Thank you, Henrik, and welcome to everybody also from me. It's great to have so many here, and I hope we'll have a great day. We'll take you through an awful lot of PowerPoints today. I apologize for that, but we are quite a large number of businesses. This year, contrary to earlier events, we've decided actually to run you through all the businesses. The background for that is, of course, that it's not easy everywhere out in the markets at the moment. We're not going to try to persuade you that it's plain sailing and easy cruising.
It is, we are in very tough and difficult markets, but we hope during the day when you leave that you will leave convinced that we are running the ship as well as we can and that we actually see good opportunities during this time of high competition, but also plenty of opportunities we believe for a strong company. Let me start by just running you very quickly through what we've been doing over the last years. First and foremost, that has been talked about or not foremost, but first, one of the things that have been most discussed is, of course, the restructuring we've done on the core of the conglomerate over the last years. We've divested a large number of businesses, more than actually are on the screen here.
Some of them have been very easy because they've been loss-making, others have been so because they were marginal businesses where we didn't see a future. Some have actually been divested because we just didn't consider it within our core area. The net of this divestment program is that we got $11 billion out of it, which we have used for partly bringing down the debts, which in 2009 were close to $20 billion, and partly have done for reinvesting in our businesses. Sort of as the last major step, by the Q1 of this year, we also decided to separate Danske Bank out of the group.
As we didn't need the money, we essentially gave Danske Bank to our shareholders. We gave everybody the choice between buying getting shares or getting a dividend. It was entirely up to the shareholders what they wanted. All speculations on whether it was a good time or a bad time, as we sometimes see in the press, I think is pretty irrelevant because it was the shareholders' choice. I think the restructuring, we needed to get our restructuring finished for the group. That's where we are today. We have used a big part of the money of our cash flows over the last years to invest in our large businesses.
If you look at what is on the screen here, the Maersk Line volume has grown by more than 30% during the period. APM Terminals number of containers handled have grown also significantly, around 25%. We've tripled the Maersk Drilling fleet. And we also, in the last, and I admit that we're cheating on the years here, but in the last 3 years, after a number of years of investments, we have started to see growth in Maersk Oil's oil production. We have invested quite a bit of money in doing that, while we've also taken our debt level down.
We have not seen those growth figures in volume terms in what we actually handle translated into growth on the top line for the conglomerate, partly due to the divestments, but also partly because we've seen dropping container freight rates and recently also drop in the oil price, which of course has worked the wrong way on that. Essentially the underlying amount of business that we handle has been growing during the period. We've also gone through an extensive program to ensure competitiveness and ensure efficiency and productivity in our businesses.
The outcome is we measured and we sort of pursue it or follow it on this kind of analysis here, where we can say today we have seven out of our eight businesses are trading in the top quartile in the industries. We have three which are top quartile, but with lower returns, and we're working on that, of course. This is partly outside our control because that is where we see the effect of market fluctuation. Fortunately, we have four that the returns above WACC and also in the top quartile. We have Damco still in the red area.
We are expecting, as we've said before, Damco to deliver black figures this year, and we're seeing a good development in this direction, although it's too early to celebrate victory. Over a longer period, we've seen quite a nice development in profits, and this is underlying trading profit, excluding gains from before the crisis. Today, where we are, you can say in a new phase where everything in the market is under pressure. We're delivering $4 billion this year, or at least that is the guidance, so we'll see what comes out of it. We have gotten in a situation where the underlying operating earnings of the company are quite solid, and on a reasonably high level, we believe.
We have gone through the restructuring has paid off quite well. We've also, under the heading of becoming a premium conglomerate, we've also taken care to distribute part of the earnings to our shareholders. We've steadily increased the underlying payout, so the dividend has gone up over the last years. We are now distributing DKK 6.6 billion in normal dividend. That was this year. On top of that, we launched last year the first share buyback program on the back of a very strong balance sheet. This is the payout or the buyback, as you've seen that come on top of the normal dividends.
We have, of course, announced now that we'll buy back also this year, so that will eventually come on top. This is actually only what we've spent so far. To the right, we show the extraordinary dividend payout or payout of Danske Bank, so to speak, $37 billion paid out this year. We think we've been quite fair in sharing the value creation with our investors. Maybe I should say that we realize, of course, that we only pay out around 30% of the underlying profits in dividends. That of course reflects the fact that we do believe that there are many interesting long-term investment opportunities in the company.
Our work, we feel, has paid off. If we compare the figures here to 2009, and I'll come to it in a minute why we picked 2009. It's not just because it's the lowest point in our earnings, but it could have been a good guess. The underlying earnings of the company are up from a -$0.5 billion- $2.5 billion or $2.4 billion. Our net debt compared to 2009, down from $19 billion - $9 billion, which means that we are in a pretty strong position to spend money with higher earnings and less debt.
Our share price, if we take the liberty of including Danske Bank payout, is more or less double of what it was back in 2009 this time of year. If we look at the underlying profitability of the different businesses, actually the composition has come out a little bit different than we expected, when we launched the strategy in 2009 for the good reason that Maersk Line is making much more money than we expected, and fortunately, also much more than back in 2009. Maersk Oil is down a bit due to the oil price and also lower oil production. APM Terminals, Maersk Drilling, and other shipping services is all in good development.
A much stronger group than five years ago or six years ago. The reason, this is the reason why we picked 2009 as the comparison figure, because actually the container rates are below the rates we had at the low point in 2009. Many of you have of course seen that from your own analysis. Pretty dramatic figures. We also have an oil price, which is not quite at the level of the lowest level in 2009, but it's very, very close, and it's been there over a longer and extended period of time, which is of course worrying, especially as we don't know when it will leave this low point.
The effect of the low oil price has also been that the oil services are seeing declining demand. In the industries where we compete, we are pretty much in a 2009 situation. We are, as I just alluded to before, in a completely different situation as a company. We're very competitive, we have a strong balance sheet, and we make quite a lot of money, depending on the definition of a lot of money. We make very good returns during this downturn. We actually ready, we believe, to use this downturn in a much more constructive way than we could in 2009. We'll do the same as we did in 2009. We will deliver on cost reductions in the areas where it's possible.
In particular, the oil business and the oil-related businesses have all embarked on cost saving exercises. With Maersk Line and APM Terminals, it's really an ongoing effort that we've gotten used to over a long time. Because we have to realize that market competitiveness is crucial, and it has to be, and we have to be competitive in all our businesses because that is what sums up to a strong conglomerate business. We also last year actually did maintain a reasonably high investment level during the crisis. We were never in a situation where we had to do things which were, you can say, working against our customers or taking our eyes off the long-term view, but we did have to put the brakes on to a certain extent. This time we will continue with all our normal growth investments.
We've just published or got approved two big oil investment projects in the North Sea, one in U.K. and one in Norway. Jakob and his team will talk about that. We also, at the beginning of the year, published that we would invest in a big terminal project in Ghana and so on. We are doing all the normal growth investments that we need, buying ships and so on and so forth. We also published in the strategy update, and I'll come back to that later. We did say that we're also ready to invest enough to increase or grow the market share in Maersk Line.
That doesn't mean that we have any intention of throwing the container market into a price war, but we have an intention of defending our leadership position. As we see that some are being reluctant to invest, we need to make sure we invest our share of whatever free capacity or market there is that's available, so we don't lose out in the long term. We've said that we will also look at M&A opportunities. This is, of course, something that we've done before. We believe now that with the way our companies are run, that we are actually ready to take over and integrate businesses in the areas where we think there are good opportunities.
Doesn't mean that we'll go out and buy in other business areas, but we do believe that within the areas where we're active today, that there are actually interesting opportunities. We've talked about oil, and we published an APM Terminals deal yesterday. Also in innovation, we're not going to talk a lot about that today. We are working on innovation, and historically this has been done mainly to reduce cost or give better customer service. We would like to see some of it turning into growth. This is of course a very long-term way to grow a business.
Before I end, I'll just give you a very quick just a little bit of wording or color to the strategy update that we sent out in connection with the half year account, where we, as you probably all recall, took out absolute targets from all business units. Maersk Line actually never had absolute targets. They had relative targets. We will keep those relative targets, so that means it's still the ambition of us to have a margin in the business that is five percentage points above the average of the industry. We've proven we can do that, and of course, we don't want to let go of that. We want to add one little twist to it, that now we also want to grow ahead of the market.
We still want to finance that with Maersk Line's own cash flow. Basically better maybe, or the same, but a little bit more, probably, to the ambitious side. Maersk Oil, we took out the 400,000 barrels of oil by 2020. Does that mean that we've given up on it? No. We also always said that it had to be profitable, and with an oil price of $45 or $50, you have to develop a different strategy than you have at the $120 or $110. Therefore, we've taken the target off, and we'll see where we get to, but we are very keen to take opportunities for acquiring.
We have ambitions to grow, but where it will end, we don't know at the moment. APM Terminals, we took away the absolute profit target of $1 billion in 2016 on the back of problems in earnings in the oil-producing countries where volumes have gone down. Also because we had invested less over the last years than we envisioned. We still expect APM Terminals to become a $1 billion profit business in the foreseeable future. We just did not want to keep the timing. In Maersk Drilling, the situation is of course very hard to predict at the moment. Surely the drop in the oil price will put pressure on that business for quite a long time.
In addition to that comes that we also stopped investing in speculative rigs back in 2012, as we actually foresaw that we would have a drop in the oil price. We didn't, we haven't ordered a speculative rig since 2011. For those two reasons, I think it's very unrealistic to expect the short term or midterm result above $1 billion in Maersk Drilling. What we have to do here is utilize and to the best possible extent the modern and new drilling rig fleet that we have. In the shipping service, we took away also the $500 million target for 2016. It's still our ambition to grow this business to above $500 million dollars a year.
We can't say at what time, because of course, here Maersk Supply Service has been impacted badly by the drop in oil price, and therefore, we took away that target. Overall, the reason for taking the targets out are that we are conglomerate, and we want to make sure that we deliver on the overall, ambitions of the conglomerate, which is good returns, above 10%, and it is growth, and it is a healthy development, as I alluded to before. We, on the overall level, we're not becoming less ambitious, and we're actually also not becoming less ambitious on the different business units, but we just want to have the freedom to invest where we find it most appropriate.
all in all, and this is my last slide, all in all, what this ends up with is that we think that we have proven that we are able to deliver top quartile performance. That is something that we'll continue to focus very strongly on, because if we don't deliver top quartile performance, then we cannot deliver long-term healthy organic growth. Our businesses in general, with a few exceptions, are not based on, okay, we don't grow by leveraging the assets up 10x. If we wanna double the number of containers we ship, we need the double amount of containers and double amount of ships. It is, we need the money to invest if we want to grow.
We have we can generate that with the top quartile performance. What is new is that we talk quite openly about acquisitions. I think we, again, it's a logical consequence. It's a good way to create growth if you feel you can integrate. We do believe that we have successful business models within our industries, and that we're able to integrate the new businesses. As I said before, we've done one in APM Terminals. We've done acquisitions there before, usually successful, at least from an integration point of view. We've also said that we're looking in the oil area where we believe that the timing is good, provided that sellers come down and accept the new oil price reality. We're not going to buy at the bottom and pay premium prices for assets.
We have to have realistic pricing. Then, as I said before, innovation, just to show that we are stepping up investments in this area, but this is very long-term. Thank you very much. With that, I will pass over to Trond.
Thank you very much, Nils. I'll take you further in the sort of the numbering part of the development that Nils has just alluded to. Just take you through the first half. We're delivering very good numbers first half this year with an underlying result of $2.5 billion or $2.4 billion. Totally, I think that delivery part, the first half year, this was very good. The return on ROIC on 12%, and we have a cash flow conversion that is also following the trends that we had earlier. The operating cash flow the first half year were $3.7 billion. We're spending, if you exclude the Danske Bank transaction, approximately the same amount all in CapEx.
We're spending approximately $3.5 billion. That leaves an operating or net operating net cash flow of basically close to zero, but 200 million in plus. Then, of course, we have the Danske Bank transaction that comes out of it of $5.2 billion in this. That of course affects the cash flow picture. Underlying numbers are very good delivery on Maersk Line of $1.2 billion. Maersk Oil better than expected relative to fairly good pricing of oil, at least relative to the market as we see it now in Q2 . And a few reversals coming then to the 400 level. Terminals, slightly lower than expected on 334.
Drilling, very good uptime and also having all the rigs in operation at $390 million. Shipping services doing well, Damco being stabilized and tankers making money, and that means that they are actually delivering a good $200 million. All in all, a very good first half of the year. If we then look at the consistent financial performance. Over a period of time, we have focused more and more on the return requirement. I think we see good results from that in the first half year. If you look at all our businesses are close to or above the 10% level. If you see the second column, you see that the delivery in the first half were basically everything from shipping services and upwards, basically delivering the 10% return.
In this environment, we actually think that this is very good. We also see that some of our volatility as has been large earlier is slightly limited now, and we see that the volatility elements in our businesses comes or is slightly lower. As a result of that, we see good progress on the return requirement. All in all, we're very satisfied with the development so far this year. It's also the trend line that we have seen that we basically have seen that the return has come upwards as a result of the trend lines that also Nils showed.
If you then come to the cash conversion and our ability to actually convert the earnings to cash, you see that our cash conversion over the period of time, or basically $50 billion of the five since 2009, is fairly high, and it's fairly consistent relative to the earnings that we have produced. Some elements, of course, there are timing elements, year-end and so forth, with some working capital and taxes and so forth. Overall, it's a very good cash conversion. In addition, we have the investments of approximately $17 billion. Of course, those two elements of basically $66 billion over that period of time have been the major part of us having the ability to strengthen our financial flexibility as we have it right now.
If you then go to the growth investments, you see that we have had a level of investments over the period of time, topping with 2011, with almost $11 billion, and then basically going slightly down to around the same level of operational cash flow over the period. First half this year, $3.9 billion, and the DKK 6.6 billion comes as a result. That's the dividend, but that dividend comes as a result of the Danske Bank exceptional element. You see the increase to $1.8 billion on distribution of last year. That is also the combination of dividend and buyback. All in all, the cash flow is reinvested in growth. I'll come back to the allocation. That has resulted in a debt reduction. The debt has come down.
In 2009, the net debt was about $18 billion. Now we're just short of $9 billion. Of course, a lot of that cash, operating cash flow and the divestment money has been used to reducing the debt side. As also Nils mentioned, we last week introduced or started the second share buyback program of approximately $1 billion. We are continuing sharing the value creation in addition to fulfilling our main goal, and that is to develop the growth company. If we then look at the capital allocation. Since 2009, we see that the capital allocation have been directed towards the companies or the parts of the business units where we have said it would.
You see that all the increase in invested capital have been on drilling, terminals, oil, and line. Damco is there percentage-wise, but if you look to the left and look at the numbers, they don't sort of contribute that much. The reason for being there is really two acquisitions that has been done in this period. If you look at the bottom line, you see that the other business and Dansk Supermarked, the other business is a lot of smaller businesses having been sold, and also the Danske Bank share and then Dansk Supermarked being fully exited. All in all, we do think that the approach that we have relative to have very solid cash flow from operations, we are reinvesting to focus on growth.
We are doing the capital allocation that we have said in the direction to the business unit we want to grow in. Basically, you can see that from the progress that we have had so far. That was basically my statement. Just to revisit our guidance of 2015, we gave our guidance after or at the point of delivering the Q2 . Our guidance is that we see that we expect to deliver an underlying result of around $4 billion.
Our presentation will be, not surprisingly, heavily influenced by what we have seen in the market over the last year, halving our product price, which has influenced every part of our organization, every asset, every project, and of course, every employee. I have on stage today with me Graham Talbot, our Chief Financial Officer, and Gretchen Watkins, our Chief Operating Officer, to help me out. I will start, and let us just dive directly into the presentation. In the Q2 of this year, Maersk Oil produced 306,000 barrels a day of oil equivalents. That is 30% up over the same quarter last year.
A pretty significant increase due to improved operational efficiency, new projects coming on stream, and also a higher share of the production from Qatar due to the dropping oil price, where the production sharing agreement gives us a higher share. We do foresee, if we look a little further out in the future, that we'll continue growing. It will be a nonlinear growth. We will have shutdowns, maintenance turnarounds on our assets, and we will have projects coming online in chunks. The growth rate is not going to be, I have to say, 30% year-over-year every time. We maintain our guidance for the year at 285,000 barrels a day, and that is still a significant increase compared with 2014.
We have recently added close to 300 million barrels of oil equivalents to our reserve space. A substantial increase of our reserve space from sanctioning the two projects, Johan Sverdrup in Norway and Culzean in the U.K. sector. Of course, as a result of the market, we have started a major cost saving campaign, driving costs out of our operations, and we have cut back around $1.7 billion to date. We are heading for an operating cost reduction of around 10% towards this end this year and our target of 20% reduction by the end of 2016.
If we look a little closer, we have seen a much stronger operational performance over the last period of time, especially in our U.K. assets. We have brought three new fields on stream, Jack in the U.S., Golden Eagle in the U.K., and Tyra Southeast in Denmark. All these three projects have been brought on stream on time, on budget, and are performing in accordance with the expectations. That is satisfactory. Then we have sanctioned, as I said, Culzean and Johan Sverdrup. Despite the headwinds in the market, we have robust projects that are sanctioned with even at when the prices are under pressure.
We are continuing with our cost program, and it's clear that if the oil price and the gas price stay low, we will have to do more than we have started off now, but we are well underway. The Qataris, Qatar Petroleum announced earlier this year that they are going to tender for the extension of the operation of the Al Shaheen field in Qatar. We will participate in that tender. We are making our preparations. Unfortunately, since this is a competitive tender, I can't tell you a whole lot about it today.
I'm sure you have loads of questions, but unfortunately, we can't really comment on it as it is. Our presentation today, I will talk a little bit about the market trends that we see and how we respond to them. Graham Talbot will talk about how we optimize our financial performance in the current environment. Gretchen Watkins will tell you about operations performance and our project delivery. At the end, I'll come back and give you a little bit of our view into the future and how we are gonna keep growing despite the challenging market. On the left-hand side of this slide, you have the well-known.
With yellow, the well-known oil price curve that was hovering around $110 a barrel until approximately mid-last year, where it plummeted down to the current level of around $50 a barrel. Nothing new in that. We have EIA supply and demand curve as well in the two bluish colors, and you can see a simple reason why the oil price dropped. Basically the supply outstripped the demand. There had been plenty of oil in the market, in our view, until then. The supply completely outstripped the demand at the time. When you look forward on EIA's prediction, you can see that the supply-demand gap is forecast by EIA to narrow in the coming year. We still see major uncertainties, especially around China's growth.
OpEx response, notably when Iran starts coming into the market again. Of course, the resilience of the U.S. unconventionals that so far have held up quite well in their production, despite the dropping prices. All in all, we do foresee a period of time, where the prices will be under pressure, 18 months-24 months, and then we foresee a recovery of the prices, after that. Of course, the entire industry has responded. There's a few sound bites on the left-hand side of this slide. Some of the key actions taken is major project cancellations, especially of high-cost projects, deferrals, mothballing, major cost-cutting, redundancy programs, big impairments taken by a number of companies, especially in the U.S., onshore arena, but also elsewhere.
There has been quite a pressure on the supply chain as well, renegotiating, and canceling, contracts. A lot of other reactions as well, but these are some of the main reactions. We are slightly different. That doesn't mean that we haven't reacted, that we just lean back. In last year, we talked about our outlook for a softening oil price, going forward, and we actually did adjust our strategic approach to the outlook of a dropping oil price. Now, that doesn't go to say that we had expected that it would happen as quickly and as deeply as it did. At least we had started looking at our portfolio and saying, what do we do to prepare for a bearish market?
We are at advantage by the fact that some of our mega projects, like Culzean and Johan Sverdrup, are now sanctioning in a deflated supplier market where we can actually take major advantage of lower prices in the yards, much less pressure in the supply chain. Our core portfolio of producing assets is strong, creates value even at low oil prices. We have a good cost curve in our portfolio, and we have limited exposure to high-cost asset. The obvious exception is Chissonga in Angola that is under real pressure and where we are going through the motions of improving that project. At the current oil price, it's basically not economic to sanction it. Finally, we are part of the A.P. Moller - Maersk Group, of course.
As you can hear, we are financially strong, which does enable us to make counter-cyclical move and invest through the cycle. Both Johan Sverdrup and Culzean are good examples of investments. Now, as I said, that doesn't mean that we have not reacted to the dropping oil price. On the right-hand side, you can see some of our responses. We talked about the OpEx program, and we'll talk more about that later. We have through optimizations and also mothballing capital projects that don't make sense in the current market. We have shaved $1.3 billion off our capital expenditures this year.
Our unit operating costs have decreased by 33% in our producing assets, both because we have managed to improve our operational efficiency, increasing the production, but also because we can see the effect of our cost program on the operating costs coming down. We have unfortunately had to reduce our workforce. So far, we have reduced by 600 positions in total. We have another 200 that will be added from the recent announcement that we will close down the Janice field in the U.K. We are, of course, constantly monitoring and see what we have to do going forward. Then we are actively managing our portfolio to reduce our exposure to high-cost barrels, like for example, the Janice field in the U.K.
On the growth side, we are still working on sustaining and growing our reserves and resource base. We have shifted our focus more to the inorganic side. We believe that this is an opportune time for inorganic moves, whereas the exploration market is still challenged. We'll talk a bit more about that later. Our overall strategic frame remains the same. We are maximizing the value and the recovery from our existing assets in Denmark, U.K., and so on, through operations excellence and through driving down costs. We are delivering the projects that will give us the medium-term growth. Three projects online during the last year, two sanctioned, and more to come. Then finally, we will sustain and build our reserve space through organic, but in the coming years, primarily inorganic, growth.
Of course, this will all be leaning heavily on our ability to sustainably reduce our cost and stay competitive in the current environment. All in all, we have seen production growth over the last year. We have seen that our cost programs are delivering results, and we are heading towards a 10% reduction of our operating cost at the end of the year. We have a really robust starting point with advanced barrels in our current portfolio. Projects that can be sanctioned even at lower prices. We are well positioned to take advantage of the market with counter-cyclic moves. With these words, I would like to leave the stage to Graham Talbot. Graham?
Thanks, Jakob. I'd like to start by reiterating our financial ambitions. As Jakob points out, the market is difficult at the moment and requires some specific interventions. That being said, our overall financial ambitions remain largely unchanged. Firstly, around cost management, we have initiated a very ambitious cost reduction program targeting a reduction of 20% in our operating costs by the end of 2016. In conjunction with that, we're also screening our overall project portfolio to look for opportunities to reduce both the capital costs, but also the timing of those projects through either delaying or canceling various projects. Overall, as Jakob said, we managed to reduce our capital forecast, and cost forecast for 2015 by $1.7 billion.
In relation to our return on invested capital, we have previously said that we strive to achieve a minimum of a 10% return on our invested capital. That remains unchanged. We appreciate that that will be difficult in the current environment, both with the volatile oil price, but also with the nature of our own investment program where we've got some fairly heavy capital investment in the near term. That being said, we believe we can deliver 10% through the cycle. In relation to capital expenditure, we believe the capital profile to mature our major projects over the next few years will require investment of between $2 billion and $4 billion per annum. Included in that forecast is our Chissonga project in Angola.
That's currently pre-sanctioned, so depending on the timing of that project, that'll determine whether we're at the upper or lower end of that range in any particular year. As Jakob mentioned, with the sanctioning of two of our major projects in the North Sea, Culzean and Johan Sverdrup, we've now booked additional 2P reserves of close to 300 million barrels of oil equivalent. Going forward, you know, we plan to continue building our reserves base, both through exploration and also through acquisitions. If I now turn to our financial performance. Over the last five years, Maersk Oil has made a very significant contribution to the group profitability. Even in the current difficult markets, we have produced a profit in excess of $400 million. You'll notice that we've excluded impacts of impairments and also gains and losses on divestments.
When we look at that over the five-year period, we've contributed over $7 billion in profit to the group. Clearly going forward, this is going to be very much impacted by the oil price environment. Even at today's current prices, we're still forecasting a positive return to the group, although it's not gonna be as big as it was in 2014, and that's based on an oil price between $55-$60 per barrel. Our entitlement production story is very positive growth story. As Jakob mentioned, between 2013 and 2014, we've grown our production by some 7%. Yes, it's off a fairly low base and, but this is still very competitive compared to our peer group.
With our current forecast for 2015, which is an average of 285,000 barrels a day for the full year, that would give us an extra 13% increase over 2014. These are quite material increases in production and put us far ahead of most of our peer group. As Jakob mentioned, if you look at it quarter-on-quarter, that's a 30% increase, and unfortunately, we will not be able to repeat that year-on-year. Our growth in production, which we still do forecast, will be nonlinear. A couple of our big projects that you're very familiar with, namely Culzean and Johan Sverdrup, they're both due to deliver towards the end of this decade. You know, as we get to the sort of 2019, 2020, we'll start to see a kick up in production from those projects.
Historically, Maersk Oil has delivered very strong return on invested capital. We have a very enviable production profile with low lifting costs and also fairly light, investment. Even in the current environment, we still continue to return double-digit returns on our invested capital, albeit not at the same levels as it was last year. This is primarily impacted by the oil price. Even in the current low oil price environment, we're still beating our competition. As I mentioned, going forward, this is gonna be challenging. Quite, simply, we're gonna be investing some major amounts of capital over the next few years maturing our big projects, but we're not gonna see revenues coming in from those until later in the decade. Therefore, that makes some of the other actions we're taking around cost transformation even more imperative because that'll help us deliver these returns.
We continue to have very strict capital discipline when it comes to allocating capital and managing our portfolio. We have to balance our capital risk together with value delivery. As mentioned by Jakob, once we've gone through a rescreening of our portfolio in the current oil price environment, we've actually reduced our investment program for this year by about $1.3 billion-$1.4 billion. Going forward, we expect to invest around $2 billion-$4 billion per annum, as I mentioned, and this is down from the $3 billion-$5 billion that we communicated previously. We've also been able to use the current market environment to improve the economics of some of our projects.
Key examples for that are Chissonga in Angola, which we're currently optimizing in this softer oil price environment, which allows us to access better supply chain. Also, we reduced the costs on Culzean by sanctioning it into a lower price market as well. Our cost transformation program is really focused on improving our profitability, but also positioning Maersk Oil for growth in a low oil cost environment. This is a non-negotiable imperative throughout the whole organization and is being run as one global program. The target for this is to deliver a 20% reduction on our 2014 operating costs by the end of 2016. That equates to about $560 million.
Based on where we are today, and our current forecasts, I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver at least our 10% for 2015, which will set us up very well for delivering on our full target by the end of 2016. The program itself is sort of oriented around four main work streams. The first one's around portfolio management, which we've touched on a few times already. Two aspects to that. One is actually the process of reviewing and managing your portfolio, which leads to a lot of the decisions we've been talking about. But the other piece is putting in place tools and processes that enable us to do much more active, program and project management, on a shorter term cycle, which is necessary in the current oil environment. One of the other work streams is around organization and process.
As Jakob mentioned, we have reduced our headcount by around 600 positions already throughout the program. There's some more to come on that going forward. This work stream is also looking quite strongly at simplification and new ways of working. That takes a little bit longer to sort of see the impact of, but the early indications of that are quite encouraging as to the delivery. Procurement and supply chain, sort of one of the obvious areas to tackle. So far, we've renegotiated over 250 of our major contracts, and that's delivered considerable value for us, and we've just initiated a global supply chain optimization project. Cost performance. This piece is really more about cost culture, for want of a better word.
This is around making sure that we have the right level of transparency around our costs and that we have our cost targets and budgets actively locked into scorecards and into individual performance contracts to ensure delivery. That's just really hard wiring the performance all the way through to the individual deliverers and owners of the budgets. Overall, we're doing pretty well on this program, but we've clearly got quite a bit of work to do still. In summing up, I'd like to leave you with a few key messages. Firstly, Maersk Oil continues to deliver material profits to the Maersk Group, even in the difficult oil price environment we're currently in. Although we're very strict on our capital discipline, we are continuing to invest in major value-creating projects throughout the oil cycle.
We have delivered material increases both in production and in terms of maturation of our reserves portfolio. We have taken immediate and decisive action in response to the market, which is putting us well on the way to developing a competitive and sustainable cost base upon which to grow our business. In summary, Maersk Oil continues to deliver. On those final words, I want to thank you for your attention and hand you over to our Chief Operating Officer, Gretchen Watkins.
Thank you. Good morning. It's good to see you all this morning. I'm gonna spend a few minutes talking to you about 2 key strategic focus areas for us that are critical for us to have strong foundations in place in order to position ourselves for successful growth. Those are operational excellence and major project delivery. We're very pleased to be able to show good progress underpinning these key strategic focus areas. Today, we operate a safer business with more production and lower costs than a year ago. We have also brought through 3 major projects to first oil as planned on time and on budget within the last 12 months. We've recently sanctioned 2 new major projects, actually mega projects, North Sea mega projects, and just in the last month, have received government approvals for both of these.
These are Johan Sverdrup in Norway and the Culzean project in the U.K., operated by Maersk Oil. As you've heard, we continue to invest through this oil cycle and have taken advantage of the soft market conditions in order to reduce our overall capital investment required for these projects, thereby improving our returns. I plan to spend a little bit of time on each one of these for the next few minutes. Maersk is active in 11 countries around the world. We have exploration in seven different countries and in fact have drilled seven exploration wells so far this year. While we continue to hold back on our overall exploration investment, we are in the process of working to replenish and refresh our exploration portfolio from a growth perspective. We have major development projects in nine countries.
Of particular note, the two projects I mentioned earlier in the North Sea, Johan Sverdrup, which is one of the five biggest North Sea oil discoveries ever in history, and Culzean, which is a high pressure, high temperature gas project operated by Maersk Oil, discovered by us, and we'll spend a little bit of time, particularly on Culzean in just a few moments. We operate in four countries around the world. Right here in Denmark, we actually operate about 85% of all oil production produced here in this country, 97% of all gas production, which makes us a key part of the overall national energy infrastructure. We also have a production rate of about 65,000-70,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day net to Maersk Oil.
On a gross basis, it's about 200,000 barrels of oil a day. In the U.K., we have a great story to tell. Over the last 12 months, our production has increased dramatically from a couple of standpoints. First, we've had some new projects come on stream, Golden Eagle in particular. We've drilled some new wells in mature fields, showing that we will continue to invest in mature fields because there's still a lot of value left in them. We've also really improved how we operate our mature assets in the U.K., improving our overall production by quite a healthy margin, and we'll talk a bit more about that in detail. Lastly, we have 4 non-operated investments in various countries around the world.
Of particular note, Algeria, which delivers very high value, low cost barrels to us in the order of about 35,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day net to Maersk Oil. Safety is not only aligned with us, with our corporate values, but it also creates good business value because it allows us to deliver a predictable result, a predictable business result. You can see over the last five years, we actually have greatly reduced 66% the number of work site injuries that we have at our workplace. This is a lost time injury frequency chart, and what that is is really just a metric that our industry uses very frequently to measure the number of people that are injured on our work site. That's really about personal safety.
We also, of course, look at process safety, and process safety really is about keeping the hydrocarbons contained in the system. We look at that through several different lenses, from designing good systems, to building them, to operating our equipment well, all the way to making sure that we have leaders on our site that are capable and competent to make good safety decisions and be good safety leaders. These two areas will continue to be a key strategic focus area for us going forward. You've heard that our production growth has continued over time. If you look at Q2 of last year to Q2 of this year, we've seen a very strong 30% growth in production. Several things have contributed to that.
I think the company is most pleased that our mature assets have actually started delivering more barrels. When you have mature assets that deliver more, it's generally creating a lot of value 'cause they're pretty low cost barrels to bring on stream. Secondly, we have had some new projects come on stream in the U.K., in the United States, and then thirdly, we've got a little bit of oil price effect in there from Qatar, so we have a little bit more barrels coming through while the oil price is low. Going forward, you'll see that we'll have improved our production full year, not by 30%, but by about 14% full year 2014 to full year 2015.
Still a very healthy production increase, but the reason it's a little bit different is in the summer months, right now, in the early autumn, we have a lot of our planned maintenance shutdowns. We're actually in the process of shutting down many of our fields and doing planned maintenance. That's why you see the full year increase is a little bit less than that, but still a healthy 14%. You've heard me mention operations excellence, and I'm just gonna spend a moment kind of talking to you about what that's about. Our base production will be declining and is declining, as typical oil fields do, somewhere between 15%-25%, depending on the field, every year.
In order for us to counteract that effect, that decline effect, we do a couple of things. First, we drill new wells. We've actually drilled some infill wells, we call those infill wells, in our mature fields, particularly in the North Sea, but also in Qatar. We've brought some new production on through that method. The other thing we've done is we've really focused on honing in on where are we having unplanned downtime on our assets, and how can we either eliminate that or greatly reduce that. Through that kind of activity, we can actually add about 10% more barrels. These barrels are typically kind of on average about $20 per barrel cheaper to bring through the system than if you went out and drilled a new well.
When I say low cost, it's really low cost. We spend a lot of time working on this. Some of the reasons why you've seen our production growth so healthy last year to this year is due to this. I'm just gonna give you an example of a real live asset in the U.K. This is an FPSO or a floating production storage operation called GP3 or Global Producer III. In May of last year, it was producing about 16,500 barrels per day. In May of this year, it was producing 30,500 barrels per day.
An 85% increase, some due to some new wells, but a large portion of that due to us recognizing that we had a lot of downtime on our compressors, and fixing that so that we don't have that downtime anymore, and also debottlenecking the system so that we can actually push more barrels through by running two compressors at the same time versus just one. Sounds simple, but it isn't as simple all the time, but a lot of value created here. I can tell you since May, we've got even more production going through this asset than you see on the chart there. While we have improved our overall production, we've also brought our costs down.
Some of that, of course, is because we've got more barrels going through the system, but we've also taken some real, made some real clear decisions that has helped us, deliver 33% lower unit costs last year to this year. We do believe that that's a sustainable cost reduction. Some of the things we've done is we've renegotiated contracts. You heard Graham mention 250. Just to give you a sense of what that looks like, we have an ongoing wells program in Denmark. We have renegotiated a number of contracts associated with that. Going forward, it looks like we're actually gonna take 40% of our costs out over the next three years on that particular program, just to give you a sense of the scale there.
We have prioritized our work, and at the same time, we've looked at reducing our overall position. 600 positions have been eliminated in the first part of this year, with another 200 coming, particularly associated with Janice in the U.K. Just, that's a good link into this portfolio management system that we're basically implementing now. We had been doing it on an annual basis. We're doing it much more rigorously now. Just to understand where do we have assets that are at the brink of or going to become uneconomic to continue to operate. The Janice asset is an asset in the U.K. It's been operating for several decades. When it was actually brought on stream, it was anticipated to end its field life in 2010.
Through prudent reservoir management, through good operations excellence, we've actually extended the life of that asset from 2010 for an extra five or six years. At this point in time, we recognize that next year it will become uneconomic, and we will stop producing there. Again, we'll bring our costs down through that activity. Now I'd like to talk to you a little bit about our major projects delivery. For those of you that were here with us last year, you'll remember that we promised that we were gonna bring on 3 major projects on stream to first oil between then and now. I'm pleased to say that we have done that on time and on budget. First, you'll see the Golden Eagle project in the U.K.
When that's at full plateau, we see it contributing about 20,000 barrels of oil equivalent net to Maersk Oil. Secondly, Jack, which is a deepwater Gulf of Mexico development, came on stream at the end of last year in the Q4 . When it's at full plateau, will deliver about 8,000 barrels of oil equivalent net to Maersk Oil. Then thirdly up there, Tyra Southeast, which came on as planned on time and on budget in the Q1 of this year. Again, a great opportunity to recognize that there's still quite a bit of value left in our mature fields in Denmark in particular. We continue to invest there and create value. At full plateau, this will deliver about 4,000 barrels of oil equivalent net to Maersk Oil.
In the bottom row there, you see first, Chissonga, which you've heard us talk about before. Chissonga is a deepwater Angola oil development. As a lot of companies have struggled with these types of developments, these deepwater developments in particular, in the downward oil price environment that we're in, we are no different. What we're working on right now is looking, can we reduce our overall capital investment? Can we improve our returns? We will not sanction this project until we have a positive return on our investment. The next one, Johan Sverdrup, again, a mega project in the North Sea. It is one of the top five discoveries ever in the entire North Sea.
When it comes on stream towards the end of this decade, it will deliver about 25% of all of Norway's oil production. It is really huge. We received government approval just in the last month to sanction that. Last, but certainly not least, the Maersk Oil operated Culzean high pressure, high temperature gas project. This is in the U.K. Just last week, we were able to announce that the U.K. government had sanctioned and given final approval for this development, and this will be on stream at the end of the decade, also 2019 we anticipate. I'm just gonna spend a couple minutes, don't go to sleep on me, but I'm gonna show you a video while I talk to you a little bit more about Culzean.
Discovered in 2008 by Maersk Oil, Culzean is located about 260 kilometers due east of Aberdeen. A $4.6 billion investment will take us through the first stage of development, and that includes our top side platforms that you see here, as well as our subsurface wells. If you go down below the surface, you'll see a salt pillar there. That's a common subsurface feature. Then we're gonna be developing two high pressure, high temperature reservoirs shown in brown here. Just to give you a sense of what that means, high pressure means 500 times the pressure of a typical car tire, and temperatures like that of the inside of a pizza oven. We're dealing with real extremes here.
The wells are extremely expensive because of the extreme conditions that we'll be drilling in. In recognition of that, the U.K. government has recently developed what they call a Cluster Area Allowance. Culzean is the very first project to benefit from this allowance, and it allows us to recover some of our investment costs. The wells are actually four kilometers long, and because they're so long and because this is such a high tech development, they take quite a bit of time to drill. We will actually be on site starting to drill next year in 2016, several years in advance of any of our platforms going in place.
When Culzean comes on stream, it will actually deliver about between 60 and 90 thousand barrels of oil equivalent, which is about 5% of the U.K. total gas demand. Just to put that in another frame, it's actually equal to a full day of Danish gas demand. If Culzean was offshore Denmark, it could supply all the gas needed for Denmark in a day. In summary, we are safely and reliably delivering more from our assets than we were last year. We have 66% fewer worksite injuries than we did a few years ago. Top-tier class production growth and lower costs. We continue to deliver predictably on our major projects while we invest through the cycle, and we'll be bringing these on both now and through the end of the decade, on time and on budget.
Thanks for your time. I'm gonna hand you back to Jakob.
Thank you to Gretchen and Graham. We have taken time to talk about how we deliver in our existing business, essentially keeping the path we're on, but of course, responding to the changes in the market and keeping a real sharp focus on doing just that. I hope that we have made it clear to you that we actually have a really strong portfolio. Of course, not stronger than a project like Chissonga is challenging us and that we're dealing with the tender in Qatar, but a really strong portfolio. As you can maybe imagine, this is in its own right enough to keep a big chunk of the organization really busy, and that's what we're doing with one hand.
On the other hand, we also have to secure our future growth in a profitable way, and that's what I'm gonna talk a little bit more about now. As I alluded to in my introduction, we do see inorganic growth as a path forward right now. We do believe that we can acquire competitive barrels to a unit cost that is at least as good or maybe even better than we see through exploration. That doesn't mean that we'll completely stop exploration, but our exploration portfolio is quite thin now, and we'll spend some time rebuilding the acreage position. Over the foreseeable future, we will go for inorganic growth. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how we frame that inorganic growth.
I can't give you any details on specific opportunities, but we're trying both to grow within our existing footprint, typically Northern Europe, northwestern Europe, but also take more opportunistic steps where we see possibilities of adding low cost barrels to our portfolio that are competitive, maybe with a different risk profile, but still competitive in today's market. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see four of the dimensions that we're looking at when we screen projects that are in the market. First and foremost, we wish to maintain an advantaged cost curve, so we don't just go for high cost barrels. We need to make sure that we are robust to dropping oil prices like we are now.
We have really enjoyed our current portfolio in the market now, and we are still profitable even at the low oil prices, and we wish that to continue. That can be tricky, but that's what we're going for. Of course, we need a geographic fit. If we can, Northwestern Europe is a classic, but stay within the footprints that we have, maybe with some opportunistic moves outside our current footprint if we find advantaged opportunities. We are trying to find opportunities that are fitting in our project portfolio and in our production timing, such that we maintain a relatively even production profile and a relatively even load on our organization, so we can keep our project teams going in a relatively consistent way.
Of course, last but not least, we wish to leverage our capabilities, our classic capabilities, strong subsurface modeling, strong drilling solutions, and strong project maturation and execution capabilities within a commercial framework. Now, of course, there's a lot of other aspects. You will see the Culzean project, for example, weighing our portfolio more towards gas. We are a pretty oily company, but Culzean, in its own right, will make us more gassy and a number of other dimensions that we don't mention here. These are four key dimensions that we are looking at. We are quite patient to find the right opportunities that fit and the market since the oil price drop has been relatively slow.
There has been deals made, of course, but the inorganic market in our business has been relatively slow. We are working on it, and we are quite optimistic that we'll find the right opportunities. To round off, we believe that we are in a strong position to make the counter-cyclic moves. Our cost reduction programs work. We deliver the projects that are already within our portfolio. As Gretchen discussed, our operational efficiency program really starts paying off at an opportune time for us when the price comes down, so it really makes a difference. We believe that this positions us well to deliver material value through integrating inorganic moves.
In summary, we have grown our production, we have added reserves to our reserves base, and we have reacted ambitiously to the changed market in Maersk Oil. We believe we are on the right path. We are confident we are on the right path in the challenged market right now. Thank you for your attention. Before we jump to the Q&A, I would just like to introduce you to the rest of the executive team in Maersk Oil, so they can help me out if there's questions I can't answer. Vincent Clerc, Troels, and Stine, could you please get up, just get up and say hello? Vincent Clerc to your right is our Chief Growth Officer.
Troels is our Chief Technology Officer, Technology and Projects Officer, and Stine is running the HR department. That was the Maersk Oil executive team, and thank you for your attention.
Good morning, welcome to Maersk Line's part of the Capital Markets Day. We have been looking very much forward to sharing our story and answering your questions as we go along today. I'll dive straight into it. I'll start with a slide that I'll also leave you with, basically to say these are the most important points that we want to make today. The first one is that we have done exactly what we told you we were gonna do last year. We have executed on the priorities that we set out.
We have continued to deliver financial results, and we believe that we have built a business now which is resilient, which is able to make consistent profits in what truly is a tough industry, which on top of everything else, is experiencing a lot of headwind right now. We do see a path to continuing to grow the company and deliver more value. Last year, we told you that cost leadership was at the core of our industry of our strategy, and that we would continue to cut costs, and we have done so. Our Q2 costs were down at fixed oil price by 5% compared to the same quarter last year. We have delivered on that agenda.
We also told you that we would get 2M approved and implemented and start delivering savings. We did that in the Q1 . We moved around 193 ships to create what is today truly the best East-West network in our industry and certainly the most cost competitive. We are well on track to deliver the $350 billion of savings that we outlined last year, despite the fact that fuel prices are actually a lot lower now than what they were a year ago. We said that we were gonna protect our North-South market share, where we are overweight. We have around 20% share, and we still have around 20% share in those very important good markets for Maersk Line.
We have announced, launched a number of growth initiatives, most importantly, SeaLand, which we told you last year we were gonna launch in the Q1 . We have done that successfully. The company is growing, and our share is growing profitably in that market. When we met last year, we also said that we were gonna start investing in Maersk Line again. We have started to deliver returns that are above our cost of capital, so for that reason, it makes sense to invest in the company again. We also needed to get more capacity to grow with the market from 2017 onwards. We have used the opportunity to get out of the starting gates quite early.
We have ordered 27 ships this year for total commitment of more than $3 billion. We have done so because we think that now is actually a fairly decent time to buy ships, at least if we look at what historical costs have been for container ships, then we are close to historical lows for investments in container ships. It's a relatively good time to invest, in our view. We have not just been busy executing on our priorities and investing, we have also been busy delivering financial results. We now have six consecutive quarters with a return above our 8.5% threshold, and also eight out of the nine last quarters we have achieved that.
We have 11 consecutive quarters with our EBIT margin gap north of 5 percentage points to the industry. We are growing in line with the market. In fact, last year we did take a little bit of market share globally, and we continue to generate a lot of cash. We now have 3 solid years of positive cash flows behind us in Maersk Line. We think, as I said to begin with, we believe that we have built a business that is starting to be truly resilient and profitable, also, in a very tough and volatile industry. One way to illustrate that is to compare Maersk Line's performance in 2015 in the first half to the performance we had in the first half of 2009.
At the time, we had rates in 2009, which were slightly lower, 4% lower than the rates that we experienced in the first half of this year, but we also had fuel costs that were actually significantly lower than what we experienced in the first half. All in all, we believe the trading conditions in the first half of 2015 are quite similar to the trading conditions we experienced in the first half of 2009. Of course, you can see on the numbers the difference in performance is actually quite remarkable. We lost $1 billion in 2009 in these conditions, and this year we make $1.2 billion.
Of course, from a return perspective, we've gone from negative double digits to positive double digits in those six years. We believe that we have built a set of competitive advantages, certainly built on cost leadership that has allowed us to build up a sustainable margin gap to the rest of the industry, but also by constantly upgrading our products so that we today have, in our view, the best and largest network to offer our customers in terms of our strong brand and in terms of our improving customer experience. A set of competitive advantages that are all able to overcome both the poor industry fundamentals that we have to deal with, but also the headwinds that we see right now in the market.
Going forward, we think that Maersk Line can continue to create value by being able to price competitively, to grow share, and still deliver returns that are above our thresholds, our objectives, and also to generate sufficient cash to be able to invest in growth and to invest in new IT so that we can continue to improve our customer experience. Of course, improving the performance in the way we have done does require more than just capital and ships. It also requires a very strong global organization and a competent leadership team. You can see my colleagues here in the management board of Maersk Line on the slide behind me. Since we met last year, we have added Pierre Danet to the mix.
Pierre has joined us as our new CFO, and he comes from a long international career with Procter & Gamble and HP. That has allowed us to free up Jakob Stausholm to focus entirely on the strategic development of the company and the massive transformation that Maersk Line is undergoing in these years in terms of our global processes, our global IT platform, and not least our global operating system. With those words, I'll hand over to Pierre, who will talk about our financial performance in more detail.
Thank you, Søren. I'm actually very excited to be standing in front of you today to talk to you about our recent financial results and trends. What I will focus on is the following. 1, we are delivering strong results. 2, we have been doing so sustainably over the past 3 years. 3, we can now rely on very solid cost and balance sheet fundamentals. 4, as a result, we believe that we can claim that our company today is significantly more resilient than it was in 2009, and as well as in 2012, and is actually fit for the future. Let's talk about our profit results first. As you remember, we delivered about $0.5 billion in Q2 .
Now, some of you might want to look at the glass half empty and say, "Yes, but that profit was 7% lower than the year before." That's true. However, considering the headwinds we were facing in Q2, a 14% decline in freight rates year-on-year, we believe that that was actually a solid result. On the cash front as well, we delivered positive cash flow. As Søren mentioned it. We have been delivering positive cash flow for now 12 quarters in a row, which means that we are delivering in line with our objective to be able to fund our business and potentially our expansion through our own cash and actually return cash to the group. Again, should you want to look at the glass half empty, you might say, "Yes, but $13 million was marginally positive." Yes, true.
We actually don't manage the business for every quarter. Actually, we took delivery of 5 Triple-Es in Q2 . Without that seasonal impact, our cash flow delivery would actually have been in line with what it was in the previous quarters. At the end of the day, the summary remains. We can now fund our own business with our own cash sustainably. Now, good profit and good cash typically means good return on invested capital, and of course, that is the case. We delivered our sixth consecutive quarter above our midterm target of 8.5%. Actually, if you restate for one quarter that was below that level, we have been at that level now for nearly 2 years, which is, at the end of the day, what matters. We can sustainably deliver strong return on invested capital with Maersk Line.
How did we do that? First, by regaining momentum on the volume side. You probably remember that at the end of Q1, we posted a volume result that was slightly below the year before. Actually, as a result, we lost some market share in Q1. We did not like that. Of course, we went into Q2 with a firm resolve to get every share point back, and we did. We therefore closed Q2 with volume up nearly 4% year-on-year, and in turn, we could therefore fill our vessels. That's a very important part. As you know, shipping is an industry where asset intensity is high, margins are low, and competition is high, and fixed costs are high. Being able to deliver strong asset utilization is key for us to be able to deliver good financial return over time.
This is something that we therefore measure at a very low level of granularity on our business. Now, please allow me one slide to actually step away from Maersk Line and talk about the industry. If you look at the past three years, Maersk Line, by and large, increased capacity in line with market demand. The industry did not. Actually, some of our competitors increased capacity significantly ahead of market demand, which we believe is a problem. Now, does that mean that we have lower ambitions than them? Of course not. Our ambition is to grow at least in line with the market to defend our market leading position. What that means, though, is that we are probably more disciplined than the rest of the industry when it comes to capital utilization, and that, we believe, is actually a competitive advantage as this will continue going forward.
Coming back to Maersk Line. Cost. As you can imagine, being the CFO, cost leadership is very, very dear to my heart. If you look at the past three years, we delivered a cost improvement of about 9% annually. Of course, some of you will say a lot of that was driven by bunker. We actually don't see bunker savings as sustainable savings because in the end, we get them, but so do our competitors. Unfortunately, we operate in an industry where sometimes commodity savings get passed on to consumers in the form of lower pricing. That's why we actually measure our cost performance at flat bunker. The right part of the slide shows you the cost evolution for Maersk Line with bunker at $400 flat over the past three years.
There you can see we did improve our cost per FEU by 5% annually over the past 3 years. That, we believe, is a sustainable competitive advantage. SG&A is also a portion of our cost that we do focus on. Admittedly, it's a lower portion of our cost envelope. We spend about $2 billion per year on SG&A, and that accounts for about 8% of our revenues. That being said, we do focus on it in the spirit of turning every stone and of course, looking at every dime we spend. Over the past 3 years, we delivered an SG&A improvement of about 2% annually.
If you take into account that over the same period, there was some volume growth, that would actually mean more than 5% annual savings in SG&A over that period, which is about the same level as we saved on the rest of our cost envelope. Now, we are actually healthily dissatisfied with that number. We do believe that our scale and our operating effectiveness should give us more advantages in terms of SG&A, and you should therefore expect continued focus on the SG&A line coming from Maersk Line going forward. We've talked about revenue and cost. Now let's talk about the balance sheet. What this shows to you is over the past three years, we have been able to keep our invested capital largely flat in U.S. dollars. Over the same period, we grew our business in volume terms by about 4% annually.
It's probably fair to assume in our business that capital invested should typically grow in line with volume. We are in the business of moving goods, so if we have to move more goods, we need more vessel capacity, and we need more containers to move those goods. Over that period, we actually managed, therefore, to improve our capital effectiveness by 4% annually. That alone, beyond giving us actually the possibility to deliver more cash and return cash to the group, that alone actually enabled us to improve our return on capital invested by about 80 basis points, which is not around, which is not a rounding in our business. By now, I am assuming that you're getting the story. One, we are delivering solid results. Two, we've been doing so sustainably now, that is what we can start calling a trend.
Three, our business is grounded on very solid cost and balance sheet fundamentals, and that will continue. Therefore, four, we believe that we can claim that Maersk Line today is a significantly more resilient company than it was three years ago, and we are better fit for the future. Let me therefore pass it on to Jakob now, who is going to tell you how we see that future.
Thank you, Pierre. Good morning. Turning to industry analysis, let me start off with three key messages from our analysis. First of all, as I will describe shortly, we are facing a truly adverse business environment right now that leads to a deflationary freight rate and development. The way we deal with it in this industry, it's a very fragmented industry where scale actually matters significantly. We, Maersk Line, as Pierre described, have good financial results. They're also competitive, also because we have scale. Let me start off from the demand for our services in this industry. This industry has for decades had near double-digit growth until the financial crisis. At that stage, we had expected it to return. It didn't. It returned to around 3.5% a year.
That's the fact when we look back over the last 7 years. The more near-term, we have seen a further weakening. The Q2 here, the estimate is actually a growth rate, global growth rate of 1.3%. That's together with the Q3 2012, the weakest growth rate that we have experienced since the financial crisis in 2009. Now, what is the reason behind that? A major reason is very weak import into Europe from the Far East. In fact, after a couple of years with good growth on this major trade, 5% and 7% the last two years, we have experienced a contraction to the tune of 4% in the first half, 6% in Q2. It continued in July with 7%.
Now, this trade is pretty volatile also because of major stock movements. A major reason behind that was stock build in 2013 and 2014 and significant destocking in 2015 so far. You can see the destocking here. We expect that to normalize again next year. These things doesn't continue in eternity. 2015, we actually expect a contraction on this major trade of 2%-4%, also aggravated by the collapse in Russian import. However, assuming a normalization of stock impacts, it gives us confidence that this will turn towards 2%-4% positive growth next year.
Going back to the global growth, another way of looking at global demand is that we compare it against the global GDP, and we tend to look a lot on the multiplier impact that for decades was close to 3 due to globalization, containerization, and offshoring. Now, those trends are obviously less prominent today, and that's why we, after the financial crisis, have seen a multiplier to the tune of 1.5. Quite frankly, our analysis still indicates that there's good support for multiplier in excess of 1 compared to the global GDP. Probably best estimate would be around 1.5%.
It's going to be lower this year because of the stock impact I just mentioned in Europe, and actually, we see also destocking in the U.S. this year. Normalizing that, we are confident to see a return with growth returning to 3%-5% next year. Now, combining demand with supply and nominal capacity growth, you can see that there has actually in the last five out of six years since the financial crisis been more supply growth than demand growth. Fortunately for this industry, the industry has solved its problem by consuming the excess capacity by investing it into slow steaming. The problem we are facing right now in 2015 is what I would call a triple challenge, because we are experiencing lower demand growth than expected. Supply growth is actually historically high, not seen higher since 2011.
The supply-demand gap is the biggest since 2009. Unfortunately, with the low fuel price, it's not really economic to do so much further slow steaming as we have done in the past. I'm not saying it's unraveling the current slow steaming, but we're probably more at an ideal point now. It's difficult to see it being economic to further slow steaming. There is a real supply-demand issue right now, and therefore, it should not be a surprise to anyone that we see pressure on the freight rates. At every Capital Markets Day, we have mentioned that we believe the industry is driven by what we call the vicious circle that leads to oversupply, that leads to deflationary freight rates.
In fact, when you look at the development, rates have gone down to the tune of 2% per annum over the last 10 years. In fact, when you look at shorter period of time, probably a higher percentage. There's little fundamental analysis that indicates that this should change. We will continue to plan for that. That also helps us in terms of setting the mindset within the company that throughout Maersk Line, we have a deflationary mindset. It drives our cost leadership agenda. Looking for leading indicators, a good place to look is the new ordering. Unfortunately for the industry, we have seen a record level of orders of major vessels so far this year.
In fact, if you look over the last 12 months, the ordering amounts to 37% of the total fleet of major vessels in excess of 10,000 TEU. Huge renewal within the industry, obviously with a risk of oversupply. Another way of looking at it is looking at the order book. The industry order book at the end of the Q2 was around 21%. Now, we assume that demand growth will be 3%-5% in the years to come. With certain assumption around the duration of the order book and the scrapping percentages, we come to a calculation that the industry needs an order book between 9%-14%. This analysis indicating future oversupply. Søren told you earlier that we have started ordering some vessels.
I would put it into perspective and mention that we are still having below average industry order book. There are other competitors who has very significant order books. Now, I'm sure in this room there's a lot of people who would ask the question, with this analysis, why on earth are you ordering vessels right now? Quite frankly, this is the result of a fairly long process that started almost two years ago. We have done endless economic calculations. We need this capacity to grow. We have no alternative. There is no liquid time charter market for these vessels. The investments are actually quite small compared to the size of our network. And having now phased in 2M, we're able to fully deploy these vessels immediately. Whenever we do the economics, it is NPV positive.
It does create value even if the environment turns more adverse than what we are facing and expecting. Nils mentioned at the beginning the importance for Maersk Line to not just look at our performance, but look at the relative performance to industry. We are obsessed with trying to continue to meet our targets of being in excess of 5 percentage points to the rest of the industry. We have done so for 11 successive quarters, and actually the last nine quarters, we have been best in class as well. The last thing that is worthwhile mentioning on this analysis is look on the right side, see how much variability there is in industry, which perhaps is saying that the average makes little sense. There is a lot of variability.
Another way of looking at the industry is to say on average, yes, it's an unhealthy business. The optimist might say, at least it has improved over the last four years. If you look at the best performing carrier, the best performing carrier is actually having a profitable business. Now, I discussed this topic. I spent a week earlier this year at Stanford University. I discussed it with a strategy professor, and he said recent research says actually it does not make any sense to talk about is this a good industry or is it a bad industry? Because actually what you have, you have more variability within the industry than between industries.
Now if that analysis is correct, it's very encouraging for Maersk Line because we don't have to start thinking about whether we are in the right industry or not, because we can't change that, but we have to start asking the question differently. How do we stand out? How do we make sure that we have sustainable competitive advantage? A third way of looking at the industry is when you plot out profitability against the size of the carriers. Here, I've taken the average EBIT margin over the last three years and plotted it against the capacity of the carriers. A new picture is emerging, where you clearly see three segments of carriers. One, small segments with carriers that has a regional focus, they're profitable. Another segment of global scale leaders, they're profitable.
All the rest that are operating globally and lack scales and are struggling to be profitable. I mean, scale clearly matters. As we said last year at the Capital Markets Day, it's really not that much about the average size of the vessel. It is about the network. The network that gives us a unique proposition to our customer, the big network that gives us a lot of optionality to continue to adjust the network and become more and more cost efficient. Another conclusion I wanted to mention today, but I have to say, somebody stole my thunder, because I don't know whether any of you have seen, the Lex column today, that is exactly addressing the point about the need for consolidation in industry.
I think the analysis from our side and according to FT, Lex column as well, is that it would be in the interest of society, customers, and the carriers if we could see a less fragmented industry in the future. Therefore, we welcome any moves like the latest announcement that the two Chinese carriers are considering to merge as a step in the right direction for the industry. That leads me to another analysis, another dimension, the last dimension I want to share with you, and that is about growth. I don't like this chart, but we have decided to show it in any case. Because in general, when you get things on the table, it's somewhat easier to address. We have been obsessed the last three and a half years to improve the profitability.
We have got a long way on that road. We have had less focus on the growth. We have said we are growing with the market. We have been growing with the market. If you look at things in a wider perspective over a 15-year period of time, the three biggest carriers have had different growth patterns. You can see that the number two and the number three has grown dramatically. One entirely by organic measures, another one by a blend of organic and acquisitions. We have not grown organically. We grew through the P&O Nedlloyd acquisition in 2005.
I think the combination of just looking at our current profitability, our cost leadership, and then this pattern here has got us to think carefully about what is our growth ambitions. Søren will cover that, in a moment with you. Let me finalize my section here by just restating the forward-looking statements I have made, over the last 10 minutes. First of all, industry demand is gonna be low this year, 2%-4%. Right now, it looks really in the lower end of the band, but we have good reasons to believe that it will return to 3%-5% next year. Nominal capacity growth, very high this year, 9%, will probably dampen to 5% next year, which forces us to continue to take out cost, and we are committed to do so.
We will continue with our investments. We expect to invest to the tune of $2.5 billion a year in 2015 and 2016. If you take on average for the full period until 2020, probably on average of $3 billion a year. Let me stop here. Thank you very much, and hand back to Søren.
Thank you, Jakob. I've been thinking about whether it would be helpful to hire a new head of strategy to come bring some better news, but no, it is as I started out by talking, we are in a tough industry, and we are actually also facing some significant headwinds right now. Short-term, you know, our response is the only rational response, and that is to take capacity out. Actually, from a purely economic point of view, you know, if you're not filling your ships, the rational thing to do is to take capacity out as opposed to lower prices, because we don't create any more new demand by lowering prices. That's actually not how it works in the real world, unfortunately.
We will be taking capacity out. We have announced more than 30 canceled sailings in the next couple of months, which is more than double of what we did last year in connection with the October holidays in China. We have made a number of structural moves that are important. We have pulled out a whole string from our Asian North Europe network. This morning, we announced we were gonna close down a string from the Middle East to Europe, which actually reduces our capacity in that trade by 16%.
We are working on a number of, well, 2-4 other big things that we can do within the foreseeable future to get our capacity or get our utilization up, basically. Longer term, we will simply continue to drive the agenda we have been on for the last few years in terms of taking cost out. I'm often being asked whether we can continue to take cost out or, you know, when our cost programs will be over and done with. I have to say, you know, we will never be done taking cost out, and yes, we can continue to take cost out. We have actually lots of opportunities for doing that, and I also believe we have a strong toolbox.
There are a number of different tools on the slide here behind me, and I'll speak to some of them. Since we have ordered ships this year, I thought it was relevant to give you some kind of understanding of the economic sense from our perspective. With the Triple-E order that we did this year, we will have some time in 2018, a network to North Europe, which is 100% Triple-E. When we have that will mean that our cost per slot will have come down by 12% compared to a 2014 base. We continue to drive cost out by deploying bigger ships and filling them.
This is really where I think the point that Jakob made earlier about the 2M network gives us an advantage because it does actually allow us to fill the big ships in a sustainable way. We have more tools in the toolbox. Network rationalization is the biggest and single largest driver of unit cost. We operate 600 ships. We have more trades than anybody else, and one of the simple mechanisms of rationalizing network is to eliminate overlaps. When we have services that go from one through Asia, if we put them together, we can eliminate the overlaps in Asia, just as an example. We will continue to drive utilization up in the coming period.
We've had a little bit of a lumpy addition of capacity here in the last 12 months. We have taken delivery of a lot of Triple-Es, and you have seen that we had a long period through 2013, first half of 2014, where our capacity was actually almost not growing. We had a quick increase in capacity. Overall, as Pierre outlined, we have not grown capacity more than market has grown, but it was a little bit lumpy. In the next 12 months, our capacity growth will be back down in line with market growth. That actually enables us to slowly but surely grind away in terms of getting utilization up.
Cost leadership is at the core or is the core reason for why we have been able to improve our performance. It has enabled us to grow margins over the last 4 years from negative to positive. Despite the fact that our top line during that period has basically been stuck. In fact, our top line has been stuck around $26 billion-$27 billion for the last 7-8 years, with some big swings in 2009 and 2010. Improving performance in that environment, of course, can only be done if we can get margins up, and we have done that by lowering costs.
It means that we today consistently are delivering returns that are above our cost of capital, and I don't have to tell this audience that means that actually growth is your friend. When we were destroying value back in 2012, growth was definitely not our friend. It's this picture that we are showing here today that is really behind the changes in ambitions that we outlined in connection with the Q2 results. We still have to deliver a top quartile performance. We still have to deliver an EBIT margin gap to the average of the industry north of 5%, and we still have to be able to fund our own growth. We now are saying that we're not just satisfied with growing in line with the market.
We want to grow at least in line with the market to defend our leading position. Because we do recognize that actually scale matters, and if we were to grow less than the industry and less than our largest competitor, sooner or later, we are gonna lose that scale advantage, that leadership position we have. But it's equally important to mention the second change we did in ambition, which was our ambition in terms of returns. We went from having an ambition of more than 8.5% to having an 8.5%-12% range that we are shooting for. The key point here is that growth and returns has to go hand in hand for Maersk Line. Growth for the sake of growth is gonna destroy the company.
We have to grow the company and make money at the same time. That is the challenge for us in the coming years. We believe we have built a business that will be able to do this, and that's certainly what we'll be pushing forward at this. It's absolutely clear that we have to do both growth and returns, not just one of them. We have also a toolbox for growth. Though this is of course quite competitively sensitive information, what I can say is that we believe that in the East-West trades, we can grow based on cost leadership, based on leveraging the East-West network that we have built as part of the 2M alliance.
It's not only very cost competitive, but it's also from a service point of view, the best out there. In North-South, we already have a very high market share in many markets, and there we're probably more in a position where playing defense is what we need to do in terms of protecting what we have.
Of course, we'll go for the pockets of opportunities that we see. This is more a protect and grow with the market scenario. We have built three very successful intra businesses that are able to leverage off the big Maersk Line network, but also a unique business model within our company. We see certainly SeaLand that we launched this year as one of the growth engines for the future. Then in terms of our reefer business, where we are the global leader and clearly overweight, we see opportunities still for doing more conversion. There's still a lot of bananas that are being transported in conventional reefer containers.
We'll try to see if we can convert more of that business in the coming years to create some growth by containerization. Let me leave you with what I started with. We've done what we outlined we were gonna do last year. We continue to deliver on the financial metrics. We've built a business that we believe is can be consistently profitable, resilient in a tough industry, also when we experience headwinds, and we do see a path to continued value delivery and more growth.
Thank you. It's again a real pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our current performance and our plans going forward. APM Terminals is a company that is in a strong position in a fundamentally attractive industry.
We are challenged by the current market conditions. Therefore, we need to work on our revenue, on our cost, and on our productivity in order to improve our performance. Also, at the same time, we also need to take advantage of the current volatility in order for us to place investments and grow the portfolio in a disciplined manner. This is fundamentally what this presentation here is about. Let's start with a few minutes on what we see as the key trends in the markets and the industry. Over the last 4-5 years, the ports industry have grown by 2%-6% on an annual basis. This is still, relatively spoken, a good growth type of industry.
It's of course not as great as it was before the financial crisis in 2008, but it's still good growth. It's still good growth when you don't only talk relative growth, but actually absolute growth. What is added in terms of demand for new capacity each and every year on this large-scale global industry is quite staggering. We calculated that the additional demand that is needed every year, that actually corresponds to roughly 60 new container terminals. The big question mark is, of course, what is it we are seeing for the next 2 quarters-6 quarters. Jakob from Maersk Line already talked about this, and I think our slide here illustrates it as well. The upper band here, that is the latest Drewry numbers, this is 4%-5%.
What we understand in our dialogue with Drewry, that is when they come out with their new forecast, I think later in September, then they will revise that down to, say, 2% for the coming quarters, and then up to 3% and maybe a little bit more for the next quarters. We see, of course, the same picture as Maersk Line does. This is a challenge for us as an industry and as a company, but it's also an opportunity. If you go a little bit deeper into the market situation, then the underlying local trades are actually showing accelerated volatility.
This is of course driven by the macroeconomic fundamentals, lower oil price, falling commodity prices, economic policy setting, you know, Greece, a lot of exchange rate fluctuations, in particular in emerging markets, and also stock market volatility. Good example is what has been going on in China the last 2-3 weeks. A lot of impact. What you see is the positive thing right now, that is increased import and export related to USA. But then you have Europe with very low demand. And this reflects on the exports out of China and the imports that China had hoped for has not picked up. Then the big thing, and in particular, also related to APM Terminals, that is the volatility that we see in emerging markets.
Really downfall in West Africa, Russia, and many others of the key oil-dependent markets around the world. This is the situation we are facing from a market point of view here, at least in the short term. If we look at our customer base, the global shipping lines, then we have heard from Maersk Line the situation and seen from a port industry point of view, then the important pieces here is that our customer base, they're competing on their network cost, scale and efficiency in the network. There are two key trends that relates to us. That is the bigger vessels and the bigger alliances.
What it means for us is that in terms of the bigger vessels, then we see less frequent port calls, but when the vessels they arrive, you know, then it's bigger chunks, it's more peak volumes. That put a strain on the infrastructure and the hinterland. What you also see is that a little bit like the shipping lines, they're starting to segment those that have scale and those that are smaller. It's a little bit in the local ports, the same we see, where some facilities are only capable of handling the smaller vessels, the feeders, whereas other ports or other terminals in the ports are able to cater for the bigger vessels. In terms of the bigger alliances, what this means is that it's becoming more complicated to deal with the bigger alliances.
The alliances are also, and the shipping lines in the alliances are becoming more professional. The bargaining skill sets are getting bigger. The port industry are getting increasingly under pressure because of the bigger alliances. On the other hand, this also means that if you are a professional large-scale port operator, then you may also gain an advantage compared to the more local and smaller port operators. What this means for a port operator in terms of the product delivery, or you can say the productivity, what our customers they are asking for, that is for sure speed, and it has always been. It's for sure, and that I can get Maersk Line to confirm to you, it's also low cost.
The added feature to this is actually reliability in terms of having a consistent service level each and every time the vessels are calling, and also availability that you are able to adjust. So if the vessels are coming earlier or with more volumes, that you can adjust your production to cater for that or the other way around, if it's late and smaller volumes, that you can adjust for that. The service offering are becoming more demanding, more professionalism is required. In the good old days, it was only about capacity, building more. But now it's maturing. It's a more professional type of relationship. In terms of competition in the ports industry, when we look at this from a global perspective, it's quite a fragmented industry.
Most of the port operators are seeing maturing growth, margins increasingly coming under pressure, but still most of the operators are making a good return. There's no real appetite for global consolidation as of this point. That situation is somewhat different if you look locally into the individual ports. Because what you see in many mature market ports, and the example here is Los Angeles, Long Beach. What you see is that there's quite a number of individual operators. With the bigger vessels and the segmentation of capacity, as I talked about, as well as the bigger alliances, then this system creates a lot of inefficiency and waste. Truck drivers, they're coming with an empty, then they go to one port, then they have to drive over to another port to pick up a full and go back.
This whole hinterland system is inefficient. There's an opportunity to create value by going in, helping with consolidation, upgrading, modernizing some of these facilities. Just in conclusion on this, very quick update on the ports industry. The industry continues to be attractive. The growth is slowing down. The industry is maturing to some extent. We do see very high local volatility, in particular in emerging markets as of this point. The bigger vessels, the bigger alliances do put a demand on the ports industry to enhance capabilities, and there is a real need to seek local consolidation. How these things are impacting APM Terminals and what our plan is to do about it, that I will now leave to Henrik. Henrik Pedersen, our CFO of APM Terminals.
Thank you, Kim. Good afternoon, everybody. Let me just walk you through the financial performance here. Historically, APM Terminals have always delivered increasingly growing results. It's different now in first half of 2015. The markets, the external factors are really harsh right now, and most notably the oil prices. First half of 2015, our revenue is down by 2%. Our volumes is down by 5%. Our first half results is $334 million, down 400 from 427 million last year. There's no denying there's pressure on the current results. If you look at our invested capital, 2014 and 2015, it looks flat. However, in fact, we have invested more than $400 million in the first half.
In 2014, in the end, we had some significant impairments, and in Q3 of 2014 we sold Virginia, and that's why the overall invested capital looks flat. When it comes to the returns, the returns for first half of 2015 is also down from the lower profit of course. The thing is, for first half, under all the pressure, we have still been able to maintain 11.3% return. As we have communicated publicly, the full year results for 2015 will be significantly below that of 2014. What are we doing about all this pressure? We're working on our top line with commercial, the operations team on taking cost out and on portfolio plays. This is what I would like to give a few more details about.
Right now, our top line is under pressure. We have a rough external environment. We have the shipping lines forming alliances. We have the shipping lines doing global procurement. What we have done to counter it is we have also set up our global commercial team. What we're doing right now in the global team is there's a relentless focus on deals, volumes and rates. In some markets, we have high amounts of revenues from importers and exporters, so not the shipping lines. We're also tailoring service offerings to the importers, the exporters. Of course, we want to get paid, we wanna get paid on time, so we have some efforts going into that as well. As Kim mentioned, the shipping lines are having bigger vessels, bigger alliances. They want speed, they want availability, they want reliability.
Talking of speed, reliability, and availability, this is exactly what our global operations organization is working to deliver to our customers. They are not only working on delivering those services, they are also working hard on delivering those services in a cost-effective manner for us. We will continue to have a relentless internal cost focus. If we don't have it, we will not be able to stay as a top quartile performer in the industry. Right now, we are leveraging our global scale when it comes to procurement, technical asset management, innovation, automation, IT, et cetera, et cetera.
We're also working on specific projects, and one I just want to quickly mention is the dual cycling up here, because it's quite a good one to illustrate an initiative that can bring us cost savings in APM Terminals, but a higher productivity to our customers. Simply the hook under the crane is never empty. When the hook goes towards the vessel, it brings a container. When the hook goes back, it brings another container. The hook is never empty. It does create both cost saving and higher speed. Both our commercial efforts and our operational efforts are of course the highly perform and managed. Earlier in this year, when we saw the external markets turning against us. I call it simply all the facilities we have globally.
We set up a program which we call Adapt to Market, which is additional revenue and taking cost out. I'm, as you have seen, in our announcements then for the first half of 2015, we have made a positive bottom line impact from these initiatives of more than $100 million. If we just look at some of the important key performance indicators for our global business, some are trending in the right direction and some are not going as fast as we want. Starting with the important one, safety. We have, and we still have fatalities and high severity accidents. We have worked very, very hard over the last years in our global health and safety organization to bring it down. Right now those efforts are paying off.
We do see a lower amount of high severity accidents. The port industry is, of course, an inherently dangerous industry, but it's fair to say that APM Terminals becomes safer and safer every month. When you look at our crane productivity, and I have a few people looking at me here, the last couple of quarters it looks like it's flat, but we have actually made improvements over the last couple of quarters. Where we have been countered and where that productivity increase has really been eaten up is that we have implemented new operational procedures to enhance our safety. We have implemented a very complicated 2M network. We are also servicing bigger and bigger vessels, which is also taking a toll on productivity. We have worked very hard, and we have made improvement just to have this line stay flat.
The third KPI I'm just presenting here is the capacity utilization. It is dropping as a factor of us decreasing in volumes. When I, under the commercial section, talked about the need for us to focus on deals to land volumes, then that doesn't only benefit us on the top line, it will also benefit our asset utilization. The last one, our margins. No doubt, the revenue is down a little bit also, most notably because we have lost volume in some of the high revenue generating terminals. On the cost side, then the unit costs have taken a hit from the unfortunate combination of a high degree of fixed cost and lower volumes. Those margin pressures is another reason we are focusing both on our top line and our operations and cost savings.
Another way of looking at APM Terminals globally in terms of our business is something, a few of you have asked for, a few times, and that is actually to segment our business. What I'm showing here is three different segments. First of all, we have the consolidated businesses, we have the joint ventures and associates, and we have the implementations. We have shown returns for each of the three segments. Starting with the implementations. Right now, that segment includes four terminals, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, İzmir in Turkey, Moín in Costa Rica, and Vado in Italy. Those four terminals are non-revenue generating because they are under construction. If I disregard those from our balance sheet, then the 11.3% we had as underlying ROIC for first half of 2015 would actually be 13%.
As we continue to go forward, we will have assets on our balance sheet that will bring down the ROIC. We are building for the future, so that's okay. In terms of our growth ambitions, then they are increasing, so I could imagine a period where this segment from implementations would actually expand in terms of share of overall invested capital. That short period will also take the overall returns down a bit. The next segment, the consolidated businesses. The decrease from last year is really heavily impacted by the oil price and especially our terminals in West Africa. These oil-producing countries are simply having less import volume today. As you can see, this segment here has 13.5% return.
For us, it's a healthy segment, it's a segment we control, and thereby it's very ripe for our efforts when it comes to commercial, cost savings, and operational matters. The last segment that I'll show you is our joint ventures and associates. Typically, in the port industry, a lot of value is generated in joint ventures, and it's no different in APM Terminals. In fact, a little bit more than one-third of our profits is generated in these joint ventures. Simply put, we bring to the table our global, commercial and operationally expertise. We partner up with local partners who have a high knowledge of the local markets.
Going forward, I will expect that we still have strong returns from this segment, the first half 12%. I also see this segment as a good way for us to mitigate risk. When I talked about the need for value creation in commercial and operation, then I had one more value generator that I wanted to take you through. We call it our active portfolio management. Basically, it is investing in new projects and divesting. You can see in 2015, we have already now been quite active. If you look at our divestments, then we have divested 3 smaller units in the U.S. and 1 in Italy. We simply have the philosophy. If an entity after repeated efforts cannot turn a profit, we'll find a better owner.
In terms of the new investments, we have a section later on where I'll come back to that. We have managed to secure four this year. I'll take you through a little more detail there later on. Now it's time to go through our strategy segment. Kim, please come.
Thank you, Henrik.
The business we are in as APM Terminals, this is long term. It's infrastructure with a transport logistic flavor to it. When we are placing or deciding on investments, it's very important that we have a view on the very long term, because this is something we have to live with for the next 20, 30, 50 years. What we believe in is that the ports industry will remain attractive, and this is based on that we believe in that world economy will continue to grow. The key trends here is that world population will grow. Today, we are roughly 7 billion. In 30 years, we believe we'll be 9 billion. Underlying this, the global middle class will continue to grow.
Today, you have roughly, say, 2 billion people in the global middle class, and we expect this to grow to roughly 4 billion people, very much still based on growth in wealth in emerging markets. What this means in terms of the amount of goods and energy and food that needs to be produced and consumed, you know, this is just enormous. It's really staggering. The key point here is that the goods and the energy and the food that will have to be produced in locations that will be separate from where it will have to be used and consumed. This will trigger increase in trade over and above regular economic growth. That's our real long-term belief. In terms of our position as APM Terminals, we believe we have a very strong position.
We have a strong reputation in the industry. We deliver on our promises, and we are known throughout all countries. We have a strong position in terms of our customer relations and of course, a unique position in the industry in terms of our opportunity to work together with the best and the biggest shipping line, being Maersk Line. We have built global capabilities in the organization with a documented track record in implementations and how we run our operations. We do have a diversified, strong network of ports in the right locations, so we have the scale. We have the strengths of the group's balance sheet. Then the final thing is we also have the best and the right people in this industry, and we have the right people to make the right decisions.
We have combined all of this, the external as well as the internal, elements into our strategy. The strategy is called Reach 2020. It was launched last year to APM Terminals, and also to the investor community earlier this year. It does consist of four elements. The first one is about reaching new markets and customers. This is about accelerating investments in our core business, the container ports, but also seek investment opportunities in what we have called multi-ports, which are port activities that is not container related. We have a dedicated team to work on that. We are very convinced that we will over time land some good and attractive opportunities adding to our non-container portfolio that we have already.
Could be in liquid storage, could be in dry bulk, or could be in other types of related port activities. It's about reaching safe and industry-leading operations. It's about using our global scale and technology to drive synergies in the portfolio, and it's about implementing global standards and procedures in everything what we do. It's about reaching results through capabilities and collaboration. This is about people. This is about, yes, we are working in the local port, but we are also part of a global company, and we need to learn and share best practice from each other. Finally, it's about reaching our bold ambition, namely, growing and becoming the leading port developer and operator in the industry.
You know that our financial targets is about delivering double-digit returns and also growing at least in line or actually above the global transportation market. This is very brief. There's a lot of details on this, but very brief, our strategic direction. I would like to focus in a little bit more about how we want to grow the business and how we take advantage of the current volatility. Over to you, Henrik.
Okay. As mentioned that in the last part of my finance review, I'll just get back to the growth part here. What you look at here is essentially our future revenue-generating entities. Right now, we have $3 billion under construction. It's not only new greenfield terminals, it's also big expansions like we have in Callao in Peru. In 2015, we have secured 4 new projects, one being a joint venture container terminal in Qingdao. We have a reefer terminal in Italy. We also have Cartagena in Colombia. Cartagena is on the Atlantic side of Colombia. Colombia is the third biggest economy in South America, only trailing Argentina and Brazil. It's in a growing economy, 50 million people. Cartagena is the second biggest port on the Atlantic side of South America.
What we have acquired here is into what we call a multipurpose port. We are not only operating containers here, we are also operating general cargo like grain. As we speak, our commercial and operations team, they are there to instill our expertise within these matters. We're working together with our local partner. What we're going to do is invest $200 million in upgrading this facility to become world-class. Africa. Ghana. We have earlier announced a $1.5 billion joint investment in Tema. Ghana is a very vibrant economy. It has been growing 6%-8% a year, 27 million people. It's not only an oil-dependent country. It is actually a diverse economy, agriculture and mining, et cetera. The Port of Tema is the main import gateway to the capital of Accra.
What our project is about is we're going to build a brand-new greenfield project outside the existing port complex that we are currently operating. In addition to investing in this new greenfield terminal, we're also going to invest in building the connecting road networks. Looking even further ahead, we actually do have a strong business development pipeline. Our intention is to still pursue growth in high-growth markets. The current volatility in the markets could open up opportunities to invest and acquire and consolidate in mature markets as well. In 2013 and 2014, it may have looked that we had less of a growth appetite, but in fact we still had our appetite. We were just working on long-term projects like Tema in Ghana. We also looked at acquisition opportunities, but those specific acquisition opportunities we simply thought were not financially attractive for us.
We said, "No, thanks." Prices are still high when it comes to acquisitions. We have our competitors, sovereign funds, private equities. They're all motivated to invest. In APM Terminals, we have a unique value proposition, and we intend to use that value proposition to make disciplined investments that will fit us strategically. Speaking of strategic investments, as you have seen, we have announced an acquisition where we signed an agreement to acquire the portfolio of TCB. Kim, could you give a little more overview of this exciting opportunity?
Thank you. Yeah. You have heard about this. I mean, we are very happy and also really excited that we now have signed an agreement to acquire the 61% of TCB. This is still subject to certain conditions and also approvals by relevant authorities. We have signed it. We have not closed it. This is a great addition to APM Terminals and an opportunity for us to create real value because this will cater for our growth ambitions.
It will also add new markets and new services into our portfolio, so more value to our customers. Then it will give us an opportunity to review the portfolio, go in and see where can we modernize, where can we upgrade, where can we use our skills and experience, and maybe even learn from TCB as well, as a very respected and reputable company in the industry. The next steps here is working towards closing, preparing for the takeover, and then actually the real hard work only starts after closing, where we need to deliver on the integration.
In conclusion here, APM Terminals, as I started saying, we have a strong position in an attractive industry, but the current market conditions is a challenge for us. We need to continue to work on revenue, cost, and productivity, but also use the volatility to take advantage and place disciplined investments in to cater for our growth ambitions. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Henrik, and thanks indeed for being back for the last stretch of the program. For Maersk Drilling, we have called our presentation here Navigating in Low Visibility, and I guess most of you can appreciate why. We have for a long time not had a dimmer outlook and as much doubt about the market as we have right now, so navigating in low visibility seems to be appropriate. Fortunately, we are mariners, so we are good at navigating in low visibility. Now I'm challenged. There's two, but I guess they both work. Yes. You will have to do with me for this presentation, but I did bring part of my management team. The rest of the team is out elsewhere in the world, but we have with us Trond Westlie, our CFO.
We have Anna Zambelli, our Chief Commercial Officer, and we have Michael Harboe-Jørgensen, Head of Strategy. They will be here to assist me if it gets too complicated. Let me spend a little bit of time here, half an hour approximately, to tell you a little bit about a very exciting but also a very challenged industry, and tell you a little bit more about how we think Maersk Drilling is doing in this current environment and how we are positioned for the future. I will spend a few minutes on the market. It will be the shortest oil field services market outlook that you will get.
I will spend a little bit more on Maersk Drilling's performance and position and end up with our financials and then of course the Q&A. Let's start with the challenging part, the market that we are sitting in. This is reflecting a little bit back to the Maersk Oil presentation earlier in the day. It's of course the same market. You have on the left-hand side here the development in the oil price. That development in the oil price is driven by not only the increase in shale oil and shale gas production, but also in general, a very handsome supply in the oil markets. In 2014, middle of the year, the oil price started to tumble as a reaction to increased cost and poor oil company profitability.
You'll see in the right-hand side how the capital expenditures for the oil companies has been decreasing in 2015. We expect a 22% decrease in oil company expenditure in our businesses and the related oil field businesses in 2015, which of course dramatically hurts our business. It is actually not the oil price alone, the drop in the middle of 2014, that has created the situation. We already saw in 2012 and 2013 how the oil company profitability dropped and kept decreasing. The cost in the industry kept increasing, whereas the oil price remained flat. When finally the oil price tumbled, of course, it had a profound impact on our markets.
That impact you can see primarily here on the left-hand graph, where you will see the oil price impact on the demand for oil rigs, that is the dark blue side, which in 2014 peaked and has been decreasing since. You will see at the same time that of course, rigs that have been ordered back in 2010, 2011 and 2012, of course, kept on entering the fleet. Utilization in oil rigs dropped dramatically to a level where the latest estimates are below 75%, and I would say that it's probably still dropping.
If there's any good news in the current utilization, it is that the bifurcation in utilization in oil rigs that was introduced with all the new and modern and more efficient rigs coming into the fleet in during the late 2008, 2009, and 2010, there was a huge difference in how a modern, efficient, sophisticated rigs were utilized and how the older rigs were utilized. You can see here how that development has continued into 2015, where the older rigs, the less efficient rigs utilizations are dropping towards the 60% mark, whereas the younger and more modern rigs in the floater segment is still hovering above 80%. At least there's a little bit of comfort in that.
When you look at the right-hand side on the graph, of course, the day rates that we are able to command and that our competitors are able to command in the industry is also hurting from that lower utilization. These are average rates, so some of you will probably already spot that, if a floater is really above 350, well some of them are, and some of them are also dropping below, and the same for the jack-ups. This is the latest sort of official numbers we have. If you want the trend, I think you can extend it a little bit. Whereas the rate decrease is flattening out, it's probably still extremely competitive and probably still developing a little bit to the negative side.
If we look at how Maersk Drilling is positioned in this, very challenging market, then I think we have a few things going for us that is extremely important. First and foremost, coming back to the bifurcation in the market, we do have one of the youngest and definitely one of the most modern rig fleets in the market. We have built some of the most capable and sophisticated and efficient rigs over the last, well, the last eight rigs we've been building in particular, but also before that, and that gives us a very good starting position. We have an industry-leading operational performance and safety record. That is also something we have achieved over the past years, and I will get back to that to show you the facts of our performance.
We think we did it early, but in the beginning of the year, we instigated a cost-saving program, a profit optimization program. We could probably have started that in 2014. If you remember, we took delivery of a lot of newbuildings last year, and we also have a huge yard stay program. There's simply a limit to how many things an organization can focus on at the same time. On the other hand, we got off to a good start this year and we're actually making good progress on the cost optimization. We have built an extremely strong relationship with our customers. Maersk Drilling has transformed into this very sophisticated, highly efficient drilling contractor. We have focused on the ultra harsh environment market around the North Sea, and we have entered the ultra deepwater market.
That has been done extremely successfully with a very, very good customer track record in reward. Finally, we have a solid contract backlog of $5.6 billion providing a certain degree of earnings visibility for the immediate future. Now before going in a little bit deeper into those points, let me also say that last time, when we met, we also spoke about the growth that we had ahead of us and the challenge of getting the right people and the competent people in. I'm very pleased to say that over the last two years, we have hired more than 1,500 people into the fleet, into the employees, colleagues of Maersk Drilling, and they've all been hired into an extremely high competence level.
If I'm talking a lot about rigs and steel and performance, it all goes to the people that we have hired in. That is an asset that we really have going for us, going forward as well. Alluding a little bit back to the rig fleet, this is the overview, and you say maybe this is a short list, but it does represent more than $8.5 billion invested capital. What you will see here is on the left-hand side, 7 of the most sophisticated deepwater rigs that are in the fleet out there in the market. They are all from 2008, most of them from 2014 and 2015, with a median age of 3 years.
A very, very competent fleet and a very competitive fleet, and a young one on top of that. In the middle, we have our jackup fleet. Thirteen out of the 15 are harsh environment rigs, and six of them are ultra harsh environment rigs. Most of them also a young fleet giving a relatively young median age in the market. It is very young, and gives us a very, very good position in the market. Mind you, many of the expensive ultra harsh environment rigs are on good, solid long-term contracts. Nils was saying this morning, and I think it's worth highlighting that the last rig we built on speculation, ordered on speculation, was in 2011.
The rigs that were ordered after that were all ordered against a very, very solid long-term contract to start the rig off by. On the right-hand side, we have included our joint venture in Egypt. It has been mentioned before, but we have a joint venture with the Egyptian state with 62 land rigs and 4 offshore rigs. It is not core to our business, but it is a solid drilling contractor, and it is probably the best drilling contractor, recognized for being the best drilling contractor in the North Africa, Middle Eastern region on land. Let me go a little bit back to what the fleet has provided for us together with the people that I talked about, so the competent people and the very competent rig fleet.
On the left-hand side, you see our performance graph, and you may find that graph boring, and it is supposed to be boring as long as it's up in these numbers here. We have consistent operational performance that is ranging between 97%-98% 10 quarters in a row, and I'm not allowed to say anything about this quarter, but it probably won't spoil the picture. It is really, really providing a good, solid, consistent message to our customers that this is what they can expect to get when they contract a Maersk Drilling rig. It is outstanding in the industry and an operational uptime, as we call it, performance of 97%-98%. That actually gives a revenue efficiency of 99.5% or roughly in that area.
Not only is it good for our customer track record, but it's certainly also good for our own bottom line and top line. On the right-hand side, you see our safety performance. If there's two things that an oil company is measuring us on, it is what we deliver to them in terms of wells. Do we deliver the rig time and the progress on the drilling of the wells as we're supposed to do? Secondly, do we do it safely? That's actually not a priority. The two has to go hand in hand.
The good thing about our performance is that over the same period, as we have taken 6 rigs into operation and taken more than 1,500 people into our crew, we have managed to actually uphold this performance at the same time as we have had a very, very good development in our safety record. You can see here how the industry is faring in general on the dark blue and how we have improved our performance on the light blue graph. A very, very good, I wouldn't say starting point, but a very good foundation to stand on when we are navigating in this very, very complex market.
I would like to go back to the cost saving program because I know that is something that everybody's looking for with drilling contractors these days. We started early this year or very late last year, and I just assure you that we leave no stone unturned. Obviously, when we have an operational performance as the one I just displayed, we are very, very careful that we do not jeopardize that when we go into our cost savings programs. We are looking into our OpEx, both in terms of maintenance and running cost, procurement, and any savings we can come by. We do have very, very good traction in actually saving on our OpEx. Part of the OpEx is manning costs.
There's no doubt that in this industry, manning cost is a very large part of the OpEx, and therefore it is also important that we address our manning costs, and you can imagine that that can be of a rather sensitive nature. Yard stays, when you look at the financial performance a little bit later, you will see the impact of a lot of yard stays in 2014. We had half of the existing rig in for five-year class surveys. That's something we have to do.
We are working very hard to avoid when we get five years further down the line and when we get all the new rigs to get five years of age, that we actually have managed to introduce condition-based and running maintenance instead of having these very, very expensive yard stays that are not only costly from an operational point of view and from a maintenance point of view, but also costly potentially from the lack of revenue that we suffer while they're in. Administration and overhead has been high on our agenda. We started the year out cutting out 20% of our head office headcount both to send the signal to the rest of our colleagues that this was serious, but also, of course, because our growth plans had changed somewhat. We're also looking at expats, traveling, and you name it.
A frequent question is about our stacking approach. Yes, we do have a strategic approach to stacking. So far, we haven't had rigs stacked as such. We have managed to keep most of the fleet, almost all of the fleet working, and stacking for us so far has been of a temporary nature. We do, of course, have a very, very disciplined approach to how we plan a stacking, how we evaluate whether we cold stack or warm stack, how much we preserve the rig, and that's all depending on how soon do we need to get the rig out again.
You will hear a lot of my competitors talking about taking very aggressive stance, and some of them may not have the choice, but we do actually have the choice to keep the rigs warm, and we will be in a much better position to compete in the market. Secondly, it will be incredibly expensive to take these rigs into operation again once they have been totally shut down and preserved. It is a very disciplined approach and of course, we evaluate it as in each individual case. The performance that I talked about before, the safety records, the competence of our people, and the fact that we are managing to cut down our cost to make us more competitive has also given us a successful track record in terms of signing new contracts in 2014.
As many of you will know, there's not been that many contracts to sign, but we have certainly gotten our better part of it compared to the industry. Maersk Voyager, a long contract starting up directly from the yard in Ghana, three and a half years with Eni. The Heydar Aliyev down in the Caspian Sea, a five-year extension with BP, taking that rig to 2021. A rig like the Maersk Innovator, who has worked for decades with ConocoPhillips and at least getting an extension, taking it into 2017. Maersk Giant coming down from Norway to Denmark soon. Short contract, yes, but definitely shows that we are willing and able to move rigs around in the market in order to take the business that there is.
Importantly, I will not go into the individual contract. I'll just say that all the contracts that we have going forward for us are profitable and positive. We are also having that going for us. I think, especially the Voyager and the Maersk Innovator, that's something that we are really proud of, that we got these two awards from two esteemed customers, and something that weighs in very heavily on our future prospects. Looking at where that brings us in terms of contract coverage, this is really what it's all about when you look at the current outlook. We have 81% of our rig fleet firmly signed off for the rest of 2015.
We, at this stage, have more than two-thirds of the rig fleet signed up for 2016. A few contracts in the making, so hopefully that number will have increased before the end of the year. Also in 2017, 41% of the rig fleet signed up. I, without making comparisons directly, I think this contract backlog in terms of percentage of a rig fleet are well ahead of our competitors. It gives a revenue backlog for next year of $1.8 billion that are already secured now and $1.2 billion for 2017. It's not only the revenue backlog and the size of it, but it's also the customers with whom we have signed these contracts.
I mean, you can see here that it is customers where you do not normally place too much of a counterparty risk to, and it is customers where Maersk Drilling has a long and outstanding relationship. We can safely say, or we can regard those contracts as secure and safe for the future. There's a few other things that we have been doing since last time, and that is some of the execution highlights that we actually spent some time on. We have taken delivery over the recent 18 months of 7 new buildings. They have all been built in the yards on time and on budget, and they have all come out and started operation with flying colors.
There has not been a trace of a startup issue, and we've actually received a lot of praise from the oil companies for not wasting time and not having any operational issues as we go on location. I'm sorry about my voice. We also have successfully completed probably the most busy yard stay program in Maersk Drilling's history. Six rigs taken in one year with incredibly tough work schedule, and they all came out by and large on time and budget and without incidents. We've divested our barge business in Venezuela, difficult place to work, but a business where we had a long, good track record almost 25 years, and beneficially so.
Finally, we have decommissioned and recycled the oldest rig in the fleet, the Maersk Endurer, which ended her career down in Cameroon and has currently just arrived in China for a good green certificate recycling. That was some of the highlights that is outside the primary delivery of our performance and our financial results. What this has led to is a rather impressive financial development. If you look at our EBITDA and our NOPAT, the two graphs to the left, and I will just not dwell on 2012. Most of you will know that we had an operational issue in 2012, but apart from that, the track record in 2011, 2013, 2014 for the rig fleet that we actually built back in 2008, 2009 and 2010 has come solidly through.
2014, a lot of cost for the seven yard stays and the six new buildings taken into or the five new buildings we took into operation in that year. Nevertheless, a positive ongoing development. In 2015, we see the result of our hard work in the first half with a first half record result for Maersk Drilling, both on EBITDA, but also on NOPAT getting close to $400 million. We also see the EBITDA margin as soon as we get out of the yard stay program and the new building program that the EBITDA margin spikes up where it belongs.
The most gratifying is probably when you compare ourselves to the industry where we have managed through the cycle or through the five years to stay in top quartile and actually ending in first half 2015 on top of the pack. It's been an incredible journey and one that has taken a lot of effort to deliver, not least in the aftermath of 2012, but one that I and the team are very proud to have arrived at. Going forward, our strategy, as Nils alluded to earlier, we have taken away our ambition of $1 billion, obviously, with the market outlook as it is, and also with the new building program having stopped for now.
Our strategy remains to deliver a 10% return over the cycle. When we go through the cycle, our ambition is to stay probably what is a few % ahead of the industry and deliver 10% return. We will maintain our focus in the ultra-harsh environment segments and in the ultra-deepwater segments. We will continue, of course, to target optimization of our cost. When I said we had good traction before, we have a target in 2016 to reach two-digit savings. We have not disclosed the amounts, but what I can assure you is that we only count what we call sustainable savings. We are not taking in one-off savings. We are taking in savings only that can we sustain through 2016 and 2017.
Whether that will be enough, the time will tell, but that is at least our ambition, currently. Of course, what is absolutely essential to Maersk Drilling and our success in the future is to maintain our operational efficiency, as you saw on the slide before, and to do it at the same time as we maintain a good, solid and continuously improving track record. We still have a target to go towards zero incidents. It is not something that happens fast, but it is still a target that we have to take Maersk Drilling in the industry down to that level. In the last bullet here, we also point out that we, of course, in the current environment evaluate growth opportunities.
This is not only M&A, this is also some of the projects we have going for us. You remember that we have the 20K project with very, very high pressure, high temperature drilling in a new frontier in the deep water. That is still a project that is ongoing. Of course, it's subject to constant evaluation, not so much by us, but by the oil companies. We're also looking at what happens in the market. We will only consider
20K new buildings, other opportunities against very, very solid contracts, and we will only consider M&A activities if it's really something that sits very well with us and something that we can execute on and delivers value on an ongoing basis also in the current market.
Good afternoon, everybody. At the Capital Markets Day last year, I said that the most important purpose of APM Shipping Services is to put in place a strong foundation in each of our four businesses in order for us to improve our results, and this is exactly what we have spent most of our time on.
Continued result improvements and sustaining the positive development that we so far have seen in the businesses will remain our key focus also in the coming time, and we will, in some of the businesses, also pursue growth opportunities, which I will outline in just a moment. In my presentation here today, I will first give a short account on our financial performance so far this year, and I will then very briefly zoom in on the four businesses, give an outline of the main developments that we have seen there. I will do the presentation on behalf of all the four businesses here today, but we also have Hanne Sørensen, who is CEO of Damco, with us. Could I ask you just to stand up, Hanne?
As I said, I will cover the presentation here today. First, the financial performance so far for this year in the first half. We've had a quite decent performance and development during the first six months, which was also necessary. We have seen good progress in all four businesses so far this year, most notably in Maersk Tankers and in Damco, and with the comments that the market situation in Maersk Supply Service is deteriorating, which I'll detail later in the presentation. Overall, a profit for the first half, underlying profit of $200 million. Including the specials, we had a profit of $232 million, equal to a 9.9% ROIC for the first half.
We also expect a decent development for the remaining part of the year and a full year here in 2015, significantly better than 2014. That was a short account of our financial performance so far this year. Let me then turn to each of the businesses with a brief update on them, starting with Maersk Tankers. In Maersk Tankers, we have had a very positive development so far this year, both in terms of our results and our returns, which are the best ones for us since 2008. This is to a large extent due to a strong market in general, but we're also starting to see good impact from our own strategic initiatives.
By and large, we consider our performance right now to be on par with the average competitor in the industry. There's one or two competitors that are beating us still on returns. Our aim is very clearly to become a consistent top quartile performer in this industry, which our strategy is designed to deliver. We've seen a very good progress on our three strategic components that we're focusing on: cost leadership, active position taking, and third-party services. We've so far this year taken out more than $20 million of operational costs, and we will continue to take out a lot of costs also in the coming years.
On active position taking, we have now developed the database market view model, which we now are using to help us predict the markets and guide our commercial decision-making. Under the active position taking umbrella, we have over the last 12 months acquired 18 vessels from the markets before the secondhand prices started to increase. In third-party services, we now have all but two of our existing pool partners converted over to a new pool structure and fee structure. We have in this process secured two new partners as well. Overall in Maersk Tankers, a quite good development so far, but this is a volatile market, so we're first and foremost focusing on the things that we can do something about. That's taking costs out. It is taking the industry-best commercial decisions.
It is continuing to renew our fleet to stay competitive, and we will remain focused on the product tanker segment also going forward. Turning to Maersk Supply Service, this is actually a business that has delivered good results, returns, and a top quartile performance over many years. This is also the case for the first half of this year, mainly due to 2, you could say, initiatives that we have taken, a strong contract coverage for the first half and also a fast and good impact from the cost savings initiative that we started towards the end of last year.
Due to the situation in the oil industry, the results in Maersk Supply Service, however, will be severely impacted in the coming 2-3 years, where lower but positive returns will be expected. What we do in this situation is to continue to take cost out. We will, by 2016, reach a level with an annualized savings impact of $40 million. We'll continue to lay up vessels when necessary. We have laid up currently 4 vessels out of the more than 200 vessels laid up in the market, and we're working closely with our customers to remove some of the many inefficiencies that exist in and around the oil industry. We do expect that the market for subsea support vessels and anchor handlers will improve again in the future. As mentioned, it may take a few years.
In the meantime, we are then adjusting and focusing our investment program for the company. Now focusing more on possible distressed assets and opportunities in the market and focusing on specialized new buildings against a long-term secure contract, if and when that becomes available. Overall, a good, you could say, performance in the first half of this year. Tougher times ahead, which may also, at the same time, present some opportunities for investment, for us. In Svitzer, we have so far this year delivered a result on par with our performance last year. We have in Svitzer seen a quite decent development here in the first half of the year. We are currently in Svitzer, focusing on two main areas.
We are continuing to focus on efficiencies and productivity improvements over and above what we have secured already this year, and more can be found. What we have seen so far in the first half of this year is that the efficiencies that we have achieved in our existing business have been countered by rate of exchange and commodity price developments in Australia and Europe, which comprise 80% of our business. In addition to further efficiencies, we also are focusing on selected growth opportunities for Svitzer, mainly within emerging markets in order to balance our business portfolio better. We have, as an example, earlier this year, acquired a small operator in Brazil in order to get access to a new and very large towage market for Svitzer.
We'll continue to look at selected opportunities for Svitzer. This also given that the returns in Svitzer now have improved and they're competitive, and also given the fact that many of our customers in Australia and in Europe are also active in other parts of the market where we are not present, and this will be a good way into these markets. We expect a satisfactory development in Svitzer, where we also will, in the coming time, see that projects earlier won will start to become operational here in the coming time. Finally, on to Damco. Damco is, as many of you will know, going through a comprehensive but necessary transformation program, which has resulted in large charges and losses in 2013 and 2014.
We definitely still have a number of challenges in the company. As Nils said earlier today, we are not celebrating victory still. We are not even close. We have seen a good development on the initiatives that we have been working on in recent time. Damco did deliver a profit in the Q2 . We see continued good progress in the Q3, and we are on track to deliver a small profit for the year, full year 2015. What we're working on in Damco right now are three overall areas. Continued efficiencies across a number of individual items across the business, the existing business.
We're also focusing on restoring our performance within ocean and air forwarding, where we especially are starting to see progress, good progress on our air freight business. We are working to build on our supply chain management business. We have a leading position within supply chain management in the industry, and we see good opportunities to grow the business. In Damco, we have a number of challenges, as I mentioned, but we also do see a number of good things in the company, which we can build on going forward, and which are actually quite unique in the industry. As an example, in freight forwarding, we have just completed the rollout of a new platform, which is giving us a very good visibility of our business, a very competitive platform.
especially within supply chain management, the DNA of the Damco people is quite unique in terms of exploring, building and testing solutions with our customers, which actually should not be underestimated and is very difficult to replicate by our competitors. So that's where we are overall on Damco. We continue to focus on, you could say, putting in place the strong foundation, further efficiencies, restoring our performance on forwarding, building on our strong position in supply chain management. Once we have established this strong foundation, we will then work out the longer term strategy and plan for the company.