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Investor Day 2019
Jun 17, 2019
So I think we can start. Yes? Hello, everyone, and 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.
So I think this is the largest capital markets they ever for neuroscience. We are particularly excited to host you here at our brand new innovation campus in Lingby, which we only inaugurated 10 days ago. It's a very cool building, lots of cool technology, So well, solar panels on the roof. We even flush our toilets with rainwater here. So it's really a very exciting building.
Now before we get started, the agenda and with the program, let me look at a few practicalities. First, in case a fire evacuation point is in the parking lot in the ground floor. So please follow the green exit signs to the Mayor's emergency exits, and you'll hear it in the speaker if we have to leave the building. 2nd, defibrillators are placed in reception at A00 at the D2 Coffee area and in the ground floor in the parking lot. For the Q And A, we'll limit our questions right after the presentation to two questions only and we'll be strict with that in order to be able to keep our schedule.
But we have a lot of time during the Q and A session and also, of course, during the breaks in the dinner to interact with us. As you know, we'll round off the day with the dinner at Tivo Lee Gardens, the entrance ticket for your entrance to Utility Gardens is at the back of your name tag. So please hold on to that one. In case you get lost or you don't choose not to go with us in the past to the Tivoli Gardens. So we have a very exciting day ahead of us.
And 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 a sliding column bar. There is a story around our new innovation campers, and there's a virtual reality tour for Balanxio, so a Nu X, enzymes. You'll be able to see some more of this also during the break.
We will start with Peter taking off with the updated strategy followed by Thomas talking about innovation, then Anders, Andrew and Tina will be talking about the commercial presentations. Then we'll have a short break. Then I will lead you through the financials and the targets before we break into a Q and A. Now we'll split you into 3 groups for the Q and The group number is on the back of your name tag. So important to note, after the Q and A, we will then go to the demo tours same thing.
Color code is at the back of your name tags, so it's important to hold on to this name tags. The demo tour will include microbial discovery protein engineering, the Household Care FreshNet's platform, baking and sludge dewatering. After all of that, we'll meet back here for a wrap up and then we go for dinner. And with this, this is familiar to you. I won't read it out.
It's our safe harbor statement. You all know it. But 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.
And, also a very warm welcome from me. This is a, it's a fantastic event It's a fantastic day for Novozymes. We're really excited about it. The place itself here, as Twiscoisco was talking about, we moved into about 10 days ago. There's about seven fifty people here now.
It's a mix of, research and and administration. And I think we'll be able to show you some pretty cool things as the afternoon progresses. But of course, the most significant thing today is the, is the strategy update. As the title indicates, it's not a revolution. It's more like an evolution of, of Novozymes.
When we look at the business today, we have a number of different businesses. We have exemplified this. We when we talk about slide internally, we talk about the Petersens. It's actually a family Peterson, 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 5,000,000,000 people with solutions on an ongoing basis.
I'll not belabor all the different business segments we're in, but just make the point that we are in many different segments, actually around 30 30 different industries. When we look at Novozymes, then it's a couple of technologies, Ensign and MicroP Technology. That travels into all these different end markets. That also means that we do not necessarily have total insight in every single one of these end markets. But one thing combines them all, and that is that the technology that Novozymes offers replaces other inputs.
We replace energy in, in detergents we replace energy. When you look at the fuel, we replace natural ingredients in food with our enzyme systems and so on. We reduced the amount of feed that's necessary to produce chicken or piglet. So it's a The common denominator is the technology and then the sustainability profile of our solutions. So that's what we have combined in our purpose.
The purpose that we design for 2015. And we have found that that is a very mobilizing thing, both with customers and also internally. As I'm sure you're aware of the, in a company today to get the right, track 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 that you have an inspiring purpose And 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, then, at least the way we look at it today then there are some really compelling reasons for continuing to invest in that.
There are consumer needs to be covered, our customer needs of course and there are planet needs. When we look at the consumer needs, then it's about the 9,600,000,000 people we're going to be by 2050. It's urbanization. Anas will talk later about the underlying growth in Household Care in the emerging markets. That's pretty much all driven by urbanization.
And we'll and you will talk about, how we engage in a 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, our customers and ourselves have to relate to a more complex regulatory environment. And then, of course, you have planted needs.
We are still not handling global climate challenges. And that's a tremendous issue And 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. And when we look at the last 9 years, it is here, then we have an average growth of about 5% when you look at the last 4 years, it's been lower. And with the recent outlook for 20 19, of course, 2019 will not in all likelihood add to the or contribute to a higher average.
So the question is how come, and that's of course also a question we've asked ourselves, and 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%. And I think the good news that we are here to share with you today is that we we actually think we can grow fast So 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 are all kinds of external factors to save, but we're betting on that we can change ourselves and we can get to higher growth. If we look at it in more details, then, 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, in Bioenergy in 2015 2016 that took its stint And 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 the pricing news though, we have a very strong pickup in the emerging markets across these categories. We have some really solid product launches that 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. And we're basing our future solutions on the divisions as they exist today. So if here comes the next wave of change, so to say that we're going to review to you 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 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 it's a significant one. Balanchers that you may have had a chance to review over lunch is another one.
And bio yield with Bayer for as a Corn in Auckland is a 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. So we have 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 30 out of the Fortune 500 companies. But after 6 months of review, We have now designed a strategic twist, a strategy update that we call better business with biology. And 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 25 and on this side of 25. So 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. So now it's also time to simplify And then we have over the last 2, 3 years now, we have invested quite a bit in digital transformation and now is the time also to harvest some of the results of that.
Combined that will give us some savings. Cymers, we want to be the best place for the the most outstanding scientists, but we also want to have outstanding salespeople. We want to be a good place for people to work So as we'll get back to, we're also taking care of, we're also using this opportunity to create the framework for a company and an organizational people going forward. That goes must be on this building. This building is still only 7 fifty people out of 6300.
So 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, and I 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 we also 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. And 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 is into a good 30 units. And we've been looking at how to segment and on this slide, you have a the terminology, the segment segmentation terminology that we're going to use going forward. Let me just start saying that every major industry is important to Novozymes.
So 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. But we want to differentiate how we deal the these the markets are different, of course. And I think, again, with the benefit of hindsight, when you get a half year to review things, and you get a bit of on 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? And maybe that's not the most effective way of getting a new solution.
Maybe it's too costly. So we are, and let me just take you through a couple of examples to understand this to illustrate this. So we have a bunch of businesses the good thirty one I talked about that we have tried to put into the grid that is behind me. So let's just take them 1 by 1. So a value creator in our terminology is a business that has a very strong base for profitability.
And it's not a business that in all likelihood it's 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. So while we may in the past have done innovation to support starts processing, we're going to dial that down.
And we'll try to find other ways of working with our customers in start processing. If we then go anti clockwise, then we have something called Anchor Businesses. Those are typically rather large stable growth and revenue. So 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 and likelihood comes out of the, except for freshness comes out of the, comes out of the emerging markets. That's an example of a, of an anchor business. Then 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, so with the lanchers, push that harder into the marketplace, make new products in the same space, the same thing for grain milling as an example. And then we have development seats that are more innovative, more innovation plays in the marketplace, And examples of that, I mean, there's really strong growth engines for the midterm And, examples of what we have there is, is act bio yield, so with buyer and the following bio yield 3. And Anders will also talk about biological detergents as an example of that. Then at whatever it is, 10 o'clock, we have new strategic opportunities, which is more long term.
Look at them as post-twenty three. 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 and what you'll what we see is that we take resources away essentially from value craters 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. So that creates a higher growth. The magnitude of this I mean, 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 $200,000,000 to $300,000,000 Tkk.
That goes into a commercial push that is primarily related to development seats and growth stars of an additional 100 and then an additional 150 in new strategic opportunities. So that's an additional 150. We already spent some money in that space. So, that's what we call dual transformation. We do both There's both more investments, particular 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 R and D on growth areas, we're going to simplify structures and again, digitalization is an enabler of this We think we're going to have that in place over the next 2 months. So 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.
But exactly what this means in terms of walk structures and where and what that's going to be worked out over the next 2 months. So 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, so much more milestone driven And the three areas we call out now is on this slide. It is feeding the world.
It's really about protein. And Thomas will talk more about it. But there is a world where you can actually ferment protein that will play a meaningful role in kind of mid tier food products. Then there's increasing health and well-being, which is, in our world, about primarily combinations of enzymes and microbes for oral and gut health. We think that there's a 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.
And the last is water. You heard us tea water up, I think a year ago, We worked on water, but maybe mainly on the waste treatment side. In the meantime, we have worked a lot more with water, and we see a lot of unit is not only reducing waste, reducing waste water, handling waste water, but also in water management and water peer vacation with biotechnology. So 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. And then we'll see where that takes us.
And then we're adding $150,000,000 annually on top of the investments we're already making. So when we look at at the world, this is most of our business not all of our businesses are driven by sustainability. In fact, creates a preference in all our businesses. We have defined for ourselves new sustainability targets also. And, they on this slide.
The darker part is the external part. That's the world part of it. So if we take climate, for example, we want to help limit global warming increase to 1.5 C, that's the Paris agreement. Our contribution as we measure ourselves by 22 is going to be a saving of 60,000,000 tons from low carbon fuels in the transportation sector. That's not the only reduction contribution over I'm just making, but that's where we're going to measure ourselves.
That's on the transportation sector. Then if we go down, so vertically, then we look at Novozymes' own commitment. And you can see that we commit to having reduced the CO2 emission, the absolute CO2 emission from our operations by 50% in 2030 and we commit to work towards carbon neutrality by 2050. Those are actually quite significant tasks for a company that consumes a bit of energy By 22, 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 imbalance 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. And with those depending on the size of the issues, I would say, And by 22, so in 3 years' time, we'll have water management programs for all our different sites.
The other the 3rd area we're calling out is production and consumption, which relates to food essentially. And we're going to our technologies and there's a few we're going to track will by 22 have produced 500,000 tons of additional food. On our in our own system by 2030, we're going to have 100 percent of all our materials in a circular system. And by 22, we're going to do that for one of our major waste streams, which is the spent biomass. So by 22 spent biomass, we'll all be circular.
That brings me to a, to summing it up. So when you look at, 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 large extent that 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 market.
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 do not we're not proposing to expand outside our core capabilities of enzymes and microbes. So do not expect us to jump into other areas through acquisitions 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.
Prisca will talk later about margin expansion, but of course, the 150 the additional 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. And 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 that might be market bolt ons. And those are probably a combination of some of the some pieces in the micro space and then in these 3 strategic opportunity areas I talked about before. So if we sum this up, then 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% 5 plus percent growth, 2022. We're also calling out that these portfolio changes, we'll have to see how exactly they work out for 20 there may be some of those things where we're dosing down, where we'll get a little bit of an issue in 'twenty.
Let's see. There are also things where we're dosing up where we might get tailwind in 2020. So there's just an uncertainty we're calling out Then we are going to move towards an EBIT margin of 28% by the end of the period. Say roughly a 1% hike up compared to the underlying margin today, and we're going to get to 23% right, which we'll talk about in the short time. On Symas, we're trying to create this new world trying to well, not create a new world, but we're trying to embrace how the world is developing.
And, in a world where where jobs, where tasks are changing rapidly and with a higher and higher speed, it's very important that we continue to enable learning. So we're going to invest more in that and we have a target of of an 80% score. It's a fairly international scoring of, of the, of SIMERS by 22, 80 80 would bring us in the best quartile. So it's just to continue to make sure that we enable learning. Nurture diversity.
We're doing pretty well, but we need to continue. So we are putting the bar up at 86, which would put us at the very top. Ensure well-being, I think is what we think is a is an emerging area. You may see when you walk around this building that we've actually tried to create rooms where people can if you like nurture themselves and and take a break if you like. For example, in the Coffee Islands out here, if that's an English term, you'll see jigsaw where people can take a break.
And I think we all have to understand that this, I mean, the world is changing. We're all going more digital. We're more online. This whole thing about a company taking a wider responsibility for well-being is necessary and We are trying to do that. Of course, one part of that is safety on the workplace.
So we're also going to work hard to reduce the safety incidents we have in the company. And then we are, hoping to engage our employees in inspiring each others, but also inspire the world. And the pledge we're making is that we will be spending time to let employees engage, and I'm sure that's going to be around the the agenda of sustainability. I'm pretty sure we're going to spend 90% of the discussion today on the centerpiece, the business piece, So with that, I just want to move on and, tee up the strategy update that we call Better Business with biology and just close this session off by saying that I'm absolutely sure that the tweaks we're doing to the portfolio now, the investments we're making in R&D, the simplification we're making, will give us higher growth rates. And with that, I'll close it here.
Tobias? Thank you very much.
We'll do that later. It's an hour's instigate sessions, making in the program. So I think we invite focus now, so we continue immediately.
Okay. Thomas? Thank you, Peter.
Also, very warm, welcome for me. It's great to see so many people here, great to see the interest in Novozymes. No signs is built on innovation. This is how we got to where we are today, and 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, but responding and building on, 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, data analysis that we can do today that just a couple of years ago, would have been absolutely impossible to comprehend that we would be able to make sense out of the data, but today, we can just put into a computer This means from an opportunity point of view that today, we are able to find cause and effect in a completely different way than just a couple of years ago, as mentioned. And by doing that, we'll be able to work with specific customers developing a very, 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. So when we look around the world, there's a lot of things that we need to attend to. There's a lot of opportunities.
And some of them will 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 ourselves. We don't have to build the strains ourselves. 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 where it makes the absolutely most sense for us as a company to do.
Peter talked about the 30 businesses that we are in today. And ever since we started more than 60 years ago, with the introduction of enzymes into that leather industry. That verification has been an important point in how to grow our inside 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. So building diversification that's actually also creating resilience to some extent towards the volatility in very specific markets, but 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.
And of course, when we come across ways of optimizing our specific production in one area. Very often, we find ways to you set in other areas as well. So being in a number of different industries, of course, creates some complexity, but certainly also create a lot of opportunities are leveraging what we're doing in one area into other areas. After the IPO or the demerger, if no Nordisk back in year 2000, we started to look at other technologies. And 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. And what we have been doing has been to build businesses like our bio ag business, animal health business, we are in a wastewater treatment using microbes a number of very specific micro applications. When we look to the future, we see again an increase in the different segments of industries where we're operating, and we see more and more a convergent between an Incyme application and a micro application. And very often, we are looking through opportunities where enzymes as well as microbes, it could be the solution going forward. Peter talked about the focus areas of our update that strategy at Better Business with Biology.
He mentioned the 3 focus areas, a differentiating, a differentiator exceed, invest in impact and spearhead new businesses that, of course, have very specific meanings when we talk about the technology how we're going to work with our technology, differentiate to succeed. That's about doing the portfolio roles that Peter was was mentioning. I'll get back to that. Invest in impact could be interpreted in our technology development as making sure that's the projects we are investing in. There are projects where we put enough resources in and not getting ourselves first spread too thin.
And then about spearheading new businesses, the new opportunity areas that Peter was alluding to. And 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 and D capabilities will be completely different in a business like this. We will not be putting up research programs within an anchor business like science business. But if we can come up with opportunities of increasing our profitability, is making better strains thereby getting a higher yields, getting better economy, then of course, we will carry out programs.
But the programs will be about securing a stronger profitability at better profit margin in that particular business. And as Peter mentioned, and the starch business as 1. Peter, in the anchor businesses, talked about the laundry in developed markets, 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 customer's best partner, I sort of say, but we are 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.
If that happens, we would be changing our approach to an industry and maybe also change the way we look at it. But as it is, an anchor business, it's not about a big independent research programs. Gross Stars, as I think Peter mentioned, luckily, we have a non 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, the Valencia's, as mentioned, there was one. Elterian is another product that we've been introducing over the last couple of years and where we're seeing very good growth rates. So we'll continue to optimize those products. We will use the commercial competence in the company, of course, to push them into the marketplace. And 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 Balenciers and Alterian, but there's a lot of other opportunities we could and should be working on.
That's where we will be throwing some of the R and D muscles towards in order to try to get and even better foothold in an interesting gross market where we think opportunities are there. And then we, as a development seat, 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 the turquins to a different level when it comes to a higher degree ability and being 100% biological. And we will throw significant R and D resources into trying to build a case around percent biodegradable or biological detergent. So 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 Peter mentioned, this means that we will be rebalancing a couple of 100 to 1,000,000 Danish grounds coming out of the focus that pipeline and coming out of efficiency programs within our part of the business, in R And T, in supply operation, we will continue to push efficiency programs in the organization. We're working already on a number of activities, the delayering, trying to make sure we have the organization that fits for and not more than we are 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 relocate people as well as resources. So with this, by being focused on this, we will be able to liberate this million that we can then add into new strategic opportunities, but 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 gross markets with growth opportunities And that should drive Novozymes to a higher growth range as such.
We talked about focusing the pipeline opportunity, and we tried to illustrate this in this slide that we have to admit that We have been running a number of R and D projects the way Peter was talking about it. Any of it unity or any issue we were looking at, a response from us has been to carry out an R and D project. We will be cutting back on the number of projects. We would be running a fewer projects, but with a higher allocation. Thereby, our belief is that 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 100 and 25 different project and our 8 priority platforms. When we look at the way we are running our projects, it's we actually think we have a fairly good machinery in in our gating in our project system here. So that's not what we will be focusing to change.
This is working quite well. We'll continue to fine tune it. But what we will do is that we'll be taking some projects out. Hopefully, we will make the because of de risking, we'll make the some of the value of projects, Pika, 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 have already been commercialized.
But overall, we're looking at taking about a third of our current R and 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 seats and in new strategic opportunity areas. I mentioned that the the eight platforms that have been developing well, and we will no longer be following them from a technology point of view, of course, from, how they are 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 previously, 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 an Air is also continuing to be important areas for us, whereas we will no longer putting R and 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'll be able to then built further on what we already have.
But at this point in time, we think we are ready for whatever could come up in this industry. And then water, we already talked about, we're actually adding an extra program in contaminated removal from water. So that finalizes our priority platforms. So no longer talking about those but focusing on a smaller portfolio of more impactful projects. Peter mentioned the new opportunity areas, where we will, based on a lot of the talk to partners, customers, consultants work in a very different way.
Going forward. We will separate the units from our core business. We'll make sure that they are not measured in the same way as the rest of our businesses are. We will be working here very much shared 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, startup companies, and we would want to work like that within Novozymes the groups working on in these areas could not necessarily have to use internal resources in moving forward. Don't necessarily have to sit at Novozymes, and it's about finding out what is the problem. It's about defining out who is the paying customers. It's about defining out after that, do we then have a technology that would fit to this and why is no sign the right company to actually develop solutions. Peter 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 that we're using today. And 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 mouse field, getting the right sweetness, getting the right cities 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 6 decades optimizing how we produce proteins at a competitive cost. And 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, this again, a very interesting market opportunity. There's a lot of growth consumers, they take more and more responsibility for their own well-being.
It's not so much about treating diseases. It's about staying well. And we have opportunities that we'll be able to fit into this area. One example is we're currently looking at Ensign solution for oral, we're looking at enzymes that will remove plaques. We're looking at enzymes that will help on bad press.
That's an area where we see opportunities. If we find the right partners, if we're looking at food intolerances, we have a very, very good indication about the enzyme applications. We have a good indication about the mix of enzyme and microbes. And 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, 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 And 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. Calling out today, that's within the removal of a micronutrient or micro contaminants 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 micro contaminants that's currently being at an increasing and actually alarming rate being found in our different water streams This is a opportunity for us to look at does our solution fit into this area. So summing that 3 different opportunities that we would be putting sources 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. And maybe when we meet next time, it's not 3 of these new opportunities we're running.
Maybe it's 5 and maybe 3 of them are new. And one of them we have decided that that was not the way for us to go forward. So this is about finding the ways that we will be three very specific areas. So 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. And then it's about strategic growth opportunities.
And then I'll be handing it off to 2 years. Yes?
I learned I should use the mic. I'm sorry for that last time. Q and A later, I said that before, There's a 1 hour Q and A session, as a bit in 3 teams that comes a bit later. So we don't do the Q and A now. We invite the executives here, Anders, Andy and Tina, to go through the different divisions.
Alright. So we're now we dive into the business, Household Kent tech will go first. And this is a great opportunity, but before we get started, I just want to given perspective of what we do in Household Care. Today, we meet half the world's population with our technologies coming out of Novozymes. And actually, I think we make quite a difference, both for consumers, but also for the world.
So 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, the a lot of the products have been 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 And then for the 70% of the world's population that washed by hand, actually having really, really efficient products, laundry products makes a huge difference. It's a tedious task and making a better job for these people actually matters.
So our commitment, to this industry is 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 100% biological detergents. And 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. So that all sounds really good, but we also have to reflect on the past 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, challenges on doing some dosages that they used. Some of that relates to the fact that they've been out improving their margins. Some of it relate 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, but we also have really, really good indication that the pipeline that we have we look forward to the future is actually a stronger one than the one that we had in the past. And I get a chance to talk a little bit more about that in detail.
While these challenges have been rather significant, we've also had quite good developments with a lot of our regional customers actually been growing very nicely over this period of time, and we also see that our emerging markets have been doing really well in this period. Our technical and pharma has a bit 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 leather businesses have not delivered much growth in the period. Now you've seen this slide before, and this is to sort of bring into perspective what how does this strategy impact the different businesses and functions in those times? So 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 at a with less resources compared to what we've done in the past. And 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, but it's also other things like biological detergents that I'll get to talk about a little later. And it's some other smaller segments that if we succeed in these, they will be net, delivering growth to our industry. And 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. Now, 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 treatments now in China are being sold online, where is that in 5 years? It's probably much more than 20%. That drives a big change for the packaging simply because e tailers is 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 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. And that's also why we see a lot of products being put out there. What we translate that into our business is that that actually drives a need for bio based solutions. And again, our vision is getting to 100 percent bio based solutions at a cost effective position. We're not there today, but that is where we are working towards.
Then, we've talked much about, emerging markets, and I'll give a little bit more flavor to that, but 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, and it calls for new solutions, and it also calls for us improving the presence we have in the emerging markets. And then 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 a stain removal, which we have built our entire business around. And if you do not believe me, then you can go and listen to some of the calls from some of our largest customers, P And G and others are out talking about this being the single biggest issue that we need to solve and we have I believe one of the most prominent solutions in this space. So now I'll take you into 3 of the areas that are truly strategic to our Household Care business, it's emerging markets, is our freshness platform and is what we call biological detergents. If we start out with the emerging markets, then this
is a little bit of
a busy graph. But if we index Europe to 100 in usage of our technology, Then you can go to North America and they use about half, then you can go to the rest of the emerging markets and they use around 20% and Asia even less. So 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 But of course, we are deeply committed to doing that. And one of the ways we show that is that we are opening up new offices.
So we already have a rather significant innovation in China, India and in Brazil. We have the sales offices in, in Mexico, Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey. And we are opening up new offices in Kenya and in Thailand. And then we are putting presence in, with people on the ground in Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria and Venezuela. So it's rather substantial of 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, but I also want to caution. There is no silver bullet that would open up any emerging markets. It's about being closed and it's about understanding the needs of these customers out there. But we believe this whole substantial potential for Novozymes. Another thing that we believe holds substantial potential is what we call biological detergents.
And it's illustrated in 2 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, but we also believe that a lot of the components that are currently used for cleaning can be replaced by biotechnology and with biology. And 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. 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 have been used are used to mask mail order by removing the mail order, well, essentially, you do not need as much perfume. And then we know that, some of our cellulose technology can actually go in and challenge some of the cleaning and whitening polymers that are being used And 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. And from that perspective, it also has a quite good sustainability profile. Now 100% biological detergents is, of course, a vision, and it's something that we'll not get to next year, but it's something that we are deeply committed to that we'll get to eventually. It will require for us to develop new technologies, but it'll also require for us to partner with new players, not only our customers, but potentially also other technology providers in this space.
Then I'll talk about freshness. And for those who've been following no symptoms, you know that we've been out talking about story. We are on track to deliver the 1,000,000,000 within 5 to 10 years as we have committed to. We have 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.
First of all, 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 close looks actually changed is 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 feel with that challenge. As consumers in the Western world, they turn down the dial on temperature We actually also see that, mode build up and challenges with mail order increase, especially in the Western world. And we also see the fact that the the market is changing towards pouches, small unit dose and liquids, you you're not allowed to use bleach technology, which actually has a a good bacteria fighting capability that you can't use in those formats simply because their 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. Now to the other side of that chart, some of the consumer drivers around this.
Mailloader is, as I said before, one of the biggest issues consumer face today, largely driven by the fact that I talked about before, grind 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 the way we have the technology to deal with that. Now these are sort of the core components of what we do and how care, but I also want to say that there is a little bit more to Household Care than that.
And 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. Actually have a sizable business in this area, and it's one that's growing, quite well. Discwash is a segment, especially hand dishwash as a segment that is hardly unpenetrated with enzyme, the volumes are huge and substantial and wakes see both in 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, and we actually right now are in, discussions with some of our major customers around that.
We have a vision of microbial cleaning, and 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 hot 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. And for those who, 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, 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 field with cellular lasers 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 had to caution that it's also a relatively low profit category, so 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're on track to deliver the SEK 1,000,000,000 in revenues that we 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.
And we see a number of interesting smaller opportunities that will be meaningful for our business in Household Care. And I think that's my 20 minutes and then we move on to Mr. Forreis. Thank you, Johannes.
So now we're gonna we're gonna talk food and beverage, 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. But before I go there, I wanted to let you know that what we what we motivate ourselves around within the purpose of novozant and food and beverage is this idea of we can work with food and beverage companies to help transform both the quality and the sustainability of what they're doing. And this is actually quite a motivating purpose and one that our customers actually value a lot. That comes in basically 3 forms. 1 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. And 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. And 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. So if I talk about what's underlying, and what's behind and happening in the world from a food and beverage viewpoint that we think is quite interesting and motivating for us.
There's 4 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 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 plus 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. Now the bottom 2, there's this idea about more natural foods, and 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 And natural foods with 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, but yet avoid some of the ingredients that they've used in the past. And we think we've got good opportunities to help them do that. And then 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. But these trends actually focus us around 4 different opportunity areas.
1 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 maintained 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. And then health, safety and sustainability. And these are all areas we feel pretty confident we can deliver even better growth by investing in them.
So When we look at the existing business, rates over time. We're averaging about 5 5% over the last 5 years. This is about 2x the actual underlying market growth when comes to raw materials that are being produced to go into the food value chain. Now 2x might sound good, but we think we can get this higher by how we invest in So 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 the standardized food supplies And then 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 2 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.
So we've been able to grow in spite of one of our big engines coming off patent and seeing some erosion. And also the fact that in the around the world, the starch processing businesses rather stagnant, and that's a big area for us. But in spite of that, we've been able to grow. But 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 and especially the emerging markets. We've got a lot of ways to add additional 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. So if we look at the left side of this slide, there's 3 broad drivers of opportunity that we're using as we planned both our commercial activities and our innovation activities. 1 is, again, this idea of emerging markets. If we look at our business more than about 2 thirds of it in food and beverage is in the developed markets, but the underlying penetration, which 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 think that's a good way to continue traded and it's quite mature.
But 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. And then 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. And 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, but we'll be quite selective about how we use innovation to do that and would be quite streamlined in the way we do that from the it leader in all the major markets where starch is processed, but it doesn't really benefit our customers a lot or us a lot if we continue to do a lot of lifecycle manage investments in these areas.
We'll still do them where required to maintain our strong position, but 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. So a shift in the way we both resource these in the field and the way we create innovations to support our customers in starts refining. And then 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 But 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 create that don't necessarily create enough growth.
So there's underlying portfolio units on both sides of these two categories within the food and beverage business that we're very excited about And I want to talk about a few of these to give you, a bit deeper insight into what we're talking about. So if we, 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 starting to show a lot more interest in these areas and Latin America is kind of in between the two extremes. Now We have relatively few resources in these areas, especially for the geographical size and the diversity of applications that are out there, but we have quite broad product portfolio that serves all kinds of different food production categories. So 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 undercovered, but we're also investing in capabilities, local lab resources and additional near to market innovation that help us cater to these different spaces.
Kind of 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 often 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 relatively high double digit growth rates over the coming period by investing more in vegetable oil processing, brewing and basic food processing and 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. So 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. And that goes similar to what Anna's 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 to invest more to get outsized growth opportunities. So 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.
Now 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 but 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.
Now I want to talk about 2 agro processing areas that offer very good opportunities for us to create value for customers One 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 oilseeds 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. And that's an area where Novozant has launched new technologies, both in oilseed Becoming, but also in palm oil extraction. And this is new technology unpenetrated, enzymes are now playing a role in these areas in a way that could be quite meaningful and offer a nice opportunity to create value for customers.
And that's in the milling phase. But also, there's a lot more effort going into oil refining and creating quality oils and healthy oils. And 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 and fat stocks. Traditionally, if you do that chemically, you end up with these off quality trans fat health, no nose.
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 ahold of these for things like infant nutrition and specialty foods. And there's additionally an opportunity to use enzymes to improve the quality of existing refined oils. There's things like 3 M CPD, 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. 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 sustainableoleochemicals.
These are fatty acid based chemicals. And they're looking for ways to avoid petroleum. So we see this also as an area where similar technologies that are being used in food and beverage can be applied in bio catalysis, in oleoprocessing environments to open up a brand new area for opportunity for noozymes with our existing footprint some of the innovations we're already applying in food and beverage. So we offer value we offer different opportunities and solutions in different parts of the value all the way from the milling, the refining side and the specialty oil side. We're investing in this as a area where We've got some good products and but we've got a lot of ideas on how we can add to our innovations through additional enzymatic projects.
To open up a 1,000,000,000 Dkk opportunity on the refining degumming side and another 400,000,000 Dkk on the Oleo chemistry side. So 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. Now we've been quite, 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.
And we've launched very recently over the last couple of years The 1st phase of these new grain milling products, Fronthia is the platform, the brand platform. Fronthia fiber wash is frontia or it's a grain milling enzyme that goes into corn based products in Europe and North America. This gets you additional yield on both starch production side and the protein production side within milled corn. And this is a first step We followed that up with a specific product tailored to the Chinese market. It's called Frontia Jade.
And this opens up a very, very large 80,000,000 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 on to this by looking at how we can leverage these initial steps into wheat as an example. So it's another area that we can use similar technologies and we're developing that. And we'll also look at additional grain milling opportunities and things like sugar beets in the future. So this is an agro processing area that has many, 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. Now there, as I mentioned, there's more and more consumer interest in sort of healthy options. And 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. And 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, but we've seen very rapid growth from 2015 to 2018, and we anticipate that continuing and things like acrylamide reduction in baked and fried goods, lactose removal and dairy goods, less sugar added in a variety of different food areas where we can use enzymes to maintain sort 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. And 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. So 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.
Now overall this idea here is that we're very much motivated by the idea of how can we produce better food for more people. So 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.
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. And with that, I'm going to pass it
So now over to the last of our 3 divisions, I'll gonna talk about Bioenergy and agriculture and feed. And then right after, there should be a break. So coffee is coming up Before I get started, I mean, I would like to look a bit at the trends, which they are out there. And a lot of them we have already talked about today. So there is a tremendous pressure on the agricultural value chain, and we desperately need a sustainable solutions in order to address that.
We have talked about that there comes more and more people on this earth, I mean, plus 1,000,000,000 until 2050. And as the earth has its size, the earth has we are going to get less land to cultivate per capita we are. These more people we get and given that we also get richer and richer, We need more food, and we also need more animal proteins. If we look back in history towards the sixsters, Then we can see that already since then, we have seen a 50% increase in animal proteins, and this is expected to continue. So we need more animal protein as well.
This coupled with that we have more extreme weather. We have more we have more diseases and so forth. We today see that about a third of the global crop production is getting lost. So we need more sustainable tools in order to secure that we can continue to get the food for the people on this earth. And we need to do it in a sustainable way.
So we stay within the 1.5 Degrees Celsius in the Perrisa court. This is exactly the kind of solutions we are working with at Novozymes. 50 more than 50% of the business at Novozymes is across the agricultural value chain. And 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 so the last part of the agricultural value chain.
In Bioenergy, we work to secure that we have a sustainable energy for transportation mostly, In BioAg, we look at how can we get more yield out of the same acre of land. And 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 have been bumpy. It hasn't been a straight growth line. And 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. But 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 gonna drive a lot of the growth in the near to midterm. Examples of that are the Balencios, which we just launched and which I hope you had a chance to see out here, and also some of the yeast products which we are launching and have launched in the biofuels space. In bioact, 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 differentiator approach to the different business segments, and that is going to help us succeed. For us, that 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 bio yield business in BioAg. We also want to invest in impact, so we want to secure that we have more feeds on the ground, for example, in our Bioenergy business. In Agriculture and Bioenergy, we have 3 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 incense as well as microbes and yeast. As I'm sure you are aware, we utilize both enzymes and yeast and microbes across our different business areas. If I translate these 3 parameters over into the different business, 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 yeast. In animal health and nutrition, we will focus in on making animals healthier. We see a lot of growth there. And then in BioAg, it is a matter of focusing on the transformative bio yield solutions. But I'll now go into each of these individual segments give you some more flavor on, 1st of all, how things are and where it is we are seeing the opportunities.
So first, we start with bioenergy. So bioenergy is a North American market still without 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. So if you ask the Brazilian corn ethanol association, then in 2016, around 1,000,000,000 gallons of corn based ethanol was produced. That was last year 1,000,000,000 gallons.
That is expected in the next 3, 4 years to come to increase to more than 1,000,000,000 gallon, so a very strong growth in the Brazilian market. But 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, but we expect that a 1% to 2% growth over the year per year over the years to come is how it is that the U.
S. Will expand into E15. Also 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, but they are coming then.
We start seeing various provinces moving towards E10. So 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, we'll put more focus on putting people on the ground in Latin America and in China in order to help us boost this growth. But 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 2 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 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 in over 4, which is a new yeast. It is, in fact, the most advanced dry yeast, which they are in the market. It is helping customers get more flexibility and more reliability in that reduction. And that yeast has a tailor made companion blend of enzymes which uniquely fits to that yeast.
So 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 a more stressful conditions such as elevated temperatures. So two strong examples of how it is that innovation still play a role in this business and how we think that we can continue to push growth in that area. Then over to BioAg, we talked about the new partnering structure with a number of you in April when we are launched the new partnership structure. We have still our strong as our stronghold and our focus, our core, with the former Monsanto Alliance, where we work now with Bayer in upstream contact Technologies.
This is now supplemented or expanded with other players and other partners like Unibar in the more pulse based market in Canada. And then with, St. Ginza and UPL, which is more specialty crops and bio controlled specific projects which we work with them on. But this for sure opens up more opportunities for how it is we can innovate and how it is we can partner. If we look ahead towards 2025, we have a clear path towards the plus 250,000,000 acres.
In this time span, corn and soy will still be the predominant crops which with 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. But the biggest contribution to the near to midterm growth will come from the upstream corn area, which we have launched which we already have talked about. But if we are looking at the BioX base, this is just the immediate priorities where we work in microbial bio control and where we work with microbial inoculants. If 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, way bigger. But we need to focus, and that's why these are our priorities for now.
But 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. But given that we will have more and more animal protein being produced, we need more and more feed being produced as well. And 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, 2 segments in this area. We have the Animal Nutrition segment and we have the Animal Whole In the animal nutrition, there's still a lot of growth to be had. Given that we have, 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 that'll 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 We have 5 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. And with this partnership, we leverage the stronghold of DSM, and that is that global reach with their premix footprint. So what we do in all of these partners 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 Eddy's sale, we focus in on bacillos for monogastres. So mostly poultry. And we launched 3 years ago a product called Daterion, which we already have talked about and which we are selling globally.
With Boerringer Ingelheim, we have a partnership with them for a the hatchery segment. The hatchery is when the chicks are just being formed or chicks are just coming out of the X. And it is important that we secure they have the best possible starts of their lives. Birnie Ingelheim have a very strong position with their vaccines for exactly hatcheters, and that's why they are 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, so that's why we work with them.
And last but not least, we work in aquaculture and pond treatment with Bayer as well. So these are the partnerships where we are trying to leverage what our partners are strongest at and combining it where we have our strong for to hold. And for sure, what we want to do is we want to continue investing in the animal health space and the la and the newest example on that journey, the Splendius, 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 Balencios product. We sell it in in in North America and Latin America, and we just recently also got the registration here in Europe.
So last week, We had a launch with Balencios here in Europe as well. It took place in Poland. And when we are finished with the geographical expansion of that product, There's also the expansion into other species. So 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. So in order to sum up, we see very strong underlying trends for a need for sustainable energy.
There is also underlying trends from 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 and 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 So with that, I'll hand over to Tobias who will
Thank you, Tina. I hope you can hear me. We're actually running quite well according to schedules. I think we should just open up for one or two questions from the floor. But I think we're limited to 1 or 2 questions because we have a break at 3 o'clock.
So we have one here. I can, if you can state your name and
where you're from. Told me, I should ask, difficult questions to all the other managers, not him. Okay. No. I'm I'm I'm wondering when when when you look, towards 2030, 24 to 2050?
Yes. 25 years from now, how many combustion engines are we going to have globally compared to today?
So, we have in fact looked quite much into it also together with McKinsey, together with ACB Bank and together with a number of external sync tanks. And 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. So around 2050, that's going to be the shift from where there'll be more electrical vehicles. But there are still some time to 2050, but you are right. It is on the rising print with the electrical vehicles but there's 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.
So one more question. I saw the first hand all the way down. So I think I have to stick to the order here. And I think we tried to get a mic we have one on that side.
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 at our for 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 and what has changed over the last 3 or 4 years for you to click the 1% to 2% off versus the previous target, is it purely lower commodity prices?
I think we wait a
bit with that question. You will have time for that, that the Q and 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. So then we have time for another question. I think in the back,
Thanks. Ben Gorman from UBS. 1 on Food And Beverage, if that's okay. 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? And are you already in this market?
Are you supplying Beyond Meat or any of the comparables?
Right. So we've talked about actually 2 different opportunity spaces when you talk about sort of protein in the future. And 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. Now 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. But it's not an area where we've sort of focused in a more comprehensive and holistic way. And now we think the opportunity to do that more holistically is now because the trend is becoming much more prevalent, much more organized. And we think both our existing product portfolio and new innovations create an outsized opportunity for us to create business going forward. So 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.
And the fermented part will come later because that's more a mid to long term growth driver.
And on top of that, alternative meat and so forth is often based on pulses. And we also sell a lot of micro solutions for pot scrubs.
On the ag side? Yes. Exactly.
I think that's, the Q and A session for now. We'll see here at 3:20 again, and our CFO, Prisca will do her presentation followed by Q And A for 1 hour in different groups. And that's a little bit of a logistical exercise. So, please bear with me on that one. We'll see you here back, 15, 20.
So let's start. So 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 Discretion capabilities quite well. I also hope that some of you have taken a tour through the chicken gut to see Valencia's connection.
But now back to the strategy. So by now, you have heard Peter talk about the strategy, the update you've talked, heard Thomas talk about innovation. You've heard about Anders and Argentina talking about how do we translate that in our commercial strategies, And before we go into the Q And 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. Oh, sorry.
Yeah. I will lead you through a quick recap of the financial performance of the past period. So overall, we've actually delivered quite solid financial performance over that period. Despite, as Peter 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 9 years since 2010.
We if we look now into the and we've delivered margin expansion from an EBIT point of view. Now if we look into 2019, as you know, we have revised our outlook quite recently to 1% to 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, underlying EBIT margin is around 26%, 27% for which we are guiding for this year.
And this is, if you take into account around 2 percentage points of deferred income, if you adjust for that. And then also if you adjust for one offs. So 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 contracting costs, counteracting that. So overall, at 26%, 27% underlying, EBIT margin that we are cruising at right now.
If you look at Wrike, you know that we've guided for 23% for this year. This, of course, includes around one percentage point from there's 16 lease accounting. So the if you compare it to historical figures, so that's sort of a 24, but it also includes a positive impact of around two percentage points from the release of all deferred income. So that means net net, the underlying ROIC is at around 22% for this year based on the outlook that we've given. Looking at the portfolio, I think what you see is a quite balanced picture here.
Now particularly if you look at the industries, we're sending to into more than 40 I'm sorry, 40 different end markets. And if you take a step back memory lane, we had 50% of our sales with 3 Household Care customers back in 2000, a little bit of food and beverage. So I think this has come a long way from a resilience of the revenue streams point of view, which of course I'm, as a CFO, I'm pretty pleased with. If you look across the region, you see a similar well balanced picture. We're standing to 130 countries.
And if you look into our emerging markets, we see exactly the picture would like to see an increasing share of emerging markets, and there's more to come as we have alluded to earlier with our strategy, we'll be increasing that. So overall, a quite well balanced portfolio. Now we've talked about margin expansion that we saw in the past 9 years. This has come if you look at the profitability drivers, this has come from 2 factors: 1 is gross margin, 1 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. So if you adjust for that. And 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. And that's the continued productivity improvements that we are delivering. So we have since the inception in 20 On average, the delivered round about 4% to 5% of productivity improvements.
That have supported the gross margin and have offset price erosion and also import cost increases. And 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 the prior levels for this we have currently around about 100 projects ongoing. So key messages here will continue to support our profitability with the productivity improvements you've seen in the past.
Now 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 networking capital on an increasing basis. Now, of course, keep in mind that the year is affected by the initiation of the BioAg Alliance. Now 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 year over year.
And we've also have, as you've heard before, a lower than anticipated sales growth. At the same time, we've seen CapEx or investment levels elevated. So CapEx has been running high in the last 3 years. One reason is the innovation camper that we are here today. We've also expanded capacity in the U.
S. And Nebraska in our player site, and we have inaugurated a new site in India, as you know, So overall, higher investment levels. So we are not satisfied with this. I think cash is a very important metric to me. And Novozymes cannot be included, excluded.
So 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, and you see this in this picture, We have delivered since 2010, a 10% CAGR in free cash flow before acquisitions. Add an average free cash flow to sales before acquisitions of around 16%.
I think that's actually not that bad. And you keep in mind that we have done that while investing heavily in CapEx and in R&D. If you take our R and D to sales ratio or CapEx to sales ratio compared with what 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 debt. So actually, what I'm trying to say here is we have demonstrated that we can generate substantial free cash flows in this company. Now Also looking at the picture, and I'm sure you will challenge me on that is cash generation since 2015 has not been improving.
So we have some underperformed somewhat in the recent past. And 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. So basically going closer depreciation or even below depreciation, for the next 3 years.
And on net working 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 your organization has certainly it's certainly caught the attention of the organization, I can say. So there's more to come here.
And 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. Now this slide should be actually quite familiar to you. I'm not telling you something new.
This is our cash, our capital allocation policy, and it is largely unchanged. We are a growth company. So we are reinvesting priority number 1, our cash flows into for growth to support our strategy. So that means into our innovation programs and into our assets. I think what is important to note here, and as Peter as I've also alluded to is, with the new portfolio logic for our business areas, we will be allocate the resources according to the role in the portfolio of a certain business area and also according to the performance of that business area So 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.
2nd priority is also unchanged. We will only today will continue to do with our acquisition strategy, which means we will be at, 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 and A strategy. 3rd priority is return cash to shareholders. And if we look at that, we have actually returned more than DKK 20,000,000,000 since 2010.
You know that? We have done that through a steadily increase in dividend with even acceleration over the last 5 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 of that with keeping our conservative leverage structure.
As you will remember, our leverage target historically has been between 0:1 times net debt to EBITDA. We are at roughly one times today as of Q1. And that also means, of course, we are significantly below our peers, which are more or less in the two times, maybe 2.5 times of space. We like our conservative leverage. That will not change.
What will what has changed is that we put it in a different framework, which means basically we'll aim for the next 3 years at one times leverage. Because we believe that's a good structure, a good capital structure for us over the next 3 years. Target by increasing the dividend payout towards 50% as I mentioned. And we'll complement that with share buyback programs to bring basically the leverage back to target. And the aim is to distribute all the free cash flow to shareholders.
So moving on now to the targets. So a lot of thought, a lot of thinking has gone into these targets, as you I don't think you couldn't even imagine, but we have really worked hard over the last 6 months on this. And Peter has, of course, already shown them, but what I would like to draw your attention to is first starting with 2 things. The first thing that you note here is we've gone for a 3 year period. So we've gone for a shorter period and that's intentional.
And 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. So we've gone for a reduction of targets. To provide focus.
The reason same reason to provide focus for the execution. We have, as Peter already alluded to, of course, included the SDGs into our thinking, particularly for our world target, and we are we are taking up or we are targeting 3 global challenges, climate, water and production and consumptions. In our world targets. Peter has already talked about our internal cyber targets, which focus around learning, safety and well-being, inclusion, and inspiration. And we have taken 3 KPIs, which I believe are important value drivers for this company for our financial targets, which are top line profitability and capital returns.
So these targets will be our light houses for the next 3 years. We will regularly follow-up on them and track executions towards them. And we are confident that while they are ambitious, they are attainable, and we will closely track the performance against them. Now I guess you're also interested in more detail on the financial targets. So I'll I'll zoom in into that a little bit more.
Not a big surprise, I think. But so this is financially what will hold ourselves accountable for. And what I would like to, for you to keep in mind, as you look at these, and I'm sure you'll challenge us on these, is 3 things really. One is over the past 2 decades, we have a contributor. We have driven profitability to very, very high levels.
So 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. So why do I say that? Because, obviously, it's obvious, but 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. But on the other hand, we've also, as Peter alluded to, have done a lot of soul searching and reflection on the things that didn't go that well. And we are not satisfied with the top line growth that we have been delivering in the past couple of years. So 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 a maybe a slight difference from the past in the XLT. We have actually very much taking a market and customer lens when we came up with both the strategy but also the financial targets. So we've contacted various analysis, very detailed analysis over the course of 6 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 profit profitability, our product profitability, cost potentials, resource allocation.
So why am I saying that? Because that means that we have actually done a lot of detailed work to come up with the assumptions that then live behind these targets. And we have, in particular, included a market and external perspective in them. And 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. And that is, of course, in an effort to ensure that we'll deliver what we promise.
So overall summing up, 3 financial targets. On organic sales growth, EBIT margin and return on capital invested will deliver a quite significant set up on a very strong baseline with these targets. And this would lead me into what I believe is actually the most crucial thing for the next 12 months, and that is execution. Now you've seen that slide before, as Peter and Thomas talked about it, they talked more about the reinvesting areas, I will focus more on the efficiency program and the execution. So we are embarking on an efficiency program.
It's quite a sizable program. We actually addressed it with quite some urgency. So we intend to see the savings already early in 2020. The whole organization will be in scope, but if you, for your models, you know, want to have a little bit of an indication, we'll go for around about 1 third of, back office and administrative processes. We'll go for 1 third COGS and operations, and we'll go for 1 third processes in how we go to market.
So 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 in our manufacturing, we will take adjustments to the organization into account where we need that and where it's unnecessary and try to delay. But last but not least, we'll also invest even more into automatization 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. And 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. Then last point is on execution.
Now this is quite a sizable program actually that we are embarking on. It's quite complex. Therefore, 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 milestone 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 portfolio. Now with this, I would like to sum it up in 5 key messages.
We are well positioned to accelerate our innovation driven growth Our solid financial track record will continue. The key focus now is in execution of the rebalancing We are increasing the focus on free cash regeneration with an aim of above 20% by 2022. And we have a clear capital structure in place and strong commitment to return to our shareholders. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Prisca. I think we might, now speak in the 3 groups. And this is a little bit of logistical exercise. You have your name tags. There is one number code, and there's 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 3 groups. You with and number 1 on your card. You will follow me. We're going to another room.
Number 2, you follow Carl stands up there in the corner. And you with group number 3, you stay here. Those of you who have no number, you stay here. Because those also exist. Then, we run Q and As for 3, not for 3 hours, but for 1 hour in 3 groups.
There will be 2 EVPs executives in each group, and they will circle around. You would have plenty of time to ask questions. So you with group number 1 now, follow me, you with group number 2, follow call. And group number 3 and no numbers. Stay here.
Thank you.