Hello! Welcome, everyone. What a crowd. It's great to see you all, and both for those who are here in the room and those who are following us on the webcast. This is a very big day for us. It's the first Capital Markets Day for Novonesis. We have roughly 200 people here in the room, so we're excited to see you all. And we're grateful that you're taking your time to be with us today. I will spend a few seconds on just the agenda and the message we want to convey here today. Our intention is threefold. First of all, we want you to get to know Novonesis's management team. Secondly, we want you to learn more about who we are, who is Novonesis.
And thirdly, we want you to understand how we capture and how we accelerate growth even further. This is the management team, and you've likely met them before, or you've seen them before, because they're both from Novozymes and Chr. Hansen's legacy companies. They'll be present all day, so you have time to ask questions and chat with them during the full day. The agenda for today, you've seen it before. It's a full journey through the value chain of Novonesis. The full management team will be present on stage and present their respective areas of expertise at 5:30 we would go upstairs we will have a cocktail event and each either upstairs in the restaurant or it's upstairs on the rooftop terrace and that depends on the British weather but as of right now it looks okay.
So hopefully it works out to be on the rooftop terrace. The event is webcasted, but it's only for you here to ask questions. We don't have that opportunity, so you can ask questions here in the room. With this, I think I'm done, and I will leave the word to Ester, our CEO. Please, Ester.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tobias. Welcome to all of you. Welcome to the ones that you're here in person, and also welcome for the ones that you're joining us, and you're joining us virtually. I've been so much looking forward for this day. This is a good day. This is a day of pride. This is a day where we will share with you how we feel about Novonesis. Here is the day that we will share with you on how we are on the path to deliver on our promises, and how we are starting the era of Biosolutions.
Novonesis is a unique company, a company that has created by the combination of two extraordinary companies, that together they become even better, even stronger, even better equipped to develop the answers of today and the answers of the future.
Even better equipped to drive value for our customers, even better equipped to generate sustainable growing earnings for our shareholders. We are on a very good place. We are well on track, on our delivering on our guidance, on our commitment that we made on 6%-8% growth CAGR to 2025. We're well on track, and we're recommitting on our ambition to accelerate growth after that. The updated guidance that you saw yesterday, it was Tobias? Yesterday. Feels like many long hours these days.
Yesterday, for the upgraded guidance for this year on both upgraded on EBITDA and also the expectation that we're gonna finish on the high end of our revenue guidance for 2024, this is another good point showing comfort, showing we are on our good place, on a really good path to deliver on our promises. During today, you will hear from the team how and why. During the day, you will hear from the team why we're ready to make this happen. I would like to maybe start with you showing why the era of biosolutions is exciting, and how we're already part of your lives. Either directly or indirectly, we are today already present in your life. Maybe you don't see us, maybe you don't feel us, but we're here taking care of you.
If you look at the little tiny, there, dots from this house, you see how biosolutions are already present in your life, how we are enablers of the goods that you consume, how we making those solutions more sustainable, more efficient, biodegradable, how we making them better for you. We're present in more than 30 different industries, from the yogurt that you eat, to the recycled paper that you write in, to the fuel that you fill up your car, to the probiotics that you take. We are a crucial component of all the goods that you consume, at the same time, a tiny component of the final cost. And there is maybe... Let me give you a couple of examples of what does this mean.
4 billion people already use detergents today with our solutions, either on washing their clothes or on cleaning the plates. In the yogurt and in the bread that you all eat, there's more than 50% chances that we are there, enabling better texture, better taste, life extension. If you live in North America or in Brazil, there's an extraordinary high likelihood that when you go into a car that gasoline has a component, biofuel, enabled with our solutions. Biosolutions enable sustainable agriculture. They turn those agriculture needs on those agriculture goods into value-added nutrients, from healthier chickens to plant-based foods, biosolutions enable a clean label, food preservation, and healthy nutrients. We are already present today in your daily lives, and we will become even more in the future.
When we look ahead, and we look at the fundamental biodiversity that we see, we see the supporting need for biosolutions. A wider use of biosolutions can meet and provide the answers of many of the humanity challenges that we're facing today. Biosolutions will be a stronger enabler of those answers. The material use that we are consuming today has increased more than 3 times over the last 5 decades, and it's continued to grow 2.3% every year. Today, we are collectively using the resources 1.8 times faster than the Earth can regenerate. When you add to that a growing population, we're going to be 10 billion people by 2050, becomes even wider.
Fulfilling this growing demand, coupled with a growing population, coupled with increasing nutritional needs, coupled with more energy needs, it cannot be fulfilled with only the answers of the past. We need more. We need more answers. And biosolutions, they're going to be in a stronger part of those answers of the future. For all of these challenges, for each of them, there is a biosolutions. Only if today we would implement, we would commercialize to its full potential, the biosolutions that they already exist today, we would reduce the CO2 emissions by 8%. That's the same.
That's the equivalent amount of CO2 emissions that the whole Europe produces and emits. Biosolutions will play a stronger role on enabling those answers of the future. They will play a stronger role on enabling the society needs, while at the same time, staying within the Earth system boundaries.
We will do that by unlocking low carbon, regenerative, circular, and healthy products. Maybe you wonder, "Okay, that sounds very nice, but why is this going to happen now?" Well, we live in a pivotal moment at this moment, a moment of inflection, a moment of whether technology, advanced analytics, technology advancements, they make that those answers of the future, they are available, they are affordable, they are ready today. A moment that we see also a pull, a pull from governments, a pull from society, a pull from geopolitical strategies supporting domestic industries, a pull from regulatory bodies considering the impact on how products are being produced and the impact of those products over on the society. Also, a pull from an increasing funding going into biosolutions. The demand for biosolutions has only one way: up.
It's growing because there is an increasing demand for healthier lives, there is an increasing demand for a healthier planet. And also at the same time, it's not only about healthier lives and healthier planet, it's also with energy savings, with savings on energy costs, it saves on efficiency. So we continue, clearly, clearly see the potential ahead of us. But if we add numbers into this potential, maybe that's a little bit how it looks like. 60% of the whole physical products, of the whole today economy, 60% of those products could, in principle, be produced through biology.
It's only a matter of time, but that's the way we're going. The technology is ready to do so. Biosolutions will be a stronger enabler of those products. It will be a stronger enabler of the foods that we eat, and a stronger alternative to the fossil-based goods.
If we take as a reference, the chemical and a specialty chemical and ingredients market, this is a market that has been built over centuries. It's a market that covers solutions from agricultural, agrochemicals, consumer goods, high-end ingredients. It's valued at $1 trillion, and it grows more or less at the level of GDP. Well, biosolutions, they help us to reduce the dependence of fossils, the dependence of the solutions of the past. Biodegradable solutions that will replace and replace agrochemical, increase the yields, energy efficiencies, and provide sustainable and healthy nutrients for the consumers, and enable plastics to be recycled. Today, we look an addressable market of EUR 20 billion. That market has high margins, that market grows fast, and that market will continue to grow faster than GDP.
As we further penetrate within our innovative solutions, with our bio-based solutions, we expand the relevant biosolutions market for Novonesis, and we eating our share firmly, swiftly, one step into the EUR 1 trillion specialty and ingredients market. The bioeconomy is expected to grow by a factor of seven times within the next two decades, and we, Novonesis, we are extremely well positioned on making this happen. We are uniquely placed to back that change, because we have all the fundamental drivers that you need. Our business is split between 50%, human, food and human health, and 50% planetary health. That split, it gives us resilience. It gives us the capability to adapt, but it will most probably continue to be a very volatile world.
We address the customer and the consumer needs through highly specialized fermented solutions. We master biotechnology as a pure play. We are a pure play biological powerhouse, and we're not going to venture into any other type of an ingredients. During today's presentation, you will hear more about the strength of our portfolio, about the opportunities ahead of us, and how with now being together, how with now, with our broad and leverageable pure play biological portfolio, how now we are even better equipped to develop those answers of the fu ture and the answers of today.
Jacob, Amy, Tina will go deeper and share with you in, for the individual commercial areas, examples on how we play with our customers, how we co-create, and how we're now even better equipped to develop value-added solutions for our customers. Our technology and our solutions are agnostic.
They're based on biology, and they are agnostic of the final application. They are scalable, and they are leverageable across multiple different markets. They're also complementary, and when we co-create and design them simultaneously and together, they also boost effects. This, exactly this fact, the fact that we are a pure biological players, that allows us to be focused, to de-risk, to have an efficient use of the investments in R&D, the investments in operation. And Claus and Anders are going to talk later about why and how. More examples and more meat of why being a biotech powerhouse gives us competitive and operational benefits. It's not only that we have a unique capabilities, it's also that we leverage across a broad range of segments, and that becomes every time being better.
And by combining these two extraordinary companies, we have just created an even stronger one. We have just created an even stronger biotech powerhouse. We have access to a world-leading proprietary library of strains, 100,000 strains, that allows us for speed, for higher impact, and to develop better solutions for the market. We combine the front-end, customer business with a state-of-the-art innovation. We bring artificial intelligence, we bring advanced analytics, and we have a unique capability to bring those solutions to scale. We have unmatched economics of scale across everything you need to win in biosolutions. The combination of the diverse market reach, more than 30 different markets, the world-class products, the R&D, the capabilities, the production areas, put that together. That makes us very unique.
We have everything you need to master the path to connect market to value-added solutions, and we are extremely good at each of these steps. You will hear more about this today. It's important to remember that we're not starting from scratch. We're not starting from scratch. This is, this is who we are. This is our joint company. This is our heritage. We have been more than 100 years of legacy, each building strong capabilities. We are in an extraordinary good place, in a place of comfort, in a place with a backbone, and the strong legacy for both companies makes us an even stronger foundation. We knew this was a good match, but, man, we see it. We see it every day, and it... We see how one plus one can and will become more than just two.
We have a technology where it's second to none, and combining this with the commercial insights, we're better for our customers. And Henrik will talk about how good we're doing, not only in the cost synergies, but also how solidly we're forming the foundation of amazing growth synergies, and we are creating the foundation of a really, really special company. And all this, it's underpinned with a firm commitment of the Triple Bottom Line. Rainer, Morten will talk more about this. You will see that since 2018, we have reduced our CO2 emissions 63%, and at the same time, we have increased revenue more than 20%. We have increased our diversity. We have provided ESG capabilities to our customers.
We're showing that it's possible to do both, that growth, profitable, sustainable growth and sustainability, they not compete. Actually, it's the way that you deliver long-term shareholder value creation when you combine the two of them. We are in a journey of a strong prioritization. We have been doing in the past. We will continue to be doing that. There's plenty of opportunities. That's, that's not our problem. Prioritization will continue to be our area of focus. We'll continue to prioritize and choose where we invest and grow. We will invest where it matters, we will invest what generates the highest returns, and we will invest where it generates the highest capture value creation for Novonesis . Prioritization is not only what we will do, it's also what we will do less. We will not shy away from closing projects.
We will not shy away from tempering and sunsetting efforts if it's not the right time, if the market conditions have changed, or if the environment is not the one that we came in. We will continue to use prioritization as the way that we work, and we define whom we are. We are recommitting to our growth expectations of 6-8 growth to 2025, and we are recommitting to our ambition to further accelerate growth after that. We see continuity on those growth drivers, that they have put the foundation of these amazing companies. The drivers of growth we will have, first, grow with market, continue to grow with the markets that we present, and at the same time, at the right price, being pricing a sustainable and continuous driver of growth.
And we see this component of market and pricing as an enabler of 3%-4% growth from these factors till 2025. Penetration will be also a driver of growth, with expectation to contribute around 1% till 2025, and then, being stronger together, being now a bolder company, being now even with more application centers, with a broader global reach, also a stronger driver of growth in the future. Adjacents and upselling are and will continue to be a driver of growth, and that comes through the cross-fertilization of existing solutions. That comes with the innovation and the, and the broader toolbox that we have. And we're expecting, in adjacencies and upselling to be 2%-3% contributor of growth.
So fundamentally, we grow, we drive accelerated growth by growing with market, by price, and by delivering value to our customers from innovation, from our broad portfolio, and therefore, that's how we increase our share of the wallet. We make the market, we grow, we ground the rules, we break the rule, the ground. That's what enabling us to grow the underlying markets. The explorative opportunities, such as plastic or carbon capture, that's not part, that's not expected to contribute in the near term. So all together, we are in a very good place to deliver on the 6-8 growth until 2025, and as the growth synergies materialize, that will drive the accelerated growth after that. And additionally, add the potential for explorative growth opportunities. That's a further upside, that it will come at the...
Not in the near term, but we will start materialize, making an even stronger parameters on our growth algorithm. We are in a very good place. We feel really, really good. Maybe to summarize, maybe that will be the way of summarizing on what you're gonna go through today. This is a strong biotech powerhouse, the one that we have created. Today, you will see from the team, the foundation on why we are the company who's starting the era of biosolutions. You will hear more why the world needs more biosolutions. You will hear more about the breadth of biosolutions, that we have them readily available. You will hear more that we have the structure, we have the platform, we have the insights, you have the R&D, you have the capabilities.
During these last, a little bit less than five months, I spent time with colleagues, I spent time with customers around the world, I spent time with stakeholders around the world, and I feel that excitement. I feel that inflection point. I feel the pull that they wanna be part of this journey, and that's why I'm inviting you to be with us in this journey. Hear it from the team, from all of us, and before I'll pass the word to Morten, who's going to guide you on how we're bettering our world with biology. Thank you.
Well, good day, everyone, and wrap up here to round off the presentation. I hope with this presentation that I've given you a good understanding and confidence that there is such a unique match between consumer and producer, food and beverage trends, and what we have in our food and beverage biosolutions toolbox. We have a differentiated business model with an in-depth application know-how, strong customer relations. We have a track record of commercial execution, and just in front of us is a wealth of great opportunities. We're ready to execute, to drive substantially higher growth than the underlying markets, both in core and adjacencies. The complementarity of our portfolios that we have put together provides an even stronger value proposition to customers, and we know it's gonna facilitate an accelerated growth for Novonesis.
I hope that you, as consumers and investors, will join us on that exciting journey. Thank you. Amy?
Super. Thanks, Morten. So as we move into this next section of the presentation, we are focused almost entirely on the third United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, with which Morten showed earlier, which is good health and well-being. The focus of our Human Health Biosolutions business is to support better health, wellness, and nutrition for people around the world. And we do that across all elements and timeline throughout the life cycle and all stages of life. So we start with infant and children, where we bring the composition of infant nutrition closer to that of mother's milk with our ingredients. We're able to bring supplementation that helps the development and healthy development of brain health through intestinal health at early stages of life.
In adulthood, we continue on that journey, bringing specific health solutions to target specific health outcomes and challenges. So think about, again, gastrointestinal health, think about immune health and development, but also getting more precise and specific around oral health, women's health, and even through the impact of the gut-brain axis, impacting mood, sleep, and stress management. We also bring solutions for preventative healthcare, where we start to target whether it's specific solutions for medical nutrition, for specific needs, or even the ability through probiotics to remove harmful substances from the body, and I'll speak more about that later. The role which biosolutions can play to impact health and wellness is still evolving, and the potential increases every year.
As humans, we're made up of trillions of microbes, and that makes up our microbiome, and the understanding of how that microbiome impacts our health and wellness is increasing year after year. We've been accelerating over the past decades, and if you look only 20 years ago, you would have maybe a handful, 20 studies being published every year on this role and the impact of the microbiome to influence health. We're now publishing more than 1,600 a year as an industry. So this is a real acceleration, and every year we learn more about the potential to impact health and wellness. This impacts us in many different ways.
I referred to some earlier, so women's health, gut health, immune health, oral health, but the increasing understanding as well of the gut-brain axis, where you realize that microbes in our stomachs impact the way our brain functions, the way our cognitive development, our cognitive capabilities, as well as our ability to influence stress, mood, and sleep. So this increasing understanding is a key enabler for us to understand the potential of biosolutions. And obviously, as that scientific understanding grows, the market potential grows along with it. In addition to that science-driving growth, there's also a lot of key macro trends and drivers, which are driving growth in the market. Our human health business is composed roughly 75% of dietary supplements.
So this is both in the form of ingredients sold to customers to formulate with and also in finished format, dietary supplements themselves. The remaining 25% of our advanced health and nutrition business, it's smaller today, but this is one of the big growth drivers that we see going forward. The primary focus of that today is on infant, so it's our HMO business and our probiotics business, which complements ingredients into infant and children's formula. But we also see the potential to apply precision fermentation, particularly in this area, as a key growth driver for Novonesis going forward, and I'll come back and speak beyond the impact of that beyond just this infant and children's space.
There's also these macro trends of just, and I'm sure everyone can relate to that themselves, this increasing consumer awareness about the importance of health and wellness. Along with that, a willingness to pay for solutions, for preventative health and wellness, being more proactive, and an increasing awareness of the connectivity between what we eat, the environment that we live in, and the health and wellness that we experience. So these strong macro trends are really the key drivers, along with the development of the science, of the growth that we see, for these potential. So if we look, starting at the beginning at the dietary supplements and vitamins, the very broad market, here, you see that actually growing quite attractively at around a 5% growth globally.
If we then narrow in to the probiotic supplements market itself, that is growing even more advantaged at about 7% a year. Maybe what's interesting, particularly about the conscious choices that we've made around our portfolio, is that we've consciously chosen to target specific health areas which demonstrate higher than market average growth. So you see that here in terms of our focus on infants and children, our focus on mental health and wellbeing, women's health, immune health, all of these are markets where we actually see higher than market growth. And this is where we bring solutions today to the market, but it's also where we're focusing our pipeline and future development.
So the breadth of this Novonesis portfolio is unique, both in terms of the novelty of solutions, but also, as I just said, the focus and the different health categories which we participate in. And maybe let me walk you through a little bit more in terms of the solutions that we bring today. So in this chart, you see down the left-hand side, the various solutions that we have in our portfolio today, and across the top, the various health categories that those are relevant in.
So if we start first with our probiotics product offering, we have an extremely broad range of probiotic offering, which is critical because it allows our customers to formulate with us, to bring novel solutions, differentiated solutions, to the market to target different types of health outcomes. We have within this scientifically documented patented strains, which we call our patented science strains, and these are the ones which help our customers to develop claims, marketing claims, scientific claims, to really be able to differentiate on the market. We also have broader, less strain-specific documentation around our powered strains. The importance of this is that it's a full portfolio that really allows our customers to work with us, to formulate, to create different combinations for a specific market focus and differentiated outcome on the market.
Within these, you see the various sort of hearts across the top of where we play, some where we have real leadership positions, some which are more emerging. The interesting is that we have some strains which are very broadly documented to bring a wide range of health benefits, which has been clinically proven across a number of different health outcomes, general health and wellness. We also have some which are very specific to a specific mode of action, which allows a really targeted approach, which is differentiating on the market.
If we go to spores and postbiotics, those are interesting because they are easier to formulate with, they're more stable to formulate with, and they allow customers to bring probiotic solutions into a broader array of different products. So that could be in the form of gummies instead of a traditional capsule probiotic.
It could also be, as Jacob referred to earlier, into functional foods and beverages. Synbiotics is a very interesting emerging space where we look at combining prebiotics and postbiotics to bring together both. Think about this as saying you bring the microbe with the desired impact, but you also bring with it the food which it needs in order to thrive. So you create a complementarity across a combined solution, which actually enables to increase efficacy of the solution. And then, of course, we're leveraging our knowledge in enzymes to make sure that we're bringing enzymatic solutions as well into the human health space. This could be digestive enzymes, it could also be we have targeted enzymes for oral care and fresh breath.
I think actually in the bag that you received this morning, you have an example of some of those enzymatic solutions for fresh breath. Then, of course, our human milk oligosaccharides, which I'll come back to later, but bringing infant formula closer to mother's milk, and our newest investment area, precision fermentation, for advanced proteins and advanced health and nutrition, which I'll come back to in more detail later. So this breadth of solution portfolio is incredibly relevant and unique, but what really different, and where really we lead our conversations with our customers, is the science that backs it and supports the claims that we make.
So every conversation that we have with a customer starts first with science, and our sales teams are joint teams with salespeople who build relationships and can open up opportunities, supported by scientific advisors who bring the robustness of the understanding of the science to be able to be a true partner in the development of solutions with our customers. We have, and this is specific to Novonesis, we have published 250 clinical studies, and we have performed a number of real-world and consumer studies involving more than 227,000 consumers around the world. And it's that science that's been generated by that investment, which forms the basis of our sales activities. Let me give you a few examples to bring it to life, so some of the findings that we have from those clinicals and scientific studies.
So our BB-12 strain is, our probiotic strain, is the most clinically documented Bifidobacterium strain in the world. It has been demonstrated to have a broad range of health benefits, from gastrointestinal to infant health, to cardiometabolic health and brain development. Our UREX product is a probiotic that has been proven to reduce yeast overgrowth in women's vaginal flora by over 73%. Maybe of particular interest to the audience in the room here today, our ProbioBrain strain has been proven to work via the gut-brain axis to reduce the cortisol response, output in response to stress. So reducing stress and allowing better mood, stress management, and sleep.
And you actually do have another example in your goodie bag of that one, which is actually in a chocolate format, so as Jacob referred to earlier, and that one piece of chocolate actually contains a daily clinical dose of ProbioBrain. I forgot to mention it, also in the bag, you actually have a combination, a probiotic, a one-month supply of LGG and BB-12, our two most clinically documented strains, which have been formulated for general gut health and wellness.
And then, of course, our 5-HMO mix, which has been clinically studied to show the benefit, that it beneficially modulates the bowel movements of infants, shifting the behavior of infant formula, formula-fed infants closer to that of breastfed infants. It's also been shown to increase the abundance of good bacteria in an infant's gut, and it actually reduces the abundance of opportunistic pathogens.
So this scientific evidence is absolutely key in our customer dialogues. It builds... It allows our customers to build scientific differentiation and to build marketing claims. And I hope the examples that I've given you, you know, give you a bit of a chance also as consumers, you know, to understand the relevance of, and the importance of the breadth of the portfolio that we're able to bring as Novonesis.... So we have this extremely strong and broad portfolio. It's backed by science, and we continue to invest in invest in the science to continue to support it. But there's one last link of the puzzle, which is exciting, as we create Novonesis, and that is how we work with our customers and the service we're able to provide our customers to actually make this product portfolio relevant.
This is really, this, this last puzzle piece is this end-to-end value chain that we bring together in the new combined Novonesis business. When we go to customers, we start with these consumer and scientific insights. We engage our in-house scientific advisors, who interact with our customers every day to figure out the, the types of products that they want to bring to market. We then leverage our Novonesis world-class R&D, upscaling, and fermentation capabilities, which are important not only to guarantee this existence of this portfolio and the, and the pipeline, but it also is what differentiates and enables us to deliver cost competitiveness, quality, and reliability of supply. We then work with our customers on these customized formulations, and this is not as simple as just A plus B.
This is really about also providing the product development capabilities, stability assurance and testing, regulatory capabilities, quality assurance and quality capabilities, and the development of marketing claims. And then we actually have the in-house capabilities to manufacture finished formats. So this is actually manufacturing dietary supplements into a capsule in a box, ready to sell. And that allows us to act as a true turnkey partner to our customers, accompanying them everywhere from development of a concept all the way through to a sellable product with the marketing claims that go along with it.
And while our B2B sales form the bulk of our business, we also have complementary positions in a direct-to-healthcare practitioner channel in the United States and also a direct-to-consumer brand. And our presence in these complementary channels is important because it increases our understanding of consumer needs.
It allows us to test the efficacy of claims. It allows us to target our innovation pipeline. It allows us to optimize the design of our clinical trials to make sure that the trials that we're running are actually able to deliver a sellable claim and something which is meaningful for our customers at the end of the day. So these channels essentially are able to make us closer to the consumer, and as a result, a better partner for our customers. So we have all the pieces of the puzzle, but maybe you're sitting there and asking: "Okay, so, so what do customers think? I mean, do they see it?
Are they excited about it?" And maybe the best way to share that experience is just to share some of the early wins and the traction that we have with our customers as we've spoken to them over the last four and a half months. So we had about two months after day one, we had our first really big customer win, and it's exciting across a number of different reasons. You know, first and foremost, it was a new customer, which is new to Novonesis and hadn't been a customer of either of the legacy companies. But we won that customer for two reasons. It was the power and the breadth of the combined product portfolio, and the second reason was the ability to leverage this fully integrated end-to-end value chain, which I spoke about earlier.
So this customer came to us with a concept, and it was actually for a multi-health claim product that they really wanted to be able to position, so with multiple claims on the market. And based on their understanding of the legacy portfolios, they had assumed that they'd only be able to buy a part of the ingredients from Novonesis, and that they would have to do the formulation and the rest of the work on their own. So that's where the conversation started.
It was really fun to see how sales teams and scientific advisory teams from both legacy companies came together and very quickly were able to identify that we actually had the full product range if we combined products from both legacy companies to be able to meet the full need and the target concept that they were trying to develop.
Then, that kind of threw the customer for a bit of a turn because it was a very different development angle than what they had been assuming they were running on. And we were able to, through our customization engine, actually do the full turnkey from concept to finished format and formulation, and get approval to start the production of that within two weeks. So really seeing the teams come together, to be able to leverage all of those different pieces of the puzzle, that I spoke to earlier. And that product is now in scale-up, in production, and will be launched later this year. I wish I could share the name, but we're not allowed to. We're also in the process of developing our first cross-channel synergies, where we're actually launching new product on through this customization engine, into...
These are typically legacy. One of them is the legacy Chr. Hansen, a women's health range of probiotics, which has been formulated and will be launched through the direct-to-healthcare practitioner and then direct-to-consumer channels later this year. So it's truly exciting as we engage with customers. We feel the relevance, we feel the pull, and we see the value not only of the product offering that we're bringing, but also of the service proposition. I've spoken a lot to the core of our existing business focused on dietary supplements.
So let me shift to the smaller but quickly growing business of advanced health and nutrition. One of our most unique and differentiated opportunities for our human health business is to bring the full expertise of the combined Novonesis capabilities to precision fermentation, targeting health and nutrition applications. This is all about leveraging the Novonesis biosolutions toolbox.
Claus will speak later about how uniquely positioned we are to understand the range of precision fermentation, from scientific discovery to scale-up, industrialization, and commercialization. When we apply this toolbox to advanced health and nutrition, we do this looking both to create nature-identical ingredients. So think here about HMOs. So something which exists in nature, but in either small quantities or maybe not easily accessible to isolate, and we are able to scale that up and bring it to market. We're also developing novel ingredients where we target specific health outcomes, which are maybe more targeted or more scalable than what exists in nature. And here, for an example, in medical nutrition, you may look at modifying a protein substrate to be able to bring to market.
Starting with the first bucket of taste and texture, we're of course very pleased to have started up our new facility and realizing our first commercial sales from our advanced protein facility in Blair, Nebraska, this year. And this is where we are bringing novel ingredients for taste and texture. It particularly focused on plant-based markets. Of course, since we made this investment, the development of the plant-based market has slowed over the past 2-3 years, but we continue to see demand and the underlying drivers of growth for this area. Consumers continue to look for a variety of protein sources in their diet. They also continue to look for protein sources to reduce the environmental impact of food production, which becomes even more relevant in a growing population.
And of course, with plant-based meat penetration still less than 1% of global meat consumption, the ability to grow is significant. We see within this market, while the market has slowed the development, we see customers with superior eating solutions, Jacob referred to that earlier as well, continuing to win. So it's the customers with cleaner label, better taste, better texture, they continue to win, and that's where we play. In the area of medical nutrition, we are working to design novel proteins to meet dietary restrictions associated with specific medical conditions, which is working not only to satisfy the basic nutritional needs and protein profile, but also to provide good sensorial to improve quality of life. And in infant nutrition, we're developing a pipeline of nature-identical proteins to further enhance early life nutrition.
So we include our HMO business here, where we have the opportunity to apply the Novonesis precision fermentation toolbox to increase productivity, scale, and accelerate the commercialization of our HMO product range. In many cases in this area, and Ester mentioned it earlier, where the regulatory pathways are often long, they're often unclear, so it makes it quite challenging to predict how this will scale up with accuracy. But we're also committed to act as a leader in this space, to invest and partner to develop those regulatory frameworks, which will unlock the true growth potential of precision fermentation in health and nutrition. So let me just quickly do a, a bit of a deep dive onto the HMO area where we... I know we've had a lot of questions.
So human milk oligosaccharides form 30% of mother's milk, and they play an important role in the development of infants' immune systems, digestive systems, brain, and of course, developing a healthy microbiome. Companies in the infant formula space are constantly looking for ways to bridge and close the nutritional gap between infant formula and mother's milk. And one of the most significant differences in the composition is the presence or not of HMOs. Novonesis is one of the clear leaders in the space, with our—we have five HMOs commercially on the market today, and this represents about 30% of the natural concentration of HMOs. And what's also interesting scientifically is that those five HMOs have complementary health benefits. So it's really bringing those blends, has a much higher health benefit and outcome than any one single molecule.
The growth potential remains significantly. So only about 10% of infant formula globally contains even a single HMO, and often in quite low quantities, and less than 5% contain a more sophisticated blend with advanced health benefits. So the market potential, when you look at a EUR 50 billion infant formula market, is large. As we bring HMOs into Novonesis, it gives us an opportunity, as I referred, to apply that biosolutions toolbox. And two of the key constraints, which have slowed the penetration of HMOs so far, have been regulatory approvals, which I referred to earlier, particularly for HMOs in China, which is one of the world's largest and also one of the world's most premium markets for infant formula, and the availability of efficiently scaled, cost-effective manufacturing.
Our 5-HMO mix is already approved in Europe and North America, and we've made really good advancements recently on the Chinese approvals, and we fully expect to have our first approval for the first HMO by the end of this year in China. Then we are also actively assessing opportunities to further expand our manufacturing capacity and leverage our global network to ensure we're prepared to meet the growing demand. So if we look up a little bit beyond the markets and the products and the potential that we see within line of sight, and we allow ourselves to dream just a little bit, we see that if biosolutions for mental health were able to reach just 10% of people in the world who experience stress regularly, we would help 350 million people experience improved wellness.
If half of global infant formula were to contain HMOs, you would see a tenfold increase in the market size, and more than 35 million infants a year would benefit from nutrition closer to the way nature intended it. And if just 0.1% of global healthcare spend were redirected towards preventative solutions to increase health and wellness, you would see an increase of about a EUR 10 billion new addressable market. So as Novonesis , we have all the tools and the capabilities to unlock at least a fraction of this potential. So we have the breadth and the scientific foundation of our portfolio. We have this end-to-end value chain, and we're uniquely positioned within precision fermentation to move from R&D to scale-up to industrialization and commercialization.
We're committed in the space to build the regulatory pathways for growth and to continue to invest in science and capabilities to unlock the potential for biosolutions. We will grow by bringing new biosolutions to improve health, wellness, and nutrition to people around the world. With that, I'll ask Tina to come up and speak about planetary health.
So thank you so much, Amy and Jacob, and now you have shared all the things Novonesis is doing for healthy people, and I look so much forward to taking you into the world of a healthy planet instead. Because the world needs sustainable solutions, there is a high demand in order to secure that the world becomes more sustainable. Customers are asking for higher yield, higher performance, more, more, more benefits, but lower sustainability impacts. So that's why customers, more than ever, are looking for us at Novonesis in order to help them drive their performance and drive their or support their differentiation. And the way we do it is by the unmatched innovation, as Claus will talk about later today.
It is by close customer interactions, and then it is by addressing new markets, and that together is enabling us to outgrow the underlying markets. But let me share a bit more about where it is our solutions are and how it functions. So we are greening solutions across farms, factories, and homes, but let me make it a bit more specific so that you can follow what it is I'm talking about. So in a farm, for example, we can replace a pesticide with a biocontrol product, or we, for example, can support a farmer make a healthy chicken, but utilizing less corn and thereby increase the yield. So a 5% increase in animal production equals to taking 2 million cars off the road each year. And in factories, this is large industrial processes.
They are looking for yield, higher throughput, and so forth, but they are also looking for less use of water. So in the textile, leather, and pulp and paper industries, we every year help our customers save, save 85,000 cubic meters of water. You might ask, how much is that? Well, that is, in fact, equaling to 35,000 Olympic pools. And in homes, in household care, we can support our customers to replace chemicals, but we can also support our customers at washing at a lower washing temperature. And just lowering the wash temperature from 40 degrees to 30 degrees, that is equaling to that what European, 600,000 European households are spending of energy every year. But you might ask, what is it these industries do have in common?
What they do have in common, these different sales areas, is that they are delivering efficiency, increased performance, and sustainability benefits. This is in the form of replacing chemicals, reducing CO2, reducing the amount of energy, or increasing yield. So it is as important as that and as simple as that. But let me go through each of these four areas one by one to give you a bit more detail, and I'll start out with the household care industry, which is 18% of the Novo Nordisk turnover. We are... Most of our turnover is coming from laundry, where we have a very strong presence, but we also have solid exposure to both dishwash as well as to cleaning operations.
The products, removing stains, improving the cleaning performance, they are delivering freshness and securing that textiles stay nice and fresh for a longer period of time. They are available in all kinds of formats so that they cater to all the various wash conditions which there are around the world, no matter what kind of challenges the customers are having or the consumers are having, or what kind of formats they want to apply their products in. There is a number of structural trends underlying this business. There is a growing population, not only in size, as we've talked about already, but also in wealth, and that is a strong driver behind this business. But it's not only that, because customers are also increasingly looking for lowering the amount of energy consumption, less water, and also less chemicals.
So all of these underlying markets growth or market trends are driving a solid underlying market growth of a couple of percentage points. If you look at how the volumes are distributed, there's roughly four times as much detergent volume in the emerging markets as there are in the developed market. At the same time, the enzyme inclusion rate is almost six times bigger in developed markets compared to emerging markets. So as the emerging markets industrialize, as they are more and more willing to pay for increased performance, increased convenience, and increased sustainability, the market, the opportunity is there. So on top of the underlying market growth, we are also able to grow via innovation and penetration. And penetration is gonna be the biggest contributor to our growth.
That is gonna come from the emerging markets, as I just talked about, but also from a global private label market. As Jacob has already talked about, and as has also been alluded to by Ester in one of the questions, pricing, share, and market growth is also part of what it is will contribute to the growth, and we have seen that already, and it's something which we expect to remain. On top of that, we can also bring new solution to existing customers, because you have to remember, just as in the food and beverage space, less than 5% of the ingredient cost comes typically from an enzyme in the area of household care, while at the same time, they do deliver lots of value.
In our innovation agenda, we focus a lot on increasing the claims, enable our customers to make more claims to their consumers, thereby supporting their differentiation. But at the same time, we also support them in contributing to reformulation of the full matrix. However, in order to be successful, you also need to understand the underlying customers. You need to understand what is it the customers need, what is it for application in which the detergent is being used, what is it for challenges the consumers are having? But let me give some few examples of how is it specifically we work with various customers. So, for example, we have a Middle Eastern customer, and he wanted to reformulate his detergent.
The reason for that was that he was using soda ash as a cleaning component, and that was in tight supply, so he wanted to remove away from that. So what we did was we worked with him, identified another filler for the detergent, and also designed an enzyme blend, which could help boost the performance and secure that the customers, and the, that the consumers would not be unhappy with the result. So we did perform as well as doing consumer test in order to prove that this was, in fact, working very nicely. So that's one of the examples of what we have done, because that was a success with one of the customers there. In Latin America, we did similar kind of activity. Here, the focus was on whiteness.
So the customer wanted to remove an optical brightener from his detergent, but he still was wanting to have an enhanced whiteness performance. So how do you do that? Well, we went in, we formulated a new enzyme blend together with him, and allowed for the removal of the optical brightener, and at the same time, also enhanced the sustainability profile of the detergent and at a lower cost. So as you can see from the Net Promoter Scores, our customers are appreciating what-- how it is we're working with them and what it is we're doing. So these two examples I just shared are examples of how we are greening the actual household care product, but we can also do other ways of greening the detergent industry or the household care industry.
We already talked about how it is we can support washing at lower temperatures, and that's one of the examples how you can green the use of the product. But ultimately, you can also completely reimagine the full detergent product so that you instead have a fully bio-derived and biodegradable product. And across the three different ways of greening the solution, it is something which our customers are looking for. One of the newest examples of supporting that journey is Lumina, which is a newly launched product, which is available globally, and it is fully biodegradable, and it is also working in combination with the freshness platform.
So I hope I, with this short intro to the household care industry, have showed how it is that we are well set in order to outgrow the underlying market, and how it is we are well set in order to keep that innovation journey, which we have been on so far. So now let's look at the other part of planetary health, which is agriculture, energy, and tech, and that consists of 36% of Novonesis's growth.... In agriculture, we have solutions both for animal health as well as plant health.
And these solutions support, replace chemicals, replace pesticides, replace antibiotics, or it can increase the yield on a field or in the animal production. On the energy side, we can, our solutions can replace, gasoline, as, at a lower CO2 footprint, because it becomes one of the component to be included in the fuel.
It can also be supporting biodiesel by and coming from vegetable oils, and then being blended into to the diesel pool. Technical industries is the smallest of the three parts of agriculture, energy, and tech, and it consists of many different industries. It can be textile production or grain processing, and in general, here, consumer or customers are looking for increased yield, increased throughput, and less waste, and at the same time, at strong sustainability. Also, here, we have a number of underlying fundamental trends.
We have a growing population, so for example, if you think about in agriculture, we need to secure that we do have more yield for each acre of land. There is also an increasing energy need in the world, and that has lately been coupled also with an increasing need for energy interdependence, independence it's called.
Also, in the industrial space, we are looking at replacing chemicals, and thereby improve sustainability output. So let me start by looking at the area of agriculture, and go a bit more into that area, because it is a very, very, very huge market. Ag markets and ag ingredients market is huge, and there is a low penetration of biological solutions or biosolutions in the agricultural field. We see higher growth in the area of biologics, and thereby, we are well set in order to participate in that growth in that underlying market. After the combination of the two companies, we are bringing together complementarity of our product portfolio. If you look at the animal space, we are well set, well diversified exposure across the various areas.
In the plant area, we are mostly exposed to corn and soy, and we are increasingly getting more exposure to other crops as well. That is the innovation focus we are having on secure a broader space of focus, and secure that we have more presence in the higher growth areas. This is all well and fine to have a strong product portfolio, but these products also need to reach the consumers, because if not, or the users of the products, because if not, it doesn't make any sense. There we also in, with the combination, are de-risking our market access, because we do have multiple complementary channels to the market. Let me give an example.
So we have a very strong asset, a very strong partnership with the DSM-Firmenich Alliance in the field of animal nutrition, and at the same time, we do have a direct sales force, which is selling probiotics to the market, giving us an understanding of what is it customers, consumers or customers needs, what is it that, How is it that we drive penetration, and how is it that, the market needs to secure that the products are being applied? So that combination of partnerships, as well as a direct sales channel, secure that we get the understanding, we get the penetration, but also we get the scale and reach, which is very important in that area. And this complementarity opens up for revenue synergies.
Let me give you two specific examples, one from the plant side and one from the animal side on this. First, on the plant side, we're looking at cross-selling of a Bacillus megaterium bacteria, and bringing it to market via the sales force, the direct sales force, which we have in the plant area in the U.S., in Brazil, and in India. This product is supporting the solubilization of phosphorus in the soil, and thereby securing a better nutrient uptake of the plant, and thereby, you get stronger plants, and you can complement the use of fertilizers. In the case of animal health, we are taking a probiotic, and bringing it to the market via the direct sales force, which we have in the U.S., and this is a product which is utilized in piglets.
So I hope I, with this short intro to agriculture, have shown how we are well-positioned to capitalize on the good momentum of the growing market. And now let's look at energy space, which is the biggest within agriculture, energy, and tech, and that is, in fact, three different markets. The biggest market is the starch-based ethanol market. The two others, biomass, which is ethanol coming from waste material, and biodiesel, are smaller markets. They are more in their infancy, but they will have higher growth rates. Let me go into each of the markets per geography in order to give a bit more flavor to what is happening globally here. So for example, in the U.S., there is roughly a 10% inclusion rate of ethanol into the gasoline mix.
That's driven by legislation, and there is discussions about inclusion of higher energy or higher ethanol blends into the energy mix here. In Latin America, in fact, cars today are driving either on 100% ethanol or 27% ethanol, so the use of ethanol in that geography is very significant. And if you look at corn-based ethanol is economically favored, and therefore, you see new plants are being built here. At the same time, also in this geography, biomass, so ethanol from waste material, is also gaining a lot of traction. In India, there is a 20% mandate of ethanol into the fuel, and there is a lot of starch available, and biomass is also starting to get traction in that geography. However, what is it that it takes in order to outgrow these underlying markets?
Well, it does take a lot of application understanding, because in this area, every customer is unique, and you need to understand the unique challenges that customer is having. You need to understand the setup that this customer is having, because typically, the plants, they're different. You also need to understand what is it that the customer is trying to achieve, and therefore, we are having the largest and the most sophisticated R&D and technical capability, who are capable of tailor-making solutions to each of these plants in order to drive improved performance and differentiation for them. And again, here, let me try and give you an example. So we have a customer who wants to, what we call, run very hard, and what that mean is that they want to run very speedy fermentations, so short time fermentations.
However, typically in summer, it becomes warm, and then they'll have to slow down their operations because the yeast can't survive in these circumstances. So we have been developing a new yeast solution for them, which is more robust and enabling them to run exactly as they want to run, also in summer times, without sacrificing any performance or any yields. And this combination of very strong technical understanding and very strong commercial understanding is appreciated by our customers, as you can see in the Net Promoter Score, and it has enabled us to help decouple the performance from the U.S. ethanol market, the underlying ethanol market. For sure, we do benefit when the U.S. ethanol market is doing great, and it will remain being a growth driver for us.
But compared to just 5 years back, where 100% of our turnover was linked to the traditional enzymes in the U.S. ethanol market, today, that is only 50% because we have decoupled. We have decoupled on the geographical expansion, as we just talked about at some of the former slides, but we have also decoupled on product and value stream diversification. Lastly, we have also diversified with biodiesel and biomass, getting a larger share of the mix. However, in order to understand all of that decoupling I'm talking about, let's take the ethanol production process a bit more flavor. So in comes some inputs. That can be corn-based starch, or it can be waste materials coming into an ethanol plant. Then you need some...
This is big molecules coming in, and you need to degrade that, to break that down into some components we call it into sugars. Enzymes are capable of doing that. But then when you have these sugars, you do need you need a yeast in order to ferment these sugars into ethanol. However, the output of an ethanol plant is not only ethanol, it is so much more than that. It is all these different components, and that is what I have been talking about when I've talked to corn cracking. And different customers are different.
Some want more of one component than the other, and you need to have the capabilities in order to keep innovating and deliver to what is it exactly that customer wants to have. Does you want more fiber ethanol or does you want more corn oil?
So this has been a key growth driver for us, and this will remain a key growth driver for us and will secure that we can keep outgrowing the underlying ethanol market. However, the journey doesn't end here, because if you look further ahead, more out in time, there is possibilities also for ethanol to upgrade or to get into upgraded feed with a higher protein value, to get into sustainable aviation fuel or into chemicals or maritime fuels. The International Energy Agency, they talk about that in the 2040-ish, so 15, 20 years out in time, the ethanol for road transport is gonna peak. However, after that, the share in sustainable aviation fuel, in aviation fuel and maritime fuels is still gonna increase.
So this is longer term, this is not for the near term, but this is a longer-term additional opportunity we are seeing in the area of ethanol. And I hope I also have shared with you how we, in the short term and medium term, also is seeing good opportunities with the geographical diversification, with the product and value stream, diversification, and then also the diversification into other areas.
So this is the reason why we are more positive on the ethanol field than we was just a few years ago, and that is what is strengthening our belief in that we will be able to keep outgrowing the underlying ethanol U.S. market. So now, last but not least, let's take a look at the technical industries, because technical processing is a wide range of different industries. What is typical for them is that it's large-scale operations.
So what customers are looking for here is yield, it is process optimization, it's less waste, it's less use of water, that we just talked about in the beginning, and then it is sustainability. And this is exactly where our toolbox is supporting their operations. But let me give a bit more examples, because I assume it can be a bit more fluffy, so it would be good with some examples. So, for example, if you take a vegetable oil, we can support customers with pretreatment of that vegetable oils. We can remove the gums, which is formed when you extract a vegetable oil and make it more difficult to process or secure that the final product is not so attractive.
We can also work with customers in order to support them separate various streams better, because when you run big operations like that, you want to have your different streams to have so high yield in each of these streams as possible, lower the amount of waste. We do that, for example, in starch processing, if you want to have a more clean and a higher yield of your gluten fraction. Last but not least, also, we can enhance the final product, which is being processed in these last operation. This can be in the textile processing, where it is enzymes can support garment look nice for a longer period of time. In general, this area is more mature, and we therefore invest less in R&D.
It is very valuable segment to us because they have a very nice return, and at the same time, it allows us to utilize our wide and diverse production footprint, which Anders will talk about later on. But as the others, I've also got the possibility to dream a bit. So what if enzymes for detergents, there, just 10% extra of the surfactants was moved over to a biosolution? That would double the market for enzymes for household care.
And what if we, in Europe, just implemented the same regulatory period as there are in the US? That would, in fact, triple the opportunity in the area of biocontrol products in Europe. And what if 15% of global aviation fuel were made based on ethanol, turned into a sustainable aviation fuel? That would double the ethanol markets as they are today.
So I hope I, with this, have shared my fascination for the field of a healthy planet, because customers are more than ever looking at Novonesis for performance boost, for differentiation, and for sustainable solutions. So what I want you to take away from this short session is that the trends are there, that the needs are there, and we are more than well-placed in order to outgrow these underlying markets, and we do that by unmatched innovation, by strong customer interactions and strong customer understanding and participation, and then by addressing new markets. So with that, thank you so much from the planetary health side.
Thank, thank you, Tina, and, thank you, Jacob and Amy as well. We have now time for Q&A, 15-20 minute Q&A. And, please raise your hand. One question. Lars? There's be a microphone coming.
Yeah, Lars Topholm from Carnegie. It goes to you, Tina. So I understand a lot of the value proposition, your customers get out of you, but I still don't completely understand the structure of your growth. So if, for example, you take your slide 66, where you have the various. It's where you mentioned 70% of revenue is 1 G, and, and then you have some from corn oil, et cetera. I mean, if you look at the U.S., we know quite precisely what the installed capacity is.
I wonder if you can put some comments on your penetration of that installed capacity within these various upselling elements, and also if you can put some words on if, if sales is 100 to someone who just takes the basic package, if that customer also wants to optimize the corn oil output, how much additional revenue do you derive from that?
Mm-hmm. So what I can share, Lars, is that in general, we have a very strong presence in the North American ethanol market, and that's because of very strong, I would say, technical service, technical presence. We've talked about that before. In a number of cases, our people are working so closely with the producers of ethanol that they can be in and operating their facilities. The exact nature of how it's split out, I cannot share, but what you can see is that in general, there is more and more value add from the various solutions. You can see that a ethanol as such is for sure a commodity, but it is also where you can, for example, get the corn oil out, which is used, for example, in renewable diesel.
You can enhance the feed component, which is the key element from some players. And then there's also the whole fiber-based ethanol, which is a new and more emerging area, which both have the value of ethanol as well as the value of, you could say, higher rent or enabling you to sell into a higher priced market. But the exact split, I unfortunately cannot give you.
But the concern, and now you know I'm a big fan, but the concern would, of course, be that some of the extraordinary growth rates we see now is a penetration journey, which inevitably has to come to a stop at some stage. So where are we, sort of on the S-curve? Are you accelerating? Are we near the peak, or how do you explain that?
So what I would say to that is that the ethanol industry is exactly being characterized, or the energy space is being characterized by that diversification. So it's diversification. 10 years back, we didn't have any yeast that we have now. 10 years back, we didn't have any solutions supporting the extraction of corn oil. We have that now. The same goes for fiber-based ethanol. And then also in the area of not only the U.S. ethanol, but the broader base, you have biomass, biodiesel, and the geographical expansion as well.
So what we are seeing is that we feel that we are more confident on the energy area than we was just three years ago, and we also see that we remain confident that we will be able to outgrow the U.S. ethanol market volumes. Also, given that you longer term see these opportunities in sustainable aviation fuel, materials, and so forth.
Thank you, Tina. I think over here, Georgina, a question for you. I think there's a mic coming. Thank you. Some teamwork. Thank you.
Hi, thank you for the presentations of the different divisions. Super interesting. If I think about the business models that we can see across all of the different divisions, is it fair to categorize it in kind of three separate ways? So one would be yield enhancement or that outsourcing from customers. One would be a product that's a bit more discretionary or nice to have, and then another category that would be a sustainable or petrochemical alternative. Is that fair, and how do you think about the pricing power between those three different types of products? And do you have different go-to-market strategies for those three different product groups?
I think, yeah-
Yeah, I can start. So if I look at planetary health, we have a contribution to price to roughly the same extent, across the various divisions and various areas. We have talked to that before as well. We talked to that household care came in a bit later than the others, but as we also talked about at Q1, it is, contributing to the growth as of now. So I would say the pricing power is, is across the board. I think that, if you think of where it is our solutions are needed, they are needed across the board, both on the food and health side, and you can talk to that later, but also across the categories. An underlying need for yield, for less waste, for replacing chemicals, and then also sustainability.
But I would say it's a few cases... It's typically when it goes hand in hand, both sustainability and good business, that is when it's really successful, and that is exactly what our portfolio is delivering.
Do you want to add?
Sure. Go ahead. I can add a little bit. Just to mean, I think, you know, I'm not sure I would go exactly those buckets, but the buckets we think about it are, you know, this 50% healthy people, 50% healthy planet, right? And, and how much of that is truly discretionary or not. I think we'd like, you know, if you look at the macro trends, I think it all becomes extremely relevant, you know, as you go forward. I think that the commonality across the value propositions is the activity, if I can use that word, of the ingredients that we sell. So whether it's for a yield enhancement or whether it's the actual in-health, it's the functional ingredient, you know, what we're selling is that either the catalytic or it is that active ingredient.
You said it, you know, what a small percentage of a finished format of food comes from the ingredients we sell, and yet it is the one, it is the ingredient that actually creates, whether in your case, taste, texture, you know, et cetera. So I think you really need to look at the pricing power across the value models as being relatively consistent in terms of it is that uniqueness of the biosolutions that we're selling, regardless of application.
And maybe just also, you know, we have three commercial areas that goes in depth with the various applications that we work in. We are experts of the fields we are in, and then we are blessed with the scale of a common manufacturing platform. We're blessed with the scale of our R&D platform, where we benefit from things that goes across these three areas.
Mm-hmm. But you are right in the sense of that a lot of what we talk about is performance, differentiation, and then higher yield, less waste- more sustainability benefits across all three of us.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Very good. Søren, up here. There's a mic coming.
Hi, Søren from SEB. So my one question goes to Jacob. Jacob, you were a long time leader in the old Chr. Hansen, and now you have this role for some time in Novonesis. So, what qualities and key strengths from the old Chr. Hansen way of working and doing things do you feel is important to bring over to Novonesis?
I think some of the things that we have come across in building our new company, our new culture, is traits where I can recognize them from both of the legacies. You know, the strong intimacy with customers, the scale and strength of our production and R&D is something that is strong. The ambition across our teams is critical for us, and something I, you know, with immense, you know, excitement, are looking at in the integrated business already, that we were not that different, right? We've come across now after only four months of being in action, we have a fully operational organization of people that are excited about this new journey together.
I think Sebastian here at the first row.
Thank you. Sebastian Bray from Berenberg Bank. Tina, could I ask you a question on Household Care, please? If I go back to the 2015 presentations with Novozymes, legacy Novozymes
Twenty fifteen?
Yes, around this time. I don't want to,
Maybe I need help.
I'll put you too much on the spot here, but basically, there was a slide suggesting that the difference between developed and emerging market enzyme penetration was 5 to 1, and I appreciate the regulation may have changed now, but that number does not really appear to have changed. It may even have gone up slightly. What has prevented emerging market enzymes penetration? Expanding more aggressively over the last 10 years, and is that likely to change in the future? Thank you.
I'm sorry, Sebastian, I can't go back to 2015, so but I can at least tell you that if you go back five years, then emerging market was roughly a third of the turnover in the Household Care area, while today it is 40%. So it is increasing, and it is increasing because of the increasing affordability, so the wealth in emerging markets. It is also increasing by the need for higher performance, higher penetration, and we have also, as we talked about at the last Capital Markets Day, again, not in 2015, but about putting more feet on the ground in order to drive that penetration.
So I think it is a matter of the market needs to be ready. It needs to industrialize, if I may use that word, and also wealth need to be keep growing. And then it's a matter of us being there, working with customers, proving what it is. And I think it's on purpose, the two examples I was sharing from Household Care. It is about the emerging markets. Because we see also in these markets a lot of interest in reformulation of the solutions. So that is also a good, you could say, unlock to the growth.
I think there was a-
There's a question down there.
Yep, I see it. Down here.
Thanks. It's Alex Sloane from Barclays. A question for Amy. You talked about using Novonesis precision fermentation toolkit with regards to HMOs. I think from memory, at standalone Chr. Hansen, those were quite dilutive to the margin, about 200 basis points at the time of the deal announcement. Where are you in terms of the journey of insourcing production there? And would you already expect that to be a material driver to the 37% group EBITDA margin target next year, or are those benefits to come further down the line?
Yeah. No, it's a good question. I think the, you know, the real unlock in the HMO space comes, as I mentioned, with the regulatory, and then, as you rightly point out, the scale manufacturing, right? So, so, and that, that's not gonna be overnight, you know, in terms of our ability to unlock, that growth and margin potential. I think where we are, I, I mentioned we're making really good progress on the regulatory front, and of course, as China unlocks, that unlocks a real ability to grow and to, and to bring scale into the business. From a manufacturing perspective, we're, we're in the process right now of really looking across the entire Novonesis footprint.
You know, one of the things, and Anders will come back and speak to it later, that really differentiates Novonesis is the ability to leverage the global network, and this is what we're trying to leverage also on the HMO side. So, we're actively looking at options for investments where we will go to scale and to insource, but that's still a work in progress.
... Thank you, Amy. We have another question down here. Alex?
Thanks, Alex Jones, Bank of America. Another one for Amy. You talked about sort of the split of dietary supplements into the gut and then other indication areas that are growing a lot faster. Could you give us an indication of how that splits for you today in terms of sales? I know it's not necessarily simple, and how you expect that to evolve going forward.
Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's not simple, and I won't give you a specific number, but I think it's also when you look at it's not just us, it's also the market. So if you look at—if you go back 8 years ago, it was basically, it was all about gut, general gastrointestinal health. COVID brought a lot of focus around immunity and probiotics and supplements into that space. You know, where our pipeline is, is again into these more specific modes of action, which will allow us to broaden entire.
So, you know, where we are today, if I were to look, you know, we would still have a good portion, yeah, less than half, though, on those sort of more mature, and then really the growth and driving disproportionately into, some of the newer, areas and categories, which are also growing much faster. Yeah.
Thanks, Amy. I think we have time for one more question for this session. I think there was a quick hand over there, so Linnea.
Thanks. Linnea Bensing, Liontrust. I've got a question relating to pricing. You've spoken a lot in the past about how your pricing used to be deflationary, down about 1 percentage point a year of existing products, and how over the past couple of years, you've shifted that to become inflationary, up about 1-2% each year. I wonder, how do you see pricing longer term, and have you already swept up all the low-hanging fruit across commercialization, the commercialization and strategy more generally around pricing, or is there any more you can push there?
Yeah. So if I start, pricing will remain being a growth driver for us. One of the things which we have been doing, and now I talk across Novo Nordisk, but chime in if there's something you think I should add, is that we have spent a lot of time on building system and capabilities exactly with the aim of making it sticky, making it a capability which we have, which we will continue to use.
So, that has taken a lot of effort and a lot of focus from us in management in order to train people, to do role plays, to secure the systems were there in order to secure that pricing remains a sticky part of our growth going forward. But I think the key is that we are... The key growth driver for us is volume, but price will be contributing as well. Anything you wanna add?
I wanna add that in the food and beverage space, you can. It's hard to predict exactly where inflation is gonna go into the future, but we are always gonna close that gap. And then it's all about when we bring in the new volume, it's about the deep insights of what is the value we create. So there are price points where you can get one point, you know, index 140, if you think of the new value provided. So it's very important as we grow volume, we do it at the right pricing, at the right time, and that demands a lot of deep insights that we're collecting in the industry.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Thanks, Jacob. With that, there's a break. So I ask you to go upstairs, some snacks, some drinks, and you have to be back here at 3:40 P.M., latest. See you back in roughly 25 minutes. Fantastic! So we're now ready for the final session here of our capital markets day of Novonesis. And I'm happy to take you through the research and development, operations, strategy and integration, and we round off with the financials. Then we have a large Q&A, where management will all be gathered up here. So without further ado, Claus, please.
Yes. Welcome back from the break, everyone. Also to the ones online, welcome back. It's now my pleasure to unfold how Novonesis is and will continue to be the leading innovator within biosolutions, and why we are now better set from an R&D perspective to also win the future era of biosolutions. If you sense a little bit of passion in me for the subject of biotechnology, it's genuine. I can't hide it. I've had the pleasure of following the field since its early infancy in the early nineties, so more than 30 years in the field, and Novonesis is simply a cool place to be a biotech scientist. Every year, you get to see your efforts in the lab materialize into actual products, doing a job for actual customers, and making an impact also on sustainability.
But first, I hope you will take, you will allow me to take you on a bit of an educational journey, and talk about the biology and the technologies we put into use to develop biosolutions. So, Novonesis technologies and biosolutions are founded in nature. Enzymes, they're the workhorses in all living cells, from plants to humans, and of course, in microorganisms. Here, they carry out or catalyze all the necessary functions and activities that a cell needs to grow, to proliferate and replicate.
Then, microorganisms are some of the simplest creatures on this planet, and also most sophisticated life forms. They are some of the smallest ones you find in nature, but also the largest. The largest creature on this planet is actually a fungus in Oregon, spanning an area of 8 square kilometers, from a single cell to growing that big.
Without enzymes and microorganisms, we would have no life on this planet as we know it. In Novonesis, we harness these wonders of nature, in the form of the microorganisms themselves, or what they can produce, all in the end, to make biosolutions. By the nature of this, our solutions are both renewable and biodegradable. So it's, I go around with a saying, "If nature or biology can make it, it can break it." So... Well, in Novonesis, we take building blocks, these nature's building blocks, and then we apply advanced biotechnology, science, and engineer these to provide the market target solutions. The magic starts as we design and engineer our microorganisms to make the particular solution. We then scale these microfactories through fermentation in our large-scale facilities.
Here, the microorganisms grow on simple agricultural raw material inputs, such as starch or nitrogen source. They multiply, and they produce the biosolutions at a commercially relevant scale. We then harvest and purify the outcome and put them in a format suitable for our customers to use, as either an enzyme, a protein, a metabolite, like HMO, or a live microorganism itself. In a sense, we simply take simple input from agriculture, and through fermentation with our microorganisms, we produce something very advanced.
Now, let's take a look at how broad a suite of biosolutions we actually provide for our customers. We are able to produce a vast range of different solutions, from active ingredients, like the enzymes you heard about in laundry, in food, and industrial processing, to advanced ingredients, like HMO for infant nutrition, metabolites for BioAg and biocontrol, or proteins for advanced nutrition.
In the microorganism cells, as a part of food cultures for fresh dairy and cheese making, for biopreservation, dietary supplements for health outcomes in humans and animals, and yeast for producing biofuels. In all the areas, the solutions strive for better and more sustainable processing, and more relevant and sustainable products. But, the, the potential goes way beyond the applications as you see them and know them today and the markets we serve. But while the opportunity space is vast, we have made and will continue to make deliberate choices on where to engage and participate.
Fortunately, we are helped by, the technology developments, constantly expanding the space and the opportunities, both from what's possible to do, but also for it can cost effectively be produced. And let's look closer into the technologies. We keep pushing the limit for what we can do with the biology.
We have, throughout history of the company, been at the forefront of biotech research, adopting constantly to new scientific knowledge and tools, and we apply these to make the breakthrough innovations. This is a continuous journey, also going forward. Staying in front allows us to win the future through continued stronger skills, know-how, and proprietary technologies. We do not necessarily need to be the first on developing a specific new technology, as long as we are the first to apply and use it for innovation. We were the first to realize the benefits of standardizing the extraction and use of enzymes, to then become the first to harness microorganisms themselves by controlling their cultivation. Already back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that was when molecular biology and genetic engineering was in its infancy.
Here we were the first to develop an engineered enzyme and a recombinant enzyme production when we brought a lipase to the market already in 1988 through recombinant gene technologies. Later, we were the first to use microfluidics or nano droplet screening, where you can screen millions of live microbes in really small scale and go. I can go on. But more important is that we continue to nurture the curiosity and ability to learn in the organization and through our many collaboration partners across the globe.
This will keep us at the forefront of the biosolution innovation also for the decades to come. Novozymes is today unmatched in scale and capabilities when it comes to biosolution innovation. With more than 40 application and research centers around the globe we operate in, we can source international talent and leverage collaborations globally.
We total around 2,000 employees with a science and engineering background, with an average tenure of 10 years or more in biosolutions innovation. Yearly, we invest EUR 400 million in R&D, or around 10% of revenue, resulting in a patent estate just under 10,000 patents, and a very high number of new products launches every year. Our share of sales from new products are more than 30%, simply combining the performance of the two legacy companies. New products here being defined as less than 5 years old. But what does it require to win this in the future? I'll spend the next few slides explaining this. A world-leading biotechnology toolbox is, of course, nice to have, but it's only a toolbox.
And it only creates value if you pair this up with the ability to connect it to the market and market relevant innovation. Here, our biotech capabilities rest on three important pillars. One critical important pillar is our ability to connect with the market through our applied research. This allows to understand our markets and customers, and design for higher value solutions. You heard my colleagues from commercial talk about that. Then we can bring the toolbox into place and finally leverage the third and equally important pillar, our ability to scale biotechnology to provide the solutions at relevant cost and formats that serve our customers.
Anders will cover this shortly after my presentation. Both legacy companies were strong across the value chains, but combined, we have increased our abilities in applied research and close customer relationships, allowing us to connect even better with the market.
You heard some of the examples being dietary supplements, food and beverage, plant and animal health. We have arrived at an unmatched scale of the biotechnology toolbox and an unmatched scale of product production, making us a leading innovator, independent on the type of biosolutions. The strength of these three pillars will allow us to provide more value for our customers and enable speed and efficiency across our innovation value chain. I will now try to unfold these three pillars of what makes Novozymes so very special. As mentioned before, the truly critical part is this translational piece. This is where technology becomes innovation through our applied research. Novozymes is present in more than 30 industries, and we have deep application understanding that allows us to connect with customers and understand and replicate their processes in our laboratories.
We have scientists in the front line with our business colleagues, engaging with customers to understand their challenges, and they have this ability to translate these needs and form them as a biological problem. And that's what drives and fuels the innovation pipeline. When you understand the fundamentals of what delivers a nice texture and taste in a yogurt, or how to separate grain into its different higher value components, you can sort of measure and quantify the problem in the lab and then develop the solution to fix it.
We do this at an unmatched scale in of any biosolutions company in the world. Unmatched in terms of the level of investments in R&D and the breadth of solutions and markets they address... And hence, we of course also benefit from cross-fertilization of some of the technologies and learning across end outcomes.
If you develop a fiber solution for breaking down, let's say, corn, complex corn fibers for biofuel, it's likely similar technology that will work in animals for pigs and poultry. Now, we move from application into the second pillar, if you will, and I hope it's okay now that I take it a notch deeper on the technologies. Novo Science... Oh, so no, no, no, Novozymes. We have our own world-leading culture collection .
It's huge in size, but what's more important is that while it's substantial in size, it is, it's a selection of diversity from various species and ecological niches, our scientists have carefully select over decades, of course, in accordance with the Rio Convention. It's... The library is categorized, and strains are genome sequenced. So you can compare this to walking in, let's say, to a fully ordered and indexed book library, right?
You know, it's searchable for title, content, author, you can search on chapters, and this and that. Now, versus walking into a warehouse, really not knowing what, where to look for what. This is our inspiration and source of microorganisms for the direct applications in dairy, in bioprotection, in animal and plant health, as well as in dietary supplements. But it's also our inspiration to new sources of enzymes and metabolites. Now, with the translated customer needs from application understanding, we can now put the biotechnology discovery and development toolbox fully into play. The innovation cycle can be described simply as a circular process of four phases: the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle.
In the design phase, we match our bio prospecting, that I talked about, with the latest advances in bioinformatics, structure prediction like AlphaFold, you may have heard of, and machine learning, like AI-assisted protein engineering. And then we design for the most optimal solution to meet the criteria set forth from our application understanding, often purely in silico. We then need to build the solution. We need the tangible solution in hand to test, and for proving that it works. Thus, we need to make the prototypes in sufficient scale, to be tested on our relevant parameters. Hence, here we apply advanced strain design and engineering, automation for both the strain assembly, for the fermentation, and for producing the test prototypes. In the test phase, we then test and confirm the performance of the solutions at the relevant condition.
That means bringing real-life application into small scale, suitable for higher throughput, and of course, learning, using advanced analytics. For example, mini baking, mini wash, mini yogurt, combined with advanced analytics like imaging, imaging technologies that will explain what is happening at the molecular level to learn and arrive at customer relevant benefits. And then, when with all the data generated, we apply learning algorithms for an eventual next round, design, build, test, and learn, until we have a solution in hand, we can scale. For every cycle we generate, we generate more data that adds to become an asset in itself for future innovation cycle, and it continuously add to the efficiency of innovation in the form of relevance and speed.
Here, I try to better illustrate how artificial intelligence plays a role in the process, also when it comes to biology innovation. Not as at this overall magical, encompassing tool that does everything for you, but rather a discrete tool for different stages of the process, and for an overall better prediction of the outcome and certainty, and for the learning from the billions of data points, and it is literally billion of data points we generate every year in our laboratories, through product innovation and with the customers when they apply the solutions. We get data in from the factories of some of our biofuel companies, customers, and our dairies that we serve.
As an example, in the front end here, we can predict win rates in the market of a certain level of benefit for a given solution, and that have guided the target profile for the new solution. We can then, the design phase, as I explained about, design for the most optimal and even already stabilized product, only of such in our hands physically. We apply AI in our production strain design, and again, in designing the context in which the of the application of which the solution should be tested, and will provide the customer with most benefits, such as in the Laundry Lab AI.
And then during analysis, we put tools, AI tools in the hands of our customers to provide them with the metrics and analysis so they can monetize the benefits that we provide, the Smart Bake and Biofuels Calculator. Altogether, these tools and technologies allows us to reduce, you could say, the front end of the biotech innovation cycle with up to two-fold, and to innovate. And that's more important, maybe, to innovate for more complex and higher-value solutions. The overall timelines tend to depend more on the complexity of the application, the regulatory timelines, as Amy also has spoken to and Tina, as well as the market penetration timelines, than actually depending on the discovery part.
We now move from the biotech toolbox into the third and important pillar on the ability to scale solutions at a, into suitable formats. With a solution in hand, we need it to come alive commercially, and that means producing it at a scale and in a format fitting the customer's use. We do this seamlessly and in Novozymes. The scale-up is already thought into the design and build phase for the innovation cycle. So that means that already when we have a prototype in our hands, we know that in the end, we'll be able to produce it, and also at what cost we will be able to produce it.
Through the years of built-up know-how with strain design, process understanding, equipment technology, both in the fermentation part and in the recovery part, we pretty much can scale from nanodroplets or microtiter plates to 100 cubic fermenters, and that's with full correlation across the step. The final format can in itself be a, an innovation. It's uniquely adapted to a customer's need. It can provide the stability and compatibility in the context in which the solution gets used. Examples such as probiotics to fit a yogurt application, Jacob, you mentioned live in ambient, you have a sample, without affecting the taste and texture quality. Another example are laundry enzymes to fit the unit dose formats you see, especially in North America and Europe. Our unique dosed-yeast dosing formats for our biofuels customers are a third example.
Working with biology and fermentation provides a unique opportunity to run continuous and significant optimization, and this is very different from traditional production industries. This ability gets fueled by the ability to step change performance of the biosolution itself. For example, having a new enzyme or a microbe do what the previous did, but twice as efficient. Or it's fueled through improving the strain productivity by engineering or adaptive evolution, which again, can result in 20%-50% improvement in productivity. This is a unique feature of biosolutions that adds to the traditional optimization levers, if you will, the classical production optimization, the new improved technologies for production, which we, of course, also leverage.
Overall, the uniqueness of our setup and production technologies allows us yearly contributions or productivity improvements to the tune of 2%-5%, primarily as capacity release, but also in bottom line impact. To really understand the significance, during the last 15 years, we have optimized our enzyme production threefold, meaning that we would have needed threefold the asset base as we have today, if it had not been for optimization. Moving from our key pillars of biosolution innovation to where best to apply our muscles in biotech. Given the breadth of the markets we operate in and the versatility of our machine room to innovate for ever more opportunities, it of course gets critical how we steer and make our priorities.
Fundamental to Novozymes is that the innovation pipeline is business-owned, and it's based on solid customer buy-in, allowing for proper value assessment of the pipeline with R&D as the co-owners and guardians of the technical feasibility. The front end and more exploratory part of the pipeline has a nature and faster churn, in terms of both kill and continue, and it needs to be dynamic. But as soon as the target profile of a solution is known and can be defined alongside its market value, and with a, you know, foresight to how to develop it, then we can bring it to the late stage and execute with key focus on speed and efficiency. Of course, in agreement with the business.
Given the size and dynamic of our pipeline, well over 20 launches per year, in the combined legacy companies, this calls for full transparency of the value impact and the development cost, and as well as a monthly prioritization and anchoring of the execution. We have advanced our portfolio management and associated data systems to accommodate for this dynamic in real time. We have set the organization in place for business relevance and understanding across our applied research and across the function that has merit leaning into what's given businesses, for example, the regulatory affairs and IP set up. Then we have our core R&D supporting functions, if you will, to where we leverage fully the technologies at scale and are flexible in the way we serve the business needs as they change.
This ensures flexibility to address the most impactful programs, and it also limits sort of entitlement to R&D resources from the businesses. So it's always good to have a little bit of competition for R&D. Pipeline prioritization and executing is a very close to heart of all leaders across R&D, as well as markets in the business. Here, a little over four months into the merger, we have clear line of sight to both the existing innovation opportunities, but also the added synergy opportunities, both for new innovation as well as for optimizations that we can drive. By far, the combined innovation portfolio is complementary in nature, with a minimal duplication. This forms a baseline, and then we add 20 new synergy programs on top, bringing the total late-stage pipeline to around 200.
Overall, it provides us with increased value for our late-stage pipeline, while we also increase, through our capabilities, the certainty of the outcome and lower the risk. Just to exemplify, we have recently, and I believe Jacob spoke to this, we have already launched a new product into cheese making that benefited from improvements, which could only have happened as a result of becoming Novozymes. We've created the transparency of both value and cost to complete across the enterprise portfolio, allowing a view to spend with just around 80% of R&D spend being towards new product innovation, and 20% split evenly on optimization and technology development.
The product innovation, we believe, will continue to secure Novonesis a ratio from, of, of sales from new products to the tune of 30%, driving, of course, growth, but also driving market leadership and profitability. Often you will see our new solutions come with increased profitability. This is all done without losing momentum in the near-term execution. So far, the launches this year confirms that we have been able to move forward, and in the R&D activities without skipping a beat, not missing a launch, and on track to deliver on plan. So totally, I agreed with Tobias. I can mention that we're up to 15 launches this year as of today.
The organization is excited to learn about the complementary technologies, and we've seen proof of what these can bring in terms of solving problems, which are otherwise unsolved for with either enzymes alone or microorganisms alone. In arriving at an optimal taste and texture, and bite in a future high-protein, plant-based alternative to dairy yogurt, one will need enzyme to provide the right texture and microorganism to provide mouthfeel and acidification. None of the two technologies alone makes a palatable consumer product, but together they make wonderful wonders. In crop cultivations, enzymes can release the micronutrients in the soil, such as phosphate, and then the microorganisms stimulate plant root development for more efficient uptake.
In biofuels, enzymes are critical in providing the breakdown of key components of the biomass, the fiber, the starch, the protein, if you will, while the microbes, such as the yeast, act in synergy with the enzymes to produce the biofuel. Now, just imagine what we can do with this technology. This is... I mean, our technology has the potential to completely reform existing agricultural and food systems, improving the efficiency while becoming more sustainable. We can take out the preventive use of antibiotics that are used in animal production today. This is one of the key reasons that today, human existence and disease is threatened by antimicrobial resistance buildup. Our technology has a potential to prevent and combat lifestyle diseases like cardiovascular diseases. Imagine what this will do through gut and metabolic, metabolic health-regulating, microbes and enzymes.
We can close the protein gap. 2050, 10 billion people, we need more agricultural land on this planet than we have today, if we are to continue to feed it as we do it today. By precision fermentation, we can make milk proteins, and we will spend less than a hundredth of the land to do that, to feed the same population as you do it with milk today. So these are some of the really sort of longer-term abilities this technology can enable. So Novozymes is entering the era of biosolutions with our unique innovation capabilities. We believe they will continue to fuel our growth and market leadership and allow us to capture our fair share of the existing, the expanding, and the future biosolutions market.
To reiterate, our customer-focused approach and deep application science in the front line allow us to understand opportunities at the molecular level and pair this with the value and impact it creates, fueling future innovation. Very few companies can claim this when it comes to biosolutions, and none with the breadth of Novozymes- Novozymes' span of application expertise. Our bioengineering expertise allow us to innovate for all possible biosolution outcomes: microorganisms, yeast, enzymes, proteins, HMO, and more.
Our production strain technology is second to none, and the advancements are self-propelling in terms of continuous efficiency gains through advanced technology platform, combined with learning and data-driven discovery. Our unmatched ability to engineer and scale our microorganisms in our production facilities allow us to bring biosolutions swiftly to the market and form its quality our customers desire. And we continue, continue to lift our competitive edge through our optimization.
Last but not least, our ability to work across the business, R&D, and production seamlessly and with an enterprise mindset ensures the best and most impactful outcome for our customers and for Novozymes.... This will put us in a position to unlock, build, and accelerate growth in the era of biosolutions. As I started saying, it's a cool place to be when you're a scientist that want to make a difference. So if there's three key takeaways I can urge you to bring back, it is Novozymes' unique position across what we consider the three key pillars of biosolution innovation is unmatched and leading. We see an increased value in our complementary technologies beyond just bringing the pipelines together, with growth opportunities, both in core and in newer businesses. You saw examples of that from my commercial colleagues.
And finally, we have the organization, the capabilities, the stewardship, and mindset to make the right choices and priorities to drive for impact. So now I'll hand over to Anders, who will present operations. Thank you.
Thank you, Claus. Absolutely fascinating. I love the story. I've really been looking forward to this Capital Markets Day because I get to be the one that presents operations, the largest scale producer of biosolutions in the world. Today, we can say that we are number one in enzymes, we are number one in microbes, we are number one in cultures and in probiotics. We could not say that before we formed Novonesis. Of course, scale matters in operations. It brings a unique competitive advantage to our company and something that we can leverage at scale. But it's not only about scale, it's also about a unique ability to continue to optimize what we do. You heard Claus talk about 2%-5% on yield improvement. We can continue to do that at scale.
It's going to be one of the very significant contributors to our margin, and something that we will cherish, and we will invest in between operations and R&D. It's also about a unique ability to scale new technology. Over the last five years, we have added HMO, we have added advanced proteins, and we've added yeast. You heard both Amy and Tina to talk that talked about that. I'm absolutely sure as we look ahead, there will be more biosolutions coming to operations that we are going to scale and bring to the market.
In operations, we have what we call multipurpose facilities. That means that we can leverage a global footprint. Everything we do in operation is based on fermentation, and a lot of the recovery steps are similar. That is a unique opportunity to sort of send products around.
If one market starts to pick up, we actually have the scale to move things around, quite easily. In addition, we have a very long track record of delivering unique customer solutions, where we work very, very closely with customers all the way to finishing formats. And of course, the fact that we scale up new technologies, Claus talked about more than 20 a year, is something that is also making our operations unique. If we take a look at what is operations, operations is everything between R&D and commercial, I would say. It's all the raw materials we source, it's everything we produce, it is all the orders that we handle, and of course, all the products that we ship. But it's very important to understand that it's not an, it's an ecosystem, Novonesis.
We work extremely closely with R&D on scaling up all the innovation that comes through the pipeline, and we work very closely with R&D on optimization of everything we do in operations. And similarly, with commercial, we are working very closely with commercial on securing we got the right products on the shelves, not too much, not too little. And of course, we work very closely with commercial on also securing that all our products, they arrive safely to our customers. If we then take a look at a global map of operations, as you can see here, we are scattered all over the world. We have very, very strong presence in Europe, in North America and China, large scale operations and production facilities. We also have smaller facilities in India and Argentina and Brazil.
Of course, we've got distribution centers all around the world. We are handling more than 100,000 orders a year. We ship more than 97% of the time, on time, to customers, and I believe the fact that we can do that brings our Net Promoter Score up to 75%, 72% across Novonesis. Something that we are very proud of, that we can contribute to and deliver, too. If we then take a look at what we are also doing, a big part of the agenda in operations is about our ability to optimize. We have talked extensively about our ability to drive yield, get more out of the tanks we have, get more out of the raw materials we use. 2%-5% is definitely the target also for the future.
But there are many other levels in operations that we will be leveraging to drive efficiency and productivity. We talked about AI, digitalization, machine learning, automation, robotics, all tools that we will be driving and investing in to make our operations more efficiently. Similarly, on technology advancements, we see new ways of fermentation, new ways of recovery. We are already now in the process of testing some unique new abilities in both of those aspects. But there are more opportunities, like offshoring, where we've been on a very strong journey to do that. It's about optimizing the product portfolio we have. It's about continuing the journey on squeezing everything we can out of procurement. And then, of course, it is to leverage a global footprint and to invest in producing where it's most efficient around the globe....
If we then turn to what's happening right now, we talked about synergies. The biggest part of the synergies on the cost side, they are coming out of operations. So if I start with procurement, as some of you may have heard, a few weeks into the lifetime of Novonesis, we invited the 86 largest suppliers to a journey and an invitation to actually partner up with Novonesis. Be a partner of growth, but also in that same context, we asked them to deliver actually more value to us in terms of lower prices and better payment terms. That has been the single biggest synergy enabler in the company.
And then we expand into all the indirect, which is then thousands of suppliers, and I firmly believe that we have the opportunity to actually do that again with all our indirect spend. When we do that, then we will be on a very strong journey to deliver on our synergies, and we might even be ahead of the synergies. That's where we are now on the cost side. In addition to that, we knew we had capabilities, both companies. We have looked at everything we produce and other ways to drive yield faster in our fermentation tanks. We have already now started to look at where can we move things around and again, delivering synergies. There was a question earlier today around everything we have done together with CMOs, especially in the probiotic chain.
We're taking a hard look at can't we do that more efficiently, in-house, and right now we are moving some of the things that we have asked CMOs to do historically into our own operational machine, both because we get it more in control, but also because we can do it more efficiently and cheaper. Turning to supply chain, we have some significant opportunities when we are looking at how we transport our goods around. Among the 86 suppliers, there were some of our bigger transport companies we have been looking at moving from air to sea. That delivers some really unique and impressive savings in the way we distribute products, but it also delivers some very, very significant contribution to our Scope 3 emissions, making it much more sustainable to move the goods around.
We have done change up, doing joint tender on road, on sea, and actually, it's been quite a journey because when you do that, you can sort of see it in real life, how your suppliers, they're competing, and through that process, again, we have managed to get some significant savings. Finally, in terms of optimization of inventories, of course, the fact we have a global footprint makes us able to drive down our inventories, and of course, it's also a part of how we are looking at synergy realization. So again, like my colleagues, if I were to leave you with three things, we are the largest scale producer of biosolutions in the world. We strongly believe it's part of our competitive advantage for the future.
We have a unique opportunity to continue on the journey of delivering productivity gains and optimizations that will continue. We have more levers than we've ever had to continue on that journey. And finally, we are ahead on the synergy realization that are coming out of operations. And ending on synergies, I'll pass it on to you, Henrik, to talk about where we are on the journey of integration. Henrik, please.
Thank you, Anders. Thank you, Claus. So, integration and strategy is what I am responsible for. And before we go into that, just pause for a second. I think you have been shown 120 slides. I promise you, we have only 100 more to go. But with all that information, I can only imagine how overwhelmed with excitement you must be now about biosolutions and about Novo Nordisk. I know, I know that we are. But it doesn't stop there. Not only do we have a great potential and a great vision, I can assure you we have strong plans and strong execution in mind.
With my limited time, I will show you that we are exactly where we wanted to be, in fact, even better on integration, that we have a very strong foundation as we look further ahead to grow from, and a strong combination that will drive acceleration, and that we have multiple paths to get us on that growth trajectory. Let's first start with integration. As I mentioned, we are exactly where we hope to be when we merged five months ago, January 29. We only need Claus to remember the name of the company, and we'll basically be there. The first months in an integration, I'm sure you know, are critical to success, and we have been focusing on integration relentlessly, and I, I mean, relentlessly. A lot of sleepless nights, but also a lot of progress.
So I can tell you, we are extremely pleased with where we are today. We were extremely well-prepared going into this integration with plans ready to execute, and as soon as we merged, we were able to start. Let me give you some examples. On day one, we could immediately roll out our new brand and corporate identity. Employees could access shared IT infrastructure, access our sites, and communicate from one Novo Nordisk domain. Within the first week, we had systems in place to consolidate sales and CRM data, and we could connect the IT infrastructure we had. No major issues whatsoever.
More importantly, we experienced no disruption to business continuity. Seamless customer experience has been the number one priority, and the frontline and our supply chain have continued throughout to stay focused on our customers and to deliver products and services uninterrupted.
On synergy realization, we have also made significant progress, and I'll talk more about that in a second. Plans have been validated, refined, cross-selling has started, and cost synergies are being realized even ahead of plan. Our organization, as you have heard, is in place. Everybody knows their role from top to bottom of the company. So we're in a good place, and we now start ahead at what is next in terms of long-term synergies and long-term growth, but I'll come back to that. So how do we do it so fast?
Well, it all comes down to people, as always. Designing the organization and our operating model has been a critical priority to us, to do this quickly and to do it well, to avoid any uncertainty, any ambiguity, and create clarity and clear line of sight for all our employees fast.
That means that we can retain our key talent, and everyone understands their role quickly. A well-functioning and a highly engaged organization is the foundation for our success, and our design principles, which you see on the screen here, have actually been designed by us in the team well ahead of the integration. And it takes the best from both companies. It puts customer centricity first, as is evident, as you can see, with three commercial functions presented in the executive team. It ensures minimal organizational distances and layers, and a few but well-defined cross-functional interfaces. To give you some more tangible numbers, 700 leadership roles have been described, assessed, and matched with internal talent in the last 4 months. Span of control has increased company-wide by 0.5.
Corporate interfaces have been designed, especially the critical one, covering, for example, innovation governance, S&OP, and financial planning, all up and running. Finally, 400 positions have been closed while retaining key talent. The result is a well-designed and settled organization, staffed with our strongest talents in key positions, sharing one vision, one purpose, and one set of ways of working. Setting the organization quickly has also enabled us to make significant progress on our cost synergies. And here, I'm pleased to share, although you heard it earlier, that we are now 80% complete on our ambition to deliver EUR 80 million and EUR 90 million euro EBIT run rate impact by end of 2026. It has been a priority to get us off to a strong start, as you could hear, and show early success.
And as I just described, it also has the benefit of getting the organization in place quickly. This means that the majority of organization synergies are now realized. With the addition of the procurement, the early procurement initiatives that Anders talked about, that has been extremely successful, especially in direct procurement, and is still ongoing. The result is that, as of now, we are at least 80% driven almost entirely by organizational synergies and by procurement so far. We consider this a significant success, and I'm sure Rainer will say the same, when you get on stage after me. But we will, of course, continue to drive our cost synergy program, and we expect it will get us to target faster than the original ambition and unlock further ability to invest in accelerated growth. We will see as we go.
And speaking of growth, let's also talk about revenue synergies. Here we are, again, fully confident that we will deliver on the ambitious target of EUR 200 million run-rate sales by end of 2027. These synergies will take a little bit longer, as you probably know. But first synergy sales have actually been realized already, as you heard, and while run-rate impact this year in 2024 will be modest, it will actually be meaningful already next year in 2025. And how can we be so confident? We have spent significant time after the day one to open the books and to validate and refine our plans. We now know we have plans in place that can take us to this target, not only that is it achievable, but we can comfortably get to this target.
The entire sales force have been cross-trained already, and as you heard, cross-selling has already started. The synergies will, as expected, come predominantly from food, health, and agriculture, as you heard earlier, and is fairly, so far, evenly distributed across commercial synergies, cross-selling, short-term development initiatives, like combination products, and longer-term development synergies and toolbox. We expect 1% growth CAGR contribution from these synergies, in towards 2025, which is included in the, six to eight percent CAGR that we have committed to. So in summary, the integration is going very well. It's going as planned. We have a new and strong, strong organization in place. We are progressing well on our cost synergies, and we have initiated a revenue synergy program that will deliver as expected.
Now, while our current focus is very much on achieving a successful integration, there's a life after, and that is just as important, so let's look ahead a little bit. The strategic rationale for this merger is, of course, not limited to realizing synergies in the short term. It is to become an unparalleled leader with unmatched capabilities in this very attractive market of biosolutions. So let me just summarize, as Ester shared, the need has never been higher for replacing existing technology with biology-derived solutions and for new solutions, helping our society do more, do more with less in a sustainable, planet-friendly way.
And as Claus explained just now, the technology has never been as advanced and as mature. We can do things today with biotech in terms of speed of development or precision of bioengineering, or ability to meet affordability that was impossible 10 years ago.
On top of that, we are invited to the table, as Morten explained, when governments and authorities are looking for ways to tackle the challenges the planet is facing. So we consider this being at an inflection point, where usability and affordability meets and creates so far unmet needs and creates the same, much like the computer chip did in the end of the last century. And I'm sure you will challenge me on that analogy in the Q&A. We are not the only ones, of course, to see this. We're not the only ones with the right to, to try to tap into that, but we are absolutely unique. So these are the three differentiators, that we've talked about during the day. It is so important that you understand and appreciate, these differentiators, 'cause they truly set us apart.
Now, on this slide, I've added some numbers to try to give you even more of a feel of what it means. We are absolutely unique when you combine these three. Number one is the way we work closely with customers, often, as you heard, on their sites, and the credibility and trust-based relationships we have built with them over decades, allowing us to develop exact solutions that meets their specific needs fast and reliably, and to help implement them for the desired result. I think you heard, especially Jacob, talk about that with great passion, and it's the same across all our divisions. The second one is what you just heard Klaus talk about. We have a focus of a century-long dedication to biology-based solutions and biology-based solutions only.
This gives us tremendous advantage toward quickly and effectively developing the right biosolutions and use our deep application understanding early in the process at scale, very few can match. Further, we can exploit new technology across multiple industries, further driving value out of in an innovation platform at scale. And the third one, as Anders just talked about, is our manufacturing scale and capabilities that allow us to bring products to market fast, in high volumes and quality, and a supply reliability level that gives our customers peace of mind to focus on their business.
And gives us economic scale to do so at price points that benefits them and benefits us. So while we don't compare ourselves to competition, we don't think we need to, I would say if you look at these data points on this slide, you should find that these metrics, they set us apart.
These are our key sources for distinctiveness, and they allow us to outgrow the market and to outgrow competitors with best-in-class insights, innovation, and scale. So once we understand how these strengths, they set apart, we can apply them, of course, across the you saw earlier. This is what you see on the left side. This is the growth model. It is our secret recipe, actually, for growth. So just recapping real quick, if you just look at that, growth will come from existing core segments, where we'll expand with innovation and penetration.
It will come from expanding into adjacencies, adjacent technologies, adjacent applications, and in longer term, it will come from new segments. And we prioritize our bets and our investments across this matrix and across industry segments based on our right to play, return on investments, and spreading of risk.
Any opportunity, in fact, we, we assess against this matrix and against our three core strengths. And that's what you see on the right. So this is a bit simplified, but you will actually find everything you heard today from the businesses being presented here. So if you look at the core, in our core, we leverage the full breadth of our competitive strength. Here, we think of segments like household care, dairy, dietary supplements, animal nutrition, bioenergy, for example, and here we lead.
Here we lead, and we continue to be the leader, and we utilize our strong customer relationships, our innovation toolbox, and our manufacturing scale to outgrow the underlying market through continued penetration and innovation. The core is by far our main growth engine, no mistake about it, in absolute terms, and it has a lot of growth potential left that is still unrealized.
It will deliver, and it will be the foundation of our growth trajectory. The adjacencies that you see next to it, we've talked about adjacencies during the day. You can think of Bioprotection, HMOs, plant-based foods, Biocontrol. These are one level higher in risk and reward. We don't have nearly or exactly the same right to play, if you will. It's a bit more out of our comfort zone, but still based on at least two of our core strengths. Here, we expect much higher growth rates, and we tolerate lower profitability. But in terms of absolute growth, they represent a smaller contribution in the years ahead. Finally, on the far right, and I'll talk a little bit more about that on the next page, we look at entirely new areas that can become long-term growth drivers.
Here, we very carefully consider our ability to play and our right to win, as well as long-term development of market needs. We're prudent with our investment levels here, and we leverage partnerships to de-risk our bets and to share costs. One such opportunity that I'll just mention, and we are working on is, for example, sustainable plastics, as you see here. Here, we [work] with another company to develop and commercialize at scale enzymatic technology, the recycled PET plastic. PET or polyester, you will find everywhere in this room. You'll find it in the carpet. You'll find it in a lot of your clothes. It gives a lot of durability and a lot of other good attributes. One of them, it's not that it's easy to recycle. It's very durable.
So PET producers are under tremendous pressure to make their products sustainable and detach from the fossil feedstock that feeds these products. Actually, the future growth of PET is projected to come entirely from recycling, and enzymatic recycling, in fact, is the only technology that is able to give back the plastic's virgin properties, because we can break it down to its original molecular building blocks and then recreate the material. Now, I'm not here to talk about that specific venture, but this is just one opportunity that we explore. As you can see here on this slide, they all represent opportunities. In fact, they can grow above EUR 100 million many, many years out. But they are highly dependent on market development dynamics beyond our control. We therefore regularly evaluate these growth bets.
Some don't progress, or the market does not develop as we expected, and we exit, as we have done for water treatment. Others, like those on the right-hand side, grow and mature, and we bring them into the business, convert them to adjacencies, and increase our investment levels. So we continue to evaluate new opportunities. There are, in fact, a lot to choose from, I can tell you, and you can expect to see new ones being added to the portfolio in the years ahead. Now, with so many opportunities to grow, our main challenge becomes prioritization. Our biggest competitor is our own ability to prioritize in the right places.
We are therefore, as we speak, performing an assessment across our business, our markets, and pipeline to ensure we continue in Novo Nordisk to find and prioritize the opportunities that offer attractive growth, plays to our advantages, as you just saw, as a distinctive biosolutions player, has a positive impact on our planet and our society, and balances risks in our investments. This work will lead into our 2025 budget and process, as well as longer-term financial planning, and we will use it to extend our long-term guidance, as you heard, later in 2025. To the gentleman from Danske Bank asking earlier, I can assure you, we have a quite good view on what happens after 2025.
And actually, we can see we have multiple paths, as I mentioned earlier, and as you just saw, to achieve acceleration of growth. But it's not the right time to share that yet. We'll keep that to ourselves. We'll be applying the approach I just presented, and I can assure you, we will focus on attractive growth opportunities, and we will focus strictly on biosolutions. So that's what I have to share. I hope you now understand why we feel confident telling you that we are absolutely on track with integration.
We are going to deliver the synergies. In fact, we are already ahead on the cost synergies. We are in a unique position to drive and capture growing value of biosolutions and to accelerate that growth, and we are actually spoiled for choice, with multiple paths to grow beyond 2025. It's a good place to be, and a great handover to you, Rainer, to make it into numbers.
Thank you, Henrik. Thank you, Henrik. Quite a lot going on. Great. So first of all, good afternoon, and welcome also from my side. Delivering on what we said we would do, that is really the common theme throughout this afternoon, and that is also reflected in our financials, where we find ourselves to be in a strong position. Novonesis is only four and a half months young. Nevertheless, let's have a look at some, let's say, historical pro forma sales development over the last years. We see here a 6% CAGR between 2019 and 2023. For 2024, we're guiding growth of 5%-7%, where we now expect to end up on the upper range.
I just want to remind everyone that we changed the definition of the organic sales growth at the beginning of the year and are capping the growth for hyperinflation countries at 26%. It's important to keep in mind, specifically when comparing to peers. So overall, a solid performance in the past and a strong outlook, showing that despite the integration, we continue to focus on our customers and core business. And as Henrik said, I'm very happy with where we are. As you heard from my colleagues, we are able to create tremendous value for our customers while increasing operational efficiency that drives profitability. This is reflected in our gross profits, which we expected to be greater than 55 for 2024, contributing significantly to our adjusted EBITDA margin.
Due to the fact that we are already at an 80% run rate of the overall cost synergy target, as Henrik just showed, which we wanted to achieve after three years, we now increased our outlook and expect the adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 35% and 36% this year. An expected net debt/EBITDA of around 1.5 at year-end gives us an additional enough strength and possibilities to fuel our growth. But we are not satisfied with that set of numbers. We believe we can, and we must do better, and therefore, our expectation is to grow between 6%-8% through 2025, with further acceleration thereafter. We expect volume to be the main growth driver for the coming years, supported by pricing.
Sales synergies are starting to contribute to our growth in 2025 and will play a more relevant role thereafter. As it was outlined, we expect here a net sales contribution of around EUR 200 million in 2027. Currently, the division Food and Health Biosolutions contributes 46% to the group's net sales, leaving 54% for Planetary Health Biosolutions.... Going forward, we expect Food and Health Biosolutions to contribute a bit stronger to sales growth than Planetary Health Biosolutions. So what does this mean for the overall group's profitability development? Pro forma 2023, we showed an adjusted EBITDA margin of almost 34%. For 2025, our ambition is to be at 37%. So what are the drivers for the significant margin expansion? They are multifaceted.
We continue to achieve economies of scale and productivity improvements in our operations, as well as in the performance of our strains. You heard a lot about that from Anders, as well as from Claus. Pricing is here to stay and contributes with its fair value. The already achieved synergies that we now set out to contribute with close to one percentage point to 2024, materialized faster than originally expected and will kick in with their full year effect. In addition, the normalization of overall input costs will have a positive contribution to the margin. These effects are partially offset by investments in resources. Let's keep in mind that Novo Nordisk is positioned as a growth company, and we want to ensure that appropriate resources are deployed to ensure long-term growth.
Our assumption is that besides the one-time normalization effect of input costs, all margin drivers continue to be relevant beyond 2025. Let's double-click on those synergies. They were mentioned today a few times, and as you already heard, we are in a very good shape here. 80% run rate. As of June, is ahead of where we thought we would be, and of course, this gives us comfort that we are on the right track here.
Driver for being already at this stage, is the fact that the planned organizational adjustments have pretty much been finalized. It is also good to see that the distribution of the synergies is in line with our original expectations, slightly more than half coming from SG&A, the remainder being contributed from COGS. Let's stay on the cost side of the business and have a look at our R&D spend.
Investments into R&D are a significant driver, not only for organic sales growth, but also for our overall financial performance. Science is at our core, and the continuous development of our toolbox requires us to spend 10% of sales each year on those activities. The far majority, of course, around 80%, is spent on classical new product development. The remainder, pretty much equally on research and strain optimization. The latter is quite extraordinary, since this allows us to continuously improve the use of our current asset base by freeing up capacity and improving yield. To put some color on this, by improving strain performance, we postpone capital investments in the magnitude of around EUR 200 million every five years, contributing therefore, also to our free cash flow generation. Let's have a more detailed look at the free cash flow.
In 2024, we're expecting a CapEx ratio in the range of 9%-11% of sales. Looking at the development so far, I would expect us to end up rather on the upper end of this range. As a growth company, it is crucial that we continue to invest in core capacity. You can also expect some positive effects on our cash flow from the networking capital. We see input costs coming down, which were a significant driver in the past for the inventory increase, and in addition, closer management of the inventory position should contribute positively. I want to be clear, though, that we will not sacrifice sales growth in favor of a fully optimized inventory position. We also see potential for improvement when it comes to the accounts receivable position, as well as from the trade payables.
Anders mentioned the success of our first supplier conference, which allowed us also to improve payment terms that will show the impact over the next quarters. Finally, of course, the higher profit will contribute positively to the free cash flow. So what does that mean going forward for our capital allocation? Let's have a look at that. We will, of course, continue to invest into our growth. This includes investment into our people, go-to-market approach, innovation and capacity, as well as systems and processes. This also means that we are not opposed to complementary bolt-on acquisitions.
Of course, primary focus of the organization is focusing on our customers, delivering synergies and driving the integration. But as we all know, acquisitions are hard to plan and rarely come at the right time. But if the right target is on the market, we will not shy away from it.
We will also continue to pursue a stable dividend policy. Our shareholders can count on a dividend ratio between 40%-60% of the company's adjusted net result. As important as it is to say what one is going to do, it's just as important to say what one is not going to do. We will not expand outside the core capabilities, we will not pursue short-term margin gain at the expense of long-term growth opportunities, nor we will sacrifice a dividend in favor of maintaining a lower leverage. Focus on capital allocation and financial is important, but it's not the only dimension we're striving to maximize. We are committed to what we call the Triple Bottom Line. Only by finding the balance between financials, conserving resources, as well as the well-being and diversity of our workforce...
We will be able to secure long-term, sustainable, and profitable growth, reflected in our ambition to grow 6%-8% through 2025, achieving an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 37%, and executing on our clear capital allocation priorities. Sustainability is at the core of all what we do. Hence, it is clear that we continue to focus on reducing our climate and water-related footprint, and look for opportunities where we can contribute to a circular economy. Our business is essential in, and will contribute significantly to solving the challenges that our society and planet are facing. I think that became very clear throughout the day today. Last but not least, our employees are key to our success. A safe work environment is prerequisite to run our business. We do not compromise on this.
We also believe in the collective strength of our workforce by embracing diversity and respecting differences, and ensuring everyone feels a sense of belonging. We're also happy to see that the female gender of the first three management levels is close to 40%, the female gender ratio, obviously. Before wrapping it up, I would like to talk a little bit how my agenda as CFO will contribute to our growth ambitions. First and foremost, ensuring that we have a proper and appropriate resource allocation.
That means, on one hand, stringent cost management and ensuring that our cost synergies continue to be achieved, but on the other hand, this also means to make sure that we have enough funding for and funding and resources allocated to the spaces that we want to accelerate in. One is as important as the other one.
We also need to ensure that the investments we make are balanced between a short and a mid to long-term return horizon. The mix has to be healthy. As we will continue to be faced with more opportunities that we can cater for, prioritization remains key as well. A crucial enabler for growth is also to have a scalable infrastructure in place, and by that, I mean our applications, systems, processes, and data. Both legacy organizations come fortunately from a fairly homogenous application landscape, and this gives us now the opportunity to standardize and harmonize our business processes and systems, system set up even further. An early integration of our core applications, such as the ERP, such as the HR information system, the CRM, will be an accelerator in becoming one company.
We see a tremendous opportunity and chance to reduce complexity, simplify the setup, and build a lean, strong, and state-of-the-art platform for growth. At the end, it is our goal to have relevant business insight at the tip of our fingers whenever needed, to drive data-based decision-making throughout the organization. Let's summarize. Novo Nordisk is in very good shape. We are in a strong and healthy financial position. We are on track, delivering profitable, sustainable growth, and we have a clear capital allocation model, and this is just the beginning. Thank you.
Thank you, Rainer, and thank you to the rest of the team here. So now we're going to invite the rest of the executive management up here for the last Q&A session. So this is the opportunity to ask anyone in management a good question. Hopefully, a good question. So, let me leave this here. Just wait a little bit until we have seated everyone. Watch out you don't fall down there. That's risky.
Who we miss? Jacob.
I had one. Søren, you had up here. It's the first one.
Thank you. Søren from SEB. Just a question to the last team here presenting. You mentioned the 2%-5% for productivity improvements a few times. I do remember a higher number from the old Novozymes, which means that it's been diluted by Chr. Hansen, which I guess is quite expected. But with the competencies you have in Novo Nordisk today, do you think you can improve that number for the, you can say, the old Chr. Hansen production assets?
We certainly hope so. But right now, that's the range we can foresee with what we bring together.
But maybe, maybe to add to that, when we say 2-5, it's the classical yield optimization we talk about. It was actually deliberate that I chose to bring more levels of how you can optimize for the future, because the world is full of tools, and we can actually exploit them to also deliver productivity gains, gains that are outside of the classical yield optimization.
Thank you. We have one here on the first row. Hang on a bit, and you'll get the microphone.
... Hi, Thomas from Nordea. You had a very nice margin bridge in the end that shows that you know you go from 34% to 37%, and then after 2025, there is perhaps an option to go even higher up, but you choose to invest in strategic growth opportunities. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on how high could we go? Could we go to 40%, 50%, then?
I was expecting that question. No, so, first of all, yes, we're coming from 34% to 37%, adjusted EBITDA margin in two years, so that is quite impressive. So please do not extrapolate that kind of development. But 37% is at the end, no. But we also have to maybe very cautious, that, of course, we need to invest into future and long-term growth, and not every initial, let's say, growth opportunity will probably come at the same profitability. So, our strength is scale. So is there more possible? Yes, but let's be cautious, and we're gonna actually come and give you really the numbers about that H2 of 2025, because all of that will be assembled together in our long-term plan.
Maybe, Claus, you want to put a little bit of color of what the initial new opportunity, but then how we will also feel comfortable and continue to expand-
Yeah, but I-
-the profitability.
So I think, actually, Henrik talked about it. We need, of course, to invest in explorative in the future. And as you see, also, these comes with a risk. Some of them won't materialize. But in order for us to accelerate growth in the future, of course, we have to add growth legs to the company.
Well said. Good. One here.
Hi, thank you. Charles Eden from UBS. Just a quick clarification on the margin bridge. In that sort of 24-27, pricing positive contribution, input costs coming down, positive contribution. So can I just check, what you're saying is you're not gonna have to give up pricing for input costs coming down?
Right.
That was just a quick clarification.
Yeah. Basically, pricing is here to stay, yeah.
Perfect.
We do value-based pricing, not inflation plus.
Perfect. Then my other question is just in terms of we've seen a lot around potential growth opportunities here and new areas of potential development. When you have mergers in the space in the past, typically, there's also areas deprioritized, exited. Is there anything at this early stage from the combined businesses you'd say, do we need that?
Don't underestimate, and I'll, I will ask also Henrik to build an older business representative to chip in. Don't underestimate and how did you get the blessing of having a stronghold based on how we produce and how we innovate. There is a benefit of being deleveraged. There is a benefit of being on 20 different markets. There is a benefit because we cross-fertilize, plus the assets that we have, but also the innovation that we bring in. So there is a common trend from everything we do. Deprioritize, it would—I would put maybe the question that... I would answer your question in a different way. We will continue to prioritize and invest only on biotechnology and only on the areas that they are creative on what we do.
And as long as we see that we are the best owner, then we'll continue to invest. Then it could be that some projects, they get delayed or the market is not ready. How do you call it, Tina, that you breaking ground, that we need to have the readiness? It could be that the market does not go fast enough. Okay, then we pause and, and we wait. Maybe, Henrik, you want to put more color also?
Yeah, I completely agree. No, we have not seen anything that, due to the merger, due to the combination, would lead us to deprioritize. We are constantly, of course, assessing, especially those higher risk areas. You must also think about that some of the areas that both companies was going into are quite similar. So now, all of a sudden, we just have more scale and more critical mass. That could lead to, of course, an adjustment of the investment level. And that's exactly also this exercise that we're doing, because we have more choices. We have multiple choices.
So we need to have this conversation internally on how much risk do we want to take, what margin levels we want to be at, how much- how bold do we want to be, but there's no lack of things we could do, for sure.
Thank you, Henrik. We have here, Lars.
So, your production today is on strains living from sugar, which requires arable land. Would you consider gas fermentation as an alternative? Is that too far from your core, or why would you, why would you not?
Yeah. So it is a little far-fetched, you could say, as the microorganisms that we use and actually have the productivity for making these precision fermentations, they thrive better on, let's say, C2, C4, and C6. That's sort of the buildup of the whole metabolism of these cells. So the gas fermentations rely on simple C1s. That is very ancient technology, I would say. That's how life started on the planet, and then it actually evolved in terms of productivity and metabolism to the C2, C4, and C6.
But as you know, we are looking into and exploring, and this is blue sky, we are exploring using acetic acid as a fermentation base, and we can show already that we can use that. Acetic acid doesn't have to come from agricultural resources. It could actually be produced through CO2 and electricity in the future. It comes at a cost, and it's, it's early days.
Thank you, Claus. Up here. Anders?
Andre from Danske Bank. I just have a question regarding the cost synergies, because I understand you continue to expect those will be realized within three years, despite you have a run rate of 80%. Why do you reiterate that target of three years and don't either expect them in two years or even elevate the target beyond EUR 80 million-EUR 90 million?
So, so the original assumption was that over the 3 years, or in year 3, we'll have harvested EUR 80 million-EUR 90 million in cost synergies. We're saying we are in year 1, which is normally expectation you want to get the majority or, in, in, in synergies harvested when you combine two companies. We are already at an 80% run rate. So therefore, the majority you will already see next year. Actually, if you take 80% of roughly EUR 85 million, EUR 68 million. Those, actually, you will already see next year, in hitting our P&L, and that was what gives us a good, good comfort.
So there's going to be some incremental, right, to the 80, 90, the other EUR 15 million that will come over time, but also you have by combining systems, by continuously optimizing the, the organization. So it's not... It's one is the time frame, the three years that over three years EUR 80-90 million, and we are already very fast, and achieved them within the first five months, 80% of those.
Over here.
Hi, Chetan from JP Morgan. One number, which was conspicuous in terms of its absence today was ROIC. I think you guys used to have 20% ROIC target, including goodwill. Now, of course, goodwill is,
That we're not gonna halt, and I'm not going to comment on that. You can imagine that the goodwill is going to be a bit bigger. We're gonna see that at half year. But ROIC, yes, we will come back to ROIC, but to be honest, it's been a year of the transition of where there was so much happening, we really wanted to get the right base, and then with 2025, we'll reestablish that again.
The second question was just, you know, thinking back, you know, I think both companies have 2 different platforms for microbial fermentation. I guess the IP technology is different. Is there a path to consolidate that technology base for 2 different platforms at some point? Not next 2 years, but 5 years, 10 years, thinking, given, you know, you spend 20%-25% on productivity improvements, which is duplicated across 2 platforms today, but can there be one platform in the then 5-10 years?
So I can start and then Claus can add. It's important to stress that everything we do out of the company, we base on fermentation, and a significant part of what we do on the recovery side is actually also similar technology. But on the one side, we do enzymes, and then we do microbes, and it is not the same. And that means that the assets we have, we will probably be continuing to leverage as they are today. So it's not that we have a grand plan of sort of merging that into sort of fewer facilities in the short term.
Even within microbes, it's sophisticated. They actually grow in different ways, whether they are highly aerated, need air, oxygen or don't. So it is slightly with a caveat and a twist that they are different also in nature. Yeah.
The last simple question: Can you talk about, you know, your upgraded guidance on top line? Can you give a bit more color on what, what you see at the moment in terms of, trends by markets?
We see, and please, then bring in your further comments, but we see overall strong momentum across the portfolio. I mean, the driver of moving on the upper range of our guidance, it is by a strong momentum across the company. We see continued pull from our customers, and then across all areas. And then, more importantly, we see the team 100% aligned. We've not lost one single order. We're not delaying a single shipment. We are on the boost. We already have all the sales organization trained with the capability to cross-fertilize.
So I would say it is the combination of both strong momentum, it is the combination of collecting the fruits of a lot of work done in the plants, putting more fruits on the margin geographies, having the innovation that it's flourishing, and then, yeah, a team which is fully rallied, and just capitalizing on the good momentum in the market. What would you?
No, but you're saying it completely right. I think we were running through into the year at day one with the biggest priority being the continuity of what we had already with the customers, and we've shown them that we have lived up to that commitment. And then there's been, you know, good sentiment also in the food markets. We see a reestablished confidence in Europe of buying, which is also a positive. So, yeah, overall, a good positive momentum on the food and beverage side.
We say the same on the planetary health side. What we also saw in Q1 seems to be continuing the positive trends.
Thank you for that answer. Georgina, up here.
Thank you. It's Georgina again from Goldman Sachs. For Claus, please. You had a nice slide showing your late-stage innovation pipeline, 200 projects. I was wondering if you would venture a euro and what you'd expect your conversion rate to be? Thanks.
No, no, I wouldn't venture your number. And it's also clear that a pipeline so large, of course, consists of different elements. There are different needs in the business, and in some cases, in some businesses, there is a constant need to renew the technology. For example, you take yogurt cultures, and Jacob can talk a great deal about that. That's actually about not upsetting production within dairy dairies. And that means a constant renew and monitoring of the performance of the plants and the technology, culture technology you provide in. That needs a constant renew. That's a different one. It can...
It, of course, gives you market leadership and pricing power, but maybe it doesn't add so much to the growth, but it comes at a nice ROI, right? Because of the features. And then you have the more transformational programs. We often tend to speak a little bit about those, you know, and they are bigger in size, they're bigger in maybe also growth contribution, but they're also bigger in cost to complete, right? So it's this balance that we are looking across. It's this balance and time. We can just not focus on, let's say, the launches this year. We also have to look towards next year and the days beyond that, of course. So we really try to balance this for short-term impact and long-term impact, so.
We have a question here.
Thank you. My name is Artem from Redburn Atlantic. I've got a question on pricing. I think, Esther, you mentioned on the group level, has a rough indication, 1%-2% pricing going forward. May I ask, Jacob, Amy, and Tina to comment on what pricing you expect from each division, from each business, roughly? I wouldn't expect a number range, but maybe, like, above or below the average for the group.
The average will be 1%-2%. Right?
But-
Maybe you can speak about why we feel comfortable that we will continue to drive price.
Yes. So at least what I can talk about is that you could say across the board, we are utilizing the value we are creating, and it's various ways how we create value in the different business areas, but we are there both to capture our fair share of that. But I think the key for us is, and we talked a bit about that also earlier on, that we have spent quite a lot of time across the organization in both legacy companies, to secure that we have strong commercial capabilities on the pricing side, and thereby securing that it's something which you could say remains and something which is sticky.
And that's why you could say we are confident in that it will contribute, and it'll contribute across the various areas. You know, some years it might be some areas more, other years, something else more, but, but it is across the board, we want to drive pricing as we move ahead.
If, I mean, in Human Health, I think what we see is really the pricing opportunity as new product launches. You know, so this is really about setting that price at the right point when we're at the selling point, when we are really selling the value propositions, the strength of the patented science, et cetera, that's the lever to drive pricing and growth. So as we grow, we have the opportunities to set that value pricing in place.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I would say the same. We have several thousand we win every year, and we set a new price point for every single one of them. We set that with high diligence and an ability to share value fairly with customers. When they then introduce a price point and a solution, they need to have comfort that we're not just going to jump that up the year after, but we are gonna, every year, adjust it, as a minimum, with the inflation, right? So we get continuity of that fair share.
Thank you, Jacob. I had one question in the very far back.
Hello, Mark Haly from The Analyst. You didn't talk about 21st.BIO or biotech, biotherapeutics, some of these really longer term human health technologies. Obviously, you sit within the Novo Group and their portfolio of 150 biotech companies. Is it - is that just too small to matter at the moment, or is that, like, something for the next CMD in two years' time, maybe?
Maybe I can give it a first go, and then Tina can comment. So we're not looking to get into pharma. We are looking to help pharma with technologies. If some of you recall, maybe back a few years with Corona, we were able to sell technology into the analytical space, into the diagnostics, actually, with a fairly good revenue and price points. And there's more opportunities in this space, and we're exploring that opportunity space. Now, 21st.BIO is a different thing, entirely. We are, of course, involved with 21st.BIO , as we, it's a...
We've put in some of our technology, and that is to leverage areas that for now, we don't see Novo necessarily entering. You saw the very healthy margins we have on gross margins. You've just seen our EBITDA expectations, and some of these areas are more bulk. So there's a reason when I sort of showed the map of biosolutions, there are some of the areas in biochemicals, in biopolymers, and so on, that are just different bulk markets than our, you could say, high-end solutions. And so 21st.BIO is a vehicle to explore this space, with us as part of the owners, together with Novo.
... Any comments on that?
Not much I can add to that, Claus, so.
Maybe just repeat, we're not entering in biopharma.
No.
We have a question here, and then one over here.
Thanks very much. It's Maurice Patrick from Barclays. A few years ago, the organization started to talk about taking more risk in R&D, and it looks like your slide that you've really reallocated the resource out of the sort of the more modest iterations to the more groundbreaking. Is it too early at this point to judge whether that R&D pivot has been successful? And then maybe somewhat related to that, to the respective business heads, projects like Nebraska and Freshness had specific commercial goals associated with them. Can you update where we stand on hitting those targets, both the timeline and the absolute size? Thank you.
Yeah. Let me, let me start, and then we, we, Claus and, and Amy, and, and Tina build up, please. We are going to continue to focus on prioritization. This is... I mean, in a world of endless opportunities or so broad opportunities, prioritization needs to continue to be the bread and butter of how we work. You heard me saying that, you heard our CFO saying, you heard Henrik say, and you saw everybody, how we continuously focusing on prioritization. And at its innovation, it comes implicitly with the curiosity of connecting a market need and bringing an answer. We have all the tools and the capabilities to make them happen, but then it's about the market readiness. We talk about, plastic recycling. Yeah, the technology are ready, the solutions are ready, the enzymes are ready.
Well, now, Indorama is building a plant in France, and we're going to see scaling up, and we're going to see that moving forward. If that would. And that's happening. In other cases, maybe we see the technology getting a little bit slower. It's okay, we pause. What is very important is that we only continue to invest when the market moves ahead based on the original assumptions that we made. That's extremely important. So I would invite you to look like we're planting seeds in a deleveraged, de-risked innovation portfolio, and then time and the market says how those seeds raise. And we only invest more. We're agnostic. We only invest more when we see those green shoots coming in. And then also another area, before I pass the word on Nebraska and Freshness, our asset portfolio is multipurpose.
When we invest in an asset, we invest on a grid, we invest on fermentation, that it can... Then it's incorporated on how we produce, and it is one piece more on how we're enabling growth across all, I mean, microbes and enzymes. You just heard Claus before saying those are maybe not so mixable, but proteins, enzyme, extremely within the same capabilities, and cultures within the same capabilities, interchangeable and part of a grid of how we produce.
But-
I can speak to the Blair, Nebraska investment in particular. So, you know, we look at the pipeline, which I spoke about earlier, of this precision fermentation with the taste and texture, as well as the other areas, and we're pretty confident about the ability to deliver on that EUR 130 million of revenue growth that we had announced when we made the investment. Having said that, the timeline, given the slowdown in the alternative meat market in particular, we see potentially an extended timeline because of the 2-3-year slowdown that we've had the last few years.
Again, just building on what Ester just said, the beauty of being part of the network is, of course, we're already actually leveraging some of that capacity where we have growth in other areas to be able to leverage it, and that actually protects, and we're able to confirm the margin accretion targets that we had announced when we made that investment as well.
Do you wanna confirm that?
Yeah, just to say, all fermentation tanks are actually running at 100% out of that facility, and that just talks to the multipurpose concept that we are capable of utilizing the plants, should one segment not deliver exactly as we expected.
Mm-hmm.
On the freshness platform, we are still, you could say, seeing strong contribution from that. We see strong growth, have done it so far this year and expect to do it for the full year. Lumina, as I just talked about, is another element in order to support that, overall, platform.
And maybe I can reflect a little bit about your question on, you know, does it mean that some of the risk areas or the, the new growth areas is less now important or so on? I think Henrik presented a very nice overview of what was the sort of a, the, what we called SOAs in the past, in legacy in old times, and what also the, the
Strategic opportunities
... the lighthouses in the Chr. Hansen legacies. And you actually saw some of those mature into being anchored in the businesses, and you also saw some of them still being, you know, looked at. Do they pick up? Don't they? And you should be happy that we adapt to dynamic changes in the markets and the environment. Actually, when we see something like what we've just observed now, that, for example, the buyer is coming in, in the sense of rising and building plants, then, of course, we need to step back and take that in and say, "Okay, that we probably need to deliver on.
That's right.
Right? So it's a dynamic process.
... You agree? Okay, thank you. We have another question over here.
Thank you. This question is for Claus. First of all, congratulations. I think, looking at the innovation engine you put together in the organization, it's hard not to get excited. Thank you. My question relates to kind of the EUR 1 trillion opportunity that Esther outlined and kind of maybe the broader penetration of biosolutions in that. But as a few of you have highlighted, your toolkit in the last 10 years has evolved dramatically, whether that's, you know, high compute capability, synthetic biology. What you can do today is very different than what was possible 10 years ago. And you know, looking forward, I mean, maybe there are developments, I'm thinking things like de novo protein design.
You're already working with DeepMind. Maybe there are opportunities that might enhance your toolkit further to, to give you materially better problem-solving capabilities, right? From that standpoint. So from a scientific or technological standpoint, what prospects excite you for the next few years?
Wow!
[crosstalk]
[crosstalk]
[crosstalk]
Indeed. Yeah. No, no, compute power, as you said, is incredibly important. It doesn't take little compute power to actually do full modeling of a protein in its environment, let's say, in water and interacting with substrates. So this idea about de novo synthesis is we are still waiting for the compute power to fully take that in, and maybe you even need quantum computing at some point of time to deal with such phenomena. We are looking at that, of course. We are helped of being part of the especially the Novo family and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, who's setting up these sort of centers to understand these technologies. But I do think you have to look at this as tools, right?
When I mentioned what we do, yes, we can take out time on the early discovery, but you still need physical samples. You still need to scale it. You still need to format a microorganism so it's stable for the application intended, right? And that's... We will get more learning, and as we get more learning, we can accelerate those things as well, but then it's still about developing the application and so on. I'm just excited that this is happening so fast. I would not have foreseen us being able, ten years ago, to actually bring some of the solutions we see today to market.
The sort of a innovation difficulty was simply not addressable, you know, ten years ago. You would also see, of course, as we move forward, that the cost to achieve the outcome will need to come down for some of the newer applications as well. The technology helps us do that.
Thank you, Claus. One question here in front.
It's Andre from Danske Bank. I just have a follow-up to the question on the targets on freshness and advanced protein. It was asked before. So just to be completely sure, do you still expect to deliver DKK 1 billion by 2028 in advanced protein and in freshness, or is that slashed or whatever?
Well, I can go first. I mean, what we have said is that, in order to reach, though, I mean, lots of strong developments, a lot of good growth, I mean, we do grow double digit in that area this year, but it requires an unlock of the North American market, liquid market, in order to reach that, and that we are still working on. So it's too early to tell, but it's not slashed, as you called it.
As I said, on Blair, we stick to. We converted it to euros, so the billion is now EUR 130 million that you'll hear us talk to. So we believe we'll get there. We do see a slight delay in terms of the timing to reach it, not 2028. And think about that in terms of timing, I would say, look, we are two or three years behind on growth, because of the slowdown in the market in the recent years.
I, I would invite you to read us that we always gonna get one right, the value or the time. But maybe not both at the same time. But then we will bring something else to catch up if time gets delayed. Yes, plant-based protein, it's getting delayed relative to what we thought it would be, all thought or many of us thought it would be. So what? There are others that they're rising faster, and that's the beauty that this stream brings.
We swift, we dance, we respond, we look at the wall, and we bring those needs into answers, and we deliver the growth. The total number doesn't change, but maybe we don't get it absolutely right on how or on when, but yes, on where we, we aiming and where we are and the seeds that we're creating for the future.
Up here, Nicola. Very good.
Thanks. It's Nicola Tang from BNP Paribas Exane. I was intrigued by your comments earlier that in terms of, training of salespeople around cross-fertilization, it's, it's done. Given the fact that earlier you, you were talking about the, expertise and the complexity and having, you know, dedicated, salespeople for specific applications. So I was wondering if you could just explain a little bit what you mean by it's done. And thinking about cross-fertilization, you know, I was always under the impression that it was a mandate for both your salespeople, but also your R&D people. So could you help me understand a little bit, I suppose, how you encourage or incentivize both sales and R&D people around cross-fertilization?
That's so good, and that's so fair, Nicola, and I think it was me, the one who said, so let me build on it. We're never going to be done, right? We're never going to be done because we'll bring more solutions all the time, and we'll continue to bring more toolbox to our sellers. Maybe this means we are in a really good place, and we've done what we wanted to be at the moment that we are.
But then we'll never going to be done, because we'll be giving you more solutions, because we will be learning more from what other market needs, and then we'll be bringing more answers, and then we will have also to bring that training and cross-fertilization. That's maybe putting a little bit color on the momentum on what we mean. Good place, and then, yes, much more to come.
Maybe I'll just add, yes, our salespeople and our colleagues should, of course, mention this or talk to this, but they are deeply, you know, they're deep experts in an application, right? So they might be dairy scientists, dairy engineers, or they might be in, you know, doing clinical trials in human health. They know each other's products, and it's the application notice that they're very deep on, and it's a customer relationship.
Mm-hmm.
When I refer to some of the cross-learning, it's on the technology base. For example, I mentioned a specific example, that a solution that works on, let's say, one type of substrates in one industry, is bound to work on another, in a similar substrate in another industry. So we are having these sort of cross-application innovation workshops. As we start up new stuff, we always sort of look into what do we have available of knowledge, not only in a specific application, but also inspired as well, always in the startup phase. That was when I talked about the early stage, the churn, and how you cycle through opportunities and that, before you sort of define and put a value to it and put it in late stage.
Thank you, Claus. We have time for one more question, so I'm looking out like an auctioneer. Thanks, Sean.
No pressure, Sean.
None of that.
Thank you. Just a question for Amy. Around the HMO area, your main competitor seems to have already launched products in the market in China. I think you have said around 2025. So why are you a bit behind here, or are you behind? And how can you catch up?
Yeah, so there is a main competitor who has one HMO molecule in China. We have made really good progress this year, with actually some good milestones being reached just in the last few months, and we actually believe we'll be, actually, at the end of 2024, on the market as well, so, closing the gap. I think what we're really excited about is that we are actually in the process on all five HMO molecules, are already well into the regulatory process, in China and making good traction. So yes, we're, we're closing and very quickly closing, that launch gap, in China, and we actually believe we have the opportunity to be first to market, with some of the rest of the five molecules.
Very good. Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you for good questions, and thank you for good answers.
Ah, thank you.
I think so. Before we round off and head upstairs, and I think actually the rooftop will work because there's no rain, Ester will just share a few concluding thoughts.
Yeah.
Please. No, I think you should come here.
Thank you. Thank you very much for going through this day with us. I am confident, after all the conversations with also within the break, after seeing the questions you bring in, after seeing the body language in the room, that you see what I see, that we see the power of biosolutions, and we see that the era of biosolutions has just started, and that we see that Novonesis is the right company to capitalize on this opportunity, and that we are the company who's going to deliver sustainable shareholder value creation.
We have everything that's needed to make it happen. Jacob said it: We have the depth. We have the customer intimacy. Amy said it: We are the catalyst. We are the one who makes that special, brings that special catalytic effect on what the customers are seeking for.
Tina just said it: As the markets mature, as the readiness is there, we're going to be there, making it happen. We have the right foundation, Henrik. We are doing an amazing job putting these two companies together. And yes, we have the bliss and the blessing, God bless you, Claus and Hannes, of the amazing capabilities we bring from an R&D and from a production perspectives, gluing and putting all those opportunities together. And our CFO said it very, very clear: This is just the beginning. We're going to secure a strong performance. We are going to secure a strong performance through continuous prioritization. We are ready. We're ready to better our world with biology. Thank you very much.