I think we can start, yeah? Hello everyone, a warm welcome to our Capital Markets Day. We are very excited to have you here. We have more than 100 participants here in the room and many more on the webcast, this is the largest Capital Markets Day ever for Novozymes. We are particularly excited to host you here at our brand-new innovation campus in Lyngby, which we only inaugurated 10 days ago. It's a very cool building, lots of cool technology, solar panels on the roof. We even flush our toilets with rainwater here, it's really a very exciting building. Before we get started on the agenda, and with the program, let me look at a few practicalities. First, in case of fire, evacuation point is in the parking lot on the ground floor.
Please follow the green exit signs to the nearest emergency exits, and you'll hear it in the speaker if we have to leave the building. Second, defibrillators are placed in reception at A-0, at the D-2 coffee area, and in the ground floor in the parking lot. For the Q&A, we'll limit our questions right after the presentations to two questions only, and we'll be strict with that in order to be able to keep our schedule. We have a lot of time during the Q&A session and also, of course, during the breaks and the dinner to interact with us. As you know, we'll round off the day with the dinner at Tivoli Gardens.
The entrance ticket for your entrance into Tivoli Gardens is at the back of your name tag, please hold on to that one, in case you get lost or you choose not to go with us in the bus to the Tivoli Gardens. We have a very exciting day ahead of us. Maybe as you've seen, during lunch, we have actually four demonstrations that you can use to see our innovative solutions. There's something around dishwash. There's a virtual reality tour for our site in Kalundborg. There is a story around our new innovation campus, and there's a virtual reality tour for Balancius, our new enzyme. You'll be able to see some more of this also during the break. We will start with Peter kicking off with the updated strategy, followed by Thomas talking about innovation.
Anders, Andrew, and Tina will be talking about the commercial presentations. We'll have a short break. I will lead you through the financials and the targets before we break into a Q&A. We'll split you into three groups for the Q&A. The group number is on the back of your name tag, important to note. After the Q&A, we will go to the demo tours. Same thing, color code is at the back of your name tag, it's important to hold on to those name tags. The demo tour will include microbial discovery, protein engineering, the household care freshness platform, baking, and sludge dewatering. After all of that, we'll meet back here for a wrap-up, we go for dinner. With this is familiar to you. I won't read it out. It's our Safe Harbor Statement.
Please keep it in mind for the remainder of the session. With this, it's my great pleasure to invite Peter to the stage. Peter, please.
Thank you. Also a very warm welcome from me. It's a fantastic event. It's a fantastic day for Novozymes. We're really excited about it. The place itself here, as Priska was talking about, we moved into about 10 days ago. There's about 750 people here now. It's a mix of research and administration, I think we'll be able to show you some pretty cool things as the afternoon progresses. Of course, the most significant thing today is the strategy update. As the title indicates, it's not a revolution. It's more like an evolution of Novozymes. When we look at the business today, we have a number of different businesses. We have exemplified this. When we talk about this slide internally, we talk about the Petersons. It's actually a family, Petersons, and you can see where all our different solutions, where they're getting into daily life.
If you think about your life so far today, you've probably been in touch with Novozymes multiple times. Actually, this year or last year, we touched about a good five billion people with solutions on an ongoing basis. I'll not belabor all the different business segments we're in, just make the point that we are in many different segments, actually around 30 different industries. When we look at Novozymes, it's a couple of technologies, enzyme and microbe technology, that travels into all these different end markets. Also means that we do not necessarily have total insight in every single one of these end markets. One thing combines them all, and that is that the technology that Novozymes offers replaces other inputs. We replace energy in detergents. We replace energy when you look at the fuel.
We replace natural ingredients in food with our enzyme systems, so on. We reduce the amount of feed that's necessary to produce a chicken or a piglet. The common denominator is the technology, the sustainability profile of our solutions. That's what we have combined in our purpose, the purpose that we designed for 2015. We have found that that is a very mobilizing thing, both with customers and also internally. As I'm sure you're aware of, in a company today, to get the right, attract the right people to work in a company, it's so important that you're not just a good company to work for, but that you also have an inspiring purpose.
When we go out and check with people who want to work for Novozymes, people who do work for Novozymes, this purpose is what ties it together, that people want to work for a company that aspire for more than just a bottom line. We aspire to create the better lives in a growing world. If we look at that more specifically, at least the way we look at it today, there are some really compelling reasons for continuing to invest in that. There are consumer needs to be covered, there are customer needs, of course, and there are planet needs. When we look at the consumer needs, it's about the 9.6 billion people we're going to be by 2050. It's urbanization. Anders will talk later about the underlying growth in household care in the emerging markets. That's pretty much all driven by urbanization.
Andy will talk about how we engage in the rising demand for food as we go more and more people on the planet. Customers have their issues. Most of our customers have a profitability agenda, of course, but they also have an agenda of differentiation. They're trying to create consumer preference, and they, of course, many of them, if not all of them, are working to create that preference by the use of our technology. We also see that more and more customers get subjected to more fragmented regulatory environments. It's not necessarily that the regulatory environment is tightening up, but there are more and more countries that come in, and therefore, customers and ourselves have to relate to a more complex regulatory environment. Then, of course, you have planet needs. We are still not handling global climate challenges, and that's a tremendous issue for the planet.
Yet, with all this going for us, the obvious question is, how come we don't grow faster? Why doesn't this add up to more significant growth? When we look at the last nine years it is here, then we have an average growth of about 5%. When you look at the last four years, it's been lower. With the recent outlook for 2019, of course, 2019 will not, in all likelihood, add to the or contribute to a higher average. The question is, how come? That's, of course, also a question we've asked ourselves. That's essentially the outset for this strategy update. How come that a world that is in dire need for our solutions, we can't drive more than these 3, 4%?
I think the good news that we are here to share with you today is that we actually think we can grow faster. We're trying to organize ourselves in a new way in the world as it is. It's not like we're betting on climate changes or all kinds of external factors to save our butt. We're betting on that we can change ourselves, and we can get to higher growth. If we look at it in more details, the different segments, of course, have gone through their different cycles. Household care has been low. We've seen large customers, despite the fact that we offer a more sustainable solution, we've seen them decrease their demand for these solutions. We had a dramatic change in bioenergy in 2015 and 2016 that took its dent.
More recently, we have had a pretty tough ag and feed market and a tough bioenergy market in the U.S. It's not all depressing news, though. We have a very strong pickup in the emerging markets across these categories. We have some really solid product launches that have come to market over the last couple of years that will propel a lot of growth going forward. As a response to this, we created the divisions in 2016, early 2016, and we have concluded, just to get that straight, the divisions have worked well. They haven't solved all our issues, but they've worked well. We're basing our future solutions on the divisions as they exist today. Here comes the next wave of change, so to say, that we're going to review with you today.
Before we get into that, I just want to reiterate that we have a very strong market position. We're about half of the world market. There's hardly a base in this world that we do not cover. A lot of our customers have us as a sole supplier. We've just launched, I think, a handful of very impactful pieces of innovation. Just going to call out a few. Freshness, as we'll get to talk about later on today, I'm sure, is a significant one. Balancius, that you may have had a chance to review over lunch, is another one. BioYield with Bayer for as a corn inoculant is another really significant one.
When we look at our customer base, we've just completed a customer satisfaction survey, and we have a net promoter score of 54, which brings us in the kind of top 5% B2B companies. We have a very strong presence in the emerging markets. We have a very strong position as a company. Actually, somewhat to my surprise, we also partner, if you add up the numbers, we partner with about 30 out of the Fortune 500 companies. After six months of review, we have now designed a strategic twist, a strategy update that we call Better Business with Biology. It means better business for our customers, better business for Novozymes, and more impact on a sustainable world. In headlines, it's about differentiating, it's about getting better at investing with impact, and at the same time, we're also going to invest more heavily into completely new business areas.
We call that a dual transformation, that on the one side, we are working hard and we'll get there to get more growth, short, medium term, but at the same time, we're also increasing our investments in business areas, options, that in all likelihood will create growth on the other side of 2025 and not on this side of 2025. It's a dual transformation, and to do so, we are reallocating a lot of resources. We're taking resources away from short-term stuff. I'll get more into that in a second. We are putting more commercial activity to support some of the growth opportunities we have right now in the marketplace. Some of those I mentioned before, but also others, if we put more power behind them, we think we can get faster growth. We are going to simplify and optimize, so a simplification of the organization.
I think in many ways we have been expecting higher growth, and we've also designed structures and processes for a company that's slightly larger than we are. Now is also time to simplify. Over the last two, three years now, we have invested quite a bit in digital transformation. Now is the time also to harvest some of the results of that. Combined, that will give us some savings. We want to be a very attractive place for Zymers. We want to be the best place for the most outstanding scientists, but we also want to have outstanding salespeople. We want to be a good place for people to work. As we'll get back to, we're also using this opportunity to create the framework for a company and an organization of people, going forward. That goes must be on this building.
This building is still only 750 people out of 6,300. It's corporate-wide. It's not just about this simple thing, this building. We'll talk more about these programs as we go through the CMD this afternoon. I think some of you may say that you've heard these headlines before, and I think that's probably true. I think what we're doing now is that we're doubling down on a lot of them. We've done some before, and of course, in terms of headlines, you may have heard them before, but we're going to double down on them. We'll talk more about that during the afternoon. One thing that we're going to do quite different from what we've done before is that we're looking at our portfolio of the businesses.
We've divided our portfolio of businesses into a good 30 units, and we've been looking at how to segment and, on this slide, you have the segmentation terminology that we're going to use going forward. Let me just start saying that every major industry is important to Novozymes. This is not about taking businesses away. We think we are a good host for all the businesses we have, and they play a strategic role in Novozymes. We want to differentiate how we deal with them, at least more than we have done so far. The markets are different, of course. I think, again, with the benefit of hindsight, when you get a half year to review things and you get a bit of distance, then I think what we've seen is that too often has our response been to innovate for a new solution.
Maybe that's not the most effective way of getting a new solution. Maybe it's too costly. Let me just take you through a couple of examples to understand this or to illustrate this. We have a bunch of businesses, the good 31 I talked about that we have tried to put into the grid that is behind me. Let's just take them one by one. A value creator in our terminology is a business that has a very strong base for profitability. It's not a business that in all likelihood is going to grow fast, but it has a good profitability and it can fund growth in other areas. An example of that would be starch processing. Starch processing is a profitable, interesting business to Novozymes. But the innovation gap is not large and the underlying volume growth is small.
While we may in the past have done innovation to support starch processing, we're going to dial that down, and we'll try to find other ways of working with our customers in starch processing. If we then go anti-clockwise, then we have something called anchor businesses. Those are typically rather large, stable growth and revenue. Those are good businesses to have. We'll manage them for profit, and a bit of growth. An example of that would be our laundry business in the matured markets. It's not likely that laundry in the matured markets holds an awful lot of growth opportunities. Household care growth in all likelihood, except for freshness, comes out of the emerging markets. That's an example of an anchor business. Luckily, we also have stuff that grows much faster. We have a bunch of segments that we call the growth stars.
Those are near-term growth opportunities where we believe if we give them a bit more power, then we can actually get higher growth. Examples of that would be our animal health business. With Balancius, push that harder into the marketplace, make new products in the same space. The same thing for grain milling, as an example. We have development seats that are more innovative, more innovation plays in the marketplace. Examples of that, there's really strong growth engines for the mid-term. Examples of what we have there is BioYield, what's up with Bayer and the following BioYield 3. Anders will also talk about biological detergents as an example of that. At 10:00, we have new strategic opportunities, which is more long-term. Look at them as post 2023. These are not investments that in all likelihood will drive growth short-term.
These are investments, these are opportunities we create to get a better basis for strong growth, post 2022, 2023. This is of course dynamic, but it's going to be a steer on how we invest. What we see is that we take resources away, essentially from value creators and from anchor businesses, and we invest a lot more in what we call development seats, growth stars, and strategic opportunities. That gives us higher growth. The plans we've made clearly shows that it's, of course, there's a dent when you take something away, but the gain in putting stuff into development seats and growth stars is much larger. That creates a higher growth. The magnitude of this, the focusing of the pipeline, which Thomas will get back and talk about, that comes off this. The efficiency program is an annual saving of about DKK 2 million-DKK 300 million.
That goes into a commercial push that is primarily related to development seats and growth stars of an additional DKK 100, and then an additional DKK 150 in new strategic opportunities. That's an additional DKK 150. We already spent some money in that space. That's what we call dual transformation. We do both. There's both more investments, particularly commercial investments in short to medium term, and then there's more investments, that's a combination of research and commercial in the strategic opportunity areas that Thomas will talk more about. Internally, this means that we're going to focus our R&D on growth areas. We're going to simplify structures. Again, digitalization is an enabler of this. We think we're going to have that in place over the next two months. Today is the launch day. It's also the internal launch day. Of course, we've done some thinking.
We know roughly where we're going. Exactly what this means in terms of work structures and where and what, that's going to be worked out over the next two months. Let me just quickly talk about the new strategic opportunities that we're working on. First of all, we're going to look at this as I think a venture capitalist would. Rather than looking at how this might evolve and what sales might be in 10 years' time, we'll try to look at this in a way of creating insights, so we'll do it milestone by milestone. Much more milestone driven. The three areas we call out now is on this slide. It is feeding the world. It's really about protein. Thomas will talk more about it.
There is a world where you can actually ferment protein that will play a meaningful role in mid-tier food products. There's increasing health and wellbeing, which is in our world about primarily combinations of enzymes and microbes for oral and gut health. We think that there's a world, of course, of probiotics and human health products, but we think there's a place here where Novozymes has unique capabilities to drive that forward. The last is water. You heard us tee water up, I think a year ago. We worked on water, but mainly on the waste treatment side. In the meantime, we have worked a lot more with water, and we see a lot of opportunities in not only reducing wastewater, handling wastewater, but also in water management and water purification with biotechnology. That's what we're going to look at.
There's no guarantee, I don't think Thomas will give one either, that these are all going to be monstrously large business units. The only guarantee that we give today is that we're going to pursue these, and we're going to keep you posted. We're going to do it milestone by milestone as we get insights, then we'll see where that takes us. Then we're adding DKK 150 million annually on top of the investments we're already making. When we look at the world, all of our businesses are driven by sustainability. That creates a preference in all our businesses. We have defined for ourselves new sustainability targets also, they are on this slide. The darker part is the external part. That's the world part of it. If we take climate, for example, we want to help limit the global warming increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
That's the Paris Agreement. Our contribution, as we measure ourselves, by 2022 is going to be a saving of 60 million tons from low carbon fuels in the transportation sector. That's not the only reduction contribution Novozymes is making, that's where we're going to measure ourselves. That's on the transportation sector. If we go down, so vertically, we look at Novozymes' own commitment, you can see that we commit to having reduced the absolute CO2 emission from our operations by 50% in 2030, we commit to work towards carbon neutrality by 2050. Those are actually quite significant tasks for a company that consumes a bit of energy, quote unquote. By 2022, we'll have reduced our CO2 emissions by 25%. Water, I'm not going to read out the slide. You can see water is the same structure.
We're going to look at all our sites, and we're going to have these sites managed. This is kind of a UN term in balance with local conditions. It means that there are places where we have sites where water is hardly an issue, and there are places where water is an issue. We dose depending on the size of the issue, so to say. By 2022, so in three years' time, we'll have water management programs for all our different sites. The third area we're calling out is production and consumption, which relates to food essentially. Our technologies, and there's a few we're going to track, will by 2022 have produced 500,000 tons of additional food. In our own system, by 2030, we're going to have 100% of all our materials in a circular system.
By 2022, we're going to do that for one of our major waste streams, which is the spent biomass. By 2022, spent biomass will all be circular. That brings me to summing it up. When you look at what we're proposing here today and what we're going to do today and forward, it's going to be a fairly massive reallocation of resources, and much more than anything you've seen in Novozymes before. That will create higher growth. We're going to differentiate to a larger extent than we've done before. It's going to include a doubling down on the emerging market presence. As we see it, we're going to get even more of our growth out of the emerging markets. We're going to simplify the way we operate, and continue our focus on optimization.
It's almost a given for us, but nevertheless, we have listed it on this slide, that there are also things we do not do. We're not proposing to expand outside our core capabilities of enzymes and microbes. Do not expect us to jump into other areas through acquisitions or with any other means. It's enzymes and microbes. There's enough space for us in enzyme and microbes to continue to evolve the company. We're not pursuing short-term margin expansion. Priska will talk later about margin expansion, but of course, the additional DKK 150 we're putting into long-term growth options could have been put to margin expansion. We just don't think that's the right thing to do. We want to continue to invest, and build these new businesses for the future. Then, as I said, we're not going to embark on any aggressive acquisition strategy.
What I think you should expect is that we continue to do what we have done. There'll be technology bolt-ons, there might be market bolt-ons, and those are probably a combination of some pieces in the microbe space, and then in these three strategic opportunity areas I talked about before. If we sum this up, I talked about the measurements on the world measurements. I'm sure you've spent yesterday studying our business targets. We are now guiding a 5-plus% growth 2022. We're also calling out that these portfolio changes, we'll have to see how exactly they work out for 2020. There may be some of the things where we're dosing down, where we'll get a little bit of an issue in 2020. Let's see. There are also things where we're dosing up where we might get tailwind in 2020. There's just an uncertainty we're calling out.
We are going to move towards an EBIT margin of 28% by the end of the period. That is roughly a 1% hike up compared to the underlying margin today, and we are going to get to 23% ROIC, which Priska will talk about in a short time. On [Cimus], we are trying to create this new world. Not create a new world, but we are trying to embrace how the world is developing. In a world where jobs, where tasks are changing rapidly and with a higher and higher speed, it is very important that we continue to enable learning. We are going to invest more in that, and we have a target of an 80% score. It is a fairly international scoring of [Cimus by 2022. 80 would bring us in the best quartile. It is just to continue to make sure that we enable learning. Nurture diversity.
We are doing pretty well. We need to continue. We are putting the bar up at 86, which would put us at the very top. Ensure wellbeing. We think it is an emerging area. You may see when you walk around this building that we have actually tried to create rooms where people can, if you like, nurture themselves and take a break, if you like. For example, in the coffee islands out here, if that is an English term, you will see jigsaw puzzles where people can take a break. I think we all have to understand that the world is changing. We are all going more digital. We are more online. This whole thing about a company taking a wider responsibility for wellbeing is necessary. We are trying to do that. Of course, one part of that is safety in the workplace.
We are also going to work hard to reduce the safety incidents we have in the company. We are hoping to engage our employees in inspiring each other but also inspire the world, and the pledge we are making is that we will be spending time to let employees engage. I am sure that is going to be around the agenda of sustainability. I am pretty sure we are going to spend 90% of the discussion today on the centerpiece, the business piece. With that, I just want to move on and tee up the strategy update that we call Better Business with Biology, just close this session off by saying that I am absolutely sure that the tweaks we are doing to the portfolio now, the investments we are making in R&D, the simplification we are making, will give us higher growth rates. With that, I will close it here. Tobias?
Thank you very much.
Thank you. We have the Q&A session later. We're thinking about holding two Q&As for here now, we're running a little bit late already. We'll do that later. There's an hour of Q&A sessions later in the program. I think we invite Thomas now, we continue immediately.
Okay. Thomas.
Thank you, Peder. Also, a very warm welcome from me. It's great to see so many people here. Great to see the interest in Novozymes. Novozymes is built on innovation. This is how we got to where we are today, this is also how we think we will be able to build an even stronger, bigger company in the future. This is, of course, not done in isolation, responding and building on an ever-changing environment that we are part of. If we look at the trends that we see around us today, there's an enormous amount of data, access to data analysis that we can do today that just a couple of years ago would've been absolutely impossible to comprehend, that we would be able to make sense out of the data that today we can just put into a computer.
This means, from an opportunity point of view, that today we're able to find cause and effect in a completely different way than just a couple of years ago, as mentioned. By doing that, we'll be able to work with specific customers, developing very specific tailored products, understanding what is the very specific application that we're going into, and how do we tailor an enzyme or microbe to fit exactly into that program. When we look around the world, there's a lot of things that we need to attend to. There's a lot of opportunities, some of them we'll make benefits out of. Others, we need to be careful of. Other, again, just means like in the example of cheaper genome sequencing, that means we don't have to do that ourself. We don't have to build the strains ourself.
We can get someone outside Novozymes to do that and focus our resources in other areas. All the time we have to be on our toes to make sure that what we spend our resources on is what makes the absolutely most sense for us as a company to do. Peter talked about the 30 businesses we are in today. Ever since we started more than 60 years ago with the introduction of enzymes into the leather industry, diversification has been an important point in how to grow our enzyme business. Soon after we launched into the leather business, we came up with products for the textile industry, that was followed by products for household care. Building diversification, that's actually also creating resilience to some extent towards the volatility in very specific markets.
It also means that we can use learnings in one industry into other industries, and we are doing that whenever we can find the opportunity to do so. Of course, when we come across ways of optimizing our specific production in one area, very often we find ways to use that in other areas as well. Being in a number of different industries, of course creates some complexity, but it certainly also creates a lot of opportunities on leveraging what we're doing in one area into other areas. After the IPO or the de-merger from Novo Nordisk back in year 2000, we started to look at other technologies. For the last, now almost 20 years, we have been establishing our capabilities within the microbe area. This is an area that has a big interest and where we see a lot of opportunities going forward.
What we have been doing has been to build businesses like our BioAg business, animal health business. We are in wastewater treatment using microbes, a number of very specific microbe applications. When we look to the future, we see, again, an increase in the different segments or industries where we are operating, and we see more and more a convergence between an enzyme application and a microbe application. Very often we are looking to opportunities where enzymes as well as microbes could be the solution going forward. Peter talked about the focus areas of our updated strategy, A Better Business with Biology. He mentioned the three focus areas, Differentiate to Succeed, Invest in Impact, and Spearhead New Businesses. That of course have very specific meanings when we talk about the technology and how we're going to work with our technology.
Differentiate to Succeed, that's about doing the portfolio roles that Peter was mentioning. I'll get back to that. Invest in Impact could be interpreted in our technology development as making sure that the projects we are investing in, they're projects where we put enough resources in and not getting ourself spread too thin. Then about Spearhead New Businesses, the new opportunity areas that Peter was alluding to. I'll get back to that in a little while. Looking at the slide Peter showed on our different portfolios. Of course, being a value creator, Peter mentioned the starch business means that our use of technology and our R&D capabilities will be completely different in a business like this. We will not be putting up research programs within an anchor business like the starch business.
If we can come up with opportunities of increasing our profitability is making better strains, thereby getting higher yields, getting better economy, of course we will carry out programs. The programs will be about securing a stronger profitability, a better profit margin in that particular business. As Peder mentioned, the starch business as one. Peder, in the anchor businesses, talked about laundry in developed markets. This of course also have a consequence in how we're going to work with our laundry customers in developed markets. We will use our technology and our research capabilities in order to be our customers' best partner, so to say, but we're not going to run big programs trying to find new opportunities in this particular area. Of course, things change.
It could be that there's also a change in this environment, and if that happens, we would be changing our approach to an industry and maybe also change the way we look at it. As it is an anchor business, it's not about big independent research programs. Growth stars, as I think Peder mentioned, luckily we have a number of these also. Animal health was being mentioned. This is an area where we see a market growing in itself quite rapidly. It's a market where we have introduced products. Balancius, as mentioned, was one. Alterion is another product that we've been introducing over the last couple of years, and where we're seeing very good growth rates. We'll continue to optimize those products. We'll use the commercial competencies in the company, of course, to push them into the marketplace.
From an innovation, from a technology point of view, we will continue to look at what else can be done in this segment. We have good products now with Balancius and Alterion, but there's a lot of other opportunities we could and should be working on, and that's where we will be throwing some of the R&D muscles towards in order to try to get an even better foothold in an interesting growth market where we think opportunities are there. We, as a development seed, talked about complete 100% biological detergents. This is an area where we have some good leads. This is an area where we believe that our competencies actually could bring detergents to a different level when it comes to biodegradability and being 100% biological.
We will throw significant R&D resources into trying to build a case around a 100% biodegradable or biological detergent. These are examples of that the portfolio roles is not only something we talk about from a business model point of view, it's certainly also how are we going to work with these different industries in their roles when it comes to technology. I'll talk about the strategic opportunity areas in a little while in a separate couple of slides. As Peder mentioned, this means that we will be rebalancing a couple of hundred, DKK 200 million-DKK 300 million, coming out of the focused pipeline and coming out of efficiency programs within our part of the business in R&D, in supply operation. We will continue to push efficiency programs in the organization.
We're working already on a number of activities, be it delayering, trying to make sure we have the organization that fits for and not more than we're looking at. With getting the portfolio roles rolled out throughout the organization, we'll be able to look at areas where we don't need to carry out the same activities, and we'll be able to be more efficient in the way we work by doing that, and thereby be able to reallocate people as well as resources. With this, by being focused on this, we will be able to liberate these DKK 200 million-DKK 300 million that we can then add into new strategic opportunities.
Also looking at development seed and growth stars to make sure that we are getting the technology push in those areas where we still look at growth markets with growth opportunities, and that should drive Novozymes to a higher growth rate as such. We talked about focusing the pipeline opportunities. We have tried to illustrate this in this slide that we have to admit that we have been running a number of R&D projects, the way Peter was talking about it. Any opportunity or any issue we were looking at, a response from us has been to carry out an R&D project. We will be cutting back on the number of projects. We would be running fewer projects but with a higher allocation.
Thereby, our belief is we'll be able to lower the risks on the individual projects that we are running and actually creating an overall higher value of the portfolio that we're looking at for the future. To illustrate this, we brought the slide that I was using back in November at our webcast. I'm sure some of you will recall it. We have a portfolio of more than 125 different projects and our eight priority platforms. When we look at the way we're running our projects, we actually think we have a fairly good machinery in our gating in our project system here. That's not what we will be focusing on to change. This is working quite well. We'll continue to fine-tune it. What we will do is that we'll be taking some projects out.
Hopefully, because of de-risking, we'll make some of the value of projects bigger, and thereby generating an overall higher value, as I mentioned. On the priority platforms, these projects that we've now been talking about for a couple of years, they're actually all getting ready to be either be commercialized or have already been commercialized. Overall, we're looking at taking about a third of our current R&D projects out and using those allocations to boost what we do within the projects that we'll keep and focusing on projects in growth stars, in development seeds, and in new strategic opportunity areas. I mentioned that the eight platforms have been developing well, and we will no longer be following them from a technology point of view. Of course, from how they're doing from a turnover point of view, this will continue to be interesting.
We will continue to invest significantly in the freshness solutions. This is, as we talked about previous, going really well, and we have a lot of very interesting opportunities in this area. Likewise, our solutions for emerging market, as well as the grain milling and vegetable oil processing. Animal health and then ag is also continuing to be important areas for us, whereas we will no longer be putting R&D resources into biomass. This is an area where we believe that we have the enzyme ready should this business take off. If it happens, we are ready to service the industry, and we will be able to then build further on what we already have. At this point in time, we think we are ready for whatever could come up in this industry. Water, we already talked about.
We're actually adding an extra program in contaminant removal from water. That finalizes our priority platforms. No longer talking about those, but focusing on a smaller portfolio of more impactful projects. Peder mentioned the new opportunity areas where we will, based on a lot of talk to partners, customers, consultants, work in very different ways going forward. We will separate units from our core business. We'll make sure that they're not measured in the same way as the rest of our businesses are. We will be working here very much based on milestones. This is about getting very fast to either reach the next milestone or understand why we are not reaching the milestone, and then maybe cut that activity out and focus resources in other areas. It's about getting the mentality, so to say, of startup companies, and we would want to work like that within Novozymes.
The groups working in these areas do not necessarily have to use internal resources in moving forward. They don't necessarily have to sit at Novozymes. It's about finding out what is the problem. It's about finding out who's the paying customers. It's about finding out, after that, do we then have a technology that would fit to this? Why is Novozymes the right company to actually develop solutions? Peder quickly mentioned the areas that we are looking at. Proteins, we all know that the world needs up to twice as much protein by 2050 as we are producing today. A significant part of that is going to come out of plants being vegetable proteins rather than the animal sources we're using today.
While we can get a lot out of vegetable proteins, you're not always getting the same texture, the same mouthfeel, the same taste as you do when you are producing some of the products that we have gotten used to today. Fermented proteins, fermented specialty proteins can, in some instances, actually help out by being then supplemented to a mix of different proteins, getting the right mouthfeel, getting the right sweetness, getting the right taste. That's what we are partnering with different companies in looking to, is a role for a company like Novozymes to play. We are today an enormous protein producer. All our enzymes, that's proteins. We spent the last six decades optimizing how we produce proteins at a competitive cost.
If we could tailor some of our activities to fit into this area, that might be an opportunity going forward. The other area, human oral and gut health, is again, a very interesting market opportunity. There's a lot of growth. Consumers, they take more and more responsibility for their own wellbeing. It's not so much about treating diseases, it's about staying well. We have opportunities that we'll be able to fit into this area. One example is we are currently looking at enzyme solution for oral. We are looking at enzymes that will remove plaques. We are looking at enzymes that will help on bad breath. That's an area where we see opportunities if we find the right partners. If we are looking at food intolerances, we have a very good indication about the enzyme applications. We have a good indication about the mix of enzyme and microbes.
Looking at this as an area, it's not that we are a company with a lot of products already within the human health area, but very few other companies have the breadth of technology to be able to deliver enzymes at a competitive cost as well as microbes at a competitive cost. We could end up being somewhat of a disruptor in such a market because we are new in this, and we have an enormous amount of capabilities that we can put to work in this area. The final new opportunity areas that we are calling out today, that's within the removal of microcontaminant from water, be it drinking water or be it wastewater. We are looking at a world where regulations are getting tougher and tougher in this area.
Switzerland has actually just put up some very tough regulations on the drinking water as well as wastewater. It looks like Europe is going to follow suit, and we might have opportunities where our technology is able to break down some of the microcontaminants that's currently being at an increasing and actually alarming rate being found in our different water streams. This is an opportunity for us to look at, does our solution fit into this area? Summing that, three different opportunities that we would be putting resources into, that we'll be running in a different way from the rest of the business, where we'll be setting up our structures in ways to operate this way. Maybe when we meet next time, it's not three of these new opportunities we are running.
Maybe it's five, and maybe three of them are new, and one of them we have decided that that was not the way for us to go forward. This is about finding the ways that we will be working in the future, as well as trying to drive business out of these three very specific areas. If I am very quickly to sum this up, it's about differentiating the way we look at our portfolio logic, the use of technology here. It's about a focused pipeline, where we have higher efficiencies and where we have thereby increased the value, then it's about strategic growth opportunities. Then I'll be handing it off to Tobias. Yes.
Thank you. I learned I should use the mic. I'm sorry for that last time. Q&A later, I said that before. There's a 1-hour Q&A session, split in 3 teams that comes a bit later. We don't do the Q&A now. We invite the commercial executives here, Anders, Andy, and Tina, to go through the different divisions. Welcome.
All right. Now we dive into the business. Household Care and tech will go first. This is a great opportunity, but before we get started, I just want to give a perspective of what we do in Household Care. Today, we meet half the world's population with our technologies coming out of Novozymes. Actually, I think we make quite a difference, both for consumers but also for the world. If you think about what our contribution is, we are contributing to lowering the energy levels that are being used for doing laundry around the world, simply because our technology works extremely efficiently at low temperatures. We are working with partners on reducing packaging through compaction. It's a huge contribution to the world. Essentially, a lot of the products that are being used are full of plastic. We have an opportunity to actually take that down.
We also work on replacing chemistry for this industry by using biological technologies. For the 70% of the world's population that wash by hand, actually having really efficient laundry products makes a huge difference. It's a tedious task, and making a better job for these people actually matters. Our commitment to this industry is, of course, to work on all of these 4 parameters, but also it's a commitment to find a way to get to 100% biological cleaning and 100% biological detergents. If you go around in the supermarkets today, you actually see in more and more products claim that it's 96% bio-based.
We want to take that to 100, and we want to be the enabler of that in the industry. That all sounds really good, but we also have to reflect on the past, and the past has not been particularly pretty for Household Care. We have had modest growth, around 1% for the last 4 years. We have talked to a lot of you guys why that is. We have had some of our large customers challenge us on some dosages that they used. Some of that relates to the fact that they have been out improving their margin. Some of it relates to some technologies that they've specifically taken out of their products. That is, of course, a challenge that we need to work on and face.
We also have really good indication that the pipeline that we have, that we look for in the future, is actually a stronger one than the one that we had in the past. I'll get a chance to talk a little bit more about that in detail. While these challenges have been rather significant, we also have had quite good developments with a lot of our regional customers who've actually been growing very nicely over this period of time. We also see that our emerging markets have been doing really well in this period. Our technical and pharma has been a little bit more lumpy, largely driven by our pharma business that has basically a development which is quite unpredictable, but also the fact that our textiles and the other businesses have not delivered much growth in the period.
You've seen this slide before, this is to sort of bring into perspective, how does this strategy impact the different businesses and functions in those times? We talk about differentiate to succeed and what does that mean when we talk about Household Care? One of the things it does mean is that we believe that with technology advances, we are able to develop the core of what we do in laundry with less resources compared to what we've done in the past. That means that we will be able to free up some of those resources for the things that will actually take this industry into growth. That's elements like freshness that we have been doing for quite some years now. It's also other things like biological detergents that I'll get to talk about a little later.
It's some other smaller segments that if we succeed in these, they will be net delivering growth to our industry. I think that's a very important strategy shift, that we take some of the resources that we have spent on developing the base and putting into real new growth areas that will deliver growth for Household Care. Just giving a few data points on at least why I'm super excited about the Household Care business and the developments in the business. We are seeing a lot of transformation happening in the world today. A few data points, 20% of detergents now in China are being sold online. Where is that in five years? It's probably much more than 20%. That drives a big change for the packaging, simply because e-tailers, if there's something they don't like, it's large, bulky products.
That opens up an opportunity for us to work with our customers on compaction. Again, it will have a huge benefit not only for consumers, but also for the environment, simply because we can reduce the waste materials from packaging. Another interesting data point is that more and more consumers around the world are being willing to pay for sustainable claims, natural products, that's also why we see a lot of products being put out there. What we translate that into our business is that actually drives a need for bio-based solutions. Again, our vision is getting to 100% bio-based solutions at a cost effective position. We're not there today, but that is where we are working towards. We've talked much about emerging markets and I'll give a little bit more flavor to that.
70% of the growth is going to come out of the emerging markets. 80% of the consumers are in the emerging markets. We need to tap into that in a different way, it calls for new solutions, it also calls for us improving the presence we have in the emerging markets. Finally, one thing that is extremely exciting and one of the things we've talked quite a bit about is what's happening in freshness. Consumers today claim that odor is an equal issue as stain removal, which we have built our entire business around. If you do not believe me, you can go and listen to some of the calls from some of our largest customers. P&G and others are out talking about this being the single biggest issue that we need to solve.
We have, I believe, one of the most prominent solutions in this space. Now I'll take you into three of the areas that are truly strategic to our household care business. It's the emerging markets, it's our freshness platform, what we call biological detergents. If we start out with the emerging markets, this is a little bit of a busy graph. If we index Europe to 100 in usage of our technology, you can go to North America and they use about half. You can go to the rest of the emerging markets and they use around 20%, and Asia even less. That opens up an enormous opportunity space where clearly a lot of the world's consumers are not using the technologies we provide.
Now it's our obligation to be out there and claim and show what we can do compared to some of the other ingredients that they can use. Of course, we are deeply committed to doing that. One of the ways we show that is that we are opening up new offices. We already have rather significant innovation hubs in China, India and in Brazil. We have sales offices in Mexico, Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa and Turkey. We are opening up new offices in Kenya and in Thailand. We're putting presence with people on the ground in Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria and Venezuela. It's rather substantial what we do in order to get out there and show our face to the customers. Additional to that, we are developing new blends and new solutions for these markets.
I also want to caution, there is no silver bullet that would open up any emerging markets. It's about being close, it's about understanding the needs of these customers out there. We believe this hold substantial potential for Novozymes. Another thing that we believe holds substantial potential is what we call biological detergents, it's illustrated in two vectors. One is that we believe that we can reduce the size of laundry detergents to something which is much smaller than today. That will have huge benefits for the world in terms of reducing of plastics and packaging material. We also believe that a lot of the components that are currently used for cleaning can be replaced by biotechnology and with biology.
We have reasons to believe, we know that some of the recent enzymes that we have launched are much more stable than what we've traditionally had, and that means that it actually can replace some of the ingredients, especially surfactants. We believe our freshness solutions can challenge some of the perfumes that are being used by our customers. Some of the perfumes that are being used are used to mask malodor. By removing the malodor, well, essentially you do not need as much perfume. We know that some of our cellulase technology can actually go in and challenge some of the cleaning and whitening polymers that are being used. The good thing about that is that we can reduce it. We can reduce plastic or polymers, which are microplastics, with something which is biodegradable and biological.
From that perspective, it also has quite good sustainability profile. 100% biological detergents is of course a vision, and it's something that we will not get to next year, but it's something that we're deeply committed to that we will get to eventually. It will require for us to develop new technologies, but it will also require for us to partner with new players, not only our customers, but potentially also other technology providers in this space. I'll talk about freshness, and for those who've been following Novozymes, you know that we've been out talking about this story. We are on track to deliver the DKK 1 billion within 5-10 years, as we have committed to. We are on track with the first partner where we launched this. I'll talk a little bit about why we are excited about this.
A large part of the emerging market are urbanizing, and they're moving into cities where their requirements on how they look and how their clothes looks actually changes quite dramatic. That is an underlying trend that will support this. Another underlying trend is the fact that cotton is used less and less at the expense of synthetics. Synthetics are more difficult to clean, and malodor tend to stick more to synthetics. You may know of that from your sportswear. It's actually a little bit of a nasty development, but the fact is we have now technology that can deal with that challenge. As consumers in the Western world, they turn down the dial on temperature.
We actually also see that mold build-up and challenges with malodor increase, especially in the Western world, we also see the fact that the market is changing towards pouches, small unit dose, and liquids. You're not allowed to use bleach technology, which actually has a good bacteria-fighting capability that you can't use in those formats simply because the technologies are not available. All of these four elements drive the need for new freshness and hygiene solutions, and we believe we have some of those. To the other side of that chart, are some of the consumer drivers around this. Malodor is, as I said before, one of the biggest issues consumer face today, largely driven by the fact that I talked about before.
Grime build-up, yellowing on armpits is another one that consumers clearly challenge, and the fact that you can actually show to consumers that what comes from your body actually sometimes stay on the garments after washing. That's an unpleasant reality, but something that we have the technology to deal with that. Now, these are sort of the core components of what we do in household care, but I also want to say that there is a little bit more to household care than that. These are some of the areas where we also will invest, although smaller, but still resources behind this. There's a huge drive for medical cleaning to take a different level than what it does today. We actually have a sizable business in this area. It's one that's growing quite well.
Dishwash is a segment, especially hand dishwash is a segment that is hardly unpenetrated with enzyme. The volumes are huge and substantial. We actually see both in the developed market and the emerging markets, a lot of interest to try to differentiate a category that has not seen innovation for decades. We believe we can be part of that. We actually right now are in discussions with some of our major customers around that. We have a vision of microbial cleaning. Of course it's obvious for a company that sits on a lot of microbial technology to consider what can microbes actually do in the world of cleaning, both when it comes to laundry, but also when it comes to hard surface cleaning.
It's an area that's a little bit still out in the horizon, but it's an area where our customers are really, really interested, talking about what microbes can do for their brands to differentiate them compared to competition. For those who live in America, you see a lot of commercials around probiotics. Some of our customers actually start to talk about probiotic cleaning. We want to be part of that journey. It will not make a huge impact the next few years, but actually after that, we believe we sit on some of the technology that's needed. Softness is another category where we know that our technology can actually provide some of that softness feel with cellulases, and if we got into that space and if we could clearly document the effect, which we believe we can, then the volumes of this segment is massive.
I also have to caution that it's also a relatively low profit category. We need to develop the claims associated with that before we can essentially break through. Now, this was sort of a fast, deep dive into household care. I just want to wrap up by saying we are on track to deliver the DKK 1 billion in revenues that we have promised on freshness. We actually feel quite comfortable that that is achievable. Emerging markets hold substantial potential. We are putting a lot of people on the ground, a lot of investments in this area. We see a number of interesting smaller opportunities that will be meaningful for our business in household care. I think that's my 20 minutes. Then we move on to Mr. Fordyce.
Thank you, Anders. Now we're going to talk Food & Beverages, where we also are using this differentiate for success strategy to go ahead and invest in some different areas that we think can actually accelerate our growth rates and generate nice underlying profitable growth. Before I go there, I wanted to let you know that what we motivate ourselves around within the purpose of Novozymes and Food & Beverages is this idea of we can work with Food & Beverages companies to help transform both the quality and the sustainability of what they're doing. This is actually quite a motivating purpose and one that our customers actually value a lot. That comes in basically three forms.
One is we can use enzyme and microbe technology to help them stay ahead of consumer trends and really kind of help them cater to the demands and needs that are coming out of different consumer groups. That's an exciting one that's actually generating a lot of opportunity for us. A second one is something that we've been investing in for a long time, and we continue, but in a more focused way, and that's this idea of optimizing efficiency and productivity to get more for less out of the different food value chains. Then the final one is, enzymes and microbes actually offer a broad-based technology that's tunable, that allows our customers to step up on a lot of different fronts and adopt these technologies at scale that actually generates quite nice returns for them.
These are what we push for when we're out, both understanding what our customers care about, but also what areas we invest in to actually enable our customers in these areas. If I talk about what's underlying and what's behind and happening in the world from a Food & Beverages viewpoint that we think is quite interesting and motivating for us, there's four different trends that we think about when we tune our business approach. One is there's a lot of industrialization that's going on in the emerging markets around producing higher quality food, higher volumes of food, more standardized production processes. That's a place where we can play to actually help enable our customers more. The second one I already mentioned, that's the idea of more with less, the basic sustainability play. The world is going to have 9+ billion people in 2050.
We need a lot more food to go ahead and handle that. We need to make sure that we're working with our customers to get every good bit out of the food they're already working with, avoid waste, reduce energy, water consumption in the process of making foods, and getting really the good stuff out in a better way. That's a strong, powerful driver for us. The bottom two, there's this idea about more natural foods, that's actually a very, very strong trend in both developed and emerging markets. People want to treat themselves to more wholesome diets. They want to treat themselves to things that are a more holistic way for them to create a healthy lifestyle. Natural foods, which are based on ingredients that they recognize rather than sort of E numbers, is something that they're quite interested in.
A lot of our customers are looking for technologies that can help them produce sustainable quality food, yet avoid some of the ingredients that they've used in the past. We think we've got good opportunities to help them do that. The last one is, there's more and more opportunity to work with our customers to actually work on specific health drivers within the food value space. I'll get into some more details around that. These trends actually focus us around four different opportunity areas. One is, again, this idea of productivity and yield. I'll talk more about that in a minute. More substrate streams are coming into the food value chain. These are things like local raw materials in different emerging markets or high volume products that are actually looking for better ways to be produced and maintain production.
That actually offers opportunities for enzyme and microbe technology. The idea of freshness and taste. People don't enjoy food unless they taste good and it's perceived as fresh. That's a strong trend that's actually becoming even stronger in the emerging markets. Health, safety, and sustainability. These are all areas we feel pretty confident we can deliver even better growth by investing in them. When we look at the existing business, we've been sort of a steady driver of growth within the Novozymes portfolio. We've been working on a focused innovation strategy to step up our growth rates over time. We're averaging about 5% growth year-on-year. Right now, it's been a little bit bumpy up and down, but on average, we've got a CAGR of about 5% over the last five years.
This is about 2x the actual underlying market growth when it comes to raw materials that are being produced to go into the food value chain. 2x might sound good, we think we can get this higher by how we invest in high growth potential areas while being a bit more modest around how we invest in some areas that are more mature. Our main drivers of growth in this past period, and ones that we're going to talk more about, are innovations providing healthy options for consumers. That's a very exciting area that continues to offer opportunity. It's penetrating our technologies into the emerging markets, which are, like I said, they're industrializing. People are looking for more and more solutions in these industrializing areas where the consumers are demanding more sort of standardized food supplies.
Finally, the idea of investing in unpenetrated agro processing areas also creates a nice growth opportunity for our enzymes business within food and beverage. This 5% that we've been delivering is in spite of actually two relatively big headwinds. I've talked about this before. We've been seeing, I would call it a pretty significant downdraft in our developed baking business, developed market baking business. We've been able to grow in spite of one of our big engines coming off patent and seeing some erosion. Around the world, the starch processing business is rather stagnant, and that's a big area for us. In spite of that, we've been able to grow.
We think by investing in some new areas and driving additional growth using the Differentiate for Success approach and investing in impactful areas, plus dosing up our commercial resources in especially the emerging markets, we've got a lot of ways to add additional growth and profitability to our overall business. We in food and beverage are also, of course, looking at this portfolio unit strategy, and I'll go ahead and give you guys a feel for how that translates into what we're investing in for impact and how we differentiate to succeed. If we look at the left side of this slide, there's three broad drivers of opportunity that we're using as we plan both our commercial activities and our innovation activities. One is, again, this idea of emerging markets.
If we look at our business, more than about two-thirds of it in food and beverage is in the developed markets, but the underlying penetration within the large food areas of the emerging markets are basically unpenetrated. By getting out with more boots on the ground into different geographical areas, we actually have a good product portfolio that we can put to immediate use and start to create value in the short term for our customers. We've started that process of investing more. Through this strategy, we'll go ahead and double down on that because we think that's a good way to continue to create value. The second one is, when we look at agro processing, there's some areas like starch refining where we're quite penetrated and it's quite mature.
If you look at some of the other areas, things like grain milling, you look at vegetable oil processing, these are very high volume businesses that are very unpenetrated because technology has not been out to actually create a lot of value. We've got innovations that we think open up these areas in a very meaningful way and offer growth star and development seed portfolio unit opportunities where both a combination of commercial resource investment and innovation project investments get us a great way to deliver super growth and super value to our customers and growth into our business. The third one is this idea of healthy food trends. Now this is a bit in different areas, different technology areas, but the underlying dynamic is that people want healthier food. They want food that is avoiding sort of cleaner label, free from type options.
Our customers are all looking for cost-effective and efficient ways to deal with these trends. Those innovation areas themselves offer great opportunities for us also, and I'll get into some more details in a second. Now on the right-hand side of the slide, the Differentiate to Succeed is sort of the idea of, hey, let's be smart about how we use resources to support selected businesses more about profitability and less about growth since the underlying dynamics are more difficult. Now let me start by talking about mature baking markets. These are still really important markets to us because they're high profitability and they don't have a huge growth rate, but they've got an underlying dynamic where we can capture some growth.
We'll go ahead and be smart about how we defend these businesses, how we rebase after the freshness patents are now off in North America, and how we create good value for customers in those areas. We'll be quite selective about how we use innovation to do that and we'll be quite streamlined in the way we do that from a commercial go-to-market viewpoint. If we talk about starch refining, this is a relatively high volume business, one where we're a market leader in all the major markets where starch is processed. It doesn't really benefit our customers a lot or us a lot if we continue to do a lot of life cycle management investments in these areas.
We'll still do them where required to maintain our strong position, we're going to invest more in profitability enhancing initiatives in these areas as a way to generate profit that can be reinvested in growth drivers and development seeds and new strategic opportunities within Novozymes in general. A shift in the way we both resource these in the field and the way we create innovations to support our customers in starch refining. The beverage businesses in general, when we talk about juice and wine, we talk about distilling, we talk about brewing. There's selective pockets of high opportunity for growth, and those will be catered to with selective near to market innovations and the right commercial footprint.
In general, these areas are more stable, more mature, and that means we will selectively invest in profitability in those areas as opposed to sort of new innovation programs that don't necessarily create enough growth. There's underlying portfolio units on both sides of these two categories within the food and beverage business that we're very excited about. I want to talk about a few of these to give you a bit deeper insight into what we're talking about. First of all, we talk about emerging markets. If you look at the food supply around the world, as I've said, things are rapidly industrializing in markets like Southeast Asia, places like China. Even Africa is starting to show a lot more interest in these areas and Latin America is kind of in between the two extremes.
We have relatively few resources in these areas, especially for the geographical size and the diversity of applications that are out there. We have a quite broad product portfolio that serves all kinds of different food production categories. What we're doing is we're investing in both sort of additional expansion of our commercial footprint in areas that have good opportunity that are relatively under-covered, we're also investing in capabilities, local lab resources, and additional near to market innovation that help us cater to these different spaces. When you look at it, we've actually added new hubs in Istanbul where we're tailoring to our baking business for Middle East and Africa, which is approximately double the flour consumption of the developed market baking world, and yet it's completely unpenetrated.
Yes, the bread types are different, but it offers a big volume area for us to innovate and create growth in, and we'll do that out of our innovation hub in Turkey. If you talk about our business in India, this is a business that we think can approximately grow relatively high double-digit growth rates over the coming period by investing more in vegetable oil processing, brewing, and basic food processing. It's an area where we've invested more resources both from a commercial viewpoint, but also for our vegetable oil processing business from an innovation viewpoint. We're getting people that are close to the markets where things are happening. We're investing more in these areas where there's high potential growth rates.
That goes similar to what Anders was saying, for places like Africa, where we're putting more boots on the ground in a synergistic way with our household care brethren, and we're expanding in Brazil. We're also expanding in places like Russia, where we've got very few people, but we see good opportunities to invest more to get outsized growth opportunities. The emerging market opportunity in food and beverage is twofold. It's got an innovation component to it, but it's also got an accelerating penetration component to it, and we think that that's exciting. That said, emerging markets are bumpy. You have to be committed. It doesn't always pan out in all markets. Middle East is actually a place where we're pretty troubled this year.
That's an area where we have long-term commitment to go ahead, and we know over time that's an investment that gets us a good return both for our customers and for us. I want to talk about 2 agro processing areas that offer very good opportunities for us to create value for customers. 1 is in the general idea of using vegetable oil processing and getting enzymes into this area. If you look at the underlying growth within vegetable oil, this is around 5% annual growth in both oil seeds and palm oil due to the fact that the basic needs of the world are expanding quite rapidly, and therefore, there's a need for additional oil yield, additional oil productivity. That's an area where Novozymes has launched new technologies both in oil seed degumming, but also in palm oil extraction. This is new technology, unpenetrated.
Enzymes are now playing a role in these areas in a way that can be quite meaningful and offer a nice opportunity to create value for customers, and that's in the milling phase. Also, there's a lot more effort going into oil refining and creating quality oils and healthy oils. This is a place where enzymes also play a pretty significant role. For example, we have enzymes that help you create trans fat-free oils in fat stocks. Traditionally, if you do that chemically, you end up with these off-quality trans fat health no-nos, and enzymes can actually help you avoid that. We also have the opportunity to use enzymes to help create tailored, health-oriented lipids, things like OPO and CBE, which the world needs more of, and they have a hard time actually getting a hold of these for things like infant nutrition and specialty foods.
There's additionally an opportunity to use enzymes to improve the quality of existing refined oils. There's things like 3-MCPD, which are off-quality contaminants in especially palm oil, that is becoming more and more of an issue, and we're working on enzymatic approaches to actually minimize that by changing the refining conditions and reducing the overall root cause for producing those things. Another area that's related to this that isn't directly food related, but it's very similar technologies, is the idea that many customers out there in personal care, cosmetics, oleochemistry are looking for ways to produce sustainable oleochemicals. These are fatty acid-based chemicals. They're looking for ways to avoid petroleum.
We see this also as an area where similar technologies that are being used in food and beverage can be applied in biocatalysis, in oleo processing environments, to open up a brand-new area for opportunity for Novozymes with our existing footprint and some of the innovations we're already applying in food and beverage. We offer different opportunities and solutions in different parts of the value chain, all the way from the milling, the refining side, and the specialty oil side. We're investing in this as an area where we've got some good products, but we've got a lot of ideas on how we can add to our innovations through additional enzymatic projects to open up a DKK 1 billion opportunity on the refining degumming side, and another DKK 400 million on the oleochemistry side.
This is an agro processing area that's sort of ripe for additional efficiency, quality, and sustainability. We're excited about that. Another one I've talked about is this idea of grain milling. We've been quite focused on using some of the technology we've gotten out of especially our cellulosic chemistry efforts that have opened up new enzymatic technologies that allow you to improve grain milling efficiency and productivity and yield. We've launched very recently, over the last couple of years, the first phase of these new grain milling products. Frontia is the brand platform. Frontia Fiberwash is a grain milling enzyme that goes into corn-based products in Europe and North America. This gets you additional yield on both the starch production side and the protein production side within milled corn. This is a first step.
We followed that up with a specific product tailored to the Chinese market. It's called Frontia Jade. This opens up a very large 80-million-ton per year corn processing industry to substantial innovation yield and productivity, energy reduction that we think can play very well with our customers' needs for sustainability and additional protein sources and starch products at a lower price, but also in a more sustainable way. We will follow onto this by looking at how we can leverage these initial steps into wheat, as an example. It's another area that we can use similar technologies. We're developing that. We'll also look at additional grain milling opportunities in things like sugar beets in the future.
This is an agro-processing area that has many different substrates, very large volumes, and we can work with customers to create extreme value from the productivity and yield side. We're excited about that. As I mentioned, there's more and more consumer interest in healthy options. What we're trying to show here is that it's not like these things come in one neat bag, but they come in many different forms. That's why we're focused on how do we leverage the different customer relationships and the different technologies to cater even more to these healthy food option opportunities.
I've given you a wide variety of examples here. We've seen very rapid growth from 2015 to 2018, and we anticipate that continuing in things like acrylamide reduction in baked and fried goods, lactose removal in dairy goods, less sugar added in a variety of different food areas where we can use enzymes to maintain the flavor and the profile of the taste without adding sugar by getting more of the natural sugar out of the food substrates. I mentioned this idea of healthy oils and fats, removing trans fat from oil sources and also creating healthy lipids.
We're now investing quite heavily in enzyme technologies that can help us play into creating better flavor, better texture, better functionality out of plant proteins, which is a very hot trend, and our customers need ways to actually create more, let's call it desirable properties, out of things like pea protein, soy protein, other plant protein sources. That's another area where we see quite exciting opportunities to continue very high growth rates by catering to these different approaches, by working on both innovation and getting our solutions in front of customers in a very holistic way. That's another exciting area for us. Overall, this idea here is that we're very much motivated by the idea of how can we produce better food for more people.
It's got both the quality desirability element to it, and it's also got very much this idea of productivity, sustainability, improving the volume and efficiency and sustainability of the food supply. We think helping customers to achieve this is something that's right in the middle of what they care about. We're seeing good opportunities to accelerate the growth that we've delivered over the last few years. That's partly coming from just the technologies that we're opening up, but it's also about getting more boots on the ground and more tailored solutions in the emerging markets, and a really strong innovation agenda around this idea of healthy food trends and these areas of large unpenetrated volume within agro-processing. We're very excited about that. We're looking to step up our profitable growth rates as part of our overall portfolio strategy within food and beverage.
With that, I'm going to pass it to Tina.
Perfect. Now over to the last of our three divisions. I'm going to talk about bioenergy and agriculture and feed, right after, there should be a break. Coffee is coming up. Before I get started, I would like to look a bit at the trends which are out there, a lot of them we have already talked about today. There is a tremendous pressure on the agricultural value chain, we desperately need sustainable solutions in order to address that. We have talked about that there comes more and more people on this earth, plus two billion until 2050. As the earth has its size, we are going to get less land to cultivate per capita we are.
These more people we get, given that we also get richer and richer, we need more food, we also need more animal proteins. If we look back in history towards the '60s, we can see that already since then we have seen a 50% increase in animal proteins, this is expected to continue. We need more animal protein as well. This coupled with that we have more extreme weather, we have more diseases and so forth. We today see that about a third of the global crop production is getting lost. We need more sustainable tools in order to secure that we can continue to get the food for the people on this earth. We need to do it in a sustainable way so we stay within the one and a half degree Celsius in the Paris Accord.
This is exactly the kind of solutions we are working with at Novozymes. More than 50% of the business at Novozymes is across the agricultural value chain, Andy has just been talking about some of the examples of what it is we do at Novozymes. I'm going to talk about what we do on bioenergy and on agriculture and feed. The last part of the agricultural value chain. In BioAg, we look at how can we get more yield out of the same acre of land. On animal health and nutrition, we work with securing that we have strong animal health and that we get more animal protein being produced. If we look back in time, the ride has been bumpy. It hasn't been a straight growth line.
With the changes we are making, we believe that we are better positioned for growth. The reason why it has been bumpy is a combination of both external as well as internal factors, and there are things which we for sure could have done differently. As we look ahead with the differentiated approach to our different businesses, we believe that we are better positioned in order to capture more growth. We have a number of very strong innovations. Peter was alluding to some of them in the beginning, and this is going to drive a lot of the growth in the near to midterm. Examples of that are the Balancius, which we just launched and which I hope you had a chance to see out here.
Also some of the yeast products which we are launching and have launched in the biofuel space. In BioAg, we have some of the upstream solutions, which is also going to help us drive growth here in the near to midterm. With this strategy, as I said, we will be taking a differentiated approach to the different business segments, and that is going to help us succeed. For us, that, as was alluded to before, we, for example, have animal health, which is one of the growth stars, where it's important for us to double down and secure that we continue investing. The same it is for our transformational BioYield business in BioAg. We also want to invest in impact, so we want to secure that we have more feet on the ground, for example, in our bioenergy business. In agriculture and bioenergy, we have three focus areas.
We want to work with the portfolio roles and secure that we, in a disciplined way, follow through on these priorities which we are setting out. We want to streamline our projects and our pipeline in order to secure we get the impact. We want to focus on investing in the emerging markets with an extra commercial push, and we also want to leverage the technologies we have on enzymes as well as microbes and yeasts. As I'm sure you are aware, we utilize both enzymes and yeast and microbes across our different business areas. If I translate these three parameters over into the different businesses we operate in, then in bioenergy, the key focus will be on pushing towards extra growth in emerging markets. It is securing that we continue to win in our core markets, in the bioenergy, such as yeasts.
In animal health and nutrition, we will focus in on making animals healthier. We see a lot of growth there. Then in BioAg, it is a matter of focusing on the transformative BioYield solutions. I'll now go into each of these individual segments and give you some more flavor on, first of all, how things are and where it is we are seeing the opportunities. First, we start with bioenergy. Bioenergy is a North American market still with about 35% of corn-based ethanol being produced in North America. However, in the last years, we have been talking about as well to you that we see strong growth in the emerging markets, most specifically in Brazil. If you ask the Brazilian Corn Ethanol Union, then in 2016, around 0.05 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol was produced. That was last year, 0.2 billion gallons.
That is expected in the next three, four years to come to increase to more than 1 billion gallon. A very strong growth in the Brazilian market. Also in the U.S. with E15 being passed on, that is going to give some growth. It's not going to come overnight, because it takes time to get the infrastructure in place and so forth. We expect that a 1%-2% growth per year over the years to come is how it is that the U.S. will expand into E15. In China, we see the business starting to come online. You know that they have wanted to have an E10 by 2020. Might take a bit longer. That's at least our estimates. They're coming there, and we start seeing various provinces moving towards E10.
We will see a gradual shift towards more growth coming from the emerging markets, and that's why we want to invest for impact, and that's why we, as part of this strategy, will put more focus on putting people on the ground in Latin America and in China in order to help us boost this growth. Also in the established markets, we see that there are areas where we can do things. We might start out in a certain geography and then move it to other parts of the world where we'll get more underlying growth. As an example, I have here two new solutions which we just launched last week.
The first one is an example of the combination of microbes and enzymes and how it is that they in fact go hand in hand and why it is such a stronghold that we have both technologies in our hands and that we can work with them as Thomas was alluding to. We have Innova Force, which is a new yeast. It is, in fact, the most advanced dry yeast which there are in the market. It is helping customers get more flexibility and more reliability in their production. That yeast has a tailor-made companion blend of enzymes which uniquely fit to that yeast. This is a way of securing that we leverage both our technologies.
We also have Fortiva, which is a new liquefaction enzyme, which helps give more oil, give more yield, and helps customers also be able to process even at more stressful conditions, such as elevated temperatures. Over to BioAg. We talked about the new partnering structure with a number of you in April when we launched the new partnership structure. We have still our stronghold and our focus, our core, with the former Monsanto alliance, where we work now with Bayer in upstream corn technologies. This is now supplemented or expanded with other players and other partners, like Univar in the more pulse-based market in Canada.
With Syngenta and UPL, which is more specialty crops and biocontrol-specific projects which we work with them on. This for sure opens up more opportunities for how it is we can innovate and how it is we can partner. We look ahead towards 2025, we have a clear path towards the plus 250 million acres. In this time span, corn and soy will still be the predominant crops which we work, but we will, as time evolve, see more and more contributions from also other crops such as pulses, oil seed rape, and more and more from wheat as well, and other minority crops. The biggest contribution to the near to midterm growth will come from the upstream corn area, which we have launched the new products, the Corn BioYield products, which we already have talked about.
We are looking at the BioAg space, this is just the immediate priorities where we work in a microbial biocontrol and where we work with microbial inoculants. We think broader about the ag space, there are so many different opportunities in order to tap into the ag value pools, which are way bigger. We need to focus, and that's why these are our priorities for now. Over time, we need more innovation in order to secure that we open up the full space in order to tap into the value pools which you have in ag. In animal health and nutrition, we have an underlying need for more animal protein, as I talked about in the beginning.
In order to get to these animal proteins, there will for sure be, as you know, we focus in on the poultry side, monogastric side, mostly poultry, and also swine. Given that we will have more and more animal protein being produced, we need more and more feed being produced as well. The way we have chosen to go to the market here is with partnering with a number of different players. We have, as you know, two segments in this area. We have the animal nutrition segment, and we have the animal health segment. In the animal nutrition, there is still a lot of growth to be had. Given that we have more enzyme dosages you can increase, we have more enzyme types you can get online, and we can also increase the penetration of the specific enzymes.
We though expect there will come more growth on the animal health side, and that's why this is the area where we truly want to double down and secure that we focus our investments, because this is an area where we see a stronger underlying growth as well. As I said, in this area, we have chosen to go to market with partners. We have five partnerships right now. The first one and the longest standing partnership is with DSM. It's a partnership which was founded more than 20 years ago. We were, in fact, celebrating the anniversary last year. With this partnership, we leverage the stronghold of DSM, and that is their global reach with their premix footprint.
What we do in all of these partnerships is that we focus in at what we are best at, and that's doing R&D, and that is doing production, while our partners do what they are best at, and that is the in-market testing and marketing and sales. With Adisseo, we focus in on bacillus for monogastrics, so mostly poultry. We launched three years ago a product called Alterion, which we already have talked about and which we are selling globally. With Boehringer Ingelheim, we have a partnership with them for the hatchery segment. The hatchery is when the chicks are just being formed, or chicks are just coming out of the eggs, and it is important that we secure they have the best possible start of their lives.
Boehringer Ingelheim have a very strong position with their vaccines for exactly hatcheries, That's why they are a very strong partner for us in that segment. We have a partnership with Elanco, with health solutions for cattle. Elanco has a very strong point in the cattle area, That's why we work with them. Last but not least, we work in aquaculture and pond treatment with Bayer as well. These are the partnerships where we're trying to leverage what our partners are strongest at and combining it where we have our strongest foothold. For sure, what we want to do is we want to continue investing in the animal health space, and the newest example on that journey is Balancius, which was launched not that long ago together with DSM.
We see a very strong acceptance, a very strong trial rate, and we do already now have reoccurring customers for our Balancius product. We sell it in North America and Latin America, and we just recently also got the registration here in Europe. Last week we had a launch with Balancius here in Europe as well. It took place in Poland. When we are finished with the geographical expansion of that product, there's also the expansion into other species. There is a lot of opportunities with this product together with DSM, and we are very happy with the developments as we are seeing it. In order to sum up, we see very strong underlying trends for and needs for sustainable energy. There is also underlying trends for politicians and from the regulatory frameworks in order to get more sustainable energy.
Our key focus will be on penetrating further and winning more in emerging markets, That we have a very strong innovation pipeline and have putting more feet on the ground in order to get there. In the ag and feed segment, we want to transform the productivity in agriculture as well as livestock farming. Innovation and getting more out there will remain a key priority for us in order to secure that we win longer term. With that, I'll hand over to Tobias, who will
Thank you. Thank you, Tina. I hope you can hear me. We're actually running quite well according to schedule. I think we should just open up for one or two questions from the floor. I think we are limited to one to two questions because we have a break at 3:00 P.M. We have one here. If you can state your name and where you're from.
Lars Topholm from Carnegie. It's for you, Tina, because
Okay
Anders told me I should ask difficult questions to all the other managers, not him.
Okay.
I'm wondering, when you look towards 2030, 2040, 2050
Yeah
25 years from now, how many combustion engines are we going to have globally compared to today?
We have in fact looked quite much into it, also together with McKinsey, together with SEB Bank, and together with a number of external think tanks. The best estimates, the most aggressive estimates which they are coming with, is that by 2050, about half of the world's cars is going to be with combustion engines. Around 2050, there's going to be the shift from where there'll be more electrical vehicles. There are still some time to 2050. You are right, it is on a rising trend with the electrical vehicles. There is a lot of infrastructure which needs to be in place. For sure, that is also one of the reasons why we'll talk about a shift towards more emerging markets, because Europe, North America will probably get electrified earlier than Africa, for example.
One more question. I saw the first hand all the way down, so I think I have to stick to the order here. I think we try to get a mic. We have one on that side.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Sebastian Bray of Berenberg Bank. Could I ask a question about your new organic growth guidance, please? You've set out so far over the course of the day what exactly the drivers are in terms of the strength and sustainability of Novozymes products, but at the same time, there appears to have been a trimming of guidance from returning to historical levels to 5% plus. Just to clarify, are you happy if you reach 5%? To what extent should we read much into the plus? What has changed over the last three or four years for you to clip the 1%-2% off versus the previous target? Is it purely lower commodity prices? Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastian. I think we wait a bit with that question. You will have time for that at the Q&As. There will be plenty of opportunities, because I think it's more general than a specific question for the divisions. Hope that's okay. We have time for another question. I think, in the back.
Thanks. Charles Eden from UBS. One on food and beverage, if that's okay.
Sure.
Specifically, in terms of you tackling the plant proteins replacing meat, can you be a bit more specific on what your products are really doing to these categories? Are you already in this market? Are you supplying Beyond Meat or any of the comparables?
We've talked about actually two different opportunity spaces when you talk about protein in the future. If you think about some stuff that Thomas was talking about, that's this idea of creating fermented proteins that can kind of augment over time, some of the taste, texture, functionality, using fermented proteins where you actually produce the protein itself. That's early days. We're not in that business right now, but there's, we think, a lot of opportunity over time to get into it. On the food and beverage business itself, we're already in that business. We've got a number of enzymes that go into creating flavors within protein substrates, creating additional yield in different substrate processing areas, and creating more functionality, solubility, and health components. It's not an area where we've sort of focused in a more comprehensive and holistic way.
Now we think the opportunity to do that more holistically is now, because the trend is becoming much more prevalent, much more organized. We think both our existing product portfolio and new innovations create an outsized opportunity for us to create business going forward. In the near to medium term, in the food and beverage side, we'll use existing enzymes and then augment them with newly launched enzymes to go ahead and cater to the trend for more better flavor, better solubility, better functionality, and better yield out of plant proteins. The fermented part will come later because that's more a mid to long-term growth driver.
On top of that, alternative meat and so forth is often based on pulses, and we also sell a lot of microbe solutions for pulse crops.
On the ag side.
Yes, exactly.
Okay. I think that's the Q&A session for now. We'll see you here at 3:20 P.M. again. Our CFO, Priska, will do her presentation, followed by Q&A for one hour in different groups. That's a little bit of a logistical exercise. Please bear with me on that one. See you here back 3:20 P.M.
Let's start. Welcome back from the coffee break. I saw some of you getting quite intense with the water guns, so I hope we have been able to showcase our enzymatic dishwashing capabilities quite well. I also hope that some of you have taken a tour through the chicken coop to see Balancius in action. Now back to the strategy. By now, you have heard Peder talk about the strategy, the update. You've heard Thomas talk about innovation. You've heard about Anders, Andy, and Tina talking about how do we translate that in our commercial strategies. Before we go into the Q&A, I would like to take some time, 15, 20 minutes, to tell you how I think about that from a financial point of view. Before I do that, however.
I will lead you through a quick recap of the financial performance of the past period. Overall, we've actually delivered quite solid financial performance over that period, despite, as Peder has already mentioned, our top line not always quite living up to the expectations or the aspiration we had. We have delivered a 10% EPS growth as a CAGR over the last period, nine years since 2010. We have delivered margin expansion from an EBIT point of view. If we look into 2019, as you know, we have revised our outlook quite recently to 1%-3% organic sales growth for this year. I would like to particularly call out the adverse conditions that we're seeing in the ag-related markets in the U.S.
From a margin point of view, the underlying EBIT margin is around 26%-27%, for which we are guiding for this year. This is if you take into account around two percentage points of deferred income, if you adjust for that, and then also if you adjust for one-offs. Maybe let me be a little bit more specific into those one-offs that lead to this 26%-27%. We expect around a percentage point of margin impact on a positive side from a divestment of a pharma-related royalty streams that you'll see in Q2. We'll also see anticipated restructuring costs counteracting that. Overall, a 26%-27% underlying EBIT margin that we are closing at right now. If you look at ROIC, you know that we've guided for 23% for this year. This, of course, includes around one percentage point from IFRS 16 lease accounting.
If you compare it to historical figures, that's sort of a 24, but it also includes a positive impact of around two percentage points from the release of all the deferred income. That means net net, the underlying ROIC is at around 22% for this year based on the outlook that we have given. Looking at the portfolio, I think what you see is a quite balanced picture here. Particularly if you look at industries, we're selling into more than 40 different end markets. If you take a step back memory lane, we had 50% of our sales through three household care customers back in 2000, and a little bit of food and beverage. I think this has come a long way from a resilience of the revenue streams point of view, which, of course, I as a CFO, I'm pretty pleased with.
If you look across the region, you see a similar well-balanced picture. We're selling to 130 countries. If you look into our emerging markets, we see exactly the picture we would like to see, an increasing share of emerging markets. There's more to come, as we have alluded to earlier with our strategy. We'll be increasing that. Overall, a quite well-balanced portfolio. We've talked about margin expansion that we saw in the past nine years. If you look at the profitability drivers, this has come from two factors. One is gross margin, one is operating leverage. If we go to gross margin, what you see in the numbers is a rough 56, 57% gross margin, a stable gross margin. That's if you deduct deferred income, if you adjust for that.
I think I would like to call that out in particular because I think that is an ability that sets Novozymes apart from, I would say, almost all, if not all our peers. That's the continued productivity improvements that we are delivering. We have, since the inception in 2000, on average, delivered around about 4% to 5% of productivity improvements that have supported the gross margin and have offset price erosion and also import cost increases. We will continue to do that. The optimization machine, as you know, it is running quite well. We are continuing to invest into that, and that means we are confident to deliver at least at prior levels for this. We have currently around about 100 projects ongoing. Key messages here will continue to support our profitability with the productivity improvements you've seen in the past.
Moving from profitability to cash. If you look at this picture, what you see is that we have actually, since 2014, tied up more cash in our operations in the terms of net working capital on an increasing basis. Of course, keep in mind that the year is affected by the initiation of the BioAg Alliance. Where is this coming from? It's coming from DSO as well as DIO. What is the reason for this? We have had higher emerging market exposure. We have had higher safety stocks. We have more complexity in our supply chain and our inventories. We have a structural headroom from deferred income, of course, as we release it year-over-year. We've also had, as you've heard before, a lower than anticipated sales growth. At the same time, we've seen CapEx, so investment levels, elevated.
CapEx has been running high in the last three years. One reason is the innovation campus that we are here today. We've also expanded capacity in the U.S., in Nebraska, in our Blair site, and we have inaugurated a new site in India, as you know. Overall, higher investment levels. We are not satisfied with this. I think cash is a very important metric to me, and Novozymes cannot be excluded. There's more to come, and going forward, there will be more focus on cash generation in Novozymes. Talking about cash generation, if you look at cash generation overall, you see this in this picture. We have delivered since 2010, a 10% CAGR in free cash flow before acquisitions, at an average free cash flow to sales before acquisitions of around 16%. I think that's actually not that bad.
You keep in mind that we have done that while investing heavily in CapEx and in R&D. If you take our R&D to sales ratio or CapEx to sales ratio and you compare it with what would you consider our peers, you'd see or you know, I'm not telling you something that you don't know, that we're actually well above that. Actually, what I'm trying to say here is we have demonstrated that we can generate substantial free cash flows in this company. Also looking at the picture, and I'm sure you will challenge me on that, is cash generation since 2015 has not been improving. We have underperformed somewhat in the recent past. As I said, there's more to go. We will be able to decrease our CapEx levels while still keeping our high-class assets and investing into our growth.
We anticipate to bring CapEx down to 8% or below. Basically going close to depreciation or even below depreciation for the next three years. On networking capital, there's no doubt that there's more to do there. We will put a lot of target, a lot of focus onto networking capital improvement targets, both big and small across all categories, so receivables, inventories, payables. We've already started some of these initiatives, and it certainly caught the attention of the organization, I can say. There's more to come here. If we combine all of this together with our acceleration in growth, we're actually aiming for a significant step up in free cash flow generation. Our aspiration is to reach above 20% in terms of sales, free cash flow in terms of sales, by the end of the period, so 2022.
This slide should be actually quite familiar to you. I'm not telling you something new. This is our cash, capital allocation policy, it is largely unchanged. We are a growth company, we are reinvesting, priority number one, our cash flows for growth to support our strategy. That means into our innovation programs and into our assets. I think what is important to note here, as Peter and Thomas have also alluded to, is with the new portfolio logic for our business areas, we will be allocating the resources according to the role in the portfolio of a certain business area and also according to the performance of that business area. From a CFO point of view, I'm very, very happy with that because it will lead to an even better and even more differentiated capital allocation, resource allocation across the company.
Second priority is also unchanged. Peder mentioned it today, we'll continue to do with our acquisition strategy, which means we will be looking at targets that either complement our technologies or are in strategic adjacencies, but don't expect any bold moves. We will not embark on an aggressive M&A strategy. Third priority is return cash to shareholders. If we look at that, we have actually returned more than DKK 20 billion since 2010. You know that. We have done that through a steadily increase in dividend with even an acceleration over the last five years. We have increased payout ratio from 35% to currently 45%, and we have complemented it, particularly since 2015, with substantial buyback programs. We did all that with keeping our conservative leverage structure. As you will remember, our leverage target historically has been between zero and one times, net debt to EBITDA.
We are at roughly one times today as of Q1. That also means, of course, we are significantly below our peers, which are more or less in the two times, maybe two and a half times, space. We like our conservative leverage. That will not change. What has changed is that we put it in a different framework, which means basically we'll aim for the next three years at one times leverage, because we believe that's a good capital structure for us over the next three years. We will pay basically, or we get to that leverage target by increasing the dividend payout towards 50%, as I mentioned. We'll complement that with share buyback programs to bring basically the leverage back to target. The aim is to distribute all the free cash flow to shareholders. Moving on now to the targets.
A lot of thought, a lot of thinking has gone into these targets, as I don't think you can even imagine, but we have really worked hard over the last six months on this. Peder has, of course, already shown them, but what I would like to draw your attention to is first starting with two things. The first thing that you note here is we've gone for a three-year period. We've gone for a shorter period, and that's intentional. The reason is to power up execution and to create a sense of urgency. The second thing that you note is, or hopefully you note that, while it might seem that there are still a lot of targets, it's significantly less targets than we've had in the last period. We have gone for a reduction of targets to provide focus.
The reason, same reason, to provide focus for the execution. We have, as Peder already alluded to, of course, included the SDGs into our thinking, particularly for our world target. We are taking up or we are targeting three global challenges, climate, water, and production and consumptions in our world targets. Peder has already talked about our internal Zymer targets, which focus around learning, safety and wellbeing, inclusion and inspiration. We have taken three KPIs, which I believe are important value drivers for this company, for our financial targets, which are top-line profitability and capital returns. These targets will be our lighthouses for the next three years. We will regularly follow up on them and track executions towards them. We are confident that while they are ambitious, they are attainable, and we will closely track the performance against them.
I guess you're also interested in more detail on the financial targets, I'll zoom in into that a little bit more. Not a big surprise, I think. This is financially what we'll hold ourselves accountable for. What I would like for you to keep in mind as you look at these, and I'm sure you'll challenge us on these, is three things really. One is, over the past two decades, we have contributed, we have driven profitability to very, very high levels. We are operating at a baseline that is high. We are delivering an operating margin that is the highest or amongst the highest across our peers, and our capital returns for sure are excellent and I think are at the top of the field. Why do I say that?
Obviously it's obvious, on the other hand, it's important to keep that strong baseline in mind when we are setting targets. Are we proud of this performance financially? Yes, we are. On the other hand, we've also, as Peder alluded to, have done a lot of soul searching and reflection on the things that didn't go that well. We are not satisfied with the top-line growth that we have been delivering in the past couple of years. We are hungry, we're ambitious, and we have set a strategy in place that will enable us to accelerate that growth. Second thing to keep in mind, and I think that's maybe a slight difference from the past in the ELT, we have actually very much taken a market and customer lens when we came up with both the strategy, but also the financial targets.
We have conducted various analysis, very detailed analysis over the course of six months into consumer trends, customer behavior, pricing strategies, competitive analytics. At the same time, we've also taken a pit stop, basically, to look into Novozymes, look in the hood and see what's in the machine room. Looked at product profitability, cost potentials, resource allocation. Why am I saying that? That means that we have actually done a lot of detailed work to come up with the assumptions that then lie behind these targets. We have, in particular, included a market and external perspective in them. The third point to mention, and maybe that's the most important one for you, is that we have underpinned those assumptions with action plans that we can execute upon. That is, of course, in an effort to ensure that we'll deliver what we promise.
Overall, summing up, three financial targets on organic sales growth, EBIT margin, and return on capital invested will deliver a quite significant setup on a very strong baseline with these targets. This would lead me into what I believe is actually the most crucial thing for the next 12 months, and that is execution. You've seen that slide before. As Peder and Thomas talked about it, they talked more about the reinvesting areas. I will focus more on the efficiency program and the execution. We are embarking on an efficiency program. It's quite a sizable program, and we actually address it with quite some urgency. We intend to see the savings already early in 2020.
The whole organization will be in scope, if you, for your models, want to have a little bit of an indication, we'll go for around about one-third of back-office and administrative processes. We'll go for one-third COGS and operations, we go for one-third processes in how we go to market. That's roughly where we're going to end, or where we intend to go. We will focus on various levels in how to reach this. There will be simplification of processes. We'll take out complexity. I've talked about inventory and complexity in our supply chain, so basically reducing SKUs in our manufacturing. We will take adjustments to the organization into account where we need that and where it's necessary, and try to delayer.
Last but not least, we'll also invest even more into automatization and digitalization, not only in the classical areas like sales and back office, but also continuing the successful journeys we started in R&D and operations. All in all, with this, we will also move our key processes even closer to our customers and even closer to the emerging markets in particular. Last point is on execution. This is quite a sizable program, actually, that we are embarking on. It's quite complex.
We have decided to implement a program management office, so a PMO, that will help the whole organization in following up on all the detailed measure sheets, hold us accountable to delivering on the milestones that we've sent out in the action plans, and at the same time, also help us manage the KPIs that are needed for the new way of steering the portfolio. With this, I would like to sum it up in five key messages. We are well-positioned to accelerate our innovation-driven growth. Our solid financial track record will continue. The key focus now is on execution of the rebalancing. We are increasing the focus on free cash flow generation with an aim of above 20% by 2022. We have a clear capital structure in place and strong commitment to return to our shareholders. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Priska. I think we might now split into three groups here. This is a little bit of a logistical exercise. You have your name tags. There is one number code, and there is a color code. The first event here we're looking at, just let me grab this one because I think the schedule is there. We're going to split in three groups. You with a number one on your card, you will follow me. We're going to another room. Number two, you follow Carl. He stands up there in the corner. You with group number three, you stay here. Those of you who have no number, you stay here. Because those also exist. We run Q&As for three, not for three hours, but for one hour in three groups. There will be two EVPs, executives, in each group, and they will circle around.
You will have plenty of time to ask questions. You with group number 1 now, follow me. You with group number 2, follow Carl. Group number 3 and no numbers, stay here. Thank you.