, there's still a number of challenging specific safety issues, the engine technology is not yet ready. Based on the same, we have decided to initially pursue methanol for our 2023 feeder.
Our current position on LNG is that an LNG path can have adverse effects on the climate when considering well- to- wake and the methane slippage, both upstream and during combustion in the engine, notably, on a low-pressure engine. Our focus is on future fuels with a potential to be net zero. We do not believe that there is time for transition fuels in our ambition to create meaningful impact for our customers and for society. We will naturally keep monitoring the options as the fuel landscape and the technology evolves. Our current hypothesis is that the green fuel availability will be our key constraint. The technology is there, but scaling volumes to the full Maersk fleet over time requires significant volumes. When an uncertainty like this exists, uncertainty to the exact cost impact also exists.
Short term, the OpEx for green fuels will be higher, but the cost is expected to be reduced significantly as technology matures and as more firm offtake agreements will be established. Furthermore, we believe we need to look at this relatively. We see the price premium as being reasonable for our customers and for end consumers. A hypothesis that is being confirmed from the current interest in our ECO Delivery product, as well as through dialogue with leading customers. We focus on future fuels with a potential to be truly carbon zero, and we find we do not have time for transition fuels. OpEx is expected to be higher but will go down significantly as technology evolves. Our customers are committing, and we see real interest for collaboration to decarbonize transport and logistics.
With that, I will conclude this introduction to our ESG thinking. In summary, we have an ambitious and holistic ESG strategy covering the full scope, and we will share more insights across all categories in our ESG Day in the fall. We have prioritized focus areas where Maersk can truly make a difference, either for ourselves or for our customers. Notably, decarbonization is the area where we have the ambition to lead the way with a cost-efficient green fleet transition strategy based on strong indication of customer commitment. We are committing to Science Based Targets, and we have signed a UN Global Compact commitment letter to a business ambition of 1.5-degree, meaning we will have Science Based Targets and a defined plan for our full Scope of emissions. Finally, we believe cost and CapEx will be manageable as we transition.
I hope this has served as introduction for our thinking around ESG and notably decarbonization, and we look very much forward to unfolding it further in more detail later in the year. Thank you.
Thank you, Henriette, for the presentation. Now we'll have the next Q&A session again with live and with written questions to us. I'll start again over, Henriette, by a question, how do we ensure that all the good things we do also become an integrated part of how we live in Maersk every day?
Good question, Stig, but I think it already is, and I think it is indeed, as I also mentioned, very much ingrained in our values. How we have anchored this today is that every area within ESG is anchored with a member of the executive leadership team, but it is ingrained in our business decisions. What I think is different is that clearly there's much more interest in this also from investors and others. What we need to figure out is how we can increasingly give even more transparency on this area and how we can structure it so we are giving disclosure in the right format.
Exactly. Good point. We'll take the first question from the live. I can see Carolina Dores have the first question. Doesn't seem to be online. I'll take one from the written ones here. I've got one question here from Michael Vitfell-Rasmussen from Danske Bank. Are your customers willing to pay a higher premium for CO2 neutral transport? Going forward, do you think this premium will be large enough to neutralize the higher CapEx for ammonia and methanol vessels?
We do think not all customers, but we do think that there are customers that are willing to pay a premium. We also think that over time, we can make that premium required quite reasonable compared to what it will be for a decarbonized product. Yes, that is our view based on the engagement we have with customers, both how we see the interest and the pickup and the ECO Delivery, but also the interest we have seen from a number of customers since we announced our feeder vessel. We are positive that is both possible and workable going forward.
Yes. Another question I received was, first of all, it says, "Impressive ambitions." Good to hear. Do you expect this to be a competitive advantage towards customers for Maersk, what we do now on our ESG ambitions and decarbonization?
Clearly, we want to do this for several reasons. We want to do it because we think that is what is right for us as a company and the role we want to play in society. We also believe that it is good for a number of our customers, and therefore they will join us on this journey. Hopefully it will indeed be a competitive differentiator in the sense that we can offer products that are attractive also from a decarbonization angle. We are working very closely, in the sense that we are not talking ESG on one side of decarbonization, but it is indeed a very close dialogue with Vincent and both the Ocean and the Logistics & Services team on how we make it fully integrated in our offering. Morten also mentioned how some of the initiatives already taking place in terminals around this.
It is truly ingrained on how we want to do it, and we want to do it end-to-end, so to say.
Maybe Morten, that brings me to you. Maybe you could elaborate a bit on what do you do in terminals to support this strategy and our agenda?
Certainly, definitely we are completely part of these ambitions here. Of course, our emissions as such in the Terminals business is at a completely different level compared to on our vessels. We actually consume a lot of energy in APM Terminals. We have a long range of initiatives to address that challenge. We partner with some of the best companies outside the industry in terms of working on alternative energy forms, using solar, using winds for our terminals, working also on alternative ways of sourcing electricity and energy. We are very much part of this overall initiative, and it will help us consume a lot less energy compared to what we do today, and what we do consume definitely will be a lot more sustainable.
I have another question here from Parash Jain, from HSBC. What are your thoughts on carbon credits offset for the shipping industry?
Our thinking is that we also need to look into different options for credits, but we don't think it's an area where we really need to be careful. Our focus is particularly on our Scope 1 emission is to be truly carbon zero and go that path with our own vessels, with the technology, with the fuels we are using. Whether there is then a path for looking for certain carbon offsetting when you're looking at the interim supply chain, that is something we are looking into. I will say there, we are aware that it is an area where you really need to make sure you're having the right quality of the products or the projects you are engaging in.
I see a question again on LNG, and I also saw there were articles this morning from one of the big customers saying they don't believe in LNG. We have another question on LNG, looking at the conversion, why don't we really think that's not the best strategy when we see some of our peers investing a lot in LNG?
We try to concentrate on what we want to do, but the reason why we do not see LNG being an option is, as I said also before, we look at it from well- to- wake, and we look at it for all greenhouse gas emissions. There, how the LNG technology is right now is that there's just a lot of methane slippage. There's both that when you are having in the upstream, but also you can say when you are doing combustion in the engine, and that's why we do not think that is a good path. We see it as a transition and we would much rather go to the-
Yes.
-if I can say so, green fuel.
One of the questions we also have, I can see is, of course, around a lot of our ships are chartered today.
Oh.
Henriette, you mentioned also the charter owners.
Yes.
How are we going to incentivize these people also? We did it with the IMO-
Yeah.
-in a good way, and we managed to convert our charter fleet also there into IMO friendly.
Yeah.
Do we have some thoughts around that?
We have some emerging thoughts and some emerging dialogues around that, but we do expect that a large part of our chartering partners here are willing to go with us on this journey.
The last one I have here is from Bank of America. How do you see the regulatory landscape in terms of decarbonization globally? Will it vary by region?
Hopefully not in the longer term. Shipping is inherently global in nature, so we very much hope that IMO will succeed in setting global standards also for this area in a way that is benefiting first movers, but also is creating an equal playing field. To get there is a path where certain regions do something first, we will need to look and follow, and be part of that. We definitely hope that IMO, over time, will set global standards.
Thank you, Henriette. Good to hear. We have now come to an end on this presentation. Again, in autumn, there will be much more ESG on the agenda. Now it's time for a coffee break again, and we'll be back with the finance update afterwards.
[Break]
Welcome back from the break. We will start our last session for today. You've seen, you've heard a lot. You've seen our value creation model. You heard a lot about synergies. You heard about how we want to create a different Ocean business model, growing our Logistics business, Terminals become a superior returning business. Putting all that in context, putting all that together now, we have Patrick Jany here. Patrick, now it's up to you to try to explain everything and make it very clear to people how all that's going to fit into the financial models. Patrick.
Welcome back. I hope in the last few hours you have gained deep insights on the way we operate, and you have seen the progress that we have made as well. You can appreciate the level of change which is running through the organization. As Stig was saying, if we put now all the pieces together, we really start to see the value creation model putting together and working together to create additional value. If we now look a little bit at our value proposition for the next few years, it is all about really aiming to have higher and more stable returns as we combine a more profitable Ocean being more resilient and more differentiated with an asset-light growth strategy in Logistics & Services, which we complement on the one end through organic growth, as we have done in the past, but also through acquisitions.
Rounding up with a best-in-class Terminals business with operating at higher returns. The underlying stability here is the capital discipline that we have had in the last few years, which we'll continue to maintain. Those elements put together are really today already creating additional value. You can see the progress in the last two years, which has been made, for instance, by differentiating Ocean or the growth momentum that we have developed in Logistics as well. The one new element as well, which has significantly improved in the last two years, is the strength of our balance sheet. The increased level of earnings and the extraordinary earnings we have allowed us to accelerate the transformation.
Today, we are in a position where we have not only a better operating business, but we also have a strong balance sheet, which allows us to, when we look forward, continue to invest in growth, but also have very solid shareholder returns. Let me go through those elements of our value creation one by one. If we start with Ocean, which is the fundament, really, of our stability looking forward, the improved performance of Ocean has a couple of drivers. One is certainly the industry, where we see evidence that the industry has improved its agility to match supply to demand, particularly in the last two, three years. That is very encouraging. Now, the more important part is what we are doing. We have been investing not in vessels, but in customer value proposition.
We have been investing in differentiated offerings, which we are linking together in the supply chain of our customers. That is, for instance, as Johan was saying earlier, and Vincent, that we have new contracts, we have longer term contracts, we have dual commitment contracts, which reinforce the fact that both parties rely on each other to actually get the job done. Therefore, reliability is extremely important for our customers today in this very dramatic environment that we have. Building on new contracts, reliability, and ultimately as well, as you have heard, solving an issue for our customers, solving their sustainability topic by allowing to decarbonize the supply chain are value elements where we see tremendous growth potential looking forward. Another differentiator is the digital visibility that we create.
Through our technology platforms, we are able to offer an easier way to do business for our customers and for us. It is easier for the customer to place his orders, to follow his orders, and to plan his own supply chain with us. For us, it gives visibility. It gives visibility which allows us to plan our network in a better way. Therefore, it is also about reliability for the customer, but about cost efficiency for us as well. If you consider those elements together, it is quite a tremendous difference on how to run an Ocean business. Therefore, we are confident as well when we look forward that we can also change the level of performance of that business. Which is why we see looking forward that Ocean in a normalized environment can actually generate an EBIT of above 6% every year.
Of course, it is a normalized projection, which means that the current environment we are in is obviously a bit boosting the performance right now. There might be a year in the future where you have a negative effect, which also impedes the level of performance. When you look at it on a multi-year normalized view, you actually do have a very significant different performance. If we look at the past five years, we had profitability of around 3% between 2016 and 2020. If we look forward to the future, we expect those 6% on a yearly basis. A tremendous difference here, which opens the door for tremendous value generation as well. On that base, we want to improve and continue to grow with our Logistics & Services business, which is really the growth engine of the group, both in terms of revenue and in terms of earnings.
Our differentiator here is really the unique value proposition that we have by combining Logistics and Ocean. I think you have seen through the presentation early on how impactful it is for our customers when we can actually combine our Ocean strength with the possibilities that we offer in Logistics. There are two elements here. One is to leverage the customer intimacy that we have on our top customers, and therefore it is a cross-selling between the different parts of Logistics and Ocean we do with them. The other part is actually to go further with them, to go end-to-end in their supply chain, which is really extending the reach of our logistical product. Those two elements together make us very confident that we can, in the future, maintain a growth pace of 10% a year, based on a significant portion, 50%, with our top customers.
A tremendous focus in the organization is dedicated to make that growth happen. This growth will not impede profitability. We actually commit to have a profitability of a minimum of 6% EBIT going forward. We're not compromising between growth and profitability. It actually comes together. We have reached this level of profitability in the Q1 2021, we just announced a week ago, because we already had a 6.8% EBIT margins, which is very different from the past. If you look at the last five years, we also had a margin which was very low, which was around 2.4% in terms of EBIT, and we now expect those 6%. You see again, a tremendous difference here in terms of value creation, profitability, and performance level of the business.
This is on an organic basis. We expect, over the years, to continue to gain capabilities by acquiring some businesses and progressively as well increase scale. To round up our value proposition, it is also all about terminals, where we expect to further improve the returns of terminals. They have progressed a lot in the past. This infrastructure business is now aiming for best-in-class returns. Actually, if you look at the performance in Q1 2021, we have actually closed the gap to our peers in terms of profitability with an EBITA of 35%. Going forward, we will continue this progress through automation on the one hand, which is excessively important when we look at the ongoing improvement of the performance, but also through the operational excellence Morten was referring to early on.
When we combine an improved profitability with a sustained capital discipline, because we will invest in growth, but always when it's de-risk and when we can make our Ocean advantage as well a factor to ensure a good return, we actually get to a very attractive return of above 9% during the period. That, again, a bit like the other segments, is a stark contrast to the performance of the past. If we look at the last five years, we had between 2016 and 2020, ROIC of 3.9%, close to 4%. Now we already had 7.4% in the Q1 2020, and we aim to reach the 9%. Overall here as well, a significant improvement in the value generation. When we put those things together, we do see a step change in the performance and the return for the whole group.
By putting a more solid Ocean and asset light growth in Logistics together with the best-in-class return in Terminals, w e actually are very confident that we can generate value every single year looking forward. Of course, the current environment is exceptional. We expect the current circumstances to abate in the second half of 2021 and progressively tail off in 2022. If we put those conditions aside, we are very confident that we can, on a normalized basis, generate a return of 7.5% every year. The 7.5% was actually the target we put out there back in 2016. It was really an aspirational target, which we actually have achieved. We have delivered. Now it's about delivering it every single year looking forward in normalized conditions.
If we look at the exceptional performance that we have this year and build it into the average, we actually will have, and we look forward to having an average in the 2021-2025 period, above 12%. A stark contrast to the average of the last five years, which was 2.3%. You can measure here the difference in value generation that we expect the company to bring in the next few years. If we combine those elements on the return side, it is very important to keep disciplined. We have added here a view on our capital allocation, which is an important subject, you know we have raised our CapEx guidance to $7 billion for 2021 and 2022. We want to give you here the insight on how this money is spent and where the CapEx goes.
It's all about ultimately replacing our assets, whether it is vessels, whether it is terminals, operations. It is about improving efficiency, and it's also about growth, particularly in Logistics, where we expect to invest 15% of our CapEx in the next two years to develop new warehouses and new facilities there. Also it's about sustainability, which is a main part of the vessel investment as well as we go on with a normal recurring replacement of our vessels. The capital discipline combined with our sustainable growth environment will allow us to be stable in invested capital. The aim is here that the CapEx and the leases together will match the depreciation over the period, which means that from a restrictive environment for the last two years, where we have been thoroughly reducing CapEx and reducing our invested capital from $43 billion- $40 billion.
Now that we switch to profitable growth, we will maintain this invested capital at $40 billion and ensure that over the period, the CapEx and leases are offset by the depreciations. There again, a disciplined message looking at the years ahead. If you look at our financial strength, I think it's important to place it into context that in the last years we have significantly deleveraged our balance sheet through first disposals and then allocating the extra earnings that we have had in the last 12 months or through the extraordinary conditions that we are living in today. We have been able to reduce our debt significantly from $21 billion- $14 billion gross debt currently.
Actually, if you look at the last two years, 2020 and 2021, we have evenly split, more or less, the repayments between repaying debt for $3.5 billion in the last two years and returning cash to shareholders for $3.6 billion in the same period. We are progressing on both elements here to really, on the one hand, build a solid balance sheet, but also return cash to shareholders. If you combine the perspectives that we have shared with you today of having a stable free cash flow generation as the earnings quality has significantly improved with a sustained discipline in terms of capital allocation, you actually have a very strong position because as we said before, we have the extraordinary situation that our balance sheet now has progressed tremendously. We are years ahead in where we want it to be.
We are now in a situation to be able to, on the one hand, continue to invest in growth, but also to return cash to shareholders while maintaining a very solid BBB rating. It is an ideal position to really accelerate and continue to transform the company. When we look at the priorities for the cash allocation, it is very clear that we have a good priority here in allocation of cash. We will use the cash to, on the one hand, invest organically, particularly in Logistics, to repay debt when it is necessary, but also it allows us to grow externally. We'll be pursuing selective acquisitions, as we have mentioned earlier on today. Then we will obviously pay out the recurring dividend. I'd like to mention that the ordinary dividend is actually quite important when you look at the value creation looking forward.
As earnings quality is higher and stability of earnings is also better than in the past, the portion of value creation through the ordinary dividend is actually increasing quite significantly. We can absolutely confirm our dividend policy of 30%-50% of the net profit. Whereby I'd like to mention as well that we, as we have progressed significantly, also can fully target the range of 30%-50%. You might remember that we said in the first period where we are growing logistics, we would limit our dividend to the lower half of the range, so 30%-40%. Given the financial strengths we have, we can now just plainly say that we adhere to the dividend policy of 30%-50% of underlying profit.
The last element is clearly when we have excess cash, which is a situation where we have been, thankfully, in the last few quarters. That is clear that we will return excess cash through extraordinary dividend on the one hand, but also share buybacks. As you know, we have accelerated the share buyback, which is already ongoing in 2021. We will finish it by the third quarter of this year. After completion, we have announced the initiation of a second share buyback of $5 billion over the next two years. If you compare it with the past, we actually had building up a track record of returning significant amounts to our shareholders. Compared to our market cap, it is actually quite a significant amount here of value creation that we have committed to for the next few years.
We believe it is a very interesting value proposition that we are offering here today. Actually, it is quite a unique value proposition because we believe that we are in a unique position to grow our Logistics business based on a strong Ocean, and that the returns are increasing for the whole group combined with a strong balance sheet. We actually can generate returns to the shareholder while growing the business in the years ahead. We believe we have the right setup, we believe that we have the right strategy, and we believe we have the right balance sheet to take the company to the next steps. Before we start with the question and answers, let me summarize really our roadmap in numbers for 2025.
What you have seen today in detail is how we build a more profitable and a more resilient Ocean business with a margin of 6% on a normalized basis going forward, which is enabling the growth in Logistics & Services where we aim for 10% growth and a 6% EBIT margin. While on the same hand, using the synergies between Ocean and Terminals to grow the returns to best-in-class levels, in Terminals to 9%. These higher returns allow us to generate an improved ROIC at group level, which we see at 7.5% on a normalized basis every year. Taking the very strong 2021 as an average, and considering into the average, we aim for above 12% between 2021 and 2025. While keeping the capital discipline as well allows us to return significant amounts to our shareholders. A unique value proposition at a unique moment in time. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Patrick, for the update. I think you put everything well together. Now we are ready for the next questions coming in. Again, I think I'll take a chance to ask the first question to Søren. It's been a long journey since 2016, Søren. When you look at where we are today and you look back to June 2016, when we announced a strategic review, what has been the most challenging part of the transformation, when you look at the company and where we are today?
It's hard to pick what is exactly the most challenging. I certainly can start one place. We today have a Logistics business, which has a run rate now of more than $8 billion of turnover and a solid margin. We didn't have a strong foundation for that growth. In 2016, when we started out, Damco did $2.5 billion of turnover and made hardly any margin on that $2.5 billion of turnover. We were not building on a strong foundation. We've gone through a lot of work in the first years, where it was really about building a foundation for a strong Logistics business from a people perspective, from a technology perspective, and therefore, we had a hard time gaining traction to begin with.
Certainly, we've also gone through a tough period with our Ocean business because we intuitively understood that we will only really be successful if we are successful in Ocean. That's why we have worked on all the different things, initiatives that I talked about in my introductory remarks about in the consolidation, the acquisition of Hamburg Süd, the way we manage capacity, the differentiated and unique value propositions, and so on and so forth. It took a little while before it came together. In the last, basically, couple of years, we have seen very steady progress. That's why we are here, where we are today.
Fantastic. I'll open up for the live questions, and I can see we have Carolina Dores as the first one in line. Please, Carolina Dores.
Hi. Hello, good morning everyone. I think my first question is probably for Patrick. Patrick, when you're looking in the slide you showed the net debt EBITDA falling a lot. I guess 2021 is probably not the ideal year to look at because, as you pointed out, it's a year of abnormal returns. When you're thinking about distributing excess cash, what is the reference point for a capital structure? Is it what you believe is midterm EBITDA? How should we think about capital structuring, trying to guess excess room for investments or payouts? I guess my second question is, as also you all mentioned, that the order book has increased. When you look at your competitors, what do you think is driving the new order? Is it environmental reasons? Is it gaining of market share, replacement? Some color on your view would be appreciated.
Maybe Patrick Jany take the first one, and Søren Skou, you can take the second.
Absolutely. Clearly, in terms of capital allocation, I think what we have today is we have a very strong balance sheet. We can have the luxury of investing in growth on the one hand, which is organic growth, and there are CapEx coming as you know. Also in acquisitions and ultimately as well, a return cash to shareholders, which as I mentioned, we should not forget the normal dividend, which is part of the recurring profit, and actually will have quite a significant role playing forward. I think this is the most important thing to model. When we have excess cash like we have now, we are more than willing to return to shareholders, and that is clearly demonstrated, I think, by the new share buyback. If you look at the next two, three years ahead, we have actually defined the roadmap already.
I would not lose time in defining new criteria. The roadmap is very much in line, particularly when you look at the ordinary dividend coming on top of the already announced share buyback. Overall, as a company, I think we feel very comfortable in the level of ratios where we are today, and we would clearly maintain a solid BBB rating, leaving enough headroom for the development of the group going forward.
On the question on order books, obviously, I'm not in well-placed to comment a lot on what the motives of our competition is. What I do want to say is that what we have tried to illustrate today is that what matters in Ocean for the short-term rates. It's really not how many ships that exist in the world or how many ships that are on order. What matters is really how much capacity is deployed, compared to the demand that is out there. As Johan Sigsgaard illustrated in his presentation, basically since 2017, we have been really, really good at matching supply to demand, and therefore also, as we did last year, even when there's a very large demand shock, we're able to, if you will, keep our pricing flat by adjusting capacity. That's our modus operandi going forward.
Of course, we are focusing a bigger part of our book of business on long-term contracts because we believe they come with a lot of benefits, including more stable earnings and certainly also an opportunity to upsell more Logistics products.
Thank you, sir. Thank you, Patrick. Next question, Lars Heindorff from SEB.
Yes. Thank you, guys. A couple questions on my side as well. The first one is regarding the 50% growth from the top 200 customers. Now, we heard a little bit about your relationship with PUMA, and I think an unusual high share wallet with 80%, which was described. I don't know if you could say something about how much of this is coming from a larger share wallet or any embedded assumption about that your top 200 customers are also growing on top of that. That's the first part.
The second question is regarding enforceability, which you used a word you used quite a lot in the first presentation. As you mentioned, there's been a lot of order and delivery vessels coming in late 2023 and into 2024, which means that we could look at something where we have a different balance between demand, supply at that point. Historically, the industry has been maybe famous for not having the highest enforceability in terms of contract, but certainly not longer-term contracts. What is it that should differentiate you from the rest of the business in terms of enforceability with the contract and the customer relations?
Yes. Maybe I can take that.
Thanks, Søren.
For me, it's super important development we have seen in the Ocean business going from a period of simply selling a commodity product from part A to part B, where the customers was not actually committed to show up with the container. We were actually also not committed to actually load it if the customer showed up with the container, to what we have today, for instance, in Maersk Spot and in Twill, which is a load guarantee and a show guarantee. The customers pay a penalty if they don't come with containers, and we pay a penalty if we don't load the container. That's what we call an enforceable contract, and that's the concept for all of the products that we have.
It takes out waste for the industry or for us, because we don't have to, if you will, factor in an overbooking ratio that may or may not be correct, in order to make sure that we fill the ships. A bigger part of our business today is long-term contracts. There we have a strong historical track record actually for having very high compliance. Our contract portfolio will approximately deliver the volume that we have signed off when it comes to long-term contracts, and we don't see that changing. Why should it?
Patrick, maybe on the top 200.
Yeah. Coming back on the first part of your question, I think the opportunity is frankly quite significant, not to say huge. It is not about just relying on customers growing on their own, and you have some very good customers which are growing, but it's really about embedding our offering into their supply chain and gaining just more coverage of their current spend of Logistics, just by increasing our own ability to follow them, before the shipment, after the shipment, to the warehouse and to the delivery. It is quite huge what we can actually achieve, and that's why we are very confident, as Vincent was saying early on in his presentation, to be able to maintain a 10% a year, which is quite a significant growth rate and probably two, three times the market growth.
If I could add to that, as we said, half of that growth of 10% or above, we expect will come from our top 200 customers who demonstrated by the growth that we've already seen and evidenced today by the comments from PUMA that the concept of a one throat to choke type of product is very appealing in the market today.
Thank you. Before I take the next one here, I just got one here around the same space. It's from Petter Haugen in Kepler Cheuvreux. He asked, "How do you arrive volume growth to 1%-2% a year in Ocean? Does that imply that the market is going to grow 1%-2%?" I think he's coming back to some kind of discussion around market share.
Yeah. No. We assume that the market probably will grow faster. This year 5%-7%. We probably also will be able to grow with the market this year. In the coming years, we would expect the market to grow 2%-4%, more or less in line with global GDP. We expect we can grow our Ocean business 1%-2% given the capacity cap that we are operating under.
We take the next question, and that's from Sam Bland.
Oh, hi there. Hopefully you can hear me.
Sam.
The first question is to make sure on the 6% Ocean EBIT margin. Is that a kind of through cycle average in a normalized world, or is it more that's the trough level, and some years could be better than 6%? My second question is, earlier in the presentation there were these five different types of contracts. Is the idea that, when we get to 2025, all of your volume will be on one of those five, and that you won't have any sort of uncommitted spot volume left at that point? I guess linked to that, what's the benefit from those committed contracts? You already have about 95% utilization on the head haul. I guess the benefit isn't volume. It must be more in cost or in freight rate. Thank you.
Perhaps I should answer.
Yes, answer.
The answer, Sam, is yes and yes. The 6% we see as a floor. As a floor for the earnings at Ocean. That, of course, means that, in individual years, we can see higher EBIT margins in Ocean. It's above 6%. Yes, on long-term contracts, the benefits are a stability, resilience in earnings. We know what we are dealing with. We can plan our capacity, our network, and thereby, if you will, ensure lowest possible cost.
Yes, if I may add to that. Clearly, when you look at how we expect the profitability of Ocean, we'll always have a certain volatility. As you have seen, from the aspiration we have, is to have it at a higher level and be much less volatile than the past. That is because we have those commitments of the customers and our own commitment to their supply chain, which allows us to have profitability you can plan and you can rely on, and build then Growth & Logistics on top of it.
I think I'll take one question from the screen here, and that's from Patrick Creuset from Goldman Sachs. A bit back to the 1.5-3x . Patrick asked, "How exactly do you define excess cash? Below 1.5x net EBITDA as shown on the slide 9, as required for BB+ rating? And if so, do you calculate this on the EBITDA implied on your 12% group ROIC guidance?
Clearly. We show you here our own estimate of translation of the actual criteria of the rating agencies, which as you know, have different ways to calculate it. In going back to a simple calculation, it means that you, in our current setup, you would be non-investment grade if you are above 3x and you are BBB+ if you are below 1.5x, and that is really what the chart is intended to say. Currently, we are below, and I think we would probably expect, as we guide for, to have a continued cash flow and to be as well disciplined in terms of CapEx. We would expect to continue in that range, which is a level we feel very confident with. If we would further have an improvement of the cash balance, that would probably be another extra cash generation.
Under the current planning, where we see the tailwinds abating in the second half of this year and tailing off in 2022, I think this is a positioning where we feel very comfortable, where we have already then returned a significant part of the extra cash, and allows us to grow in the future as well.
Thank you, Patrick. One question. I can see we have Dan Togo Jensen from Carnegie online. Dan, can you hear us?
Yeah, sorry. You just fell out there. I'm here.
Super.
I just wanted to understand the 12% return time you have for the period up until 2025. Is that solely due to the excess return we had here in 2021, and then we should see around or above 7.5%, or at least a significant drop in the period from 2022- 2025? Are we now seeing actually you making contracts going into 2022, 2023 that will secure a return close to this or around this 12% for at least the mid or the near term coming years?
Maybe I can start, then I'll turn to my CFO. I think it's important that we say the number is not 12%, it's above 12%. We may have missed the above a few times during today, that's certainly a very important addition to the guidance here. Of course, we have already, as we also disclosed earlier today, we already have 1 million FFE signed up, so to speak, for longer than one year. For two-year contracts or longer. We are starting to see, if you will, a more resilient business in Ocean. We're quite optimistic, I have to say, with that.
Going back to the actual calculation, I think it is clearly by taking the current level of performance, which is extraordinary, and in 2021, we'll have an absolutely fabulous return on invested capital. It's not to be taken, as we mentioned, as you well know, as the basis for the years ahead.
If you take your assumption for 2021, and then just would put a 7.5%, which is the floor, on the next years, you would arrive already at probably 11% or a bit more than 11%, whatever you estimate for 2021 is. Which is why when we see the regularity of the business that we are building up in terms of Ocean, but also in terms of Growth & Logistics, which is asset light, we would expect over the years to be able to run above this mark under normalized conditions and therefore be above the 12% we mentioned in our ambition level.
Yeah. The next question, I can see Patrick Creuset from Goldman Sachs is also online, so you get a second one here.
Thanks, Stig. Perhaps just a quick follow-up from Patrick. When you look at this net EBITDA ratio required for your credit rating, you would look at a sort of normalized level forward, if you will, if you have a particularly strong year. Let's assume this year or even next year, you would look at the normalized EBITDA you bake into your ROIC target?
Yeah, absolutely. I think we clearly have extraordinary conditions, but we measure our balance sheet obviously on the long-term view with normalized figures, and the ratios have to be there for the years ahead.
Great. Can I get a second one as well for Søren this time? Congrats on delivering on the 2016 strategy. I think, as you point out, has put Maersk in a much stronger position today. I suppose looking forward, the item of the strategy where the jury set out Logistics, if you grow Logistics 10% or 15% or something like that a year, it's clearly not that material at group level, right? From a base of, say, $700 million EBITDA right now. What proportion, roughly, of recurring EBITDA would you hope comes from Logistics in a few years' time, and what's the main challenge you're facing to basically get there and get Logistics big enough so that the growth actually counts?
Patrick, I'm always a little bit worried about how I communicate around this in terms of the relative size, because there are two ways to achieve it. One is to grow Logistics like crazy, and the other one is to lower the results in Ocean. Of course, we want to do as well in Ocean as we possibly can, so it's with that caveat. Actually, if we grow our Logistics business organically as we set out here to do, on a 3-5 -year horizon, it will start to make a difference. If we then assume that we add some acquisitions on top of that, I'm certain that within the timeframe that we are looking at here, 2021-2025, that we will have a Logistics business that is a material, also for A.P. Moller-Maersk.
Thanks, Søren.
The next question comes from Rob Joynson from Exane BNP Paribas. Go on, Rob.
Good afternoon, everybody. A couple of questions from me, please. First of all, on capacity. We've heard a couple of times today that Maersk is happy to keep its capacity at just above the 4 million TEU level. If that remains the case, based on the current order book, MSC will replace Maersk as the container shipping industry's number one player, potentially within the next year or so. Is it now simply the case that the board is comfortable that Maersk will not be the industry's number one player going forward? The second question on competition, how do you think about the competition dynamic going forward from some of the Asian players, in particular the main Chinese operator, which remains state-owned?
Given the rising geopolitical tensions between China and various countries around the world, arguably from their perspective, it could make sense to take increased control of their own container shipping capacity, especially on Chinese export routes. Maybe just how do you think about that going forward? Thank you.
I have to say very clearly, Rob, that we're not defining ourselves in terms of the capacity that we operate in terms of ship. That's not how to think about being number one anymore for us. We want to be, if you will, number one with our customers, number one in terms of profitability and resilience of our business. We see a huge opportunity for growing into the integrated Logistics space, having a much higher turnover per container that we ship on Ocean, that's really our focus. With the market share we have today around 17%, 18% in terms of capacity, we have the scale that we have to be competitive from a cost perspective, from a size of network perspective. If we were to have 20% net capacity share, it wouldn't mean that our unit cost would be any different or anything like that.
We are very comfortable with our strategy, and how we define, if you will, number one, and we'll see how things develop. If MSC ends up having more capacity than we have, it's not the end of the day for us if we are succeeding on our strategy. In terms of the Asian carriers, I think that the world will need all the capacity that is out there, so to speak. Certainly, I take note of the fact that most of our customers are actually European, or American, or African, or customers who decides which shipping lines to use from China. It's not the Chinese manufacturer that does that. I don't really see any risk to our business from that perspective.
Thank you, Søren . Next question comes from Alexia Dogani. The line is open.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Firstly, for the very thorough presentation and interesting insights. I only have one question. Do you feel that the barriers to entry in this industry have significantly changed post this period of disruption? This very high level of returns may potentially attract new competition for the commodity, but also the integrated container Logistics & Services. I guess, what I'm trying to understand is what gives you confidence that this time is different and that the market normalizes at a higher return level relative to previous cycles? Thank you.
It will be very difficult to start a new Ocean carrier, if that is your question. You heard, for instance, from the PUMA presentation that they are shipping containers in 850 different shipping lanes in order from their 200 plus factories to their 62 distribution centers. Most of our customers will have this dynamic that they are not active in just one particular trade, and therefore, to start a competitive new carrier will be very difficult given where the industry is today. The reason for why we believe that the Ocean as part of our business, once it normalizes will be, if you're normalizing at a higher level than the past, is because of all the things that we have discussed, the consolidation, the focus on capacity management, the focus on unique and differentiated products as opposed to selling a commodity.
All these things combined give us the confidence that we can say that the normalized earnings level is above 6% EBIT margin.
To follow up on that, I have a question here from Lars Heindorff from SEB, where Vincent Clerc had been talking about this EBIT margin, about 6% as a floor, in a normalized environment. Lars asked whether 2019 could be seen as a normalized year.
I think you clearly have to see the normalization as something which is not a 2020, not a 2021 event, right? Going further back in time, I think we also said in the presentation earlier on that we would expect rates to normalize at a level higher than the past. That is what's clearly referring to that base as well. We expect through the differentiation, that we are able to grow more intimately with our big customers, offer different solutions, as you have heard today, which put the playing field at a different level. Therefore, the rates are not just commodity rates from A to B, but actually are part of an integrated offering to our customers. That is the real differentiating factor, more than the published rate.
Next question, Neil Glynn from Credit Suisse.
Hello again. Can I ask, we obviously heard about ESG earlier, that was more from a environmental perspective. On the G side of things, on governance and steering, could I check, given your targets today, will your remuneration policy change at all as a result of these? Maybe tied to that, you've obviously committed to margins and return on invested capital, and you talk a lot about CapEx management, but why haven't you committed to free cashflow today to align yourself with some of your Logistics peers? Is that just an evolutionary thing, or caution, or some other reason as to why it doesn't make sense for you as a company to talk free cashflow at this kind of juncture?
I'll start.
Yes, sir.
On ESG, you can expect, Neil, to see an ESG component in the executive compensation from next year. As we already said, we will have the ESG Day in November, and I am sure part of that will also be an explanation on how we will handle the executive pay, because you are absolutely right that we have to get to that also being part of how management and broader part of management is compensated.
Yeah, in terms of your question on the free cash flow, I totally agree with you that free cash flow is very important, and that's how we manage the company as well. I think it's an evolution in our targets. I think what is really important is to know where the cash flow comes from, and that is from profitability. Our point today is really to show that we aim for a more stable and higher profitability in the group, which automatically generates higher cash flows when you look at the capital discipline that we have, as well alluded to in terms of dimensioning as well. I think we explicitly would expect to have free cash flow generation every single year, which is why we are confident on shareholder returns as well. It is part of the whole thing.
Maybe I can add to that, Neil Glynn. You've followed us for quite a while, and you know that we started out on this transformation using a transformation metric that we call Cash Return on Invested Capital. The whole point of that was really to start to discipline ourselves in terms of how we thought about cash, because that was one of the problems we had when we entered this transformation, that we were not disciplined about cash. The Cash Return on Invested Capital metric actually improved a lot to the point now that it's so high that it doesn't really make any sense to use that metric anymore. We have been on a three, four-year journey to become super disciplined with cash, and frankly, I think we have the results to show for it.
I think we can take the last question of today from David Kerstens.
Thank you very much, good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for the comprehensive and thorough presentation. I've one single question, just to understand the link between the EBIT margin of at least 6% and the return on capital of at least 12%. I appreciate the 6% is the floor, that corresponds to a return on capital of at least 7.5%. Wouldn't you need a much higher EBIT margin over the cycle to get to a return of at least 12%, given your capital intensity is about one time revenue? I appreciate your investing and growing in asset-light Logistics & Services, still the Ocean segment remains relatively capital intensive. Some further color on that link would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Okay. It is consistent, right? Obviously the 6% profitability per year is the floor we have established for Ocean in a normalized environment, as we've said before. That is actually directly correlated to the 7.5% ROI guidance at group level, so taking Logistics and Terminals on top, in a normalized environment. Now, the average of above 12% is considering this minimum per year and adding the exceptional situation we have today in terms of 2021 and possibly a tailing off in 2022. If you consider those, particularly 2021 effect, you actually lift, I would say, the average of the next years, 2021- 2025, to an above 12% level. It is actually compatible and based on this higher performance of Ocean as well.
Thank you very much. We've come to an end now. I hope you have enjoyed our Capital Markets Day. I hope you, of course, have had a lot of answers to your questions. As you always know, you can call the IR team if you have further questions. Thank you very much for participating. Before we end this Capital Markets Day, I would like to give the word to Søren for some final remarks.
Thank you. I will make it very short. I hope that you have received today some insights, some new perspectives on our strategy, our transformation, and the journey forward for A.P. Moller-Maersk. We spent a lot of time on our value creation framework. This is, after all, a Capital Markets Day, and we want to make sure that we explain how we believe we can create superior value for our investors in the coming years. We want to bring together three businesses that are really strong now, and three businesses that have very tangible and valuable synergies. That is really the secret sauce of Maersk, tying all of this together and then adding the technology angle on top of that.
When we started out, I said that the objective of the transformation of Maersk is to become a profitable growth company again, a company that is delivering better outcomes for customers, for employees, society at large, and certainly for our investors, and we are getting there. We are truly getting there. Thank you again for your time today and your interest in our company. Thank you.