When you ask global shippers, our customers, about how they perceive our industry, what they will tell you is two things. First, they will tell you that global shipping is actually quite inexpensive to the point where global transportation costs hardly factor when they decide where to manufacture their goods today. Where to assemble their products, whether it's close to the markets or in Asia or wherever. They will also tell you that global shipping is difficult, it's complicated, it can be frustrating, and it's at times quite painful. We are building a strategy where we aim to deal with those issues, because we truly believe we can do a better job for our customers.
We have already some time ago, actually at the last Capital Markets Day in September-December 2016, launched this vision of becoming a global integrator of container logistics, connecting and simplifying our customers' supply chains. We will talk a lot about that today. It's built on three pillars. The first one is that we want to provide our customers with simple end-to-end services. What does that actually mean? Well, it means that we want our customers, the people that ship stuff from one end of the world to the other, to be able to do that just dealing with Maersk. We want to be able to carry the box from one port to the other. We want to be able to provide the inland service.
We want to be able to provide customized brokerage, finance their goods, insure the goods, and whatever other services, consolidation and so on, that may be relevant for our customers. This is what. When we talk about this, we want to paint the picture of UPS and FedEx and DHL and the carrier express and package industry. Because that is an industry where you deal with just one party, if that's what you want to do, when you ship your goods. That's the picture I would like you to have. The second element or the second pillar in the vision of becoming the global integrator of container logistics is seamless customer engagement. What does that mean? Well, actually, it means that we want to, first of all, digitize the transactions with the customers to the point, to as much as we possibly can.
Enabling our customers to self-serve when it comes to getting prices, getting price quotes, when it comes to making bookings, when it comes to uploading documents or creating documents, and when it comes to paying the bill. Think about online banking and what it has done to the customer experience. Actually, the customer is doing all of the work himself or herself and experience that as a better service than when we had to go to the bank, stand in line, and conduct your business between 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM in the afternoon. Now, banking is online 24/7 on multiple platforms. That's also where we're going.
Seamless customer engagement also means that when our customers have a need to speak to people, then they will be speaking with people that, first of all, care, secondly, have the training and the tools that they need, and thirdly, are empowered to take the decisions that they need to take in order to help the customer. The third pillar in our strategy is around having a competitive network. What does that mean? Well, for us, it means two things. First of all, it means having a competitive network that has great geographic coverage, competitive transit times, reliability is high, and in general, delivering a great physical product. It also means having a network that is cost competitive.
Because we are strong believers that in our industry, the likelihood that we will be able to create a service package that is so good that we can charge a meaningful premium and be able to sustain a high-cost culture is simply not realistic. Actually, we are strong believers that in the long run, in our industry, lowest cost will win. The way to build up margin difference and maintain it is to have lower cost than the competition. We are a scale-based industry, wherefore we should be able to actually do that. We have done that in the past, and we would be able to do that in the future.
Now, obviously, this company, if we get it right, will help us drive higher level returns, less volatility in the earnings, less reliance on container freight rates between Shanghai and Rotterdam. That should, we believe, be a benefit also for our investors. As we have embarked on this journey, and we're now about one year into it, we have to say that this is pretty complicated. This is a transformation with multiple dimensions, a transformation at scale in a truly global company. We are, first of all, moving from being a conglomerate, a holding company that owns a couple of handfuls of businesses that are run independently at arm's length to being one company. One integrated company that is focused entirely on container shipping, on ports, and logistics.
That, of course, has significant implications for corporate structure. We have also, at the same time, acquired Hamburg Süd because we believed it was an opportunity that we could not say no to, because we believed it was very important for our strategy, but it adds the dimension of also integrating a significant acquisition at a time of transformation. Thirdly, the new company, the company that is entirely focused on container shipping ports and logistics, a global container logistics company, needs to transform itself digitally. We need to build the digital front end to run our business.
We need to build the digital tools that are gonna help us optimize the way we run the business on a day-to-day basis, how we optimize asset productivity, and we have to build a digital model that will allow us to drive new revenue sources for the future. All of this is going on while we also have to improve performance. I think all of you are painfully aware that 2015 was, excuse me, 2016 was a pretty horrible year for A.P. Moller - Maersk in particular for our main business, Maersk Line, which lost money. We were able to improve in 2017, but we're also clearly not where we need to be.
Doing a transformation at scale, at this complexity, while you're at the same time reporting quarterly results, is actually not that fantastic an experience when you're on this side of the fence. Sometimes when you look around and saw that Dell, they actually took the company private in order to transform it, you know, you get a lot of sympathy. That is not an option for us. We have to continue to improve our financial performance. Finally, to add to the list of things to do, we do need to also separate out four large companies at a time where it's pretty complex, or at least some of these companies are fairly challenged financially because the industries that they are in are not doing that well.
There I'm particularly thinking about the oil services sector. That is the agenda that we are driving. I'd like to reiterate what I said at the Capital Markets Day in 2016 or December 2016, and that was that the purpose of all of this transformation of A.P. Moller - Maersk, is not to become a smaller company. Actually, while it might be counterintuitive, actually, we want to shrink so that we can grow. We have done about $14 billion worth of corporate transactions or M&A transactions in the last little more than a year. We have sold Maersk Oil, we've sold Maersk Tankers, we have acquired Hamburg Süd, and then a number of other transactions. We've had, with Maersk Oil and with Maersk Tankers, about $5.5 billion worth of turnover is leaving A.P. Moller - Maersk with the acquisition of Hamburg Süd.
A similar amount of turnover is entering, of course, with different profitabilities and all of that. We are rebuilding the company because we want to get back to being a growth company again. Claus, he will be back to talk more about the energy M&A transaction, so I will not cover that anymore. As we move to becoming one company or one integrated company that can enable our vision, we have taken a number of steps to facilitate that process. A very important first one was actually at the Capital Markets Day in December 2016 to announce the vision of becoming a global integrator of container logistics. It set a direction for the whole company, for the new A.P. Moller - Maersk.
We have been driving on internal synergies. At the time we promised the market that we would be able to deliver around $600 million of integration synergies from this, and we are on the way. Today, we will talk about what we announced at our result announcement of how far we have come, about $100 million-$150 million. Morten and Søren Toft will talk more about that. We are on the road to deliver on the 600.
We have announced late last year a new executive board, which actually is an executive board that runs the business on a day-to-day basis as opposed to being an executive board that consists of CEOs for different business units. We're moving from being a business unit focus to being one company. That also means that our top 100 people in the organization have had their incentives and rewards completely aligned. We used to be very focused on the business unit results when it comes to rewarding executives. Now we are focused on the total company result.
We have for 2018 set one set of strategic priorities, five strategic priorities for the whole company, for all executives, and we kicked off that with a meeting here in Copenhagen in January for the top 900 global leaders of A.P. Moller - Maersk. We are moving towards a one company structure also when it comes to our professional support functions. The first one where we already fully implemented is IT. Today we have one IT organization for all of A.P. Moller - Maersk, and that IT organization is led by Adam Banks, who you'll hear from today, but more is going on in that direction.
We are remaking all of our management for us so they become management for us, not per business unit, but for the whole company. Today we will announce that we are going to change our reporting formats. We'll give you a new set of disclosures and the way we'll talk about the financial results of the company so that we report not as a holding company owning a lot of businesses, but report as one company. You saw that already in connection with our full year results that we started our guidance now being at the company level with an EBITDA guidance for 2018 at the full company level.
It's important to say, for me to say also that of course I, as the CEO, I lead this transformation, but I'm by no means alone. I think I have a great team, and you will see a lot of them on stage today. We have established not only a new executive board, but also a transformation and performance team which consists of the top 25 people in the group. The executive board meets every week to run the company and transform the company, and the transformation and performance team, the top 25, will meet every two months for two days to drive both performance and transformation. As we are integrating, we are starting to see synergies.
We have made, I believe, quite good progress in on the terminal side in terms of moving more business to the container terminals. We have also surprised ourselves actually when it comes to how well we can do in Maersk Container Industry when we do a better job of cooperating, and you'll hear more about this. We had a drag last year on our transshipment hubs because we had massive problems in, especially in Spain, where we had, you know, ongoing labor issues for almost six months. That actually was a drag on our synergies last year, but we are clearly expecting that to be over. We have taken some baby steps when it comes to cross-selling.
We have done some good early work on solution sales to key clients such as Huawei and Amazon, where we are able to combine a sale from Maersk Line and from Damco and so on. This is still very early days. I'm confident, however, that we will get to the $600 million in synergies next year. We closed the Hamburg Süd transactions, as you all know, and that transaction will give us it will give us scale. You will hear I think a solid presentation today from Arnt Vespermann and from Søren Toft on Hamburg Süd. I would just like to say that consolidation is important. It's part of our strategy. The industry needs to continue to consolidate. It's also, I believe, a good transaction for us.
It creates a fantastic market position in Latin America, a market position that rivals the one that we have in Sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of market share, around 35%. It is a transaction which gives us scale. Almost one in four ocean containers will now be moving on the Maersk network. Excuse me, one in five ocean containers globally will now be moving on the Maersk network. When it comes to reefer containers, refrigerated containers, one in five, one in four, almost 25% of all reefer containers on our network. That is truly scale. It's also an acquisition that, in my view, was done at a good time. Certainly at what looks to be the bottom of the Latin American economic cycle.
Economies have started to grow since we did that. When we look at the price that we paid, I think we paid a fair price, and particularly when you compare to other transactions that happened at the same time. All in all, a great company and a cash-generating company that we are happy to be the proud owners of today. Consolidation is important, and we are convinced that more will happen. A lot has happened actually in the last three, four years. I mean, who would have thought that we basically have gone from 43% market share of the top five carriers to 64% when all the transactions that are announced will have been implemented.
Of course, we often get the question, "What does it actually mean for the market, for pricing, for stability and so on?" Clearly, I have to start by saying that it will certainly only have an impact when it's implemented, not when it's announced. We still have two important transactions to close, the COSCO acquisition of OOCL and the three Japanese carriers that are merging together into one by 1st of April. We believe more consolidation will happen in our industry mainly because of the economies of scale, mainly because a number of competitors simply are not generating a return and have to be propped up by new equity all the time. We believe that will drive more consolidation.
We would also like to participate in that, but I have to be crystal clear that we have to integrate Hamburg Süd, and we have to demonstrate the business case for making that acquisitions before we consider any additional steps in this space. This does not mean that we will not consider additional acquisitions, but they will be targeted, and they will be targeted at getting us specific skills or capabilities or technology that we feel would fit well into the integrator vision, and in all likelihood only be relatively small transactions.
Now, in December 2016, we spoke a lot about digital, and it was probably the first time we, as a company, even started to have strong views on IT and digital and certainly communicate it in a public forum. We had a lot of fancy PowerPoint slides. I'm very proud to say today that now we're not just talking about fancy words on PowerPoint slides. We actually, in the little more than a year that has passed, have been able to build a lot of digital products and launch them, many of them which are being used by our customers today. In the upstairs, we have three expos. You will be able to go and visit the expos and see three products. One, GTD, Global Trade Digitization.
That is the joint venture that we announced with IBM not so long ago. We have actually been working on this for more than a year, so we have product to show you. We will demonstrate, if you're interested, our Remote Container Management tool, which is a tool that tracks every single reefer container with a GPS tracker and is able to tell our customer where the container is, in which direction it's traveling, what's the temperature inside, what the humidity, and all kinds of other data point. This is a product that has had a significant uptake with our customers. More than half of our reefer customers today have signed up to that, and a product that we are really truly proud of.
Then you will see our predictive maintenance system or container predictions, which we, among others, use to manage how we maintain cranes and so on. I really encourage you to do this. As I said in the beginning, we're doing digital for three reasons. First of all, we want to improve the customer experience, and we want to make that online, and I painted the picture of online banking. I can invite you to go on to mymaerskline.com, the web address is on the slide here, or you can use a.
Take a look at Twill, which is a digital freight forwarder that we have built within Damco, and Vincent Clerc will be back later to talk about that. That's demonstrating very clearly what we are talking about when we talk about digital products. We are doing a number of things that help us run the business better also. One of them is Spotlines, which is a trucking procurement app that we use in the USA with very good results, where people actually make a kind of reverse bidding on truck moves. You will hear about our Pit Stop app today, which is an app that our ships use when they go in and out of ports.
The whole purpose of that is to improve our turn times in the port so that we can get the ships in and out of ports much faster, much as the airlines try to optimize or minimize the time that they spend from when the wheels are down until the wheels are up in the airports. We want to do the same. Then we have a third objective with our digital, which is about developing new revenue sources. There's Global Trade Digitization, which is a truly exciting project because it solves a problem that the industry has not solved for the last 30-40 years.
We have done a fantastic job in terms of making it simpler, easier, and a lot cheaper to ship containers, but all of the paperwork that goes with that is still working with a concept of a bill of lading, which is many-hundred-year-old concept based on you having a physical document that is a contract between the carrier and the shipper, but it's also a proof of ownership, and that creates a lot of complexity for us. Blockchain is the tool we believe to digitize that. We don't have a revenue model for Global Trade Digitization yet. Vincent is kind of shaking his head. No, we don't have a revenue model, but if we can get a lot of users, we are confident we'll figure out how exactly to make revenue on that.
We also have on this slide, trade finance. We have a small trade finance unit. It's active in six markets. We have customers. We have dispensed about $180 million of loans, which is a small amount, but it's gaining traction, and it's gonna be interesting to see how that develops. While we're going through this transformation, we also last year had to deal with something we did not plan for, and that was the cyberattack that happened in late June and significantly impacted our 2017 result and in particular in Q3. That was an experience we frankly would rather have been without. It was extremely painful. It was expensive.
It impacted our customers significantly, particularly in Maersk Line and then particularly in Damco. So by all means, a horrible experience. I think for us, also all things being considered, an experience that we can use for something. Kelly Clarkson, she has a pop song, it's called What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger. Except I understand from my head of strategy that it was actually Friedrich Nietzsche who said that first. Anyway, you get the point. We are quite happy that we didn't have this cyber attack three years from now when we are fully digitized, because that would have been even more painful. What we have used it for is to really build a solid cyber strategy.
You should ask, Adam about that when he's up here later today. In layman's terms, what I can say is we've done three things. First of all, we have built our defenses much higher than what they were. We believe fundamentally that it's naive to believe you can have a cyber strategy that assumes that you will never have a successful attack. We have built our defenses as high as we can possibly have them. Better technology, new computers, and so on. Secondly, we have improved our ability to isolate. One of the big problems for Maersk in the cyber attack was that it became global. It started in Ukraine. If we had isolated it to Ukraine, you would never have heard about it, and it would have zero effect on us.
Even if we had been able to isolate it to Eastern Europe, you know, it wouldn't have been much of a big event. It became a global event, so we have had to rearrange our network and the way that is structured so that we get much better at isolating successful attacks. The third pillar in that strategy is that even if, even with that, we have to assume that it will be possible to bring the whole thing down, because these are state-sponsored government initiatives. We have also worked hard on being able to rebuild faster. It took us two weeks to rebuild in Maersk Line. We would like to be able to ideally in two hours, that's probably not realistic, but rebuild much faster than what we have done in the past.
The cyber attack was costly and was a big part of the problem we had with our performance in the third quarter last year, and for that matter, also in the fourth quarter when it comes to Damco. It gave us the problem that we got into a situation where we talked about our third quarter as a poor quarter where we didn't really deliver. I'm not gonna talk about the financial results today, but what I do want to say that we came out of 2017 with $3.6 billion more revenue than we had in 2016. We grew underlying earnings in our continuing business with almost $1 billion.
Cash flow from operations by more than $1 billion. Returns improved, and we are guiding a better result for 2018. In my view, while we cannot be happy with the absolute levels, we are on a path for improving our results. I would, of course, like it to go faster, but if we had not had the cyber attack, I'm pretty sure we actually would have been concluding that we had a pretty good year. We restored almost all of the leadership in terms of margins in our industry. This is a key metric for competitiveness that we use.
We have these two metrics that you have heard about a lot, EBIT margin gap to peers in Maersk Line, and the return on invested capital compared to competitors in APMT. We want to, of course, improve this because at the heart of our story is that scale matters, and we need to be able to convert that scale to competitive advantage. We have not been able to hit our 5% target since Q3 EBIT margin gap since Q3 of 2016. Last year, in the first, or in the last four quarters, which are Q4 2016 to Q3 2017, we are at around 2%-2.5% EBIT margin gap. The benchmark is getting harder because all the weak players are being absorbed by the stronger players.
For instance, Hanjin's demise was not very helpful for our EBIT margin gap. Also, the fact that a lot of people have made very significant write-downs means, of course, that they set themselves up with higher margins in the future because they have less depreciations. With all that being said, I'm not making excuses. We have to show and demonstrate on a consistent basis that our, perhaps not every single quarter, but certainly on a consistent basis, that our margins are higher than the rest of the competition. We have this, let's say, toolbox, if I could call it that, and it really starts in the bottom left-hand corner, cost leadership. We need to continue to drive cost.
As I said to begin with, cost leadership will win in our industry. We are not gonna be able to build a model where we can charge very meaningful premiums. The lowest cost will allow us to charge competitive prices and still make good margin. They will, combined with a great customer experience, hopefully help us grow organic. When you add to that, inorganic growth, such as with Hamburg Süd, the opportunities for cross-selling and from new products, new revenue streams, then I do actually believe we have a fair chance of becoming a growth company again. Then one more element. I know that is something that is very much at the heart of many of the people that are here today, capital discipline.
I guess we can say we have a newfound capital discipline. We emphasize again and again as we go through this process that we want to remain investment grade. That is important because first of all, it allow us to do things when things are tough. We were able to acquire Hamburg Süd at a really difficult time in the market, raise more than $4 billion, a little more than a week in order to do that transaction. That was a key driver of us actually being able to buy the company because the competition did not have the same resources financially. That is, of course, important for us, also for the longevity of the company.
We are gonna guide on CapEx today, and Jakob will get back to that. I will just say one thing, and that is we have been on a path of increased capital discipline in the last year and a half. Our committed forward investments at this point are $3.9 billion. That's down $1.5 billion or 27% since the last Capital Markets Day in Q4 of 2016. We used to be, as in 2013, 2014, 2015, we used to be a company that invested more than $7 billion a year on average. Since the middle of 2016, we have ordered no new ships except for two. We have not commit ourselves to any new container terminal projects.
We have not ordered any drilling rigs, supply ships, oil tankers. All the investments that are happening in Maersk Oil are now due to the lockbox mechanism of the transaction being financed by Total. We're coming from being a group that we used to invest around $7 billion-$8 billion a year to being a group that will be investing less than half of that in organic CapEx. I'm sure we will talk more about that today. Now, let me turn to a little bit about the outlook. Many of you will have heard me say, I think it was at the Q2 call last year, that I believe the fundamentals are the best they've been in a long while, in a decade or at least, in container shipping. I still believe that.
Why is that? First of all, we have broad-based, strong global economic growth. Europe is doing well. U.S. has been doing well and will be doing well with all of the stimulus to the U.S. economy from lower taxes and so on. The commodity-based countries also doing well. They're growing again. Brazil, West Africa, Russia, and so on. Because commodity prices have come up a little bit or some, and costs have come down as we have felt very hard on our oil services business. That, and a $65 oil price today means that the oil prices are making record results. That is good for those economies. That drives container demand. We were surprised very much on the upside last year on container demand, which grew, probably ended up more than 5%.
We thought going into the year, we would be at the 2%-4% mark. Let's see where this year ends. But broad-based demand growth seemed to be set for 2018, 2019. It would really take some kind of geopolitical event to change the picture in the short term, in our view. On the supply side. Right now, at the end of 2017, the order books stood at 13%. We have a graph here that goes back to 2010. Many of you that have covered the industry for a while will remember, it was even worse. I mean, in 2008, it was 60% of existing capacity that was under construction.
Over the last decade, the relative addition of capacity has come down quite a lot. At the same time, what happened last year, which was quite important, I think, for this year, was that we had a big chunk of idle ships that had been building up, ships that were doing nothing, that had been built up in 2015 and 2016. They were cleared out. It was a little bit painful last year and put pressure on prices in the second half, but they are not there to be cleared up again. Therefore, I do think that we have a pretty decent situation when it comes to supply and demand.
It does not mean that it cannot get rocky, and you can certainly debate how the market will be impacted in the first half of this year. We have about 7% new capacity coming, most of it front-loaded in 2018. We don't know, of course, what will be scrapped. Historically, about 2% have been scrapped in the industry. 2019 look very good because, e ven if you order ships today, you cannot get them delivered in 2019.
All in all, that's the picture we're looking at. Now I'll turn over to Claus, but before I do that, we're building this company that I explained, global integrator of container logistics, a company very similar to UPS and FedEx. I hope that they will be considered peers of ours when we are done with this journey three to five years. A network-based, asset-based, global logistics company. A company that has steady earnings at a reasonable level, that has multiple sources of revenue, also some that are not asset-based, that generate cash every year and is able to grow earnings.
Until we get to that point, the promise that we will give to our investors is that they can expect to share in some of the proceeds from our energy transactions, that they can expect that we will do everything we can to deliver the synergies from Hamburg Süd and from the integration of all of our transportation and logistics businesses, and that they can expect that we will continue to improve earnings from what hopefully was a low point in 2016. With that, I'll ask Claus to take over and talk about energy.
Well, thank you, Søren. You can now figure out that instead of your break, you will have a little bit of a session on the energy businesses. I will be brief and cover some of the plans and some of the achievements that we've made. As already clear from Søren's presentations, one of the key parts about focusing A.P. Møller - Maersk in the future to become the global integrator of container logistics is also separating out the energy businesses, as we also announced in late 2016. We are actually pretty proud of two significant achievements that we have made in the past year in this respect. The acquisition by Total of Maersk Oil and the acquisition of A.P. Møller Holding of Maersk Tankers. Let me just say that we are pleased with these two for several reasons.
One is, of course, the value that we have created for our company and for the shareholders. As we also said from the outset, it was important for us that these companies were separated out with a viable future and a good situation for the employees and for the companies as such. We are very pleased that Total decided to acquire Maersk Oil. It shows a great respect for what Maersk Oil has achieved through time, a great respect for the technology development, for the competencies and capabilities of the organization, and for the assets of Maersk Oil. It is also pleasing to see Total's commitment to the projects that Maersk Oil had already going for them, and not least the commitment to Denmark and the Danish part of the North Sea.
A strong commitment to a presence in Denmark for Maersk Oil in the future, with retaining the headquarters for the entire North Sea and Russia in Copenhagen and actually establishing a technology center in Copenhagen for Total, the only one outside of France, by the way. Really, a great testament to the value of Maersk Oil that we achieved those features at the same time as achieving an attractive valuation for the company. I'll get back to that. At the same time for Maersk Tankers, also very important to find the right owner for Maersk Tankers. An owner where we felt that a private owner would probably be a better solution for the company and also for the company standing in the industry, than other solutions.
We also needed an owner with a strong financial long-term perspective on the industry and a long-term commitment to the industry, and not least an owner that understood the cyclicality of the industry. With A.P. Møller Holding as the new owner of Maersk Tankers, this holds great potential for that company to thrive in the future and by the way, also to continue to trade under the name of Maersk Tankers and using the seven-pointed star as their logo. Two significant achievements in 2017 in the separation efforts of the energy businesses. At the same time, we also in parallel made two other transactions that actually also hold some significance. You know that we handed over the control of Dansk Supermarked Group to the Salling companies in 2014, and we had a remaining 19% of the shares.
Now this partnership goes back to 1964, and in November 2017, we could sell the remaining part of the shares in Dansk Supermarked Group to the Salling companies. We actually sold that at a price of DKK 5.5 billion, a value that was slightly higher than the value we achieved in 2014 and an EV/EBIT multiple of 18 x. We're quite pleased with that transaction as well. Another long-term partnership, more than 40 years, that we exited in 2017 was the Egyptian Drilling Company, one of the prime drilling contractors in the Middle East with more than 70 rigs and more than 5,000 people employed.
We sold that to our long-standing partner, the Egyptian Drilling Company, Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation, for $100 million, at the same time as they took over all liabilities and all the debt in the company. Two transactions of significance also achieved and closed in 2017. Now we have two main companies that we still have to find structural solutions for. Both companies have been moved as assets held for sale in 2017, as we are quite confident that we will find solutions within 2018. That also matched the timeline that we gave from the outset, namely that we would seek structural solutions, announce them, and announce them for the energy companies before the end of 2018. Now there's been a pick-up in the oil price.
We have seen additional activity levels in the industries, and it leads us to a little bit of an optimism, not only of finding solutions for the companies, but also that the companies will actually continue to perform well on relative terms in the industry and also have a good future for them. For Maersk Drilling, they've actually achieved to exit 2017 with almost the same contract backlog as they had in 2016, $3.3 billion. It's an outstanding backlog in the industry, and it shows how much the customers are actually putting confidence in Maersk Drilling.
At the same time, they have also launched a new strategy where they put more emphasis in the use of integrated well data, in optimizing the well program for our customers, and making sure that the oil companies actually have a shorter time to first oil at a more efficient drilling operation. One of the testimonies to that strategy was the recently announced five-year alliance contract with Aker BP in Norway that is set out to achieve exactly that of applying a new business model, a new way of working together to achieve an optimized drilling operation and a much more efficient road to first oil. For Maersk Supply Service, they also have not only new ships coming that are highly versatile and highly efficient, but they also have a strategy of integrated solutions for their customers.
Some of you will know that they gained contracts in the North Sea for Maersk Oil, both for the decommissioning of the Janice field, where they have applied totally new technology in how to pick up pipe and dismantle pipe. Also they got the towing and the mooring installation and the hookup for the Culzean project, also for Maersk Oil in the North Sea. 2017 also saw Maersk Supply Service integrated solutions pick up scope and geographical presence with two contracts, one in Angola and one in Brazil. Actually also speaking to the fact that they are actually moving forward in spite of being held for sale and in spite of waiting structural solutions, they are making progress with their customers.
Now you can see how the analyst consensus valuation of $4.7 billion on drilling and $0.6 billion on Maersk Supply Service adds up. I will come back to that. We are looking at a wide range of structural solutions for these two companies, but as I said before, we are a little confident that we will announce solutions within 2018. Now let me just go back to the two transactions that we did do. First for Maersk Oil. You can see here how the consensus valuation was in June 2017, $6.3 billion, and we actually achieved the transaction at a price of $7.5 billion. We got 97.5 million shares in total at a value at signing of $4.95 billion.
In addition to that, we got $2.5 billion in cash. The $2.5 billion in cash will be used to bring down debt, and as we have said before, the value of the shares will, in some part, the majority of it, subject to our investment grade objective, be used to distribute to our shareholders in one shape or the other. Now, if you take the total share price as of last night, EUR 45.9, that actually gives an upside to the price of not 500, as it says here, but actually $600 million as of last night.
On Maersk Tankers, we had a valuation of $1.4 billion, and we achieved a transaction of $1.2 billion in September 2017, and that transaction closed already in October. That transaction actually holds an additional upside if the value of product tankers appreciate in the market towards the end of 2019. We have an upside that is capped at $200 million that may come into play until the end of 2019. Two transactions that are providing huge value to the company and to the shareholders and huge flexibility in our financial status. Let me just add, because I forgot to say that in Maersk Oil, that the transaction has not closed yet.
We are working on getting the final regulatory approvals, and we do expect closing the transaction within the first quarter of 2018. Now let me just reiterate how the numbers stack up. As you look at the transactions that we have done for Maersk Oil, roughly $5 billion in share value, and $2.5 billion in cash, and with the additional $600 million for the share appreciation until now. On top of that, Maersk Tankers at $1.2 billion gives a total sum of $9.2 billion for the transactions that we have achieved already.
Now, if you just apply the analyst evaluation in the sum of the parts evaluation, as I showed before, Maersk Drilling stands at $4.7 billion and Maersk Supply Service at around $600 million. That gives a total of $14.4 billion in potential proceeds for the energy businesses, which compares with the analyst sum of the parts valuation in June 2017 of $12.3 billion on exit value of $2.2 billion. Actually, speaking volumes to the standing of A.P. Moller - Maersk in terms of our financial performance in the future. Let me end there and let you go to your break and to your Q&A.
Just saying that the energy transactions that we have done and the ones that we are pursuing and that we are confident in landing, of course goes to the focus of the future A.P. Moller - Maersk Group as the global integrator of container logistics, connecting and simplifying our customers' supply chain needs by simple end-to-end offerings of products and services, by a seamless customer engagement, and by a superior delivery end-to-end network. With those words, thank you for this morning, and maybe Stig will take over and tell you when to be back from break.
Yeah. Thank you, Claus. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present Hamburg Süd here, where we come from, where we're going to. Keep in mind that it is less than three months ago that the closing took place. Three months ago, Søren Skou was definitely not standing here as a member of the Hamburg Süd advisory board, but as one of our strongest competitors, our strongest competitor, and I'd definitely not like three months ago to stand that close by and look into my presentation here. That has definitely changed.
I've worked for Hamburg Süd since about 20 years, and it was a pretty emotional moment when our investors decided to divest, our former investors decided to divest from the shipping activities, and we had to announce this in front of our staff and tell them Hamburg Süd will be sold. At that point of time, for sure, the staff was not really happy about the decision that Hamburg Süd was sold to a strongest competitor. In the meantime, I think everybody agrees that the Oetker family has found the, by far, best buyer for the Hamburg Süd business. I think Hamburg Süd and Maersk Line are a perfect fit. Both are very strong companies. Both are providing first-class products, services.
We both come from a long history, both companies being more than 100 years old, both coming from a family background, which is also important because we have then pretty similar business ethics there. On top, it's good that we found a Danish buyer because the Danish and the German mentality are pretty close and the integration so far proves this concept. It has been planned very carefully. I have to say, with my background, I have followed the last 10 acquisitions of Hamburg Süd. We took over a lot of smaller companies, and what I've seen here, the way the integration has been planned, the way the integration is progressing, is simply impressive. Chapeau.
The openness, the transparency, the willingness to learn to generate the synergies of best in class exercises is outstanding, and I'll prove that later on, hopefully, also with the respective figures. We are very, very optimistic that this progress, this integration will continue to be a success story. We don't see any major hurdles in front of us, except if the Danish team should beat the German team in the World Soccer Championship, but that will not happen. Besides that, we are right on track. I start with a first slide about the figures of Hamburg Süd. You can see that there are similar numbers on red and blue ships. Unfortunately, that does not really show the relationship of size between the two companies. Hamburg Süd is the much smaller company.
We have operated end of last year 116 container vessels, out of which 52 were owned ships. Out of these 52, 48 were post-Panamax, specifically tailor-made for the North-South trades. That means that these vessels were equipped with high reefer capacities, and they were all shallow draft. You can clearly see the focus on North-South, also on the investment side. On the containers, we had a share of about 15% of reefer containers there. Half of the containers were owned by Hamburg Süd, so that the asset side reflects the trade of Hamburg Süd. We had about 6,300 employees, 75% of which worked ashore. We have very customer-centric culture. I'll come back on that a little bit later.
I said before, more than 100 years of experience, to be precise, 147. The company has been founded in 1871. We have grown over the last two or three decades, more or less, stable. Half of this growth has been organic growth, half of this growth has been by acquisitions. That means that we have knowledge of acquisitions. We know what it means to take over companies. We are for sure, or we have been more on the active side than we are now, but we know what M&A means. You can see that our acquisitions have focused on strengthening our North-South activities. I've just focused here on three examples, starting with Aliança, which we acquired in 1998.
Aliança is a Brazilian carrier and is today the by far biggest cabotage carrier on the Brazilian coastline. That was strengthening our home turf in Brazil. In 2003, we took over the liner activities of Kien Hung. Kien Hung was an Asian operator based in Taiwan at that time, focusing on the South American West Coast and East Coast trade. That was for Hamburg Süd the entry or the strengthening of the Asia South America activities. The latest acquisition we did was 2015, the takeover of the liner activities of CCNI, strengthening our Asia West Coast portfolio. All in all, you can see the investments, whether in ships, containers or even companies, were always focusing on the North-South activities.
Now comes the slide that we were successfully hiding for exactly 147 years. It's the first time for you to see these figures, but it's also the first time for all Hamburg Süd employees, except the executive board, to see these figures. None of the directors was even aware of the profitability. The good thing is that, these are IFRS numbers. We always reported in local GAAP in the past, so there's no chance even for the few ones who know the numbers, to compare it. You can see that we have been historically pretty profitable. If you see the EBITDA, if you see the EBIT, we had for sure not been able to completely escape the development of the freight rates in 2016.
2015 was not as good as it should have been. Unfortunately, coinciding with the entry into the East-West activities, we decided 2015 with the takeover of CCNI that it's a good time also to expand the business into the East-West activities. I would say that timing-wise, there was definitely room for improvement. Without the entry into the East-West activities, 2015 and even 2016 definitely had looked better than they do. On the revenue, you might recognize that it's a little bit lower than the revenue you've seen before reported in the Oetker press releases. This is mainly caused by the fact that the tramp business here is excluded. In 2017, you see the difference between the NOPAT and the underlying NOPAT.
That is mainly caused by integration costs which have already been put into account there. On the right side, I think that is a very important part of this slide, you see the volume development over the last five years. You can see the step in 2015 when we took over CCNI, an increase in volume. What's more important for me is to see the increase in volume in 2017. Keep in mind that the transaction has been announced first of December 2016. The whole year 2017, the staff was living with the assumption we will soon be sold, we will be transferred. We don't exactly know what will happen to us individually. The customers did not exactly know what would happen at the beginning.
Anyhow, customers were loyal and staff was loyal. We managed to keep everything on track. People gained confidence also because of the way the company has been integrated into the Maersk Group. Customers kept confidence, and we managed to grow the volume in a year of transition by more than 6%. I think that is a great success, and a great hope also great basis for the future. Normally I'd like to hide this slide, but go to the next one. This is a slide showing the focus of Hamburg Süd. We are by far the most North-South focused carrier, and this is only the capacity split, so it's not the volume split there. You can see that 67% of the capacity we operated has been operated in North-South trades.
No other carrier has had the focus, same focus or similar focus on the North-South trades. It doesn't mean that we did not want to enter the East-West activities. I said before we start in 2015, but the focus was clearly on North-South in respect of the operated capacity. How have we done our business? Or how are we doing our business, and how can we even further improve our business now with a new shareholding structure? I start maybe with this, on the left side, with the front of the propeller, the personal touch. The customer in Hamburg Süd has a personal point of entry from the booking process to the invoicing, if necessary, to the claims process. There's always somebody in the region, in the area that takes care of the interests of the customer.
A person the customer can contact and who takes care of him, who listens. Customer centricity, we listen and go the extra mile no matter what. We have a permanent discussion with the customer. We know what he wants. We know if a customer wants to have a special product, a unique product designed for him, we can offer that. That means also because of the personal touch, we know what the customer expects from us also if problems occur. I think that has been something we really focus on to solve problems together with the customer if necessary.
Even though you have designed an ideal process, you always know it's the weather, it's congestion, it's political changes or difficulties in countries you call that there are problems and you have to solve these problems together with the customer. We have a decentralized approach. That means that we have left a lot of responsibility and empowerment in the regions, in the areas that goes from pricing to HR. It's a lot of responsibility which stays in the regions as we believe the region knows better what the customer requires, so they should also be empowered to make the respective decisions. Accessibility, we serve all customers, not only the Fortune 500. That's also caused by the fact that the North-South trades have a lot of more BCO customers on average.
We take care also of the small exporter in Argentina exporting 10 boxes a month. That sounds like good product, but for sure a product you can improve, and we will improve now with all the new opportunities we get from the Maersk Group. It starts with a greater global coverage. What does it mean? First of all, we'll have in the future many more port connections. We have the possibility to build a joint network without being dependent on VSAs with third parties. Keep in mind that having been number seven before in the world, we relied on many partners. We just had exclusively equipped a few services with our own fleet. The majority of services were vessel sharing agreements, where we depended on the requirements, the ideas and preferences of partners.
In the future, there we'll be able to offer a greater global coverage. Because of the possibility only to have one partner to align interest with and not three or four partners, you can even lower transit times because you don't have that many interests saying, "I want to call this port because I have a customer here. I need to stop there." The product itself for the Hamburg Süd customer in the future will definitely be a better product. We have more frequent sailings coming with this product for sure, and we can make use of the Maersk digital platforms and products.
As an example, just take the RCM, remote container monitoring for reefers, which we have not been able to offer to our customers before, and where we now get access to, so that we can also pass on these advantages to the Hamburg Süd customers, before the end of 2018. All in all, we will maintain Hamburg Süd as a strong separate brand, as it has been so far. There is no reason to change this. We have been in vessel sharing agreements with Maersk already in the past, and there's a reason why a customer books with Hamburg Süd or a customer books with Maersk Line, and we should continue to give the customers this choice to pick whether he wants to transport with Hamburg Süd or with Maersk Line.
As a consequence, the headquarters also will remain in Hamburg, and by the way, it's not that far away. It's 350 km, so you can make it to Copenhagen in the morning and back in the evening or vice versa. We'll be able to design a joint network, so it's not a network which we just have to live with. I think it's a network that is designed by both groups, by people from Hamburg Süd, people from Maersk, and it's a fantastic opportunity, as said before. I think this network symbol now is the chance to hand over to you, Søren.
Thank you, Arnt. Thank you for the generous words in the beginning. I can certainly say, being on the buyer side, it's always been a great pleasure working with Arnt Vespermann and the team. I have to reveal to you also that it's not so complicated as you think because Arnt Vespermann, he's practically Danish, born and raised in Flensburg, so we don't consider the cultural differences so severe. We're taking over a great company. We're taking over a company with a proud history, a company that has very loyal customers and serves their customers very well.
What we're gonna sprinkle onto that company is cost competitiveness by delivering the synergies and making sure that combined, we can deliver a product that's far more superior that Hamburg Süd can do on their own and that Maersk Line can do on their own in the areas where Hamburg Süd provides a critical scale. On the next slide we just show some of the key events for some of the product changes on the top of the slide that's gonna happen here over the coming twelve months. We have already implemented services between Caribbean and Mediterranean. Two weeks ago, we announced a very comprehensive network between Asia and the west coast of South America, a network that's gonna start in April. I'll come back to that.
All the other networks, as you see here, are following the timeline by which Hamburg Süd could exit their existing vessel sharing agreements. It does take time. It does take the better part of this year, so we'll see the full benefits of all these changes coming in to 2019. We are integrating Hamburg Süd operationally and fully because that's where the benefits are, while we'll maintain Hamburg Sud's commercial face to the customers. The activities at the bottom of the slide are really the key events, merging the fleet, merging the container pools, and of course, until we do that, we are already now exchanging slots, interchanging equipment, so that we get as many synergies early on before we can get out of the contractual obligations that Hamburg Süd has in their VSAs.
During the second quarter of this year, we will basically do the physical integration of all the operations so that there's one operations globally covering Hamburg Süd, covering Maersk Line, and covering all the other, line of brands, that we have. Maybe we should dive just one step deeper into the engine room, because what does such a network change actually mean? I wanna show that to you with one slide where we try to just go through the steps that we are taking. Generating a great product for customers and generating cost synergies, for us. Between Asia and Latin America, we have announced a new product that's gonna start early April. We have announced a product that's gonna have a service counterclockwise from the west coast of Latin America back to Asia.
It's gonna offer the absolute best transit times in the industry between Asia and Chile. We didn't show it exactly on this, but we will do a little, and this is a very small feature because thankfully, the world is round, through New Zealand coming there. We'll not only offer great products from Asia, we'll offer great products also from Oceania. We'll have a second product running clockwise, providing a great product also to the West Coast, but on the return leg from the West Coast back to Asia, we'll also do a little pit stop, I could say, in New Zealand on the way back, and thereby we combine a so-called backhaul from West Coast South America with a head haul from New Zealand up into Asia.
Thereby we can double dip, as we call it in shipping, utilizing the slots more than once on this leg. We have a third product, a dedicated Mexico product, the best product in the industry, providing great transit times from eastern China to Mexico. We are merging it, and you can maybe see it on the slide with the yellow loop, and we do that for some very simple but very important network optimization reasons. We share origin ports in Asia and actually on the way back from Mexico, and you can't see that here either, we will do a little detour and bunker the full round trip in Russia, not only for the orange loop but also for the yellow loop, so that all 18 ships trading in those two loops will benefit from the cheaper oil in Russia.
We're not done, because we will actually have a fourth loop, eastbound around the world, making sure that we have the best product directly into the Caribbean, and also making sure that we are now seeing growth back in Brazil, so that we have actually a great product from Asia into northern Brazil. You might be thinking, wow, are we offering a lot more capacity? No, we're not. In fact, this combined network is a wee bit smaller than the standalone network that Hamburg Süd offered and the standalone network that Maersk Line offered. Of course, in that is part of the synergies also, hidden. This is a significant network. We are commanding something like 35% market share in this part of the world. You can see it up there on the top.
It's a network that in itself deploys 38 ships, 300,000 TEU. Had Asia to West Coast Latin America been an independent carrier, this would have been the 15th largest shipping line in the world. A little bit smaller than the size of HMM or the size of K Line. In itself, it's a vast network. Now, with this network, we can provide great products to our customers. Not only can we do that, we can also make sure that we are in control. Because in this product, we don't need to compromise the design of the product with commercial drivers of our competitors. We do this together, Arnt and I.
We don't need to compromise on daily execution between what is important for our customers to hold the ship for an hour or to wait for the last containers because of the requirements of another shipping line. No, with this product, we are in control, and we can make sure that we tailor it to our customers. Obviously, there is an important detail to that. We can also do it while we keep it very, very competitive. We put it up there. In this product suite alone, we will realize slot cost reductions minimum to the tune of 9%. Now, once we make the changes to the network, we're not only getting synergies in the network, we're also gonna get synergies on the terminal side.
I've come with this chart just to give you a little bit of a glimpse of what the potential is in terms of terminal synergies. Morten will speak about a little bit later, but to date about 34% of Maersk Line's volumes go through APMT's facilities. For comparison, Hamburg Süd has 5%. Now you cannot compare this obviously, because the geographic footprint and the mix is different. It should give you some kind of glimpse that when Hamburg Süd and Maersk joins network, there is a good potential of increasing the 5% to something higher.
We have an example on the right-hand side in Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, a recently established terminals by us, where we will now, as a result of merging the networks on the west coast of Latin America, move the Hamburg Süd volumes into APMT's facilities. We'll of course through that increase utilization, but we will also make sure that at the same time we do it in a responsible manner because obviously we need to cater for all the needs of the Hamburg Süd clients. Today, we are reconfirming the synergies that we have earlier disclosed of $350 million-$400 million, and we will deliver at least that. The synergies come in the shape of network.
They come in the shape of terminal volumes through APMT, but they also come through a very big bulk of what we call OpEx savings. Variable cost, terminals, inland depots, other variable expenses that we have, where we really use the best of both worlds. Arnt Vespermann alluded to it. We've had clean teams sit down that have gone through all of this in minute details, and we are right now, day by day, hour by hour, executing all of these synergies. We will also get synergies towards our other companies, Svitzer, helping them to gain better traction in amongst others, Latin America. We'll get synergies towards MCI. You already saw, Søren Skou mentioned, how a significant share Hamburg Süd had on the reefer fleet.
We will, of course, benefit from the fact that Hamburg Süd will, in the future, hopefully, also be a good client of Maersk Container Industry. Now, we have, in 2018, taken a significant step on market share. We have acquired Hamburg Süd and added 3% share to our business. Exactly for that reason, we have also said that we are planning not to grow as strongly this year as, potentially, the market. Because we're gonna, obviously, look at the fact that rarely one plus one becomes two when you do an acquisition, and maybe there are also certain customers, in terms of cargo mix, that we don't want to have on the ship in the future.
The way that we are planning our network is exactly with that in mind, planning a network that is a little bit smaller than one plus one is two. For that reason, we are also safeguarding that we can actually deliver the synergies that we have promised to you here again today. Now, in closing, before we can take questions, let me just show you and finish with this slide, which for us is a very important summary slide. We believe that we have actually timed the acquisition of a great company pretty well. We bought it in a low point of the cycle. The EBIT margin of the container industry was negative in 2016. It's turned positive in 2017. We bought it at a time where the growth in Latin America was probably at its most depressed, now recovering.
Hamburg Süd is a significant player in Latin America. We believe when we compare to other transactions in the industry, and at the bottom, left, you can see, for instance, COSCO buying OOCL, CMA buying NOL. We believe that for the 3% market share we have bought, our price compares favorably. Of course, we don't only buy market share or capacity share, we're also buying the future earnings, and that's really the bottom right side. We also believe not only have we bought it at an attractive price, but we've also bought a company that's able to deliver a consistent positive free cash flow. With those words, we spend the next, I think half an hour or so, Morten and I together to go through the performance of Maersk Line and Terminals.
Perhaps more importantly, to talk a bit about which I think is more interesting for you, what are we gonna do to improve the performance and drive more synergies from a more integrated business. Let's start with an overview of the financial results. The performance in 2017 versus 2016 improved, all with the exception of Damco, whom you heard was severely relative to all other companies in Maersk, impacted by the cyber attack. We did actually manage to continue a very strong and improved performance in Svitzer. We managed to turn around MCI. That said, we're simply not satisfied. We grew too little. We didn't utilize the assets as well as we had in the previous year.
We had severe transshipment issues in our big hubs that disappointed a lot of customers and added a lot more cost to the network. We had the cyber attack, which Adam explained. We rebuilt it heroically in a couple of weeks, but I can assure you that the cleanup cost and the time it took to really clean everything up took a wee bit longer than two weeks. All of these things combined made it very difficult to sustain an even better performance in 2017. Let me just go a little bit into Maersk Line, and then Morten will talk later about APM Terminals.
First of all, if you look at our freight rates, we actually managed to improve our freight rates for the first time in a while. In 2017, we managed to improve the freight rates by a bit more than $200 per forty foot equivalent unit. I know it can be a maybe a little bit tricky to read the graph because we have the freight rates on the left side, which is the blue line, and then we have bunker price, which is per ton, on the right side. We tried to make the translation for you because in the same period, 2016 versus 2017, our fuel price per loaded container increased not $200, but thankfully only $100 per FEU.
A large part of that was price, the vast majority of it was price, but there is a residual, and the residual is again related to the cyber attack and the fact that utilization year-on-year was a little bit down. I think the key message is here, we managed to get the rates up. We managed to deselect some less attractive cargo for our bottom line, and altogether, this was a serious driver for our performance in 2017. When there's revenue, there's cost, and we have to say that 2017 was simply a missed year on our cost journey. We pride ourselves actually quite a bit over the last five, six years of being able to continuously reduce our unit cost at fixed bunker. We managed to do so over five years.
Yes, we had wind in the back from a currency exchange that supported us. Yes, we had wind in the back from a charter market where the rates continued to go down, but we also positioned ourselves well in that market, having exceeding number of short charters where we could benefit from very fast and very agile. Yes, it's true, we have a bit more headwind now on exchange rate and so on. Reality is that in 2017, because of the disruptions in the hubs, because we didn't deliver the volumes that we wanted to, because we had the cyberattack, we simply missed out on delivering continued deflationary cost.
There is a glimmer of hope, though, and it's maybe hard to see, and normally lines that go down are not the greatest ones, but for COO, they are actually pretty good. That is that in the fourth quarter, when we were finally out of the worst part of the cyberattack, we actually managed to clock in again what was more or less our record cost level. It tells us something that when we don't have a cyberattack to contend with, when we don't have massive disruptions in our major transshipment hubs, we actually can still reduce our cost base. This I'll come back to in a second. I wanna also just talk a little bit about utilization.
Last year at the capital markets day, I think we disclosed for the first time more details around asset utilization. You'll see that in 2017, it went a little bit down from what was really, in 2016, a very high and a record high level. Yes, cyberattack played a role, but we also deselected quite a bit of backhaul cargo that we didn't feel contributed positively to our bottom line.
Then you can, of course, ask, "So Søren, why are you then adding 10% more capacity when you don't deliver the volume and your utilization goes down?" Here we don't give perfect disclosures on it, but the reality is that in 2017, we had some significant slot sale deals to third parties, most notably, Hyundai Merchant Marine, but also a very large deal in Latin America arena. Here we provide the capacity, the fuel cost, the canal cost, the port cost, and the income we get as in another income line called slot charter. When you look at our accounts and say, "Well, can I then trust the unit cost line?" Yes, you can, because there we add it all together.
When you look at our disclosure, like kilo fuel burn per FFE loaded, we show you all the kilos, but we don't divide by the FFEs that the third parties they produce. Therefore, we wanna disclose this and tell you that the capacity deployed that we put in, excluding these sales, was 4%, not to the level of the volume, unfortunately, and that's why the utilization went down. Now, looking forward, we still plan, and we very much expect that we can drive costs down. Actually, we are very confident. The starting point is changing a little bit because now the platform is not just the Maersk Line that we all know. The platform is Maersk Line and then the business of Hamburg Süd.
Hamburg Süd, we already established, have a slightly different trade mix, slightly different geographic footprint, and that also impacts the average cost. I have to caution a little bit, and I'm glad, Jesper is here because he can probably entertain you about this in the break. These numbers for Hamburg Süd are still the unaudited numbers, but it's just to give you a gist that on an average cost level, the addition of Hamburg Süd into Maersk will increase the average cost by $20 per FFE. Of course, equally so, it's gonna increase the average revenue per FFE, because we already shared with you that Hamburg Süd is a profitable company.
That being said, the combined base is the one that we look at, and it's the one that we believe that we can get down and get further down in the years to come. Of course, in 2018, through synergies from Hamburg Süd, but also from the regular cost-cutting toolbox. I have to tell you that this cost-cutting toolbox, it remains very much intact. There are still a lot of things we can do. We will still be able continuously to take out cost. It refines itself a little bit from year to year, so this year we have Hamburg Süd synergies up there, and it's gonna be there for the next two or three or four years. This year, we have also added the digital assets. Adam Banks talked about it.
Last year, we disclosed that we are starting to connect our assets. In this area, we can really start optimizing further and further on the fringes of the fuel cost. Not only optimizing every day, but optimize every five minutes. We call nearly 90,000 ports every year. I can assure you the optimization you can do by doing real-time fuel optimizing here is significant, and we're going for it big time. Correct, on SD&A, we are investing. You heard from Adam, we are investing in cybersecurity, we're investing in digital. But in the SD&A cost bucket, there are many other things we can and we will still improve. On the top left corner, I wanna lead you back to the network, because over the last five years, network improvements has been a major driver of the deflationary cost in Maersk.
Once in a while ask me, "So, you know, are we ever done with it?" Reality is, we are never done. We continuously find new ideas. We continuously thrive from the fact that we are scaling our business now with Hamburg Süd, and we continuously find ways to optimize the flows that we run through the network. I wanna just show you an example that's not related to Hamburg Süd, because two, three years ago, we announced the cooperation on the East-West trades with MSC. We took out a lot of cost in that process, but there are still developments to be had. Now we're looking at the fifth iteration, we call it five point zero, of the networks between Asia and North Europe and Asia and Mediterranean.
Last year, we added another string because we added Hamburg Süd and Hyundai Merchant Marine on board, and now the experts have found ways to even fine-tune this system further. Make sure the schedule and really the trunk lane services are more reliable. Reliability in this network is more crucial than any other network that we have in Maersk. Because here, yes, we sail the biggest assets, we sail a lot of volume between Asia and Europe and back, but we also transport a lot of volume that's not directly between Asia and Europe. These big ships, the hub ports that they connect, they really carry the trunk lane of the Maersk Line global network. When that's reliable, the rest of the network is reliable. When that is cheaper, the rest of the network will be cheaper.
Of course, at the end of the day, less ports, more reliability also translates into lower fuel consumption. This new network is rolling out here towards the end of the second half. Speaking of fuel consumption, we wanted just to take this opportunity to say a few words about the 2020 regulations that I know several of you either have commented on or will in the near future comment more on. We can certainly say that the 2020 0.5% sulfur cap will be a game changer for maritime transport.
It will add substantial cost, either in the form of higher fuel cost or in the form of cost needed, CapEx needed, investments needed to make technical changes to the vessels, be that burning at LNG, be that investing in scrubbers or other technologies, that are out there. Our view of this, at least for the moment, is that we don't really prefer the scrubber solutions. I mean, if you think about scrubbers, it is really installing mini refineries on the approximately 60,000 ocean-going ships. It is not a very sensible way of doing it. It's also, by the way, a very complicated installation. It's very expensive, $5 million-$10 million per ship per scrubber.
Perhaps, not top of mind, but certainly for us, very important, there's still no clarity about how, you know, the environmental solution will be there. What happens to the waste? How is it discharged, and so on. We follow this development very closely. We are looking into LNG. We are looking into different mixes of fuel, 0.5, so that we can make sure that we have a competitive edge. We certainly support the regulation, and we will play by the rules. We're very enthused by the broad industry support around IMO to ban fuel on ships that don't have the needed technologies on board. We wanna compete on a level playing field and compete by being better, not competing by whether we follow the rules or not.
Over the next few months, we continue to follow that intensely, what's gonna happen in this space. We have our preferences, but we'll make our choices as we get nearer to this. Handing over to Morten, I think this picture is a good segue because this is really where it comes together, the ship and the cranes in port, where we can deliver better services to our customers. Morten will now take over and tell you a little bit about the journey of improving APM Terminals. Thank you.
Thank you, Søren. Good afternoon, everybody. APM Terminals is an important part of Maersk overall, and it is a key priority for us to improve our financial and operational performance and to become an increasingly important part of the global integrator vision that Søren and Vincent talked about earlier today. Here today, I will focus on what are the specific areas that we are working on to deliver these needed improvements. First of all, we have set a new direction with some clear priorities, specifically for 2018, and there are five main levers that we are working on and which I'll be going through here over the next 15 minutes or so. The first one is cost leadership, which we'll deliver through automation, CapEx discipline, and cost savings.
Secondly, we will work to bring us even closer to our customers to understand their needs better and, overall, perform better towards our customers, win more business, and that applies both for our shipping line customers and for our tens of thousands of landside customers. Third, we have focused on portfolio optimization in order to turn around the underperforming parts of our portfolio and to raise cash. Number four of our levers is that we are instilling a strong CapEx discipline in the company in order to gradually reduce our CapEx spend and our commitments. Finally, the fifth lever is on the synergies, where we'll continue to generate synergies between the different parts of Maersk, especially with a focus on winning more volumes and increased terminal utilization and our transshipment hub performance to deliver the stable network that Søren just talked about.
These are the five levers that I'll go through one by one with a few more details than what I just mentioned here. I'll start with cost leadership, and I'll give a few key messages and then share a few more details on the situation that we're in. First of all, let me emphasize that cost leadership is a fundamental part of our strategy, and we will make cost deflationary. Secondly, let me also emphasize that I'm not satisfied with the performance that we had in 2017 on our cost, where we had a flat cost development, and we will be doing better going forward. There are a number of things that we are doing to attack our cost base from all the angles that we can find, as we have illustrated up here.
We are taking the approach that among others have worked well in Maersk Line earlier, in terms of a mindset of lower cost every year and lowest cost compared to competition. Two of the areas that are our main focus areas are our labor costs and our concession fees. These costs make up more than 60% of our terminal costs, and they are subjected to annual inflation. Taking costs to a deflationary level will not be a walk in the park. These are the areas that we are mainly focused on through automation, through workforce management systems, and through other initiatives that we attack our cost base based on. These are one of the levers that we are working on.
One more important point that also, of course, is a critical area for us to reduce our unit cost is winning more business. We have developed well on that in 2017, as I've just described to you. We've had a strong year commercially in APM Terminals in 2017. On the shipping line side, we have been winning 29 new commercial deals, and we were losing eight. As you can imagine, this is a very important point for us, because the ones of you who were here at the last Capital Markets Day will remember that I talked about a concern as to whether we will be able to be competitive towards other customers whilst we, at the same time, were cooperating closer with Maersk Line.
We have demonstrated that we can do that as long as we serve all customers well, and as long as we are making a real effort to bring us close to our customers to understand and meet their needs. About half of the deals that we secured in 2017 came from Maersk Line and VSA partners to Maersk Line. The other half was won from other customers. Even better still, I would say, is that we're trending well. Most of the business that we lost was in the beginning of 2017 in connection with the reshuffling of the new alliances, and then we gradually have been winning more business through the year. That enabled us to outgrow the market in Q4, and it has put us in a strong position to outgrow the market in 2018 as well.
One thing that we should be aware of, though, is that competition is still fierce in a number of locations. As you can see here, we have seen some price pressure in recent years. With the new alliances and the networks around them now by and large being in place, we expect and plan for only smaller price decreases in the coming years. It is still a development that makes it so important that we can make our cost deflationary to counter this development. Let me now give you a latest update on our portfolio in APM Terminals. APM Terminals has grown into a portfolio of 74 terminals over the years.
A good part of our portfolio is performing quite well, but we also have underperforming parts of our portfolio, which we have dedicated plans in place in order to seek to turn around. In addition to that work, we also continuously are looking to review our portfolio, and we will be looking to monetize, especially minority shares in high value terminals around the portfolio. That, in order to raise cash to pay for the terminals under implementation that we're working to complete and to generate cash for other opportunities throughout Maersk. While we're doing that, we also are, as mentioned, working to complete the terminals that we have ongoing. Let me just give you a latest update on those projects.
Right now, let me first emphasize, we have not started as Søren Skou also mentioned earlier, we have not started a new terminal project since the beginning of 2016, when we commissioned the new transshipment hub in TM2 in Tangier, in Morocco. The five terminal projects that we have ongoing will be completed over the next couple of years in 2019 and 2020. In addition to that, we are working to complete these terminal projects. Right now we have more than $700 million on our balance sheet for terminals under implementation that are not generating an income. They are only generating costs until they are operational.
Therefore, it is important that we complete these large terminal projects in order to bring them into an operational state so that they no longer are dragging on our performance. Similarly, we are also working to improve the returns from our consolidated businesses, where, as mentioned, we have some parts of our portfolio that is underperforming. That is the current status on our terminals under implementation. While we are doing this work, let me just again emphasize that we have no plans to initiate any new greenfield projects in APM Terminals anytime soon, and we are serious about our commitment to reduce the CapEx spend in our business. Let me just put some figures on that.
As we have illustrated here to the left, you can see that our contractual CapEx commitments have reduced by 14% from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017. As I mentioned, the terminals that we are working on right now will be completed in the next few years. While we are building to complete these terminals, we will continue to have some spend, obviously, in those projects, but that will run off thereafter. We are then, in the meantime, pushing ourselves to run our business in the most CapEx efficient way that makes sense, and that includes optimizing all our spend categories.
The final lever that we are working on to improve our results and deliver to the global integrator and Maersk overall is the synergies that we are working on between the different parts of Maersk. We have in 2017 delivered $100+ million towards the synergies, and we are on track so that we can deliver the $600 million that we have as our target for 2019. That clearly means that we need to take a large step towards that here in 2018 as well. Two areas that in particular are important for us in this respect, Maersk Line volume and Hamburg Süd and VSA volume to APM Terminals.
We can see in 2017 that volume in our controlled terminals, excluding the hubs, increased by 11%. The other very important part of these synergies is the transshipment hub performance that we talked about, and there in 2017, regrettably, had a lot of disruption that severely reduced our ability to have the synergies from that part of our business. Let me give a few more details on those two main items. Volume from Maersk Line and transshipment hub performance, because they make up quite a bit of a part of the synergies that we are targeting. First of all, we are progressing to move volume from Maersk Line over to APM Terminals.
At the last Capital Markets Day, we indicated that at that time, 32% of Maersk Line's business was with APM Terminals. By the end of 2017, that figure had increased to 33.7%. At the same time, terminal productivity or port productivity in the hubs had increased in average by 12%. As I mentioned, it is very fair to say that due to the severe disruptions that we had, especially in the WestMed, in connection with the labor disruptions, in connection with the cyberattack, in connection with crane breakdowns, that prevented us from taking full advantage of those productivity improvements. To build on that, let me then zoom in specifically on the WestMed and give a few more details on that situation, what we're doing to improve the situation there.
Algeciras and Tangier making up the WestMed hubs were the hardest hit locations from labor and cyber disruptions in 2017. Yard density increased in those locations over prolonged periods to above 100% against a normal maximum of somewhere between 80% and 85%, making efficient operations virtually impossible, impacting productivity levels, impacting customer delivery, impacting network reliability, and adding additional costs. A number of actions have been taken, which we are confident will bring us to a much better place in 2018. We have introduced safe operating capacity limits in the hubs to control the volumes in line with capabilities and capacity. We have a new labor agreement agreed in Algeciras.
We have, between Maersk Line and APM Terminals, developed a Hub Excellence program that are focused on optimizing the performance and operational performance towards network integrity. Three more cranes are being relocated to Algeciras, four cranes are being heightened in Tangier, all with the aim to improve productivity and serve vessels better. Outside the West Meds, we are doing similar steps to improve hub performance elsewhere in the network. Amongst others, we have just had eight new cranes delivered in Tanjung Pelepas, again, to improve productivity, improve crane intensity, and contribute towards this better network. Thereby, the hubs will be enabled to contribute to a stable network and contribute better towards the overall delivery of the global integrator vision towards our customers.
Let me summarize that we have five main levers that we're working on to improve our results and situation. Taking cost out, winning more business, optimizing our portfolio, gradually reducing CapEx spend and commitments in our business, and taking steps towards the $600 million in synergies that we are committed to in, by the end of next year. On top of that, becoming this increasingly important part of the global integrator vision. Of course, all that work we do with continued priority on safety and compliance, where we are not cutting any corners. Let me end with that and give the word to you, Stig.
Wow, we'll start up again 30 seconds early. Last session of today, but we will have plenty of time for asking questions afterwards to Søren, Claus, and myself.
I hope that by now you are in no doubt that we are right in the middle of a big, complex transformation. Of course, not everything goes as planned, cyberattack being the example, but we're actually very proud of a number of things that have happened. When many changes are happening, it can be difficult to really see what are the things we should be looking for, what are the things that are progressing. I will, with this, in this section, try to offer you some guardrails and share with you how we are thinking about it as management in a numerical sense, and how we are discussing with our board of directors, and how we will communicate to you in the future. I like to start with a deeply ingrained value in A.P. Moller - Maersk, constant care.
The way we define Constant Care in Maersk is saying, taking care of today while preparing for tomorrow. The trick for management is, of course, to be able to do both things. For you who ask us a lot of questions, we like to just help you with a kind of a framework for are we progressing on running the daily business? Are we also progressing on building the new business that Søren talked about, the fundamentally different new business that we are working so hard on? You heard more from Vincent around that today. If you look back on this, on the various sections you have had so far, we have actually pretty clearly tried to show you what we are doing in terms of running the daily business and what we are doing of preparing for tomorrow.
A way you could look at it is a bit of looking at it from the outside in. What is the investment case of A.P. Moller - Maersk? I'd say you can look at a short-term case, and you can look at a long-term case. The very short headline is cash focus short-term, profitable growth long-term. I like now to explore with you how we are going about it, how we look at it on the short-term case, then on the long-term case, and I will particularly also talk about how we're gonna measure this and share this with you, because it's a different company, and certain things needs to change. First of all, the short term is about finalizing the separation process from being a well-diversified conglomerate to be a focused transport and logistics business. Søren said it.
I was very happy he also mentioned it. It's close to my heart. We want to retain being investment grade. We are absolutely in no doubt that we will complete the energy separation. I hope you can see with the first transactions that, this was not just an intention, this is happening, and we are keen also to distribute, some proceeds from, that separation. The other part, whilst we are doing that, is we need to continue the journey to restore profitability in transport and logistics, and we need to have ever increasing capital discipline in order to improve the free cash flow. Let me dive into this, each of these parts of the short-term investment case. Would, though, like to say that there is a number of disclosures that are changing.
Some changes in 2017, some will change in 2018. I'll come back to the changes in 2018 and 2019, but as you probably have noticed, in Q3 and in Q4, we reclassified all the four energy businesses to discontinued business, and that has the advantage that our continuing business is our continuing business, i.e. the transport and logistics business is exactly what is called continuing business. Therefore, it's a little bit easier to separate some of the points in the various part of A.P. Moller - Maersk. Now, we are committed to remain investment grade. This is not just a statement, it's because we think it's in the best interest of the company. We take risks as a business.
You heard earlier today, Søren Toft talking about the risk of daring to buy for cash Hamburg Süd at the bottom of the cycle. You can only do that if you have a strong balance sheet. It's important for us. We have gone through a huge change, and we have had a super dialogue with our rating institutions over the last year. Going from being well-diversified conglomerate to be a single business is not necessarily easy to digest, seen from a rating institution point of view. I am happy to say that since last Capital Markets Day until today, we have not received a downgrade. We want to continue being in the investment grade. Right now, we are one notch above. Whether we are losing a notch or not losing a notch, we are in the right range right now.
We wanna continue to be there. That against net debt, significant net debt that we have here, and how does this fit together? Does it fit with investment grade? I think you have to look at the picture in a little bit of a holistic way. First of all, Q4 was a pretty busy quarter because we actually closed five deals. We sold our shares in Dansk Supermarked. We sold Maersk Oil as part of getting regulatory approval for Hamburg Süd. We sold Maersk Tankers, and we sold the Egyptian Drilling Company, all for cash. We closed the deal and bought Hamburg Süd for cash. Net-net, a little bit more than half of Hamburg Süd was actually directly financed by divestments. Of course, in a quarter where you buy Hamburg Süd, your net debt goes up.
If you just look at the bar here, with a net debt of $14.9 billion, that is too much debt for our future transport and logistics business. Bear in mind that there are other things that are going to happen. In the near term, we know that, in all likelihood, soon we will be able to close the Maersk Oil deal. The Maersk Oil deal, as Claus told us earlier today, right now has a market value just in excess of $8 billion. Depending on how much we distribute to shareholders and how much we retain, we have huge opportunities to adjust the right level of debt to the future transport and logistics business.
We will inform you when we have a deal, when we have a transaction, the new separation for drilling and supply services. It has probably served us well that they have not been in the front row because the market has recovered for oil services businesses. We have a better business conditions in drilling today, still tough market for supply services. What I put up here is just indicative. This is what we have in the books. This is the kind of our value assessment at the time of taking them to discontinued business.
If you take the totality of Maersk Oil, Maersk Drilling, and Maersk Supply Service, depending on how much you distribute, we distribute to shareholders and how much we use to reduce debt, you can see that we can construct everything from a very conservative capital structure to a not very conservative structure. The guiding light for us is it starts with the investment grade. I will just read out this quote here. This is exactly what we said at the time of the Total deal. Subject to meeting our investment grade objective, A.P. Moller-Maersk plans to return a material portion of the value of the received Total shares to the A.P. Moller-Maersk shareholders during the course of 2018, 2019 in the form of extraordinary dividend, share buyback, and/or distribution of Total shares.
I like to remind you, we have done these things before. In 2015, we sold, we divested Danske Bank, and we actually moved it all out to shareholders. Now, why are we then not, just to anticipate one question here from the room, why are we not more clear about it today? It's simply in order to be able to come up with the best possible structural solutions for Maersk Drilling and Maersk Supply Service. If we already now say, "This is what we're gonna use for sending back to shareholders," we will lock ourselves into a corner. What you should see is not four individual deals, but you should see a separation of energy out of A.P. Moller - Maersk.
We are very keen on that this new company of transport and logistics, that it has the right opening balance sheet. Moving on to the continuing business. We last week or 11 days ago when we announced our results, we started guiding on EBITDA. We really think it is the right measure to look at. If you think about the short-term investment case of free cash flow, it starts with generating EBITDA. Unfortunately, we came down very low in a cyclical low 2016. We improved significantly in 2017, and our guidance is that we will improve further in 2018, partly of course, because it includes Hamburg Süd. How are we gonna do that? It's not that we are just betting the farm on higher freight rates.
We will be pushing very, very hard on cost leadership. You heard Morten and Søren Toft talking about it. I hope you are left in no doubt that this is top of our priorities. Another way of looking at it is that our toolbox has, in a way, been filled up with opportunities to become more cost efficient. Because with the integration of transport and logistics, we will be able to harvest significant synergies to the tune of $600 million by 2019. Most of that is cost synergies. Hamburg Süd as well, a lot mainly cost synergies, coming out here by 2019. We will be able to continue to show deflationary cost trends here.
Obviously, we're guiding within a range because there are some big uncertainties, particularly here in the middle of Chinese New Year, where the freight rate's going and the bunker fuel has been fairly volatile. What we're trying to do is to build the most robust business on the things that we can control. Another feature where A.P. Moller - Maersk is continuing business now not including the energy businesses, has changed a lot, and you have to bear that in mind, is that the transport and logistics business is a business with a very high cash conversion. Partly because the major part of our business is liner business that has tonnage taxation, so the effective tax rate is extremely low.
The second part for us, that's a challenge for us and something we put a lot of focus on, is that we need to manage our working capital in a constrained way. I think what we're saying here is earnings in terms of EBITDA is important, but cash is more important, and we can convert the earnings into a very high cash conversion ratio and should be able to deliver an improved cash from operations. Now, the other side of the equation has attracted a lot of questions already here in the foyer. Because one thing is to generate cash as a business, another thing is that you would like to reinvest some of it, and some of it is kind of given.
I mean, if you wanna grow a line of business and make it bigger, you will have to get more containers. That's just how it is. Let me start with where Søren started this morning. We had, independent of each other, done a little calculation, namely that in 2013, 2014, and 2015, A.P. Moller - Maersk, as a conglomerate with the energy business, invested $7 billion on average a year. If you remember the chart that Søren showed this morning, saying we're taking 25% of the turnover out, we replaced it with 20%, so almost entirely replace it with the turnover from Hamburg Süd, but we already have half the CapEx. Then we are right now on a reduced trajectory with our CapEx.
It's also important to say, and I could perhaps have made it even clearer, but until 2017, it does not include Hamburg Süd, and the guidance we're giving here does include Hamburg Süd. If you look at the numbers that Arnt was showing, on average the last five years, Hamburg Süd have actually spent $400 million a year on CapEx. There will be no Hamburg Süd CapEx, and Maersk Line CapEx is one pool in the future. It's one network. Obviously, a bigger business will require a few more containers, et cetera. So this graph, in many ways, underestimate how much has been done. With the change we are moving towards, it's still a very capital-intensive business, but less capital-intensive than some of our energy businesses. With the taking in Hamburg Süd as well, the relative CapEx is going down.
We came in in 2016. If you take last capital markets day, we came in, we said we guided you to do around $3.3 billion. We came in at $2.9 billion. We guided you at last capital markets day between $3.5 billion-$4 billion, and we came in at $3.6 billion. Some of that, though, is phasing into 2018, and that's also one of the reasons why it's actually really tough for us as a management to keep reducing CapEx. We are committed to that. I would say right now, when I look at the budgets for 2019, we are at the top end of the range of the $2.5 billion-$3 billion. There should be no doubt that this is hugely important.
We understand the need for deleverage and generating a free cash flow, and it's probably also a cultural journey for us. We used to be this big conglomerate that had unlimited resources, and I think we are now trying to look at it in a fairly more humble way and asking ourselves how could we sometimes avoid spending CapEx. Now, what are the drivers of the CapEx reduction? First of all, as you who has followed us for years would know, for a number of years, we didn't receive vessels, but then we ordered a number of vessels in 2015, and those are the ones we are receiving right now. Few remaining vessels. Right now, we're actually having a historical high ownership share.
We could choose to, if we want to dilute that a little bit with time charter, so we are not that dependent on buying new ships. I think it came pretty clear from Morten as well, we are not planning any greenfield terminal projects right now. It's a matter of completing what we already have started. Terminals business is a long-term business. In a good way, in a way, long-term cash flows, but it takes a while to complete the projects. The final part, that is basically for every Monday's discussion in the management, is about how do we improve the asset utilization? How is our turn time of containers? What is the utilization, the head haul utilization, the round trip utilization of our vessels? How do we utilize our terminals in the best possible ways?
Being successful there means also that we can keep on reducing the CapEx requirements. The evidence for that we are actually not doing a big CapEx spree is really looking at the contractual commitments that back. At the time before we talked separation, at the beginning of 2016 was actually for both energy and T&L, around $9 billion. We reduced that to $5.4 billion for our continuing business here by Q4 2016, and we have taken relatively few new investment decisions, so that has been reduced by 27% by Q4 2017. Every quarter, we have reduced. As you can see, there's a couple of vessels waiting there, and there are a number of commitments to terminals. That's the major part.
Of course, this is what is only committed, but if we grow with the market, we will have to do further commitments of containers in the future. Now, let me try to bring that together in terms of short-term focus on free cash flow. If you look at the EBITDA, we're guiding $4 billion-$5 billion. And we believe we can deliver that with a very high cash conversion ratio. You can see we plan to have gross CapEx, and that does not include acquisitions and divestments to the tune of $3 billion. We really believe that we are turning the company from negative free cash flow before acquisitions and divestments to positive free cash flow this year.
We are not planning, at the moment at least, any acquisitions. All focus in the company is on integrating Hamburg Süd well. You have heard from a couple of my colleagues that, who knows, there might be a few places where we intelligently can monetize some assets that will both give proceeds, but also be worth more for others than for us. If you just go through the list here, you can get to, in my view, a fairly good free cash flow before financing. This is a lot of our focus right now, on top of finalizing the energy separation, of course. That's the one side of the equation. I particularly with Vincent this morning, you heard about how much we are preparing for the long term. It's very different.
It is about growing an integrated offering. It is about growing non-ocean revenue disproportionately. It's about creating a more stable growing earnings and about reducing the capital intensity. That brings me to the next point, that we are going to change how we report out. The way we report out today is reminiscent of how we established transparent reporting as a conglomerate around 10 years ago, and we have stuck with that. You can always argue when is the right timing, and, you will probably recall, some of you, that I said at last Capital Markets Day, maybe for this integrated business, it's better to look at one bottom line than looking at the individual parts. We have come to the conclusion that our transformation is at an inflection point.
It is time to make the change so that the change becomes an accelerator of change and not a resistor of change. Moving towards one bottom line, which will be how we will report out to you in Q1, from Q1 2018 onwards, is basically saying we're not a conglomerate. We will, and this is very important, I'll try to convince you about it today, and I'll, I'm prepared to take the bet, we will be able to convince you by Q1 as well, that you will get at least as good disclosures as you get today, more relevant disclosures towards what we're trying to achieve.
It's not about reducing disclosures, it's about showing things in a relevant way, focusing on the bottom line, on the one bottom line, and then offer you some segments that actually can show the strategic direction we are moving into, and in a way, basically showing the natural steps towards becoming the integrator. Let me show you the essence of the proposal. When we report out in the first quarter, and we will announce our first quarter results on the seventeenth of May. Around a month before, we will send out, we will make a stock exchange release. We'll send out spreadsheets so that you have comparables, and you can prepare yourself, so it should be digestible when you get things in a different format.
Yes, it's one bottom line, but we will provide a lot of details in segments. The new segments will be, one is called Ocean. That is, of course, quite a lot like Maersk Line, but it's not, because it's Ocean. It's not the inland part, but we do include the transshipment hubs as well, because we see that as kind of the one product from an integrated network. The second segment we will show is terminals and towage, really what goes on in the gateway terminals in the world, what is going on in the harbors. The third segment is about logistics and services. Here comes in our Damco business, our inland businesses, some of the new things that you have heard about today.
Just mentioning here, trade finance is still very small, I should say. Then we have a kind of another segment where we put in our manufacturing business of Maersk Container Industry. We will provide both activity and profitability for each segment, namely revenue and EBITDA. Most importantly, though, and this is what we're really working on right now, is that we want to hold ourselves accountable within the company and also externally of having some real good KPIs. I think we are today offering you fairly good KPIs in terms of unit costs and a number of operational metrics, but with this segmentation, we can further sharpen that.
Here you see a first split of our new segments in terms of the revenue split that you see here and we have included Hamburg Süd here. We are very dependent on the Ocean revenue as you can see here. Picking up on Vincent's point from earlier today, there is a demand for customers for more integrated solution. Quite frankly, the revenue potential is so much other than just Ocean. Of course, the non-Ocean revenue does not have to be asset heavy. It can be, but you don't necessarily need that. In a way, the trick is around leveraging our existing network.
The way we see it is successful implementation should maximize revenue growth, provide more stable returns, and reduce capital intensity over time. It's very important to say, I spent some time talking about the short term. This is the long term. Don't start saying, "in second quarter, why are you not growing that more compared to the first quarter?" This is a long-haul journey, but we like to start reporting on it. We believe this is the path that will lead us towards our financial goals of delivering over 8.5% return on invested capital over the cycle and growing revenue. Let me come back to where I started. Constant care, taking care of today while preparing for tomorrow.
We are taking an important step today by telling you how we are changing measures, how we are changing the way we measure things. What gets measured gets done. Another quote from not Mike Tyson, but it is we really believe in the fact that it's time to make that change. We will, of course, have further changes to our accounts, but from next year onwards, you will see disclosure of off-balance-sheet commitments that will give you further insight into what the real full capital commitments are, both on balance sheet and off balance sheet.
It will be much easier for you to, for example, follow measures from the rating institutions that makes a number of assumptions when they assess what our ratings should be. But that's for next year. Right now, it's about getting the one profit and loss statement in place and work from that. This is how we would like to be held accountable in the years to come. I hope you follow it. You can follow the logic of that. The short term, we are very happy to explain the minute details every quarter. It makes little sense probably in the beginning to talk about the minute details on the long term quarter by quarter. We, of course, you heard Søren talk about it's a three to five years journey. We need to make progress on that journey in the years to come.