It's a real pleasure, a real honor to open today Barco's Capital Markets Day 2022, titled Innovate for Impact. I hope you are doing well. Looks like that. As most of you do know, I'm closing my Barco chapter this week, opening up a new chapter next week. Rest assured, I'm not gonna bother you with an extensive look back of the past two decades of my Barco career. The only thing I'd like to share is it's been a great period with great memories and with above all, great people, and amongst them, also you. Thank you for that. I'm also feeling quite okay because I'm leaving this company with a very positive feeling and a positive feeling also about the future of Barco.
The future of Barco is what is today front top and center stage of what we will bring today. Today, we'd like you to kind of classical setup. We'll take it from the bottom up. We'd like you first to first of all, to meet with Barco, meet with the management team, meet also with our chairman, Frank Donck, is also here. Meet also my successor, Willem. Willem Fransoo is here. I'm happy he's here, and I'm sure he's gonna do a great job in the next coming years. Second, we hope you'll leave tonight with a better idea, with more insights on Barco. That's also one of your assignments, of course, and to take it up. Three, have fun.
Make sure that you experience, you feel, you smell, you really feel the Barco technology. We're gonna bring demonstrators, we're gonna bring technology, we're gonna bring nice examples to experience the company. The agenda, very straightforward. We'll kick it off with the keynote, and we close it with the drinks. In between, we have lunch and some deeper dives on the business, some deeper dives on a number of strategic objectives as well. I'll just close with two housekeeping topics. You have a view here on our leadership team, which you can meet today. Take that opportunity. In the first part of the carousel meetings, you see that will kick off at 11:20. For now, it's important for you to keep in mind your group number.
It was printed on the name tag. For the people who lost their name tag already, please reach out to An or Inge to check it out. We will make sure we pick you up at the end of the first coffee break to then guide you to the right carousel and keep with the flow. Next to the carousel meetings, and that's in the context of experiencing Barco, you're already gonna witness a number of great technologies during those carousel meetings. Next to that, we would also like to strongly recommend a couple of optional demonstrators. At the entrance, we have our digital art canvas. We're gonna do a couple of more shows during lunch and at the closing.
We have our brand new weConnect setup for teaching and hybrid conferencing platform. Last but not least, we also have a very nice example for your next home cinema. We call it Barco Residential. All of these are what we call in French, fleur de voyage, demonstrators. As you are here, they are all available at the experience center and take up max five-10 minutes. Available during lunch or at closing drink. Now, without further ado, I will invite Ann and Charles, co-CEOs of Barco, to the stage to kick it off with the keynote. Ann and Charles, take it away.
Thank you. Thank you, Karl. Good morning, everybody. On behalf of Charles and myself, we would also like to welcome you here at Barco, and thank you for joining our Capital Markets Day for you physically here in the room, and of course, also for our people online. It has been now one year ago that Charles and I joined Barco as co-CEOs, and I think it's a good time to basically share with you our observations of that first year in retrospect, but more importantly, looking forward. I'll flip through the agenda again. Give us one second. When we look at the last 10-12 years at Barco went through different waves. We had waves where we expanded our portfolio with innovation and small acquisitions. We had waves where we streamlined our portfolio along our three main markets.
We had also a wave where we made Barco fit for future growth, where we focus on the performance. We also lived through two crises, the global financial crisis in 2008, the COVID crisis. It is our goal moving forward to profitably grow Barco by building on our strengths, by grasping the many opportunities that we see in the market, but more than ever, to create value by setting the standard in the industry through innovation.
How do we look at Barco today? Let me take you through our SWOT analysis. We believe that Barco has incredible strengths, because we have in-house and in-depth knowledge about everything around visualizations. Also, for most of our customers, our solutions are mission-critical. We have, therefore, leading market shares in extremely interesting markets. Most of all, we have discovered, Anne and myself, actually that we have great talent in-house. We have a committed and very strong management team that builds the business. Now, a SWOT analysis means that you also have weaknesses that we need to work on. We have a culture that is still a very engineering culture, and it's clear that one of our goals is to get more innovation, more entrepreneurship within this engineering culture.
We also have, due to history, unfocused factories, where we have not streamlined it according to global markets. We will take you through what we will do about it later during the day. Fundamentally, we need to attack the fact that for the last 10 years, we had basically no top-line growth and relatively low profitability, certainly not to the degree that a high-tech company should have. We have great opportunities, as you already heard me quite a few times say. We have opportunities in the market because we have discovered that actually there are much more adjacencies and much more segments that we can attack, that we can penetrate. But also we have left China still relatively uncovered. China, for investment goods, is today nearly half the world market. There is a big opportunity there.
We also have, and that is really the crux of the day, and that we want to show you. We want to set industry standards. When I discuss with some of you, every time comes back that the Americans set the standard for the Internet, the Americans set the standards for global search engines, et cetera. Well, we want to show you that a European company can also, through technological excellence, set the standards in its industries. We have also a big opportunity in our value chain, namely, Barco has, over the years, a little bit too much idea to let's outsource everything. We see big opportunities to control better our cost, increase our quality by bringing a number of technologies in-house. That we will also talk later today about this.
Now, in a SWOT analysis, we also look at what are the threats. Well, the threats of a technology company are mostly by its own doing. It's complacency, thinking that we are the best and therefore we will stay the best. It's not at all what we want to inspire in this company. We have threats that the world is changing very fast, so we need to keep on the speed. Of course, in the technology, there is always this magic word, disruption. We always want to disrupt the other guy, but the other guy might also think about disrupting us. These are the threats. We try to be honest about it, but we think that the opportunities by far outweigh the threats.
Indeed, we see many opportunities at Barco, and we have great confidence in the future of Barco. If we summarize it in one line, we basically envision a one Barco company building around our image processing capabilities and actually developing and providing visualization solutions that set more and more the industry standard. If you combine that with the healthy and strong markets we're in, we basically believe, and we are absolutely convinced that we can grow our business and that we can grow our market share. Now, Barco is present in many different domains of the visual chain. It all starts with visualization technologies. We have advanced displays, medical-grade displays in our healthcare division. We have our state-of-the-art laser projection technology for our entertainment business, and we have our triple play large video walls for our enterprise business.
Now, a visual chain is more than just the visualization technology. You also need to get the content on the screen. Typically, that content that comes in information packages. It's coded, we need to decode it, and we need to transform it to an image on the screen. We call that rendering. At Barco, we have a full suite of rendering devices for all our market segments. That goes from media players to multimedia players, controllers, decoders, switchers. That's where the full gamma that we basically have in rendering devices to play the content on our technologies. Now, of course, we also need to transport the content, the image from the camera to the display. Also here, Barco is a pioneer in distributed networking, mainly in video over IP.
That's where we send this coded information over the Internet and not over a proprietary cable, like an HDMI or a VGA cable. Now we have great examples there. For instance, if you would look at our Nexxis product portfolio in healthcare, what we do there is we send the information from the endoscope, so the camera, to the surgical display in the operating room. The way we do that, we do that with uncompressed, so no data loss, zero latency, no delay, and a 4K resolution. Another great example is our ClickShare family, where we wirelessly connect your PC in the meeting room with the video, the mic, and the speaker in the room, and then seamlessly we connect the meeting room with remote participants.
Now, before you send the information from the camera to the display, there's one other step that is called remastering, color grading. This is basically where we reformat the content to give the best effect and follow the standard of the display. Now, one of the technologies you're gonna hear a lot about today is our new Lightsteering projection technology for cinema. What we do in Lightsteering, so we real-time in the cinema, program the lasers and the lenses in the projector to steer the light to the spots on the screen, so we can make certain spots brighter and other spots darker. This is a very power efficient way of laser projection. You're gonna see demonstrations today, so the setup is already for the people visiting us of course, the setup is there.
We also need to basically reformat the content, the movie content, to make it HDR Lightsteering compliant. Therefore, we have developed software algorithms that make it the colorist, the creators, very easy in an automated way to adapt the movie content to make it Lightsteering compliant. That is a good example of how we optimize the content to get the best effects actually on the display. Of course, there is the professional camera technology. It's evolving at a quite rapid pace. The cameras out there, 6K, 8K, HDR, very wide color gamuts, lots of shutter gates. In principle, actually, the camera evolves so fast that it's actually the challenge of the rest of the visual chain to make sure that the content of the camera, we can also, as good as possible, show it on the screen.
That's the main part where Barco is of course, active in it. Barco is not a professional camera company. We did develop one camera, though. That is our multispectral camera for skin imaging, where we basically can show more details of the skin and more of skin lesions and skin texture. Now, we recently renamed our Demetra device to Dermicus. That is actually after we created a subsidiary with a Swedish startup company. The combined portfolio is now our multispectral camera together with the advanced workflow from the Swedish company that actually enhances the workflow between the dermatologists and primary care physicians. With this combined portfolio, we can extend our market. We can not only reach dermatologists but also primary care physicians, and we can handle more than just skin cancer. We can go in many more use cases for skin diseases.
Now, all of these products that we develop, we develop based on years of expertise at Barco. We cluster typically our expertise in four domains. There is of course, our advanced display and projection technology, building on a lot of experience in optics, mechanics, electronics, and signal processing. There is our computational optics. What is that? We basically augment the traditional optics in a projector with computational algorithms. This is exactly what we apply to this new Lightsteering projection technology that we're gonna demonstrate here today. There is, of course, image processing. What do you do in image processing? You enhance the output on the display, taking into account actually the limitations of the display technology itself.
You get better quality, better insights in the images, and you can imagine that in healthcare, this is extremely important for the doctors to get the best possible insight in the images that they see. Last but not least, there is connectivity. Connectivity is also the heart and core of what we do. We don't only connect the camera with the display, but also towards the future, all our products in the field will be connected to the cloud or on-prem. That actually allows our customers to monitor their global installed base. If connected to the cloud, it helps us in a much more easy way connect with our customers and also provide service remotely.
Another area where we see our expertise grow is in AI, is in machine learning, where basically we will make our products smarter, more intelligent. We do this already in Lightsteering, so our software algorithms are AI based. We do this already also in healthcare, where we sort and categorize and analyze images in an automated way. We'll see more applications actually in machine learning and artificial intelligence moving forward. Based on this expertise, we think we are in a very good position to basically meet our markets and our customer needs.
Indeed, let me say that not only we have great internal technology, but we wanted to walk you also through the technology and market trends that will shape our future. Let me tell you a funny thing. When my children communicate, they don't write me long emails. They send me a WhatsApp with an image that has been modified. Suddenly you realize that words actually are disappearing, and that one image tells more than 1,000 words. Visual information now is more and more getting the norm. It's everywhere. Not only that, but you want better quality of image. You want a premium experience in your image. You want your cinema to be brighter, more immersive than ever. You want more pixels on your screen. You want a higher resolution. You want two screens on your desk, three screens on your desk.
You want higher brightness. You want new experiences. For example, in new experiences, there is a market that has exploded in the last few years with COVID, is actually digital museums. The image that you see here is a digital museum. It's an exhibition around ukiyo-e artists or Japanese woodblock prints artists. What you see suddenly, instead of looking at an image that is a woodblock print, is that big, you suddenly are completely immersed in the world of the artist. You can imagine, you know, walking in the world of Van Gogh or imagine walking in the world of an ukiyo-e artist. Not only visualization is a fundamental trend that shapes our future, but also we now see that everything becomes hybrid. We at Barco had defined actually the meeting experience by saying everybody should be able to bring its own device.
The own device means basically computer, but you can have a laptop, you can have an iPad, you can have a telephone, a mobile phone, a high-end mobile phone. You can have any type of, you know, Dell or Apple or Lenovo or whatever. You should be able to connect to the meeting room without any hassles. We see that in a world where sometimes it looks like everything is Microsoft. Actually, you go to China and there is no Microsoft there. There's also the importance of bringing your own device, where when we have our Chinese visitors, they can connect also to our network and share a meeting. We have to have hybrid meetings. This means meetings where participants can be remote.
Like, for example, today, you see that quite a number of people are remotely participating to this conference, as well as physical. Of course, for the demonstrations, the physical people will have an advantage or a big advantage. Now, this also brings new challenges to which we have to respond. The challenges are around security. They are around actually that more and more data goes to the cloud. Also there, not only security aspects, but also how do you ensure that you have the connectivity to the cloud and that you can process the information from the cloud. Because it doesn't bring anything to put lots of data of a control room in the cloud if you cannot analyze it and work it and use it to gather significant information.
What we tend to do not only is to manage critical operations, but critical operations also now are hybrid. You want to have direct communications with people in the field. You want to have direct communication between a central control room and other control rooms located in different locations, breakout rooms. All things hybrid shapes Barco's future. Now, I think we are incorrect, Anne.
Really?
I think we should have written customer is queen.
Yeah, I agree.
Barco prides itself to be a very inclusive employer. Not only a customer is king or queen, but it's a revolution for Barco that we are starting, is that Barco needs to be much closer to its end customer. Of course, much of our business is drawn through retail, to channels, to partners, but we need to understand, to be very intimate with our customers so that we understand their needs and what they really want to achieve with the technology we develop. This is for us a very big priority that we want to be much closer to our customers. We will organize our services, our factories, everything to be close to our customers.
We have, with that mentality, a large opportunity because our customers are telling us they want us to manage much more the life cycle of our products. They want us to basically work with them over the life of a product. That we can give not only support but upgrades. We can tell them what is the expected life, what should be the technology changes, how to basically connect and get new content in their machines. That's what lead us automatically also to new business models.
Also, the amount of data generated every year is exploding. Now the forecasts as they are actually to go from 60 zettabytes generated in 2021 - 180 zettabytes in three years from now. The amount of data is huge. The challenge that you have with big data is that how to use the data and get most insights out of the data. The best and easiest way to get more insights out of the data is by visualizing them. Again, this is the heart and core of what we do here at Barco. Now, moving forward on our product roadmaps, we see also much more need for computational power and power efficiency.
If you look at the applications actually moving forward, you're gonna see that you need so much data in imaging, you need to process so many pixels, so much data that we just need more computation power. Some good examples are like in medicine. To automate the medicine, there are more and more images created every day, less doctors to evaluate them. How can you, with machine learning algorithms, sort through the data, categorize them, see patterns, and make already some predictions to assist the doctors? This is something you need processing power for to run those machine learning algorithms. When you look at 3D imaging, I mean, 3D imaging, take just a 3D autostereoscopic display. This is basically a display that feeds half the information of the pixels to your left eye and the other half to your right eye.
If you want the same resolution for the same screen size, you need double the amount of pixels, so more data to be processed. Now, if you want the true lifelike 3D hologram where you basically want to feed information from every viewing angle that times two goes times a multiple. The data that you're gonna need to process something like that is huge, and we're evolving into that. We see also different market segments that are evolving into that. Take, for instance, gaming. Another one is Lightsteering. I talked already about it, but just to run the computational optics, actually, you also need a quite strong GPU processor to be able to do that.
We are towards the future, gonna rely more and more on the most advanced chip technology to help us actually for the image processing that we need to do for the future applications. The last trend, very important of course, is about sustainability, yeah. We see sustainability at Barco as extremely important for our planet, and we have basically embedded in our corporate strategy, in our business plans, but also in our culture, the key areas where we believe we can have an impact on sustainability. Our primary focus goes to the planet. We have set for ourselves CO2 emission reduction targets, energy in production, energy reduction targets, and also eco-labeling for our products. We also see sustainable employment as very important for our company. Basically, we need diversity and inclusion.
We need internationalization to attract the best talent and keep the best talent at Barco. We have an afternoon session, and Ann Desender will talk more about our KPIs around sustainability.
This was the introduction. Let's go to the heart of the matter, corporate strategy. We want to introduce you basically our corporate strategy, hic et nunc, here and now for level one, and then where we are going a little bit further ahead.
When we talked to you last November when we joined Barco as co-CEOs, we identified a few observations, a few challenges within Barco that we wanted to tackle head-on. Now we are one year in our job, and we want to give you an update where we are on with these observations, because they're also the foundation of our corporate strategy. The first one was our complex organization, so we had many competing centers of power within Barco. We did do a reorganization last November. We folded our sales organization into six business units. Now after one year, we are very, very pleased that we can tell you that we see the effect of that reorganization. We have much more clear accountability within the business unit, end-to-end responsibility. Also, we see a much more entrepreneurial approach in these business units.
Moreover, we are outwards looking now. We look and listen to our markets and our customers instead of having to do a lot of internal communication in a very complex matrix. Well, we see the effects. Another area that we have been working on is actually improving our operational and commercial efficiency through digital transformation. Our IT strategy is very simple: go standards as much as possible based on the best industry practices. For instance, over the last years, we have rolled out Salesforce. We're gonna maximally use Salesforce to enhance actually the integration between our sales teams and our service teams. Another approach in IT is also a cloud-first approach. We are moving to a cloud-first. We're more flexible, more scalable, and of course, we continue to automate our business processes internally, and that we do across all our sites worldwide.
Opportunities. We indicated that China was a great opportunity. How are we doing about that? Well, in order to succeed in China, we need to become local. We have built a first factory for medical, so that is in Suzhou. We have started the acquisition of land and starting the construction for another factory in Wuxi, which is about an hour and a half from Suzhou, for the projectors. We already see in medical a strong growth rates in China. Now, we come from low, so strong growth rates are quite normal, but we have every indication that we will continue on these growth rates. We have implemented a China win strategy across all our markets because China is a great country, it has great history, but it's also very different from us. They have different norms.
We think DIN, they don't think DIN. We think about Microsoft, they don't think Microsoft. We need to adapt and be able to have as well people in Europe or the U.S. understand that China is different and that China will evolve in a different way. Also, we said we discovered by our reorganization that the market potential that we had is much bigger than what we expected. We have found that there is a much larger market out there for our technology. You will see quite a few examples during your tour of the pods, so the demonstration pods, of why we think that the market is much larger than what we have seen up to now, that we will show you.
We say, "Okay, we have something further that we need to work on and where we can increase the efficiency of Barco." The first is drive for operational excellence. Basically, we will focus our factories so that we get a much more clearer picture and a much more efficient factories for the future. We will also, of course, strengthen the downstream value position by increasing our manufacturing footprint because we will increase the quality of what we can offer, and by that, expand our markets. We are also very busy for the moment to strengthen our supply chain. You have all heard us explain about chip shortages and electronic problems. We are not only addressing those, but we are also making ourselves much less dependent on those suppliers. An, but there is further to do.
Yes, of course. We also need to talk about innovation. Barco has always had a strong focus on R&D. In the past, that focus was geared towards short-term incremental R&D. We need to basically rebalance, and we have been doing that over the last year, our R&D roadmaps to prioritize what we need to do short term. We had to do redesigns when there were chip shortages, but also make sure that we leave enough room for new flagship products. We need to basically set a standard and basically, make sure that we take the lead and set our competition apart with new innovation and breakthrough products. That's why within the current R&D envelope, which is already about 11% of top-line sales, we have set aside actually a budget that will focus on breakthrough innovation. We wanna accelerate innovation.
We want our people to take the risk and be entrepreneurial and come with new ideas that we can bring on the market. Of course, we are a business, so we need to make sure that we choose the right ideas. We have also set up an innovation governance process where we have a financial control and where we also can, of course, guarantee the return on our investments. We'll talk more about that innovation funnel in a minute, but let's maybe first have a look at our markets.
You will hear us or the BU managers talk about their different markets. Let me talk you a little bit through the different business units. You will also then be able to acquaint yourself much more to what is really happening in them. Barco is associated with digital cinema. We were the first with digital cinema. Let me reassure you, all cinema is now digital, there is no film reels anymore. That's completely past. We are not only in cinema, we are the leader, but we also pride ourselves to be the innovator, and we will continue to innovate. I mean, we talked a little bit about Lightsteering as a technology. I will take you through that a little bit later.
I mean, we have a large existing installed base of more than 100,000 cinema projectors in the world, and there are opportunities down there. Immersive experience, these are the projectors that are non-cinema projectors. There we are one of the global top three companies. We think that we can further increase our market share. Why? Because innovation is happening there also with the laser light engines that start to dominate that category. We have at the moment about 10,000 UDMs or laser projectors in the field. Still room to grow. Meeting and learning experience, ClickShare. Every one of you knows and you have all been very positive about what we are doing there. Well, of course, we are not only the innovator there, we are actually, we created a new category. It didn't exist.
We today are still the leader in all agnostic systems. We have a presence today of about 1 million meeting rooms. Sounds a lot, huh? You know, it's really actually nothing. Gartner published a study saying that digital meeting rooms and classrooms, there are more than 100 million of those in the world. We scratch the surface, but there's still some room to go. Another business unit is large video walls. At the moment, we are one of the top three companies in control rooms. We have some new technologies coming, and we have about 15,000 control rooms existing. Some of you have questions around the future of that business. We will try to show you where we see the future, but that I will do later. We have two medical business units. One, diagnostic imaging.
That's the business unit that goes through distributors and retail channels. There we are not only the leader, but also an innovator in new type of technologies in the screens. We have absolutely new breakthroughs in new segments like digital pathology. In radiology, there are new flagships coming, which will also include artificial intelligence. We have in the field more than 1 million displays, where we stay in contact through QAWeb as a technology. Surgical and modality is the business unit that goes through OEM partners. We are leader there. The main push there is not only the technology in the screens of the operating room, but also in all the recording and compression devices that are needed in the operating room. Today, about 7,000 operating rooms are equipped with our systems.
Market size, according to Gartner, is 200,000 operating theaters. Funny for you to know, there are about as many in the world operating theaters as there are cinemas. Now, how do we see these markets evolving? The difficulty, of course, for us to talk about this now is that we compare to last year, but last year is a crisis year. Some might be surprised to see cinemas going up 22%-25% versus 21%. It's very simple. It goes up simply because it was a crisis year. What is sure is that if cinema wants to survive or prosper, they will need new technology. You have heard us talk about the laser wave. We also will show the Lightsteering wave. What we know is cinemas will grow.
I mean, our business will grow, and also our market share will grow because technology that we propose to that sector is unparalleled. Immersive experiences, events grow, more images. The Chinese do city beautification with our projectors. At night, Chinese cities come to life. You have new experiences like digital museums, so they also grow. Meeting and learning experiences, we scratch the surface. It's so market is expected to grow a lot. Market share, I think we have to keep reasonable. We have high market share. We'll strive to maintain that market share even if the market is growing very much. Large video walls. Well, to answer some of the questions, we see that there is a big trend in the market for more control, more monitoring, more incident management, more need for basically understanding what is happening in real-time.
Rest assured, there is no cameras monitoring what you are doing for the moment, where you are not being controlled, but maybe in the future will, you will be. In diagnostic and medical imaging. China, strong possibility for us. Adjacencies, for example, digital pathology, digital microscopy, all sectors that are coming to life. We have a high market share. We don't believe that market share will grow very much, but the market will continue to grow. Surgical modality, very high growth because operating theaters become much more automated. There are more and more surgical robots. A surgical robot, actually, the surgeon never looks at the patient anymore. He looks at the screen, not at the patient. This is really what is happening. We see there also a strong growth.
We are sounding very optimistic, but the biggest optimism that we have is actually what we have in pipeline.
Yeah. Let's talk about innovation. We see many opportunities to innovate and to grow our business with Barco, all building actually on the four core expertise domains that we have. Now, like all innovation, it takes some time to come up with new and disruptive products, but we want to accelerate that process here with Barco. We see opportunities to grow actually in all segments. We start with our core business. We see still many opportunities to grow our core business. That's why you're also gonna see that actually, in the business carousel that we have after this presentation, the road maps of our business units and how they actually sprinkle those road maps now and rebalance that road map also with more flagship products. We also see opportunities to grow in adjacent domains. That can be with our current technologies, where we basically...
Maybe I'll go back. With our current technologies, that we go to other market segments. That is one possibility. The other thing is that we have slightly derivative technologies that we can go also to adjacent markets. There is, of course, new technologies that are coming at the horizon, where we keep an eye on, where we start in development, also basically get into new domains. You hear more about our core road maps, core business road maps in the business verticals. I just wanted to give you a couple of examples in, like, how we are looking at these adjacent and new domains. Take now, for instance, projection mapping. Charles just talked about it. City beautification in China is one of them. What do you do?
You take a 2D or a 3D image, and you display it on a large wall or on the surface of any shape of a building. This is really an emerging and growing market. What does that mean for Barco? That you need multiple projectors, and you need basically specialized software to stitch the images of each of these projectors together into one image that you see on the wall. Lightsteering, HDR Lightsteering, we talked about it. This is definitely a disruptive technology for our core cinema business. Think about digital pathology. Pathology is where radiology was 10 years ago, I believe. There is more cancer cases, less pathologists, and more diagnosis. They need to accelerate their digital transformation.
We can leverage all the know-how that we have in our radiology to basically also take the lead in the digital pathology market. Another area is hybrid. Of course, we talked about our ClickShare family. Hybrid is there to stay. Think now this setup. We actually are using our weConnect platform to make hybrid conferencing for big audiences more engaging for everybody, for you in the room, but also for the remote participants. Principally, you should see if they turn on their cameras, the remote participants. The remote participants, they have multiple camera feeds. There is one, and there is one. It's kind of being a little bit controlled by the cameras, but they can switch whoever they wanna see.
If they don't wanna see me talking, but they wanna see your reaction, they will basically switch to that camera. That is also one of the platforms that is actually in this hybrid world of very great use. There is another one. It's actually our digital art canvas. This is another new trend that we see. Actually, art is no longer an oil painting. It's all about digital art moving forward. What you need for digital art, you need digital screens to display the art on. This is where we can leverage our entire portfolio, so our LCDs, LEDs, projection, to basically display the digital art. The system that you saw when you entered the lobby, I hope that you saw it.
This is actually a new partnership that we actually engaged in with a startup company in Sint-Niklaas. It's called Mankind Art. They built a system. It's actually movable displays, four movable displays on a mounted structure. Just by adding this motion into the display, you give the artist an additional form of freedom to create their art. This can be used, of course, for in art galleries, exhibition rooms, in lobbies, like we do it, and it gives you actually a visual effect. There is more. There is, for instance, graphics processing. If you look at our switchers presentation and video switchers that we have today, you can add graphical effects, real-time rendering, augment actually the performance that you see here today with augmented reality. That's adding graphic processing to our switchers.
That is another way that you basically can move into more features actually on our switchers. 3D solutions. 3D imaging is actually the holy grail of imaging because if done right, it gives you the most lifelike image of what you see in the real world. There are 3D digital displays out there. You've probably seen them. Most of them are using glasses. To see the depth, you need to use glasses. The one that you will see here in our surgical demo pod is not needing glasses. We use eye tracking that follows your eyes and sees on which angle you're looking at the screen. It's still single viewer. We're just starting to explore the 3D roadmap, but there is still lots of promise to come to basically get into this disruptive 3D imaging.
That's just to give you a few examples. I think in all these examples, the strength is that we combine our expertise in our four domains, and just by combining that, we differentiate and make our products unique. Of course, we would like to show that example. Before that I need to say a word also about our innovation funnel. We wanna accelerate innovation at Barco. It's key. That means that we need to start behaving as a startup company, being more agile, actually also work with startup principles like fast prototyping, fast fail, very early customer interaction. Of course, we need to budget for that, but we also need the financial control on the budget that we have the return on the investment. We've set up that governance process.
We go through seed phase, fast prototyping, getting first early customer reactions. Once they pass that gate, the prototype needs to be built in a manufacturable product, and we need to start creating business. Again, building on all our expertise, I think it's good to end this chapter in innovation with our new Lightsteering technology.
What is Lightsteering? Well, Lightsteering, you need a projector, and in a classic projector, about 60% of the light that is generated is thrown away. It's not used. Because if you want black spot on the screen, you don't want to have light on it. Starting from that analysis, we said, "Well, if we could reprogram, optics continuously so that instead of having the light on a fixed point on the screen, we can switch it and send it wherever we want, you suddenly have a new world." That's what Lightsteering is about. It means you need a special projector. You need actually very powerful computational optics.
You need image processing because you want basically the film that you are going to project to be remastered so that you use the supplementary light, the supplementary grading that you can have in the most possible efficient way. You want to have a powerful server on the projector that can handle all this data. That's the example. Examples, you know, technologically it's nice, but to see is much nicer.
Yes. Maybe first, financial update.
Let me introduce our CFO, Ann Desender, who will talk you through a financial perspective.
Good morning. Between the words of Charles and Ann, and then moreover coming after this, all of the demos actually, which you are looking forward to it, and it will be truly a pleasure, I can assure you. Some numbers and updates on the figures and our guidance. Starting with this year actually, which is actually a repeat of the guidance, the update which we gave with the first semester results, so in July. We are aware, starting with the assumptions and on the right side, we are indeed aware of the economic situation, on the challenges we are all in. Actually within Barco today, we are in full speed actually, and our business is.
With that, after nice results in the first semester, we can conclude to this guidance actually, which is for this year a growth on the top line of about 25%. That restoring our EBITDA levels, not yet where they were at, but moving nicely to where we wanted to be or want to be, an EBITDA margin between 10% and 12%. Looking then beyond 2023, you have heard the market share, you have heard the growth, you have heard the ambitions which we all have. It is clear that we go for top line growth, and we want to grow that top line better in line or better than what the market is doing. How do you do that? By grasping market share.
It's also by actually extending the markets, the terms where we are in and what we look at. The word adjacency, you heard many times, and this we are also including in our ambitions going forward. Operating leverage will be a big thing, actually within costs in the gross margin. Also there want to have a steady, and with some positive mix, evolution in the gross margin. On OpEx, we for sure want to keep that well balanced, so growing slower than sales. And with that then on figures actually guiding to get that and keep that below 30% of sales, which is then R&D, sales and marketing, and G&A. On CapEx, and I will add a slide also on our cash prospects and ambitions actually.
One thing you will see, and also later on during the day, is that we do step up our CapEx investments in footprint, in particular, and in particular also this afternoon on our ambitions on the focused factories and more particular on the investments which we are doing. On our working capital over time and in particular second half last year and first half this year, with the supply constraints, has caused that our inventories, we do get in what we can actually, that our inventory is at a higher level. We want to get our working capital back at what we call pre-COVID levels, which is around 6%, and also keep it there as we are growing in the next years. For your models, we do then translate this actually, and giving you both then the financial and non-financial targets.
For the next three years to come, on average, we want to be a company that grows high single digits with a more articulated growth for the year to come, 2023, whereby we do target a growth between 10% and 15% on the top line. With all the things that I named on the previous slides, we want to achieve a very profitable top and bottom line also, and very healthy margins between 14% and 18% EBITDA. On the non-financial targets and more light on that in the afternoon session, we want to target, and this is here for 2025. We'll highlight the ones for next year also. We want to get to more than 70% of our sales done with what we call Eco-labeled products.
explain to you this afternoon what this means. We did also align our targets with the Science Based Targets initiative targets, so linked to the climate change actions. By 2025, we want to lower our absolute emission, our carbon footprint with 45% versus the baseline 2015, actually, when we started. I'll throw all of the numbers at once at you. Starting with our direct available cash on the bank account, expecting for the end of this year, around EUR 200 million. This is excluding the cash which we have in Cinionic, that we want to land actually at about the same level of last year. Mind that we have some step-up to do in our free cash flow in the second semester to achieve that, in particular, actually on the inventories.
Free cash flow for the next three years, actually, we are targeting there for EUR 350 million, which is of course post-tax, which assumes a working capital of 6% on sales. Going a little bit, taking the questions which we will now have. We do include here CapEx, stepped-up CapEx, of about EUR 35 million per year. If you remember, it was more in the range of 20-25 in previous years. That's a true step up. We also foresee specific CapEx for SaaS investments, or call it the example which we have with the AMC contract to the tune of EUR 10 million per year. That's a very conservative assumption in the EUR 350 million. But mind that there is more opportunity if you add those numbers together to do more.
In that sense, it's a little bit too early to tell how far we then go and what choices we made. That's actually the assumptions which we took here. There is cash, and we take good care of that. We also want to continue to generate cash to do many more other fun things that also bring added value to the shareholder and to the company. We see that in the different domains which are listed on the right-hand side, which is both organic and inorganic. We do want to take good care of the shareholder in the sense of a consistent dividend growth policy which we have been keeping over the years in the past as well. In that sense, this concludes here on our cash.
With that, moving to the closing note and giving the word back to Anne and Charles before we then go into break and demo pods.
Thank you, Anne. Yeah. Actually, let's go to conclusions. We think we can accelerate with two levers. We can capture profitable and efficient growth. That's through a leaner and more focused organization. It's also seizing the market growth opportunities. We have strong leadership positions, and that we believe we can increase. Also we can expand geographically in Asia and mostly in China.
I think what you need to remember on innovation, we wanna accelerate innovation at Barco. We want more flagship products in our core business, expand into adjacent and new domains. We want our people to take more risk, be more entrepreneurial. On the other hand, we also have, of course, our governance principles that we can give and guarantee the return on our investments there.
The conclusion is that we have ambitious financial terms. We want to have long-term, high single-digit sales growth. This is a slight step up of what was said before, and we aim for an EBITDA in the range of 14%-18%. This concludes actually the first presentation. Karl-
Thank you.
You can take over.
Thank you, Charles and Anne, for a very clear keynote. At this time, we will say goodbye to our remote participants. Thank you for joining. Hope it was insightful, and don't hesitate to reach out as of now to Willem Fransoo, my successor, with questions. For the people here, we now have time for a short coffee break, where we actually welcomed you earlier this morning. At 11:25 A.M. sharp, we will take you away to the first carousel sessions. Thank you for this first session.