Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to see so many here today. I wanna start out on the same theme that we just saw in the video there by saying very clearly that the focus of the future Maersk will be on global container shipping, container logistics, and container ports. We aim to create a strong, integrated logistics group, global logistics groups, that can help our customers with connecting and simplifying their supply chains. That is, in essence, what we're setting out to do. On 22nd of September, as you all know, we announced that both new structure for the group and new strategies.
We announced that we were going to work over the next 24 months to find solutions for how we could separate out our four energy businesses, Maersk Oil, Maersk Drilling, Maersk Supply, and Maersk Tankers. Until we have separated out those businesses, we will manage them as independent businesses. We will limit investments in Maersk Drilling, Maersk Supply, Maersk Tankers, and we will work hard to focus Maersk Oil more on the North Sea. We also announced on the Transport & Logistics side, new business strategies. Most importantly, I wanna highlight Maersk Line and APMT. For Maersk Line, we said we want to become a growth company again. We want to grow market share organically, and we also want to grow through acquisition, also to be part of the consolidation of the industry.
For APMT, we announced a significant change in direction, saying that in the next couple of years, three years, we will focus APMT much more on costs, on productivity, on utilization, on implementing the terminals that we currently have under construction successfully, and much, much less or not at all on planting new flags, investing in new greenfield developments. We have invested a lot in APMT in the last five years. Now it's time to fill up the capacity we already have. Two weeks ago, we took the first step towards realizing the ambition of becoming a global pure-play container shipping, logistics, and ports company by announcing the acquisition of Hamburg Süd. It's entirely in line with the ambition that we set out on the twenty-second of September in terms of growing in container shipping.
We are cementing Maersk Line's global leadership position, but equally important, we are also adding significant revenue and volume to APMT. APMT has grown its footprint and is still growing its footprint, particularly in Latin America in recent years, and the acquisition of Hamburg Süd will also be important for APMT. With Hamburg Süd, we will build a very strong dual-branded platform in Latin America that is similar to the very successful platform we have had for years in Africa with Safmarine and Maersk Line. We will create, by combining these two companies, an unmatched product portfolio when it comes to the physical product result, transit time frequency, geographic coverage, and reliability, not just in Latin America, but also in Oceania, the Australian, New Zealand markets where we are strong and Hamburg Süd also have a good position, and certainly in the reefer market.
As many of you know, Maersk Line is the largest global transporter of refrigerated and frozen food goods, and Hamburg Süd actually also has a significant position in this market due to its strong position in Latin America. We aim to pay for the acquisition through cost synergies, principally through the combination of the two networks. We have demonstrated that we have taken out a lot of costs with the entry into 2M a few years ago, and we aim to do the same here. Of course, there will also be cost synergies when it comes to leveraging the combined bargaining power of the two companies. When we set out the ambition of becoming a pure-play container logistics, ports, and container shipping company, I want to emphasize that that is not an ambition to become a smaller company.
As we separate out the four energy businesses, we will lose somewhere around 25% of the group's current turnover. We aim to replace that turnover quickly by inorganic and organic growth in transportation and logistics businesses. With the acquisition of Hamburg Süd, we will actually make a very meaningful step forward of replacing 15, about 15 percentage points out of the 25 percentage points of revenue that will depart the group over the coming years. When we set out our ambition to build a strong, integrated global transport and logistics business, we believe we do so from a position of strength, actually an excellent position. With Maersk Line, we have the global leading carrier, the number one in the world. With the acquisition of Hamburg Süd, we will be expanding on that position, putting a significant big gap between ourselves and number two.
Maersk Line is active not just in the long-haul trades, but also in the intra-regional trades that are growing faster. We have APMT, a top five terminal operator with very strong gateway terminals in many emerging markets, but also equally important, significant transshipment ports, transshipment hubs that support the East-West trades for us. With Damco, we have, while it's a medium-sized logistics company, it's a company with significant and outstanding capabilities, particularly in supply chain management, but also a solid presence in freight forwarding that we can build on. We have the makings of a very strong pure play container shipping, logistics and ports company in what we already have in our portfolio. Historically, we have delivered positive earnings in transportation and logistics as a business, but we also have to recognize that our earnings have been volatile.
Since 2010, our NOPAT has averaged about $1.8 billion, and we have delivered a return of just around 7% on the invested capital for this group. As you can see, we have seen declining growth in the last couple of years and also quite some variation in the returns. On September 22, we said that we expect we can, by operating our transportation and logistics businesses in an integrated manner, that we can grow or improve our return on invested capital by 2 percentage points, all things equal, over the next 3 years. Of course, today's presentation will be largely centered around how we're gonna do that. We see both revenue synergies and cost synergies.
My colleagues will dive into much more detail around this, but I will start the discussion by saying there are really five buckets of synergies between APMT, Maersk Line, Damco, Svitzer, and MCI. First of all, we're gonna drive an increased utilization of our terminals by moving more Maersk Line and Maersk Line VSA partner volumes onto the APMT terminal network. It's a huge fixed cost base that we have built up, and we can do more to fill it up in the coming years. Secondly, we see opportunities for selling much more inland services together. All of the customers in APMT, Maersk Line, and Damco use inland services to get the containers to and from the ports. We only sell that service to a fraction of our customers. We're gonna create new products and sell them in this business.
Thirdly, our container hubs, our transshipment hubs, which do a substantial part of the transshipment, our own and the ones we do for VSA partners. In the past, we have operated the transshipment hubs as Maersk Line being a customer, APMT being a supplier. In the future, we will be, or we already started to operate our transshipment hubs as one company, very similar to what you could expect or to see when you look at how UPS and how FedEx, they operate their big global distribution centers. We will have the opportunity also by working closer together to turn around MCI, that has had a hard time in the recent years, by getting better at joint planning. Finally, joint planning of production. Finally, perhaps the biggest opportunity of all, cross-selling between all of our businesses.
We reach out and touch literally thousands and thousands of customers across APMT, Maersk Line, and Damco, and we can do a better job of cross-selling our services. You will hear much more about this later. At the end, I wanna say that our aim is to become a global integrator of container logistics so that we can connect and simplify our customers' supply chains. There are three elements that we need to achieve to deliver on that vision. First of all, we need to provide simple solutions for our customers' complex supply chain needs. We aim to do that by leveraging the understanding of customer needs we have from all of our businesses in creating better and simpler solutions. We need to elevate the customer experience through digitization.
Our industry is still, whether it's in Damco, whether it's in Maersk Line, whether it's in APMT, and so on, still quite analog, people-to-people, phone and email-based businesses. We aim to provide a distinct digital customer interface, and as we will demonstrate today. We are well on the way of being able to do that, providing online 24/7 instant transaction-based. Finally, we aim to offer the industry's most competitive network, container transportation network, to every market in the world. We want to scale up organically and inorganically. We want to solidify the margin gap that Maersk Line has built up and sustained over the last three years, and we want to take some of that experience from Maersk Line into APMT and into Damco to make sure that we also, in those businesses, create a true cost leadership advantage.
Before we dive into further details, I'd like to share some perspectives on our industry, some setting a context for the market that we are currently in. I'm gonna argue, first of all, that global container transportation, logistics, and ports is a significant market. It's a big industry, and it's growing. That's why we want to focus A.P. Møller - Mærsk on that industry. I'm also gonna argue that the liner industry is changing, it's consolidating, and we stand to benefit from that change. I'll argue that we're gonna need to spend less capital in the coming years in order to grow in line with the market. Finally, I'll touch a little bit again on digitization, how it's gonna impact our industry, and how we are positioned for that impact. The global container shipping, logistics, and ports business is almost a $1 trillion industry.
It's a $1 trillion industry that is growing in line with global GDP growth, around 3% per year. We, of course, can pride ourself of being present in every single one of these segments, but some more than others. As I already stated, we have significant opportunity of growing, particularly when it comes to containerized intermodal or inland services and when it comes to logistics. The reason for why we are focusing the Maersk Group here is because of the size of the industry and because of the growth. The industry is consolidating. Who would have thought that at last year's Capital Markets Day, who would have thought that in the span of a little more than 12 months since then, we would have seen a total of 7 carriers being announced of disappearing from the market? CMA has acquired APL.
Hapag-Lloyd has merged with, or will merge with UASC. COSCO and China Shipping has merged. Hanjin Shipping has effectively gone out of business. Three Japanese carriers have announced that they will become one by 2018. Last but not least, Maersk Line has announced that we will acquire Hamburg Süd. The industry is consolidating. By 2018, the top five carriers will have about two-thirds of the global market. Even that's a significant move towards consolidation. It's not yet a truly consolidated industry, and we believe strongly that more is likely to happen on the consolidation front in the coming years, as carriers continue to struggle with profitability, low growth, and as the big carriers will be able to offer even more competitive products in the future.
It's really only natural that the container industry is consolidating at this point. We have about 18.5 million TEU deployed in the market today. We have another little more than 1.5 million TEU that are idle, and the industry still have about 3 million TEU of capacity under construction. That's a total of 24 million TEU. With scrapping, we expect by 2022 to have 23 million TEU of capacity. With 3% growth per year, we will only need about 22 million TEU. Actually, the industry does not need any new ships, and we don't have to invest in any new ships in the foreseeable future.
Therefore, for those that want to invest in our industry, merging, acquiring, buying existing capacity is the most rational thing to do. We are also, thankfully not to the same degree, but we are also starting to see that there's overcapacity in the container terminal industry impacting APMT. We have for years had a good balance between supply and demand, a strong pricing environment, but in the last couple of years, we have seen also that industry being impacted by the low demand growth on the container shipping side. We're seeing new big global alliances that will mean more direct port-to-port services, reducing the need for transshipment ports as well. Also here, we are not seeing an environment where prices, you know, are likely to increase dramatically because of a constrained supply and demand situation.
Terminals cannot expect to be as well utilized as they used to be unless you do something about it, and that's what we intend to do. Finally, of the four things that impact our industry, I wanna touch upon digital. I mean, our industry is clearly not the first one to be digitized and therefore, you know, we can see what has happened in other industries. I think it's pretty clear that we'll have at least four impacts in the container shipping and ports and logistics business. First of all, the customer experience is likely to change. It's gonna be online, it's gonna be self-serve, it's gonna be a lot less person to person, a lot less emails, a lot less phone calls. It will give us lower costs to serve because the customers are doing more of the work themselves.
No doubt, it will also mean something to the demarcation lines in the industry. The demarcation lines between what has traditionally been a freight forwarder, what has traditionally been a carrier, what has traditionally been a container terminal. Finally, we're just starting to see also that digital will be able to provide asset productivity through the Internet of Things, and we'll, you'll hear more about that as well today. We believe that we are embarking on this journey, this digital journey, from a strong position. We have customers, we have volumes, we have brands. We've already invested heavily in digitization of our foundation, and we'll show you more about that today. We are, as we speak, investing in new digital products. Finally, when it comes to the digital driving asset productivity, we own the important generators of data, the engines, the ships, and the containers.
When we look across our transportation and logistics businesses, be it Maersk Line, be it APMT, Damco, MCI, and Svitzer, all of those businesses, they share four elements in their strategy going forward. First of all, they have to have cost leadership. Cost leadership in everything we do. We want to have a company where the culture is that the costs have to be the lowest out there, and they have to become lower every year. We want to, of course, exploit the synergies that are between us in order to help us drive that agenda. Cost leadership is important because we need to be able to price competitively. None of the industries that we are in here are industries where you can differentiate yourself and charge a meaningful premium that can sustain a high cost culture.
We need to provide value to our customers by pricing competitively. Cost leadership is what allows us to do that. Competitive prices is not gonna be enough. We also need to deliver a great customer experience. As I said before, we believe we can leverage better than what we have done in the past, our shared understanding of customer needs across all of our businesses. We want to leverage that understanding to build superior products and to build superior digital, interfaces. If we have a great customer experience, it will be easier for us to grow with existing customers, have more customer loyalty. As anybody in the business know, if you sell something the customer likes, he's more likely to come back.
Competitive prices combined with a great customer experience is what should enable us to grow inorganically, take market share every year, find new business, new customers, but also to support successful inorganic growth. In container shipping, acquiring another company, another carrier, comes with a cost of loss of volume. Minimizing that loss of volume is a key value driver when it comes to making acquisitions, and we believe a great customer experience is part of minimizing that loss. More growth is gonna drive more cost leadership because of the scale of advantages in our industries that will enable us to price more competitively. It will also improve our customer experience because it expands the physical product, and that leads to more growth. That's really the propel or the propeller that will move us forward in the coming years.
We have set a new management team in the Maersk group to deliver on this vision of becoming a pure play container shipping, container logistics, container ports company. You will hear from four of my colleagues today. You have already met Jakob Stausholm, our Chief Finance Strategy and Transformation Officer. Jakob will talk about the finances as well as our digital and IT agenda. You will hear from Vincent Clerc, Maersk Line's Chief Commercial Officer, who will talk about our customer experience. You will hear from Morten Engelstoft, the CEO of APMT, and Søren Toft. The Chief Operating Officer of Maersk Line on our costs and utilization and efficiency agenda and the new strategy of APMT. With those words, again, welcome, and I hope that we have a good day.
This will be the last session on Transport and Logistics today, the tough session after, hopefully, a good lunch. I will briefly bring the morning session to a close in a numerical manner, and then I will briefly introduce our current performance that will be covered in depth by my two colleagues, Vincent Clerc and Morten Engelstoft. Now, Søren stated earlier today that if you just take the five businesses that we are now bringing together to become Transport and Logistics, if you look at the combined entities' historical return, it has been to the tune of 7%.
We will from first of January next year report that in the right way, in a consolidated manner, and we will carefully look out for that the costs are being allocated to what are energy activities and what are transport and logistics. I think, though, we can say that this number is fairly precise. We have tested a little bit. It, you know, it might change 0.1% ROIC, but that's about it. We have a good view for how we have performed in the past. We have also as part of our disclosure in September stated the synergies, and basically this morning you have heard my colleagues talking about the synergies. You have heard Vincent talking about commercial synergies. You have heard Morten and Søren talking about operational efficiencies.
There's one last piece of savings that we haven't covered, and that basically comes from the fact that for the last 10 years we have had a business unit structure. It has served us well, and we have achieved many things with it, but a business unit structure comes at a cost. Basically what we are looking at is a number of functional areas that we can bring together. The five units together with the group, the group overlay, bring that together in one unit in Transport & Logistics, will lead to overhead cost savings. That being a number of functional areas, there's also some scale, in fact, from it. For example, bringing our whole IT activities together. There we gain scale. We're not splitting up the synergies, but these are the three buckets.
The biggest buckets is the operational efficiencies, and we can achieve that over three years. We are already starting right now. We will make great progress next year, I'm sure, but we will only achieve the two percentage point ROIC in three years' time. We have not quantified one last area, which we also have stated. We think as an integrated company, we can take better investment decisions, and we want, and you have heard that several times today, we will be much more capital restrictive. That benefit is not included, but let me try to visualize it in with this graph here.
Over the last four years, Transport & Logistics have had a free cash flow of $5.5 billion, despite a fairly high level of annual CapEx to the tune of $3.2 billion. Now, we're not gonna see much reduction in CapEx next year because we have quite a few vessel deliveries. That is a given. We will, as a new leadership team, we have already started coming together and really scrutinizing every single CapEx item because we wanna be honest to our strategy, and the strategy is saying we choose acquisitive growth, now with the acquisition of Hamburg Süd, and we wanna spend much less on organic growth, both in the two, mainly in the two major CapEx spenders, APM Terminals and in Maersk Line.
The guidance we can give you for, and this is not year by year, but it's on average over the year, would be to the tune of $1.5 billion-$2 billion. As you can see, therefore, in the future, we do expect lower CapEx than what we have had in the past, and we have had quite significant free cash flow in the past as well. That might be one last enhancing bit. But I realize now I can't talk myself around it anymore. It's been a tough year, and we are not satisfied with the situation. The biggest variances we have seen has been in Maersk Line and APM Terminals, and let me just spell it out.
We earned a lot of money in the first three quarters of 2015, and almost all of it evaporated in 2016. We actually feel that we have operated Maersk Line well in 2016. We have won market share. We have better utilization than ever. We have lower unit cost. It's all overshadowed by very, very low freight rates. In a moment, Vincent Clerc will talk about that topic. We also are acutely aware that we were one of the first reporters in the third quarter, and we missed consensus by quite a bit. Therefore, what Vincent will try to do is to try to explain how our revenue builds up against externally available freight indices that hopefully can be helpful for your future modeling.
After Vincent, Morten Engelstoft, as new incoming CEO, will give his short take on the status of the profitability of APM Terminals. Let me hand over to you, Vincent.
Thank you. I mentioned also this morning in my presentation that I was pretty proud of the fact that we have picked up the pace of growth while maintaining relative performance to competition with quite a big gap. The problem that we have is actually that if in relative terms it's okay, in absolute terms it's really unsatisfactory. To understand a little bit how this has happened, I think we need to look at the fundamentals. This is what we are illustrating in this graph. Basically, after a couple of years of very stable supply and demand growth, we saw towards the very end of 2014 a gap open between supply that started to phase in at a faster pace and demand that started to slow down.
This has had a tremendous impact on our freight rates, and we have been aware that this was going to build, or we saw for a while that this was going to build and have quite devastating effects. A lot of the decrease that you see in 2015 actually happened through short-term rates that fell quite heavily. For the year of 2015, we actually managed to secure long-term contracts at fairly decent rates with very limited impact from the start of the price war. On the other side, these freight rates, to a large extent, caught up in 2016, giving a new impetus to the price war that was being fought here towards the beginning of 2016.
The industry took a little bit of time, but you can see that things are starting to self-correct. By the end of 2014, as an example, there was 22 strings sailing between Asia and the Northern Europe, where the price war really started and the overcapacity was most acute. Today, as the alliances reshuffle, there will be only 16 strings left. That is a significant adjustment in the capacity that we offer. Of course, some of the strings are bigger, because we have phased in a lot of larger tonnage, but still the industry has shown its ability over time to self-correct.
As it self-corrected, some of the ships that got phased out of Europe started to appear in other trades where there was still balance between supply and demand and creating new impetus also to the price wars in other trades. The fact of the matter is, though, that while at the last Capital Markets Day, we could give an outlook that was fairly negative with respect to supply and demand, we can see here that in the course of 2016 things have started to self-correct, and we're starting a narrowing gap between supply and demand. This graph for me is really important to really understand how the industry develops and has gone through. We are actually undergoing the third such rate war in eight years. You can see here we have taken two lines.
Basically, one of them is Maersk Line, and the other one is the average of all the lines publishing results. What really took us aback in this was that on the back of actually a few years of truce in between two price wars, where the average of the industry made basically no money, the violence with which the price war started again was quite shocking. What really explains this is also the sudden fall in oil price, which actually gave the feeling to a lot of lines that they suddenly had money to spend to try to gain market share. This has been playing out since. Now, as you can see, this has been going on now for five quarters.
If we look at the previous price wars, this is about the time that they have taken to resort themselves. You saw in the previous slide that some of the fundamentals seem to point towards a correction on the freight rates, or at least a correction on the supply and demand. To try to understand how to model how our rates develop, I would just like to take you through two different dimensions and give you a view on how things happen. For us, it's just shy of half of our business that we lock into yearly contracts or longer.
These contracts are being fixed at different time periods during the year, but I would say that more than 90% of it is being fixed between the first of January and the first of May. The rest, about 55% of our business is actually with validities of three months to a week. The SCFI, which is one of the big leading indicators that a lot of people follow quite actively today, and that you have on the graph as the light gray line, covers in principle only the very short term out of Asia. I'll come back to what that means.
What has been quite unique here is to see, and it illustrates the violence of the price war that we have faced. In principle, the SCFI stays fairly close from the CCFI. Unless you have a real big shock between supply and demand. As you could see in 2010, there was a severe undercapacity, and the SCFI was far higher than the CCFI, the composite index. From 2015, the SCFI decoupled again, but went this time far down compared to the CCFI because there was a big overhang of capacity out of Asia. This affects basically quite rapidly the very short term and then starts to contaminate the longer validities as they get renewed.
That's what has played out from 15 throughout the contracting seasons here at the beginning of 2016. With the last contract being actually renegotiated for the Pacific in the US with the first of May, we saw the last impacts on the long-term contract phase in onto our P&L in June and July this year. The second lens that is interesting to take outside just the contract validities is actually just the geographical split because the CCFI is really measuring exports from China. It's just important for us to just also say that about 25%-27% of our volumes are exports from China, and about half of these are in long-term contracts.
That means that it's somewhere between 12% and 15% of our total volumes that have contracts that will move somewhat in correlation with the SCFI. As you can see, on the graph, there has been quite a change here. The rates out of China and out of Asia in general have been affected much more severely by this than the rest of them have. You can see also that as the rates out of China seem to have bottomed out here in the third quarter, and it was also what you expected looking at the indices, the rest of the world is actually still dealing with some of the aftermath that the cascading of tonnage has had an impact on some of the other trades. There are signs of correction.
We will have a record idling this year right now at 1.5 million TEU this week. We've had record scrapping. We've had a lot of trades that have seen actually corrections and increases coming through. I think it's really important to understand these two lenses of how long it takes then for the long-term contracts to reflect some of these changes because there is a large lag effect and also the fact that the dynamics out of China are somewhat ahead of the dynamics that we're seeing in the part of the business that has nothing to do with China. That's a couple of lenses and data points to help navigate our business and what makes the fabric of our top line.
How this improved outlook on supply and demand pans out is something that we don't really know yet. We will have to see it play out in the coming months. That will certainly have a very big impact going forward. That's what I wanted to take you through for now on rate development. There'll be a Q&A later where I'm sure I'll get a few elaborative questions. For now, I would like to just give the word to Morten to take us through the A.P. Møller journey. A.P., APMT.
Thank you, Vincent. There's no doubt that 2016 has been a tough year for APM Terminals so far. Falling results, falling margins, as I talked about earlier. This comes after, and I should emphasize that, after many years of quite attractive returns in the business. We should expect our margins to remain under pressure for quite some time still, and hence we're taking a number of actions to mitigate the impact from that. As I mentioned earlier here today, our revenue has taken a hit due to the weak global volumes and due to our margins being under pressure in the current market that we are facing.
We have seen, as you can, we have illustrated here, revenues pick up somewhat in the last couple of quarters, among others, with the addition of the TCB business, which is now 8% of our turnover. If you look at volume development during this year, had we not added new terminals to the portfolio, our volumes would have been flat in 2016 compared to 2015 in a market that is increasing, I'd say 1%-2%. The reason why we are slightly behind compared to market development is that we have seen large decreases in volumes in the oil-dependent countries like Angola, like Nigeria and Russia, where we have a particularly strong position.
After having added TCB during this year, our volume in 2016 so far this year is 4% up compared to last year. Our volumes and our results are under pressure, and we are taking a number of steps to mitigate it. We are seeking to win, as we described earlier today, more business from Maersk Line and other shipping line customers. We are looking to bring our terminals under implementation into operations, and we're looking to find ways to take cost out of the system, and we are in general looking at adding to the revenue categories in the buckets that you see here on the graph.
What I do want to emphasize, building a little bit on the question that I received earlier today, is that despite the current situation with declining results and margins, our operating terminals are actually delivering close to a 9% return. To me, that illustrates a few things. First of all, it illustrates the benefit from completing the book of terminals under implementation that we currently have ongoing and bringing them into operations, even though it does take a couple of years before getting to, in most cases, the target return. It also illustrates that actually decent returns can be earned in this industry, though these returns currently are under pressure and risk, and hence us taking a number of action as I described earlier today.
Finally here, I want to illustrate the overview of the projects, the list of projects in APM Terminals. We have eight projects on the list currently. One of them are going into operations as we speak with our terminal in İzmir, having had its first port call, vessel call here two weeks ago. There's another two or three of them going into operations during 2017, where we, amongst others, just had a trial call here over the weekend in Lázaro Cárdenas. Our acquisition of TCB included eight terminals. Seven of them were already operational, with the exception of Guatemala, where we are still awaiting the last operating licenses.
We do expect that the TCB portfolio will leave the under implementation category sometime during first half of next year. With that, I will conclude on the financial update here between Jacob, Vincent, and myself.
It's a great pleasure for me to be back speaking to you again this year and, this time in my new capacity as CEO for the Maersk Energy Division. As Jakob Stausholm already mentioned in the beginning, this is hardly the time for big news for the energy division. It's still early days. However, we are going to spend about 20 minutes talking about the division overall and some of our objectives. We are going to spend 20 minutes talking about Maersk Oil and their performance and their strategy, and Gretchen Watkins will do that. Then we will leave 20 minutes for Q&A to make sure that you also get an opportunity to get the information that you may be missing to the extent we can provide answers. Let me first start to talk about the Energy Division strategy and the objectives overall.
The division was formed as an outcome of the A.P. Møller - Mærsk strategic review that we did earlier this year, and as Søren mentioned, was announced on the twenty-second of September. As part of that, we formed the Energy Division consisting of four business units, Maersk Oil, Maersk Drilling, Maersk Supply Service, and Maersk Tankers. As part of the review, we determined that synergies between these four businesses were limited to nonexistent, and therefore, we've decided to run the four businesses on an independent and standalone basis. We also determined ultimately that it was time to separate these businesses away from A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S. What are the key objectives for the Energy Division? Well, the first and foremost, we will maximize shareholder value through an active ownership of the four business units.
It is very important to us that each of the business units perform to their level best, that they are strongly positioned in the industries, and they are attractive partners for future structural solutions. Developing those structural solutions, we will focus on making sustainable long-term development opportunities for the four businesses and focusing on that they come from a position of strength when we enter into any structural considerations, which I will come back to. In the course of doing that over the next couple of years, we will also exercise a tighter discipline when it comes to capital allocation, and investment capital will be limited.
We will still grow Maersk Oil, and I will allude a little bit to that later, and we will still make sure that we maintain the strategic and competitive positions of Maersk Drilling, Maersk Supply Service, and Maersk Tankers, but investments in the latter three will be limited. Ultimately, the goal is to separate the four businesses away from A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S. We said on the twenty-second of September that we would give ourselves 24 months. That sounds very much like the end of 2018 to me, and there should be no doubt that we want to progress on this agenda. We want to reach the stage where we can separate the units away from A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S.
Let me also emphasize that in that process, we will not jeopardize the value of the individual businesses, and we will not jeopardize that they are sustainable businesses going forward, also after the separation. The main purpose is, of course, to maximize the shareholder value of the four business units. When we talk about maximizing shareholder value through an active ownership, what does it actually mean? Well, in very basic terms, it are two objectives for the Energy division. One is to make sure that our focus on the structural solutions are 100%. We will be very focused on finding the right level of M&A activities or other activities using the right solution for each individual business units as we go forward. That is one part of the objective for the Energy division.
The other part is to maximize the shareholder value through the performance of the four business units. We will make sure that each business unit have the right strategy in place to perform in the very competitive and highly challenged markets that they are in, but also to make sure that they are best possibly prepared to stand on their own feet once they get separated. As already mentioned, we will make sure that capital allocation is very disciplined and will actually be limited to the extent possible. It goes without saying, when we have four business units that are operating on a standalone basis, it is also important for us that we have a strong focus on the performance management of the units. Of course, the units are autonomous. They are performing well. They know how to perform well.
We will also make sure that we have the right metrics, the right performance reviews in place to monitor how they are making progress, not only on the financial performance and the value optimization, but also on the path to creating units that can stand on their own. A last element to this is the organization and human capital. I will get a little bit back to that, but it is obviously important as we are making this transition, that we have a focus on making sure that the organization of the four units are in best possible shape to undertake the task ahead of us. Let me spend a moment just on what size of businesses are we actually looking at.
There should be no doubt that the four units in the Energy division, Maersk Drilling, Maersk Oil, Maersk Supply Service, and Maersk Tankers, are significant businesses in their own rights within A.P. Moller - Maersk. Now, we have taken here the 2015 numbers in order to have full year numbers, and the four business units together yielded a revenue of $9.8 billion in 2015, equivalent to 25% of A.P. Moller - Maersk overall revenue. By comparison, the underlying profit for 2015 was more than $1.4 billion corresponding to 41% of the A.P. Moller - Maersk underlying profit in total. Last but not least, we have invested heavily in this business unit, so it's also a large share of A.P. Moller - Maersk invested capital, exactly one-third, $14.8 billion invested in these companies.
Obviously it is companies of a certain size and a certain weight, and there should be no doubt how important it is to A.P. Møller - Mærsk to get this transition right and get the separation right at the end of the period. If you look at the cash flow generated for the four business units, and if you go back to 2013 and include the first nine months of this year, you'll see a total cash flow from operations of $14.3 billion. It's a significant cash flow. It's declining over time, obviously, with the oil markets taking a turn in 2014, challenging all four business units. Yet, within that reality, it is a significant cash flow that is well delivered by the business units.
If you look at the gross CapEx, so this is excluding any divestments, so this is just gross what we have invested in the businesses. Otherwise, in the same period of time from 2013 and including the first nine months, we've invested $14.4 billion. A lot of money, but after all, invested from the business unit's own operating cash flow. I can also say that going forward, the investments that we foresee in the Energy division is also expected to be covered by the business unit's own operating cash flow. Speaking about the investments to be done in the four business units, capital will be primarily allocated to Maersk Oil. Investments will continue as planned in already sanctioned development projects.
Maersk Oil is in a position where their big development projects are very well positioned to be robust, even in the current volatile oil price environment. It is investments that are focused primarily in the North Sea arena. It is investments of which a significant part is focused on gas, primarily in the Culzean field in the UK. Of course also the very big investments in Johan Sverdrup in Norway is key here. The annual capital we expect to invest in Maersk Oil over the next two years will range from $1 billion-$1.5 billion per year.
Still significant investments into Maersk Oil, but in very healthy and very lucrative projects. Last but not least, speaking about investments and CapEx in Maersk Oil, we will have a limited allocation, very close to being very limited in exploration activities, and it will be reduced to the extent possible. Speaking about the other units in the Energy division and speaking about limiting the capital investments there. We will invest, and we have already committed investments that will maintain the strategic and competitive positions of the four units. Although we will not allocate further capital to the four units, we do have significant commitments already made back in the days where we had a different, perspective on the oil future. We have $460 million already committed in Maersk Drilling.
425 of those are in the last jackup that we get delivered a little bit later this year. That jackup will go straight into the North Sea on a 5-year contract for Aker BP, with a total revenue on that contract alone of $800 million. Yes, a significant investment in the drilling business, but an investment into a business that is, after all, still very attractive. We have almost $1 billion committed in Maersk Supply Service. That is committed to 10 vessels, 4 subsea construction vessels, and 4 big anchor handlers that are being delivered in 2017 and 2018. Let me just confess that is a bit challenging. For Maersk Tankers, we have a little more than $300 million committed.
They are committed to the last 12 of the mid-range product tankers, one to be delivered this year, and the last 11 of these vessels to be delivered in 2017 and 2018. Investments in the business units, in addition to those that are already committed, will be limited to technological investments perhaps, but that will be technological investments with an immediate return. Let me speak a little bit to the business environment for the four units. I think everybody in the room here knows that the oil industry has been challenged since the third quarter of 2014. With the drop in oil price, oil companies have been extremely busy and focused on reducing their capital expenditures, reducing their operating costs, and reducing their activity levels overall.
Of course, the oil prices have impacted Maersk Oil, but certainly the reduced activity levels have impacted Maersk Drilling and Maersk Supply Service significantly. In Maersk Drilling's case, huge oversupply on the offshore rig fleet, combined with a very low demand, has created the lowest utilization and the biggest challenge in the market for the last 30 years. For Maersk Supply Service, I think the situation could be portrayed to be even worse with a similar case of oversupply and the number of offshore supply vessels now being idle really makes all the offshore supply vessel owners fight for survival. In Maersk Tankers case, we've enjoyed pretty good business up to the middle of this year, but also here the rates have taken a decrease across all segments. Again, a case of vessels coming into the market and with a flat demand for the new vessels.
All business units are challenged in the energy division, no doubt about that. What are we doing about it? Well, Gretchen will come back and talk about Maersk Oil, but I cannot help just stealing a little bit of her thunder. Maersk Oil has over the last 2 years reduced their operating costs with more than 30% and have very, very lucrative projects ahead of them, have increased efficiencies and actually is going pretty strong on their future and producing pretty good results. There's been a strong focus on safe and efficient operations, and that focus will continue. In addition to that, it is incredibly important that Maersk Oil delivers on the big projects that they have coming all the, over the next few years. I can assure you a lot of focus is on that.
Last but not least, the cost discipline in Maersk Oil will obviously continue. For Maersk Drilling, as I said, utilization in the industry is hitting the lowest in 30 years, and all players in the industry is incredibly challenged. Maersk Drilling has managed to position themselves very well with the customers due to a very high operational excellence and uptime, and also a very good safety track record. That has been recognized by the customers with a very good contract coverage going forward. Out of Q3 2016, we had a revenue backlog of $4.1 billion, not only creating some earnings visibility for the future, but probably also being one of the best contract backlogs in the industry.
Maersk Drilling has 22, soon 23, young, highly modern and efficient rigs to offer to the customers, and the customers are interested in the new efficiencies of these rigs. Maersk Drilling has been moving boundaries in the offshore drilling space for the last 40 years, and they will continue to do so. The key point here is that Maersk Drilling is in a very attractive space in an industry where the top four players only have 25% market share, and where Maersk Drilling is an attractive partner to partake in any consolidation and restructuring efforts that could be coming. For Maersk Supply Service, who has 48 anchor handlers operating in the market, it is very much an asset utilization game going forward.
Maersk Supply Service is now focusing in on providing integrated solutions, and with some success have landed the first few contracts. It means a lot if you land a decommissioning contract occupying 10 vessels for a time. There's a successful track record on that, but there's no doubt that the market will be suffering from overcapacity and very, very challenging rates. There's too many ships in the market, and Maersk Supply Service has taken the lead, and as you probably saw, announced 20 vessels to be phased out of the Maersk Supply Service fleet within the course of 18 months, and the first 9 of them has already been phased out. Maersk Supply has also delivered more than 10% cost reduction over the last year, and of course, that cost discipline will continue.
For Maersk Tankers, yes, the market has taken a little bit of a turn to the worse in the second half of this year. We only expect a slow or marginal recovery in 2017, but see a more significant recovery in 2018. Maersk Tankers have had success with their Taking Lead strategy, which is basically about a data-driven focus to enable active position taking and also providing profitable services to third parties. That combined with the true cost leadership in the product tanker industry, has actually put them on top of the industry benchmarks throughout 2016. That strategy will continue, and 2017 will be a good test case to see if it hold water also in a challenged market. There's no doubt that the four business units are all in a challenged industry environment.
To the best of my mind, they are also all forthcoming to the markets with an incredibly strong track record. They have been delivering top-line services to their customers through their lifetime, and they are very, very attractive partners. For Maersk Oil, Maersk Drilling, Maersk Supply Service, and Maersk Tankers, the path to separation may very well be different for the individual companies, but we are going to look for any structural solutions to find the right separation for the A.P. Moller - Maersk Group, and we are rather confident that we are the right people to speak to for interested parties. Whether it is listings, mergers, demergers, or joint ventures, we will pursue the opportunities that we can find. Let me just spend one moment touching base on the organization.
We do have an experienced management team and experienced organization in place to undertake the challenges of the coming few years. I'm heading the Energy Division, and I have 35 years of experience within the A.P. Møller - Maersk Group, by and large, with all the business units and all the functions of the group, and at least now having taken charge of Maersk Oil as well, then I also get a little bit experience with Maersk Oil. I have a very experienced team in the corporate team of Maersk Energy with Graham Talbot as the CFO, Mads Winther as the Head of Strategy and M&A, Christian Klegod as the Chief Legal Officer, and Jesper Madsen as the Chief Human Resource Officer. A very experienced team that does not only know Maersk and the Maersk Group, but also have strong experience from the industry.
I've chosen to focus on this slide here on the four business unit CEOs, because they have all been newly appointed over the course of the last couple of months. Gretchen Watkins took over the CEO role for Maersk Oil after having more than 2.5 years as the Chief Operating Officer, but before that, more than 20 years experience, mainly from BP and Marathon Oil. The developments in Maersk Oil over the last 2.5 years with the increased efficiencies and the cost reductions makes Gretchen Watkins an ideal, not CEO candidate anymore, but an ideal CEO. Jørn Madsen has taken over from me a month ago at Maersk Drilling. He comes straight from a position of Maersk Supply Service as CEO, and before that, vast experience from Maersk Drilling, more than 25 years, many of those as the Chief Operating Officer.
Also an ideal person to take further Maersk Drilling's drive for efficiency and customer service. In Maersk Supply Service, Steen S. Karstensen comes with more than 30 years experience from the A.P. Møller - Mærsk Group, mainly from procurement, but also from holding responsibilities from Maersk Maritime Technology and Maersk Oil Trading, thereby also good experience with the oil and gas industry. Last but not least, Christian M. Ingerslev has taken over Maersk Tankers. More than 50 years experience in Maersk Tankers from a variety of positions, and with his leadership, the Taking Lead strategy is bound to also pay off in the coming years. Now let me end with my last slide before Gretchen Watkins comes on to talk about Maersk Oil, just recapping.
What we are going to do in the Maersk Energy division is focus on maximizing shareholder value through an active ownership of the four business units, making sure that we perform to our level best in the coming years, at the same time as positioning us for the structural solutions that will eventually lead to the separation from the A.P. Møller - Mærsk Group. As already mentioned, tight capital discipline, growing Maersk Oil, limited investments in the other units, but focusing on making sure that all units come from a position of strength when we separate from A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S. Let me just say that I'm very passionate about the business units in the portfolio. It's an interesting industry we operate in. Also here, we are talking about a profit pool of between $1-$1.3 trillion in 2020.
I'm confident that we are in the right place to take part in the restructuring and consolidations in the industry. I look so much forward to, over the course of the next two years, to be able to provide a little bit more meat on the bone in terms of what we are actually going to do. This is still early days, so you'll have to wait for that.
Thanks, Claus. Good afternoon. It's good to be back again and a pleasure to speak with you again this year about Maersk Oil. Maersk Oil faces a time of great change, particularly when you think about the announcements that the group made a couple of months ago. We face that change with a strong foundation of both operational and financial performance, and I'm pleased to have a chance to talk to you about that today. We have a lot of confidence based on that track record about our future. If you leave with nothing else today, I'd like you to take four facts away from here with you. These are really what's underpinning our delivery over the last couple of years on our three pillar strategy.
First, we've seen a tremendous increase in our production efficiency over the last couple of years, actually from 82% to 90%, which is how much uptime our equipment experiences. Secondly, we've taken, as Claus mentioned, 30% of our operating costs out over the same time period, over 2 years. Thirdly, the first 3 quarters of this year, we've actually seen an 8% return on our investment, on our invested capital, and 13% in just the third quarter of this year. This sets us apart from our peers, and I'll show you some more details about that in a moment. Lastly, again, as Claus said, this is a business that Maersk wants to invest in and wants to see grow.
We plan to spend $1-$1.5 billion over the next few years, primarily aimed at our enviable portfolio of North Sea projects, which I'll also spend some time on in just a moment. I mentioned our three pillar strategy, and back in 2014 when we met at Capital Markets Day in September of that year, we were already in action. In advance of the oil price falling, we had taken a few actions at the beginning of that year. Namely, we had already scaled back on our exploration spend, we had reduced our exposure to deep water, and we had set an aggressive target for ourselves to take 20% of our operating costs out within two years' time.
In addition to that, we realized we really needed to set up a very clear and simple strategy to take us forward, and so that's what you see here today. The first pillar is about maximizing value from safe and reliable operations, and we like to think of this as our near-term cash engine. This is what generates the cash for us today. The second pillar is about world-class project delivery. This is. These are the projects that we plan to spend our capital on over the next few years, and we think of this again as our medium-term cash engine. What's gonna create the cash in 2019 and beyond? It's this pillar here. Then lastly, the third pillar is a little bit different maybe than you saw last time, but this is about creating our future.
Last year you heard us talk about big acquisitions, and while we did an acquisition last year in Kenya and Ethiopia, we are no longer looking at large scale acquisitions, but rather we're looking at opportunities to grow that leverage the capabilities that we have in pillar one and two in a bigger portfolio, but with a low capital type of application. That would point us towards mergers and joint ventures with a specific focus around the North Sea, which is really our heartland. Of course, all of this is underpinned by good cost and capital discipline. Before I dig into the strategy a little bit deeper, I'm just gonna share with you a little bit on our financials. If I can go forward. There we go.
This chart here in the blue bars shows our net result quarter by quarter over the last few years. The yellow line and bars there show the Brent oil price over the same time period. You can see that while around the turn of the year, we had a couple of quarters that were not in the black, we are now firmly back in profitability, and we anticipate a full year result in 2016 of a healthy profit there. This is not just a result of this creeping oil price. In fact, that's helped a little bit, but really this is the result of our focus on our strategy, executing on our focus on operating efficiencies.
The other thing to note here is that in third quarter of 2015, if you look at our profit there, we're actually $100 million more profitable in third quarter of 2016, and the oil price is actually lower. That proves the point there of our improving operating performance. Now this slide goes back to my very first slide, where I talked about return on invested capital of 8% over the first three quarters of this year. You can see it sets us apart not only by our peer group, other medium-sized E&P companies, but also the super majors as well. Again, I see this as the result of a relentless focus by the Maersk Oil team on executing that three pillar strategy. Now let's talk in a little bit more detail about that strategy.
Pillar one is really about maximizing value from safe and reliable operations, and our business begins and ends with safety. We aim to have everyone show up for work and go home from work in the same condition at every single day. It's not only aligned with our values, but actually it enables us to generate a very predictable result. It's actually very good business value as well. If you look at the chart on the left that shows a very typical oil and gas industry measure, total recordable incident frequency. Over the last three years, we've actually reduced that by 40%. That means that there is 40% fewer people being injured on our work sites today than there were three years ago.
On the same slide here on the right-hand side, you can see operating efficiency, and that's really, again, a measure of how much time our equipment is up and running. Over the same time period, we've improved that by 10%. The thing to remember here is that these barrels are almost free, I mean, come at a very low cost because they're about better maintenance and better predictability about how your equipment's going to run. Let's take this pillar one and apply it to our Danish business unit here. An example in the Danish North Sea is the Dan field, which started producing in 1972. Since it came on stream, it's actually produced about 700 million barrels of oil.
That's 15 times what we forecasted it would produce when we brought it on stream back in the early seventies. We've really looked at improving that production efficiency in two buckets. The first is around avoiding losses. How can we prevent this unplanned downtime through better maintenance, through better planning? The other thing is when we do shut down for planned maintenance, making sure that we plan it well, we execute it safely on time and on budget. The second tranche that we look at around production efficiency is about just enhancing our overall production potential. This could come through drilling wells in parts of the reservoir that haven't been completely accessed yet, or looking at our overall equipment and finding pinch points and debottlenecking those.
It also has to do with a really good understanding of how our reservoirs perform and how we can actually enable them to maximize their overall recovery. I'm gonna take another step deeper and show you a little bit about that. This is an example of, again, our Dan and Halfdan fields right here in Denmark. These fields are under what we call water flooding. If you see the shaded area there, that's actually where the oil is in the rock, right? We've got a water injection well where we pump water in, and that water actually sweeps the oil towards the producing well. When it sweeps it through, it actually recovers a lot more oil than if it was just producing under natural pressures.
The other thing to remember is just to kinda give you a sense of scale here. These wells are drilled from the seabed about 2 kilometers deep, and then they have horizontal sections to them that are about 9 or 10 kilometers long. They're only about 6 inches in diameter. We're way down deep below the surface, and we're dealing with very small areas here. What we've done is we've actually used what we call 4D seismic, which basically shows pictures of how well this water is flooding over time. We've noticed that over time, actually, fractures develop in the rock. You can see that little blue crack there. That's a fracture in the rock. When that happens, our water flood isn't nearly as efficient, right?
Because the water takes the path of least resistance, and we're not getting the good even flow through the rock. We just said, "Okay, how can we fix this? What’s the solution here?" We got together with a small company in Norway called CannSeal, and we innovated a way to actually inject epoxy and cement through the water injector, have it find that fracture and plug it up. Then we've restored the efficiency of this water flood. What we've done with this is we've actually improved the recovery by 10%-20% of just one well pair. If you think about that, over the course of a year, that's like 200,000 extra barrels that we wouldn't have had. It only cost us about $10 a barrel to do this.
That might sound like a lot, but if you think about drilling a whole new well in the Danish North Sea, that would probably cost you $35-$40 a barrel. Now you start to see when I say really low cost barrels, this is where the value is, particularly in these really mature fields that we're operating in Denmark and the UK. We plan to be able to apply this to 30 more well pairs, and if you sort of put that into revenue terms, $300 million in extra revenue just through this one innovative technique that we've developed. This gives you a sense of why I believe and Maersk Oil believes that we are a leader in operating mature fields in the North Sea. Good.
Now I'm really pleased to move on to pillar two because I have some exciting news that we haven't announced publicly until today. That is about our marquee project, Culzean, which is in the UK North Sea. This is a high-pressure, high-temperature project that you heard me talk about last year, actually. We had just sanctioned it when we had Capital Markets Day last year. We sanctioned it at $4.5 billion. Since sanction, we've actually taken $0.5 billion out of our overall capital spend. That has been done through a couple of different things. First of all, our project team has used a technique called batch drilling. We've actually drilled the top parts of the first six wells that will come on stream in 2019.
By drilling the top parts, which are fairly, technically, similar and not very complex, we've allowed the rig to actually learn quite quickly how to drill, these wells. It's a brand-new rig, and so there's a sort of a learning curve associated with that. They're now way ahead of schedule and under budget. The other thing we've done is we've invested quite a bit of time, and effort and money in upfront engineering, so front-end loaded this project significantly. Through doing that, as we move through execute, we're actually able to save money. That's how we've taken out, we've actually reduced the overall cost of this by 11%.
That brings the project break-even cost down to about $33 a barrel of oil equivalent, which if you look at today, what we think the gas price will be when this comes on in 2019 at $39, you see the value window that we have for this project. Maersk Oil operates this project. We have about 50% interest in this project. So this is one of our favorites. The other enviable project that we're a part of in the North Sea is the Johan Sverdrup project. This one is operated by Statoil. We have an 8.44% working interest. It too has been able to reduce its capital costs since sanction last year, and now is looking at a break-even project cost of about $25 a barrel.
Similar to Culzean, we expect this to come on in 2019. This pillar number two is about cash generation in the medium term. We have two other projects that I wanted to tell you a little bit about. First, slightly less mature, the Tyra Gas Field Redevelopment Project. That's the gas fields here in Denmark. We hope to be able to sanction this project in 2017. The gas fields are actually subsiding, and so we have the need to rebuild these. There's still quite a bit of hydrocarbons left in the ground. We have a planned project to do that. Now this is a big piece of the Danish infrastructure, and it's worth noting that actually 90% of all of Danish gas is processed through Tyra.
Just to put that into scale for you, it's enough to power 2 million homes. It is really a big asset for Maersk Oil, but also for the state, and one that's quite important to us. The last project that I'll touch on, I mentioned earlier we farmed into a 25% working interest in an outside-operated project in Kenya last year. This is slightly less mature. We actually still have 4 more exploration wells to drill in 2017, and we anticipate proving up more barrels through those. We're just starting to look at engineering to develop this. This is a good example of that third pillar, creating our future.
We'll always keep an eye out for long-term, low-cost barrels that will be ready for us in the future, and that's really what Kenya represents for us. We've taken all of the good efforts that you've seen in pillars one and two and translated them into a very competitive company. A good measure of how competitive an E&P company is, the overall break-even price. This is the price of oil at which we have basically a neutral result. If you look back in 2014, our break-even price was about $55-$60 a barrel. Fast-forward to today, and we're actually well under $40 a barrel break-even price. We've done this in a couple of different ways.
I mean, you've heard me talk about our operating efficiency, which has been a real focus for us in our operating businesses. Secondly, we have scaled back significantly on our exploration spend, and that will continue in 2017. Thirdly, we've taken 30% of our overall operating costs out of the system since we set this target back in 2014. I'm gonna take that one down a level deeper and talk about our operating costs. How have we done this? You can see by the chart, the blue bars there, we've taken not quite $1 billion out of our operating expenses in the last 24 months, and a couple of things that we've done to enable that.
First, we've reduced our head count overall across all of our businesses globally by about 25% over the last couple of years. We've taken advantage of the falling supplier prices by renegotiating contracts. Lastly, we've really honed in on how we maintain our equipment, which is an important thing to do anyway in mature fields. What we've also done is we've instituted something we call late-life asset management, where we now know very clearly when we're going to have to decommission fields, mature fields. We have a look at two, three, four, five years in advance, how much do we need to be spending on these fields when we know the end of field life is coming? A good example of that is the Janice Field in the UK.
We 3 years ago started reducing our costs on that because we knew end of field life was coming this year. In fact, we started the decommissioning process in the summer of this year. Over the course of the 3 years before that, we actually took 45% of our operating costs out of the Janice. We're gonna take this model, this late-life asset model, and apply it to other fields as we start to near end of field life. Like all E&P companies, we face some challenges that are worth flagging. First, we will leave Qatar in 2017, mid-July of 2017. This is a country where we have operated very successfully for the last 25 years.
Unfortunately, in June of this year, we found out that we were unable to renew our license. We submitted a very good technical bid. In the end, the commercial terms were not to our liking, and so we will be leaving in 2017. With that, 140,000 barrels a day comes out of our portfolio. What are we doing about that? Well, right now we're focusing on maximizing value through safe and reliable operations for the next 7.5 months. Of course, we're gonna make sure that we have a good handover when we leave there.
The second thing that I wanted to flag to you, and this kind of falls under our third pillar about creating the future, is that we have a portfolio that we're gonna be taking a hard look at and really using a couple of different criteria to screen to make sure that we've got businesses in our portfolio where we have line of sight to profitability and line of sight to scale. So where we have businesses that don't fit that or don't fit that criteria, you know, you may see some country exits along the way. Lastly, as you've heard, Claus and many of my other colleagues talk about, we will be pursuing growth but in a very low capital way.
While we still have $1 billion-$1.5 billion capital committed mainly to our major projects, our growth will be focused on mergers, joint ventures, particularly places where we can leverage the skills and competencies we have here in the North Sea. We're taking those strengths, those skills and competencies, and building them back into continuing to deliver in a very predictable way as we have year after year on the first two pillars of our strategy, maximizing value from safe operations and world-class project delivery. When we look to the future, again, you heard me talk about the structural solutions. We will also be looking at focusing our portfolio, and we will take a look at opportunities that look like gas to complement Culzean and the Tyra redevelopment project.
Certainly last but not least, we will start to prepare to look at standing on our own, as we separate from the group, either through a listing or through an IPO. We would look at ourselves as a peer to any mid-sized E&P company. I end where I started, with four key facts that are really the foundation of our overall delivery. First, we have improved on our overall operating efficiency over the last couple of years in a fairly robust manner. We've taken 30% of our operating costs out over the same time period, and we've delivered a return on invested capital of 8% in the first three quarters of this year.
All the while, we plan to continue to invest to grow this company, particularly on our North Sea portfolio projects to the tune of $1-$1.5 billion a year. This, of course, is grounded in a continued focus in sustainable cost and capital discipline. Thank you very much for your time. We have an exciting future in front of us and one where we have delivered substantially in a time of great uncertainty for our industry. I look forward to seeing you again. Thanks.
Welcome back to the last segment of the day. It's time to talk a little bit about financial targets and capital structure. You've heard about our strategy, and now we'll try to share what that means in terms of capital structure and what targets we set for ourselves. As you all know, we've had for quite a while a group A.P. Moller - Maersk group target of 10% return on invested capital.
Given the strategy or the structural changes that we have announced, separating out the energy businesses, many of them, managing them for shareholder value through active ownership, and on the transportation side, creating a new integrated pure play container shipping, ports, and logistics company, it does not really make much sense for us to have a group target anymore. We're setting the target, a dual target for the transportation and logistics businesses of delivering 8.5 percentage points of return on invested capital and growing the business at the same time. We're not setting any target for the energy businesses, except to say that we will do whatever the best we possibly can to put them in a strong position and to become valuable companies in their future.
I think the presentation by Gretchen Watkins demonstrated very well how strong a company Maersk Oil today is in generating double-digit returns at today's or actually at last quarter's much lower oil prices than where we are today. That's where we are on financial targets, Jacob.
Yeah. Thank you, Søren. We're separating out our company into two businesses, but we are still, until separation, one company. There's one thing that we share, and that's the debt of the company. We have recently seen a rise in the debt, but we are at a good starting point. We, in a historical setting, do not have high levels of debt at this point in time. I should say as an incoming CFO, I was extremely pleased to see the maturity, the amortization schedule that we have. We have a near perfect amortization schedule. It's very nice to have those things in place when you get into a period of time with major changes.
We have over the last years also by accessing the bond market, the last 3 years we have had a rating from Moody's and Standard & Poor's. We have always firmly been in the area of investment grade. We carefully track the 2 financial credit metrics here, and we have set some targets for it. Basically, it's all about that the credit rating for us means a lot. I realize we are not only shareholders in the room here, there are also bondholders. I think the key thing for us is we recognize where we are right now. We are at the cyclical bottom. Our financial performance this year is challenged.
We also recognize that some of the things which we think are hugely exciting, really good for our company, induces uncertainty into our company. We have actually taken quite a lot of time to think about how we should respond on that and in dialogue with our board as well. Søren, what are we gonna do with our credit rating?
Well, I guess what we would like to do is to send a very clear message today, and that is that we are committed as a group to remain investment grade rated. When we give that commitment, we're also saying that we are gonna defend a credit rating. We will do that in a number of ways. First of all, I think I hope that you come away today with a clear impression about our capital expenditures. We will work very hard on reducing our capital expenditures and also to the extent possible even consider reducing commitments that we have already made to the extent that it's necessary.
Secondly, in order to defend our investment-grade rating, if it becomes necessary, then of course we will also look at divestments and other cash flow-enhancing measures. We will also consider our investment-grade rating when it comes to the way and the timing of separation of the energy businesses. Finally, of course, we have our dividend policy. That is, of course, entirely up to our board. They will consider the dividend in line with our policy and we will disclose the results of those considerations in connection with the Q4 results as we always do.
We just, you have through the day heard a couple of the messages, and we are just trying to hang them together here at the end. The first thing, the thing that is something that really is in the hands of management is to be extremely disciplined around CapEx. You've seen the guidance for Transport & Logistics, you have seen the guidance from Maersk Oil, and here you have the aggregated guidance. We only guide until 2018 as at some stage, some separations will happen.
As stated earlier, we have quite a lot of commitments in 2017, so although the number for 2017 is high, it actually means that there will be barely, I mean, an absolutely minimum of new commitments and new CapEx undertaking, but we will take delivery of quite a lot of vessels, and we will invest significantly in the two great oil developments, Johan Sverdrup and Culzean. That's the one area where we will work hard. The other area, as Søren alluded to, is that we have a dividend policy that is very important to the company as well.
We're not changing the dividend policy, but if you read the dividend policy very carefully, you will see that yes, it's about increasing nominal dividend over time, but it has to be supported by underlying earnings growth. We have once before in 2009 reduced the dividend. The board has taken no decisions on where to propose what dividend to propose. We will do so, and it will be part of the Q4 disclosures. It's just important to say that we're very clear on that our first priority is our investment grade rating. Then, the final part, Søren just alluded to it, just think it a little bit like this is today we have a value in the Energy Division, and we will very, very carefully think about what structures are possible.
It will be again taken with the first priority of that the remaining company, A.P. Moller - Maersk, will remain investment grade rated, and therefore, some of the structures might depend on the balance sheet of A.P. Moller - Maersk, or it will depend upon the earnings and the cash flow development in the Transport & Logistics division. One very last thing here at the end. With those very clear separations out of businesses, obviously we will have to change the way we communicate to you. We will continue with the same reporting as we have done earlier in the fourth quarter, but from first of January next year, we will report out to you in the two divisions, Energy and Transport & Logistics. We have given some thought to how we should report the Transport & Logistics business.
I mean, we have been very clear in our communication back from September. It's one business with numerous brands. Ever since that, and since that, there seems to be coming one brand more to the family. We have also recognized that whereas we think the right thing for you is to look at our total bottom line, it's not the time to take details away in our disclosure. We will continue to disclose the bottom lines of Maersk Line, APMT, Svitzer, Damco, and actually we haven't done that before of Maersk Container Industry. I would like to say intentionally, if and when we prove the integration of the case, there will be a question mark longer term whether that makes a lot of sense.
Because in a way, whether we create synergies in APMT's bottom line or in Maersk Line's bottom line doesn't matter too much to the shareholder. It's about growing the combined bottom line. I think this was the final financial information. We're now happy to-