Welcome here in London to the D'Ieteren Group Investor Day 2025. I can't believe it's already three years ago that we had the last Investor Day. We did it in Brussels last time, but we thought it would be good to do it in London this time around. Three years went very fast. It's going to be a relatively full day today. One of the main purposes, of course, is for you to have the opportunity to meet the different CEOs and CFOs of our different businesses, to see them in action, and also to ask them questions. Before that, we'll do a short introduction on the D'Ieteren Group and what's been going on. I will show you the agenda. Maybe it will help to guide a little bit through the day.
We'll start after the introduction, which I will do together with my two colleagues, Édouard Janssen, the Group CFO, and Nicolas Saillez, Chief Investment Officer. We'll start with D'Ieteren Automotive. Each time we have a session, which is a combination of some presentation and some time for you to ask questions. It will be Denis Gorteman and Réginald Gillet, which for those of you who were here already three years ago, were also there. You will see the continuity of the story there. After the break, we'll have Belron, where we have Brito and Humphrey. Humphrey was there already three years ago, for Brito the first time on our Investor Day today. Very happy to have them on board here. After the lunch break, and as you may have seen, we followed an alphabetical order.
We go from Otto to Belron to Moleskine at the beginning of the afternoon with Christophe Archaimbault and Marcello Treglia. Marcello was already there three years ago as well, but Christophe is the new CEO since the beginning of this year. He was already part of the company, but not in the role of CEO, now a CEO. Very happy to have both of them here as well. In the afternoon, we'll have PHE and TVH. PHE, we had three years ago announced the deal, but it was not closed. They were not part of the Investor Day. Very happy to have Stéphane Antelliot, CEO, Christophe Gouttier, CFO, and also Cyril Flamand, Deputy CFO, here today with us today.
TVH, Dominiek Falcke was already there three years ago, but with Carine Van Landschoot , the new CFO since about six months, is amongst us as well. At the end, we'll do again a D'Ieteren Group session, kind of pulling it all together and looking forward, but also have time for additional Q&A. All the things you may have forgotten to ask during the sessions themselves, you can still ask them at that point in time. We'll try and wrap it up at the latest by 5:40 P.M. today. Quite a busy day. Before we get started, we have a small video that we would like to share with you to get warmed up.
At D'Ieteren Group, we invest in dynamic companies that are leaders in their sectors, and we support them in creating long-term value. Our focus lies in sectors we know well, that are fragmented and offer significant growth opportunities, like mobility, business services, distribution, and logistics. As active owners, we engage with our businesses, closely collaborating with them. We provide guidance and active support in areas such as M&A, financing, digital transformation, sustainability, talent and leadership, and many more. Progress is measured not only in strategic development, but in concrete results, notably in terms of earnings growth and free cash flow generation. We encourage our companies to meet and share best practices, fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement. We provide a supportive environment to help them achieve their ambitious goals and deliver great customer satisfaction, a key driver of long-term success.
As they share the taste of curiosity, agility, and progress, our businesses embrace emerging technologies and adjust to evolving customer needs. This helps them stay competitive and resilient in a rapidly changing market. Sustainability is central to our active ownership approach. From reducing emissions to building resilience, we support our companies in navigating challenges and creating value for both people and the planet. As a family of businesses, we value the dedication of our employees. Their commitment and passion are essential to our collective success. By promoting an environment where they can thrive, we aim to deliver the best outcomes for everyone. At D'Ieteren Group, we are proud to support a diverse group of businesses that continue to grow and develop. Together, we work towards a future where lasting value benefits both our shareholders and the wider community.
All right, three main messages I would like to share with you in this first session this morning. The three Bs, I would call it. We beat our guidance. We have a balanced portfolio, and we love best practice exchange. The guidance, while we are delivering on our commitments, and if you just look at the last couple of years, we have basically doubled again our beloved guidance KPI, Profit Before Tax Group Share. We have multiple growth platforms and free cash flow generators in our portfolio now. We add value as active shareholders through best practice exchanges, both inside and between the different businesses. Let me go a little bit deeper into each of those three messages.
Delivering on our commitments, of course, we do not have the 2025 results yet, but if I just look at what we set three years ago, what we are going to achieve between 2022 and 2025, and we compare it to what we achieved by the end of 2024, so last year, you see that we are actually very well delivering against the commitments. On our adjusted operating profit group share, we talked about being above EUR 1 billion, and that was not yet including PHE. At the end of last year, we achieved EUR 1.071 billion, and the EUR 257 million of PHE was not yet included into that. On adjusted profit before tax group share, we guided to be above EUR 950 million, and that was also excluding still PHE.
End of last year, we were already at EUR 938 million, so close to the EUR 950 million, and not including the EUR 166 million of PHE for 2024. In cumulative free cash flow generation, we said we are going to generate about EUR 2 billion of cash by 2025, but by the end of last year, we were already at EUR 1.4 billion, so nice on track. Our guidance for this year, which of course was more on the PBT group share in particular, we anticipate slight improvement, as we said in early March. That means we are very well set to deliver against those commitments. We not only did commitments at the group level, but also made commitments business per business.
If you look through that, and I'll go through the different activities one by one, sales growth, adjusted operating margin, and annual free cash flow are typically the three KPIs we guided against. In D'Ieteren Automotive, surpassed the 10% with 17.6%, surpassed the 4% with 5.1%, and this is the end of 2024, not 2025, and EUR 165 million annual free cash flow, while last year they had a very nice free cash flow of above EUR 360 million in total. Belron, again, on the top line, we talked about a high single digit. It was actually a double-digit growth in the last couple of years. We talked about reaching the 23% margin. We're very well on track to reach that this year. We landed at 21.2% at the end of 2024.
The annual free cash flow, on face value, you may say the EUR 522 million looks lower than the EUR 850 million, but of course, there have been a couple of dividend recaps in between, both in 2022 and in 2023 and in 2024. Belron has, of course, generated lots of cash, distributed also over EUR 6 billion of dividends in the period that we're talking about here. In that sense, the annual free cash flow generation has been really, really very good at Belron as well. TVH parts, on top line, actually in line with what we said, 8%-ish, and it was 7.6% to be precise, in the same order of magnitude. The 14% EBIT margin we talked about was surpassed last year with 15.6%.
In cash flow, yes, there have actually been some real estate investments that were not anticipated three years ago that were accelerated and given a bit more importance. That is one of the reasons why in free cash flow generation, we remained underneath the EUR 170 million at EUR 84 million for the picture, I would say, of 2024. Moleskine did not reach its objectives that we set out three years ago. We had hoped to see top-line growth, and we were actually only very slightly growing on average with 0.2%. Given the economics of Moleskine, you see that immediately on the margin. We were landing at 12.6% last year. There were other years where we were 18%, so closer to the 20%, but not the 25% we set out. The cash flow generation has been good. It was about EUR 11 million last year.
It was about EUR 21 million in 2022, but not again entirely the EUR 30 million that we talked about. PHE was not yet part of the family formally in 2022, but nevertheless, if I just look at their results of 2024, it showed the growth of the last three years of 12%, slightly above that even. It showed 9.3% margin for 2024 and EUR 85 million of the free cash flow number for 2024. We are delivering on the commitments business per business. Also on our corporate and allocated, so the rest, I would say, of the group where D'Ieteren Immo is part of it and a couple of other things at our headquarters, we typically foresaw a cost of, let's say, EUR 15 million annually, not more than that, while we were at minus EUR 8 million last year. That is all in all not bad either.
Again, what it means in terms of results towards the shareholders, I would say, it's been a 51% total return to shareholders. If I take just the stock price and the dividends up until the end of April of this year, it's been EUR 4.5 billion dividends, and it's been about slightly above EUR 100 million, EUR 109 million to be precise, share buybacks. As you know, we don't have a big tradition of share buybacks, but we've done some of them in the last three years as well. That's the guidance part. If I talk about the balanced portfolio part now, just look at the picture of the PBT group share over the last three years. Not only did it double from EUR 486 million in 2021 to over EUR 1.1 billion in 2024, but also the composition has changed a lot.
It was 72% coming from Belron and only 28%, so to say, from our other activities. Fast forward three years, it's basically 50-50, more or less. That includes a growth of Belron, but it includes an even faster growth in terms of PBT group share for our other businesses. We have a more balanced portfolio within D'Ieteren Group, and it's something that matters to us because for our long-term focus, it's good to have a balanced portfolio. It basically means that beyond Belron, we have multiple growth platforms. Just look at both top line and bottom line CAGRs over the last three years. It was 12% top line, 80% bottom line growth at Belron. It was 18% top line, 38% bottom line at D'Ieteren Automotive.
It was plus 8% top line, plus 6% bottom line at TVH, and it was plus 12% top line and plus 19% bottom line at PHE. Again, it shows D'Ieteren Group is not only about one growth platform, it's about multiple growth platforms, and the last three years are a good tribute to that. Now, also if you look at the content of our different businesses, I would say, they all kind of link to our mission. I hope you still recall our mission. We are a family of businesses, but our mission is to build also a family of businesses that reinvent industries in which they operate, that are in search of excellence in everything they do, and that want to have meaningful impact, both financially and non-financially, and all of our businesses adhere to that.
Even if I look at some of the characteristics of our businesses, we have a more and more increasing consistency between what they're doing. Our businesses basically deliver essential services, and that you can really say for at least four out of the five, using products that are either branded or unbranded or private label. The branded is, of course, the strongest with Moleskine and D'Ieteren Automotive, but also the others have branded products in offering. Of course, the private label or the non-branded is particularly strong at Belron, TVH, and PHE because that's very much part of the business model and how they position themselves in the market. They're offering all value-added services. All of them are B2B oriented, including Moleskine, by the way.
Some have, of course, an important B2C component, and that's particularly true for Belron, but also for D'Ieteren Automotive and, of course, for Moleskine. Last but not least, I think all of our businesses are relying on deep distribution and logistics expertise, and I think this is more and more becoming a common thread if you look at the portfolio of activities we have within the D'Ieteren Group. Now, this balanced portfolio will continue to evolve, and so may I invite Nico, maybe briefly on the stage, to talk to you a little bit about origination and what we have been doing and what we're continuing to do in terms of origination. Nico.
Thank you, Francis. Origination is really an internal word at D'Ieteren Group that we use a lot and that really regroups all the steps relating to M&A and corporate finance. That's from the identification of targets, valuation, due diligence, and financing. That's an important part of what we do, and we do that at two levels, really. The first level is really for our existing businesses. There, over the years, we've gathered quite a deep knowledge of the ecosystems around each of our business, where we are constantly screening for potential acquisition opportunities. When we find one or when we think we find one, we usually flag it to the management of our business, and then we have a first exchange to test their appetite. If there is appetite, then we frame the general priority level.
Our involvement depends really on the size of the targets. For smaller size acquisition, we usually pass the details, the contact details over, and we stop there. We love that, actually. These small bolt-on acquisitions in the core, which we see as highly synergetic and low risk, are an important manner to create value. We encourage all of our business to do that, to have the teams, to have the processes, to have the blueprints in order to execute them efficiently. We are obviously monitoring performance post-acquisition to make sure if there are key learnings, then we can use them again to be better at that. For larger acquisitions, we tend to be a bit more involved. We usually look at or participate in valuation and pricing. We look at due diligence materials.
If there is a shareholder agreement, obviously, we go through it. Examples of companies or situations we've identified that eventually led to an acquisition by one of our businesses include the acquisition of Sin Canli in Turkey by TVH last year, or the recent acquisition of Top Part in Ireland by PHE. Financing is also an important part of what we do. Over the years, we've gained a deep expertise in financing transactional dividends, whether in the institutional market through TLBs or high-yield bonds or the instruments or the traditional banking market with TLAs and RCF. Our team always is in support of our management in our businesses and strives to really obtain the best terms and conditions and the most flexible financing documentation. What we also do very regularly or constantly is looking at larger, more, let's say, transformative acquisitions or mergers for our businesses.
We know these transactions carry a lot more risks, so we are quite prudent in our approach. We just want to make sure we assess what the options are and at all times have an opinion of what the potential partnerships or strategic partnerships are around us. We know that for us to move on such a transaction, all the planets will have to be aligned. It is obviously the amount of synergies, where they are, how executable they are, when we would be execution, then reinventing the combined organization with clear roles and responsibilities, cultural fit, you name it. We are quite prudent. We are constantly considering that. We are quite prudent in our approach.
The second part is really doing exactly that, but for D'Ieteren Group as a holding, and there we are always looking for new investment opportunities, new platforms, and our very short-term focus, and Édouard will talk about that, is really to reimburse or bridge financing. As we're doing it, we are recreating gradually a strategic investment capacity that will grow over the next months into next year, and that could be redeployed in acquiring a new platform. We are quite selective in our approach. We're quite prudent as well, and we are looking into two, let's call them super sectors. Business services is one, and industry or industrial niches is the second one.
In these two, we're really looking for a company with good track records that can compound revenue growth for a long period of time, that have scalable operating models, that are either operating in fragmented markets or are in markets with structural tailwinds, engaged workforce. We want the management team of these acquisitions to be located somewhere in Europe. So we have a clear set of criteria that we use. We're quite disciplined. It's a bit difficult to know where we're going to end up. I know a few years ago, Francis always mentioned we'll have a handful of companies. We already have five, not counting D'Ieteren Immo. And to that, Francis always said, we have big hands. I never really knew what it meant, but you have the image that we are going to be focused.
We are going to be selective, but clearly we have ambitions to grow and find new platforms. With that, Francis, back to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Nico. That is on the second message of the balanced portfolio, and of course, we continue to strive to have a balanced portfolio going forward. The third message is about how we try and add value as an active shareholder to our different businesses. The corporate team, which is a small team, we are between 25 and 30 people max. It has been reinforced over the last three years. You see a picture of us all at the top of the slide. One change that happened actually in 2023 is that we extended the executive committee. It used to be myself and the CFO to now four members. Next to Édouard, the Group CFO, we have Amélie Coens, Chief Legal Officer, and Nicolas Saillez, who you just saw, the Chief Investment Officer. Also, throughout the years, the last three years, we have added additional expertise.
In 2022, we added digital innovation with Leven Hazard, who's somewhere in the room, I believe. I saw him this morning. We've added and extended a little bit some of our teams, ESG team, very important, of course, in the last couple of years. We now have a three-person team on ESG. We've added or extended our consolidation team and our legal expertise in 2023. In 2024, we added some additional treasury expertise, some HR expertise, some tax and investor relations expertise. We remain a lean and mean team, I would say, overall as a team. Also, the investment professionals team has continued to be strengthened over the last years. Now, the way we try and engage with our businesses is, of course, a combination of support, engagement, and contributions on a wide range of topics.
I will not go through all of them here, but they can go on performance management topics to corporate finance that Nico briefly talked about. It can be about legal and tax advice, sector knowledge, talent management, a whole broad range of issues that can help either on driving the top line, improving the operational excellence, finding, let's say, optimizing financial structures, and so on and so on, developing the team, the breadth, and the depth of the management teams in the respective companies. I just want to highlight a couple of points on which we've been working in particular in the last three years, more so even than before. One of the things we've done is doing a lot more systematically, or even relentlessly, if you want to call it that way, is to monitor the ecosystems in which our different businesses are operating.
We're looking at the market dynamics. We're looking at the competitors. We're looking at the trends, disruptive trends or less disruptive trends in the industries, and what players are reacting to that. We're looking at what customers and suppliers are looking for or asking for or trying to do in partnership with us. We, of course, have a dialogue with the different management teams of our businesses around all of these different things happening in those ecosystems because they are more important for the longer term, maybe less for the immediate short term, but especially for the medium and long term. As a long-term investor, we find that particularly important. The second thing we've started to do with those insights is to also use that to define a clear set of value-creating initiatives, if you like, year by year.
We've done this for the first time this year in 2025 to say, let's define and let's pursue. When we talk about how are things going, we try and link it to specific value-creating initiatives. I think it's something that gives even a bit more focus in the type of continuous dialogue we have per definition with all of our businesses, both formally and informally throughout the year. Another thing we've started to do is to create functional communities. We started already in 2022 when ESG was becoming more and more important, while we noticed that across the businesses, everybody was a bit, yeah, not inventing the wheel, I would say, but thinking, what exactly do we need to do also around reporting in ESG?
We took the helm, let's say, at the Group to say, well, we're going to put together a group around ESG that has been meeting regularly, quite regularly, I would even say, over the years. Legal as well, there has been a community of our legal practitioners that has gotten together over the different years. In 2023, we added two more functional communities, one on logistics and supply chain and one on IT in the broad sense of the word. It was not just the CIOs, it was often also the CVOs or the CISOs. By now, if I just look back three years later, they meet regularly on a broad range of topics related to cyber or data or transformation or AI and so on. In 2024, we added a financial planning analysis functional workstream. In 2025, an HR and talent management workstream.
We're thinking whether we want to add more going forward. It could be around commercial excellence and so on, but we have multiple ideas. We'll see exactly what we'll do in the years to come. They are a great way for us to, I would call it, allow us to explore and exploit soft synergies. As you know, as D'Ieteren Group, we're not looking for hard synergies. Each business stands on its own, has its own setup, its own management, its own financing, its own objectives. However, there are more and more soft synergies possible between the different businesses. I'll just give you three examples of what some of those functional communities have come up with themselves. These are not ideas coming from us. These are ideas coming from them. Warehouse automation. Many of our businesses have many warehouses. Some are real central hubs.
Others are more part of a hub-and-spoke system. People have been visiting each other's warehouses in the last couple of years and looking, oh, you automate there. Which technology do you use for that? What are your KPIs of success, service KPIs, but of course, working capital KPIs? How do you evolve your catalog? How do you manage your working capital? There are a lot of topics that surface when you have these functional communities of supply chain and logistics getting together where people compare, oh, that makes sense here because you're trying to supply in a couple of hours hundreds or thousands of garages. Oh, I'm flying overnight, 24 hours, 48 hours, or I need a different setup. These are very fruitful exchanges that we have that lead to soft synergies, whether you like it or not.
Cybersecurity, born a little bit out of necessity, because as you know, one of our businesses had a cyber attack in 2023. Rather than each of our businesses kind of reinventing the wheel and saying, what do I do to kind of step up my game in cybersecurity, we could very quickly put together a top-10 plan. Now we have actually annual audits and annual exercises within the different businesses to try and remain as resilient as possible against cyber, which is, of course, a very fast-evolving field that never stops, and you always have to be on your toes. Transformation programs. Not all of our businesses are engaged in big transformation programs, but several are at different stages. They can really learn from each other.
Yeah, as we all know, these programs are not so easy and always run a little bit different than you anticipate. Can I learn from what happened at one of the businesses and try and avoid the same pitfalls at the other ones? When I'm trying to put together a best-of-breed selection of softwares, how do you go about the choice? How do you go about putting it together? Are there any lessons learned on the way you set up the licensing, on the way you do the roadmap designs for the implementation, on the way you do piloting and testing, and so on? I think we've learned a lot over the years through the functional community that exchanges either multilaterally or bilaterally on transformation problems. These are just three examples.
I could cite many, many more, but it shows that the notion of a functional community is a very, let's say, it's very productive and useful for each functional manager themselves. It is good because they learn from each other and therefore can go faster or better in whatever is relevant for their particular business. We have also started to bring together all of our top managers across the group. A couple of years ago, we brought the top 200 managers together at what we call the degathering. This is just one of the pictures that was taken there. We were probably all a little bit excited after a session, so do not take the picture too hard, but it was a nice moment.
We spent about a good two days together, not just to get to know each other, but also to, yeah, to start nurturing, I would say, a bit more D'Ieteren Group identity while at the same time finding ways in which you can add value and learn from your colleagues across the group. Now, these are my three messages that I wanted to share you at the beginning. There is, of course, one other important thing that happened in the last three years, and that was last year in 2024. As you know, as a family business, we had a shareholding reorganization coming up, which, of course, we have talked a lot about in the last six months of last year. This is a once-in-a-generation transaction and change, as you all know. We have talked about that before.
We now have Naiaritz, so the family office of Nicolas D'Ieteren, being at 50.1% in our group. That means we have about 48% or so free float. Of course, there is still about a nine-ish % portion of that of the SPDG, the family office of Olivier Perrier. This is a setup that actually really sets us up ideally for the decades to come as D'Ieteren Group. I think we are basically put ideally to have a continuation of our strategy. That is very, very clear. We have a very strong family anchoring now. That is clear for the decades to come, while remaining a publicly quoted company with all the governance that goes with it. A very important point as well.
We have, therefore, the ability to continue to grow our earnings and to generate cash flow, which is really a focus not just of the very short term, but of our medium and long term as well. We will continue to do sound capital allocation, reinvesting a lot of what we generate, but of course, also being able to provide a good return to shareholders. We will hear more about the capital allocation this afternoon in the session we will have after the different issues there. With that, I can actually conclude. As D'Ieteren Group, we believe we are unique. We are a growing company. We unlock opportunities, and we are ambitious and create value. This is exactly the type of thing you will hear over and over again in the different presentations of our different companies throughout the day today on those four elements.
Before we go to the first activity, I do want to give the floor to Édouard, who will take us a little bit through the Q1 guidance, which we also published this morning, and that maybe is useful to have a little bit more flavor to that as well. Édouard.
Thank you, Francis. We will talk more in a few seconds about tariffs and other possible disruptions out there. Let's flag one small negative in Q1, which is that in terms of number of business days, you might know that we had one day more last year, right? On top of that, in some regions, it was two days more in Q1 that will catch up at the end of the year. A small element. Now, if we go business by business, Belron, solid, decent 6.4% top-line growth.
Volume still slightly negative, influenced, among other things, by claim avoidance in the U.S. Apart from that, continued growth in ADAS above 44% and an attachment rate close to 24.8%. Continued progress there and a bit of continued acquisitions and a positive FX impact. We will see a positive FX impact across the board in many of the businesses. D'Ieteren Automotive might have surprised, actually, with a 16.6% decline in top-line growth in Q1, but actually, this was totally anticipated as part of 2025 numbers. Why? Mainly because there was a strong Q1 in 2024. If you look carefully, you can see that the order book has rebounded nicely, right? They finished Q1 with around 36,000 cars. We had also good traction at the Salon de l'Auto, the car trade show that takes place always in January, February.
Good traction on the B2B and B2C market. For all these reasons, even if Q1 looks weak on the top line, we can say D'Ieteren Automotive is on track for 2025. Of course, you'll hear more about that in a few minutes. PHE, solid 4.6% growth, 3.5% organic, 1.1% M&A driven. Important to flag, as you'll see in the press release, that more growth always internationally than in France, right? 6.8% international, only 1.7% in France. That is very much the kind of dynamic you'll hear more about. TVH, 2.3% top-line growth, mostly driven by volumes and a bit of M&A and FX there as well. We can say softness in the Americas, but a bit more robust in Europe and the rest of the world.
Last but not least, well done to the Moleskine team who delivered 3.3% top-line growth, mostly driven by the US and APAC, as you'll hear more. Now, about the outlook, basically, I just want to flag that we confirm our guidance for 2025, excluding tariffs, and our financial charges on our loans at D'Ieteren Group. You know we raised EUR 1 billion of debt last year for our shareholder reorganization. Of course, EUR 1 billion, we communicated the interest charges roughly, it's going to make around EUR 40 million of interest charges, right, on the billion, right? Last year, we had around EUR 54 million of financial income because we had significant treasury position. So it's not a differential of EUR 40 million, it's an absolute negative number of EUR 40 million. Finally, yes, we do expect that taking these elements into account, PBT Group share will decline year on year, right?
That is logical because we have leverage at the group level and at Belron level. Now, if we talk for a second about the tariff situation in the United States and globally, we have three main businesses which are exposed to the U.S. market: Belron, TVH, and Moleskine. I think we will all agree to say that these are rather uncertain times, right? These tariffs are changing pretty much day by day. Hence, it is rather difficult to predict the positive or negative impact to our businesses and their suppliers and customers. However, we can confidently say that we remain very focused on delivering our guidance 2025 and delivering the midterm ambitions you will hear about today in this economic environment.
Within the businesses, different tariff task forces have been set up in order to be able to be very reactive and agile and to be able to deliver, right? This is both a set of opportunities and possible disruptions that arise with these tariffs. Finally, formally, we confirm that we reconfirm our guidance, excluding these tariffs and other possible disruptions that may arise during 2025.
Réginald and I are delighted to spend the next hour sharing the accomplishment of our teams and also our plan for the future. We will follow the agenda that Francis has laid out. Before we dive into it, we also have a small video we would like to share.
Mobility. It's kind of special, isn't it? It's all around us. People are more on the move than ever before. And mobility solutions, they just keep on multiplying.
That's good news because mobility drives societies, creates business opportunities, and connects people. That's why at D'Ieteren, we care deeply about mobility. As a longtime leader in automotive, we've broadened our perspective. Cars are no longer the only ones on the road. They're being used in new, different ways, and other forms of transport are expanding the possibilities. Today, D'Ieteren sees mobility through many lenses across a family of diverse companies. Mobility is more than movement. It's at the heart of our welfare and well-being. That's why D'Ieteren commits to its pioneering role and continues to shape tomorrow's mobility. We're working hard, all of us together, every day to make it easier, more pleasant, and more sustainable for people to move around. The journey is ongoing, but we can be proud because we never stop pushing things forward. D'Ieteren, moving people forward, no matter what moves you.
Indeed, you've had a glimpse of the 30 brands which are today constituting the eco-mob system that we are proposing to our customer to get mobile every day in Belgium. Of course, most of those brands, first and foremost, are around cars, new and second-hand ones from the Volkswagen Group, but not only. We distribute them as importer, but also as retailer. We are also very much active in after-sales, of course, through our official dealerships, but also through two franchises that we have developed from scratch. First one, Wonder Car. We are the number one body shop chain repair in Belgium. I'll talk a bit more later about it. Wonder Service as well for people who are not loyal to their brand-related dealer anymore. We are the number one retailer in Belgium.
We are distributing about 30% of the cars delivered to end customers through our own dealerships. We have different channels to distribute second-hand cars as well. For those of our customers, growing numbers of customers who are moving towards electromobility, we have developed D'Ieteren Energy, number one in the sector in private and semi-private charging stations, but also providing solar panels, residential batteries, and energy management systems to help them move in this new world of electromobility. For customers who do not want to drive in the city anymore, they can use our taxi company, TaxiVere, leading company, 65% market share in Brussels, or a premium service called Husk. For those who want to use a shared car, we have the number one also car-sharing company called Poppy, present in Brussels, Antwerp, and the three major airports in Belgium.
For those of you who do want to be moved without any driver at all, we invite you to test Husk around automotive and autonomous driving. For those of you who want to drive on two wheels, we have Lucien, also number two chain bike in Belgium. All those services can be financed through Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance, our joint venture with Volkswagen Financial Services. For our B2B customers who want to be truly multimodal, we have developed Umbrella, which helps them indeed get rid of all the hassle of moving from one sort of mobility items to the other. This ecosystem on top of our organization and the cars that we are distributing helped us reach for the last two years record market share around 24% in a market which has severely declined after COVID.
Before COVID, we had a market of around 632,000 vehicles, 550,000 private cars, 82,000 light commercial vehicles. Last year, in Belgium, we registered around 500,000 units. Thanks to the fact that in the same time, we were able to significantly grow our market share from 21.6% to 23.8%, we were able to deliver volume around 118,000 units. Even more important than this, we are, of course, a leading player and number one in market share, but we are also and by far leader in the BEV segment, so the 100% electric cars. I can proudly say that we are a truthful partner and an unavoidable partner for the Volkswagen Group in Belgium. We've been working together since 1948 with them. Although there have been ups and downs, of course, we are in a truly strong partnership.
They consider us best in class in Europe in many fields, in sales organization, network organization, in terms of after-sales organization, in terms of how we treat warranties, for instance. Also, we have an indisputable, as I said, leadership, but also we have developed a whole range of services, like I've presented to you at the start, to accompany our cars and to go beyond only delivering metal to our customers, but really being able to accompany them along the journey. I also believe that we have inherited the entrepreneurial spirit of our shareholders, which, as you know, exists for more than 200 years. Let me also clear the room here. The Volkswagen Group is absolutely the best partner for us, and it will remain for the next years. There are no Chinese groups who can replace and offer us what the Volkswagen Group does offer us.
We are and we will remain a strong partner together with them because they have the stronger and larger portfolio of models available in Europe. They have, of course, also a global presence and a diverse manufacturing profit. Although they have some problems in terms of profit, I would say, it still remains profitable, and they have an extremely strong cash position, which allows them to invest in research and development. We enjoy the largest car park also in Belgium. We have about 1.3 million cars on the road out of a global car park in Belgium, which is around 6 million cars globally. We serve them through, as I said, our official dealerships. We have about 1 million throughputs a year through our dealerships in mechanical intervention. Let me also underline once again the role of Wonder Car.
Wonder Car enjoys a 15% market share in terms of body shop repairs. Just to give you an idea, the number two has a 5% market share. We are head and shoulder ahead of everyone there. We are also a multi-brand, of course, body shop repair. About 11% of repairs are non-Volkswagen Group cars. We are starting also to develop a second-tier mechanical franchise called Wonder Service, which is today rich of only seven sites. Our own retail is located on the axis, Brussels Antwerp, which is the main B2B axis in Belgium. We deliver there, as I said, about 30% of cars delivered to end customers. We are very proud also to have opened last year the first dealerships which host under one roof all brands of the Volkswagen Group in sales and after-sales.
It's located near Antwerp, and we will be inaugurating tomorrow night in Anderlecht, a brand new one also under the same concept. I told you that we are also very active in second-hand cars, and we are here present through different channels. We have developed along the years a brand called My Way. In other countries, you may know it as Das Welt Auto, which is a bit of a copy of what the Volkswagen Group took out of Belgium. It's also one of our roles as an independent importer to bring best practice to the Volkswagen Group, of course, and that's one of them that they took out of us. We are also distributing, of course, only through Audi Approved Plus.
We have a direct sales for second-hand cars through a subsidiary called Lizzie, and we are, of course, active through our official dealers as well, not only for generalists, but also for luxury brands through D'Ieteren Luxury Performance, which is distributing all our luxury brands. We have also a very, very strong partnership with Volkswagen Financial Services through our joint venture, Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance. About 30% of all our sales goes through one of their products last year. It is truly extremely important to have this partnership. The long-term leasing companies are maybe the biggest threats for us in the future. There are about 10 of them active on the market, and with the risk on the residual value, their weight is becoming more and more important.
Having our own captive company is a way for us to not only be able to position our cars in terms of pricing, but also to protect ourselves against the weight of those actors. As I said also, we have developed from scratch D'Ieteren Energy, which today has installed about 30,000 charging stations and has a portfolio of 80,000 charging cards around for about 300,000 electric cars running around in Belgium. It is quite a large penetration already. This is for us, of course, a very important development for the future. Certainly now that we will receive some cars aimed for the B2C segment, D'Ieteren Energy will help those customers move from classic combustion engine to BEV cars. Poppy is very interesting because, let's be frank, it is a segment of business which develops slower than what we expected.
Nevertheless, we enjoy today a portfolio of around 100,000 customers, where about 40,000 of them are active. Active, I would say, this means using the service at least once every two weeks. Those customers, at one time or another, are moving to renting or buying a car. For us, it's really a tank of future customers there that we have as well. Lucien is a complementary also offer in terms of mobility. Bike business is growing for the B2B segment in Belgium. We are active in leisure, but it is a small part of our business. The main part is B2B. We are strong with 22 stores today. An average price, which is growing, I would almost say by the day. Today, it's EUR 2,800, but we can sell bikes way above EUR 12,000 or EUR 13,000 as well.
Globally, when we put all our activities together, we are well above a portfolio of 1 million customers. The trick in the coming months and years will be able now to join all those portfolios and make a real community of users. We are very proud of what we have done indeed in terms of developing new activities beyond only being a car seller. We have become now a real mobility actor. This is thanks to a team of professionals. The nine people making the management team are not the most important one. The most important one are the 3,000 people who are working each and every day to delight our customers and serve them as best as they can.
Twenty-one percent of women might not seem a lot, but in the automotive business, and certainly when you have already more than half of your staff which is working in dealerships, it's already quite a respectable percentage, although we strive to get above this. I'm also delighted to have a very engaged person with an 85% engagement rate. We have clearly developed a talent strategy to be able to retain and develop our people within D'Ieteren. I must say very humbly, I'm one of those. I started in 1988 working in D'Ieteren and luckily being where I am today. Indeed, I can say that we have developed a full mobility offer to our customers, that we have developed also leadership in various activities in the mobility sector as well. We have a unique access to our customers.
There is no other actor in Belgium being able to offer this portfolio of services to our B2C and our B2B customers. I am also very confident that the strategy we have developed will be successful in the future. We have indeed strengthened our leadership in the last five years. You have seen indeed the development of our market share, but also we have been able to get well better in terms of cash generation. Réginald will talk a lot more about it than I. We have also tested new ways to distribute cars. Let me take one example, Cupra. We are the only country in Europe who distributed a brand Cupra for all its models under the agency model. There also, we learned from it, and it is going to stop from the 1st of December this year, and we will go back to the classic dealership model.
No more agency. We've learned the good and bad experiences out of it, but at least we tried. We have also developed D'Ieteren Luxury Performance. D'Ieteren Luxury Performance is a very important asset for us in the future. The luxury cars in Belgium are a very strong segment developing itself. You might have seen that we reached a 1% market share last year in Belgium with Porsche, and we have delivered 99 Lamborghinis only in Belgium. That seems a very small number, but it's more than France and Monaco together, just to give you an idea. We also have developed business apart from our own automotive business, which will also help us to make us more resilient in the future, but also making us more relevant towards our customers. We have kept investing not only in dealerships, but also in our offices.
We opened a brand new one last month in Cortenberg. Réginald, can I give you the word?
Thank you very much, Denis, and good morning, everybody. I think it's time now for me to explain to you our performance over the last few years. I think we can start with the top line. To understand our top line and basically our profitability, I think it's important to remind you of the dynamics of the new car market over the last few years. As said by Denis, new cars, let's say, are our biggest revenue and profit driver. Let's go back to 2020, where I don't, I mean, I guess you know it, we had the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn triggered the shortage of chips.
Both, I mean, the COVID-19 pandemic and the shortage of chips have, as you can see here, negatively impacted our new cars' volumes, as we have invoiced only 105,000 new cars in 2020 and even less than 100,000 in 2021 and 2022. I have to say that at the same time, our dealerships and their respective sales teams did a fantastic job with record orders from customers in 2021 and 2022. Actually, we have generated more orders than invoices in 2021 and 2022, translating into an increasing order book, which culminated at the end of 2022 with more than 100,000 units.
During these two years, I mean, in 2021 and 2022, the imbalance between low supply with very long delivery times on one hand and continued demand on the other hand resulted in significant price inflation, further boosted by the premiumization of the product mix organized by VW Group. It has definitely helped to offset the effect of the negative volumes. Late 2022, the supply chain started improving gradually across the world, and our supplier, VW Group, accelerated the deliveries of new cars in 2023 to serve our big order book. This explains the big jump you can see here in our top line in 2023, as we have invoiced 126,000 new cars, together with average prices reflecting the very positive product mix and the increasing penetration of BEV.
At the same time, we started consuming our order book, as in 2023, we generated fewer orders than invoices on the back of a weak market of customer contracts after two years of tailwind, right? In 2024, we continued gradually to consume our order book in a weak market of customers' orders for, let's say, a second year in a row. Actually, you can see that we posted new car sales roughly flat as the negative volume effect was offset by a positive average price increase, which continued to normalize, let's say, gradually, while still being positive thanks to the continued increasing penetration of BEV. As you can see here, we finished the year 2024 with an order book of 24,000 new cars, which is actually still comfortable, right? A level of 24,000 is pretty much the same level as 2019.
Let's keep in mind, as reminded by Denis, the market of passenger cars, in particular, rebased downward with 100,000 fewer units, right? This is, let's say, for the new cars business. Next to our new cars, our other products and services used to deliver growth, not only our after-sales business in our pillar number one, but also in our three other pillars where we usually see increasing volumes almost across the board, reflecting the positive commercial traction of our products and services. Last but not least, this is the last bullet point on the left-hand side, our top line has been supported by some, let's say, tactical M&A, so bolt-on acquisitions. In our retail, actually, we did the two biggest acquisitions we have ever made in our history.
First, we acquired the dealership Yenes with five sites in February 2023, and then we acquired Carrera Motors in July 2024. Carrera Motors is our seventh Porsche center in Belgium. In our bike scope, we have made several tactical acquisitions to build our national network of 22 stores. That is for our top line. Now let's move to the adjusted EBIT on the right-hand side. As you can see from the chart, we posted an all-time high EBIT in 2024 with almost EUR 270 million, translating into, let's say, an extraordinary margin of 5.1%. I should say that this expansion of our EBIT margin over time has been driven by, let's say, three main elements. First, the control of our cost. Actually, we have significantly increased over time the focus of the teams on our cost.
I would say not only the volume of our cost, but also the price of our cost with a much bigger involvement of our procurement teams. That is for the first element. Secondly, our loss-making activities. We had some pockets of losses in our full scope, and we have succeeded to turn it around. That is the second element. The third element, and I would say last but not least, this is about the uplift of our margin in new cars driven by the extraordinary environment I have just explained to you. Let's move to the cash flow now. On the left-hand side, you can see that we have generated a bit more than EUR 100 million free cash flow on average over the last six years.
Actually, our free cash flow, you can see here very clearly, our free cash flow reflects the dynamics of the extraordinary environment I have explained to you again. If we look at the chart, in 2022, you can see that we have a very negative free cash flow. Actually, in 2022, the supply chain started resuming very late in 2022. As a result of that, Volkswagen Group started delivering our order book, leading to a high stock of new cars in our balance sheet at the very end of 2022. Cars that we will not be able to deliver back to our customers at the same speed. This is, let's say, the main explanation, if not the only explanation of this negative free cash flow in 2022.
Conversely, let's say in 2024, actually, we delivered many, many more new cars to our customers than what we actually received from VW Group, translating into a big decrease of our stock and then a big increase of our free cash flow. I would also like to mention in terms of cash flow that we have, again, I mean, increased the attention of our teams across the board to the working capital, right? For instance, we have significantly improved the rotation of our receivables, and particularly the receivables we have vis-à-vis VW Group. Here, I would like to give credit, they are not there, but maybe they will listen to me later on, but I would like to give credit to our commercial teams for their great efforts, because this was a collective effort between commerce, let's say, and finance.
I cannot finish this section without mentioning that more than ever, more than ever, we are very disciplined in our CapEx. We like to invest. I like to invest to sustain our future, but we pay strong attention to invest the right amounts at the right time, right? Now let's move to the right-hand side chart. You can see that we have paid accumulated dividend of more than EUR 400 million since 2020, including a super dividend in 2020 via a debt pushdown we did at that time, let's say, on the back of our carve-out, right? Actually, the payout policy decided by the board is 75% of our consolidated net income starting the second year after the carve-out. That's why you don't see any dividend payment in 2021, because we had a kind of, let's say, grace period after the carve-out.
Given, let's say, the massive cash generation, we have been able to fully deleverage D'Ieteren at the end of 2024, despite the cumulated dividends I have just explained. From a non, let's say, financial perspective, I would like to tell you a few words about our ESG strategy and particularly our CO2. Let's start with what we call the Project Zero. Actually, as you know, the mobility industry is really instrumental in achieving the Paris Agreement signed 10 years ago, back in 2015. The Paris Agreement aims at limiting global warming to maximum 2 degrees Celsius. D'Ieteren is definitely part of the solution. We want to lead the transformation of mobility in Belgium, aligning our, let's say, mobility solutions with the needs of our customers and society at large.
To this end, we have designed a climate plan, and we call it Project Zero. In this Project Zero, we have actually three levers. The first one is the electrification of our new car sales. Over time, we expect the BEV, so the battery electric vehicles, we expect the BEV represents at least 60% of our new car sales by 2030. The expansion of BEV is absolutely key to achieve the reduction of CO2 emissions, given that non-BEV cars emit more than twice as much CO2 over their life cycle as BEV, right? To facilitate the transition to BEV for our customers, as explained by Denis a few minutes ago, we are making charging easier with a wide range of energy products, solar charging stations, solar panels, stationary batteries, and energy management systems.
That's for the first lever. The second lever is about the acceleration of the growth of our low-carbon mobility products and solutions. Whether it's electric or non-electric bikes with Lucien, shared mobility with Poppy or TaxiVere, or even micro-mobility with the little Microlino, we are definitely able to offer low-carbon solutions. The third lever is about the extension of the life of our products and typically our cars. This is our life cycle strategy we will discuss later on. Next point, SBTi, in November 2024, officially approved our net zero 2050 commitment and our medium and long-term CO2 reduction targets. Basically, SBTi has approved two objectives. One objective by 2030, so this is our medium objective.
Another one by 2050, this is the long-term objective. Actually, let me explain to you, because this is important for the coming minutes, let me explain to you the first objective, which is actually twofold. It's a bit technical here, sorry for that. The first objective we want, and actually we will, is to reduce the emissions of our scope one and two by 42%. Scope one and two, this is the emissions related, let's say, to make it simple, to our own, let's say, energy consumption, our buildings, and our company cars, right? The second objective, this is the reduction, and again, we will do it here as well. This is the reduction of the emissions of our scope three by 42% as well. Here, these are the emissions resulting from the use of our vehicles sold.
This is what SBTi means by the category 11 of the scope three. This is precisely here, the electrification of our new cars that will help us to achieve this target. As you can see from the two charts, actually, we are on track, let's say, to achieve these targets as we are slightly ahead of schedule in 2024 versus 2023, which is, by the way, the reference year. The last point I would like to mention from a non-financial perspective, because we are a bit, let's say, proud of this, this is EcoVadis. We have been awarded the gold medal by EcoVadis in June 2024, recognizing, I think, recognizing our dedication to environmental stewardship and ethical business practices. This gold medal places D'Ieteren among the top companies globally in terms of sustainability performance, certainly reinforcing our leadership in the automotive industry. Voilà.
Maybe I hand over to you again, Denis. I think this was the plan.
That's the idea, indeed. Thank you, Réginald. We have defined indeed also a very clear strategy for the year to come. First and foremost regarding our market share. Réginald just touched about the vehicle life cycle. There is no secret today that indeed the residual value of the BEV cars are a concern. There are also huge opportunities. We were used to keep our cars in our ecosystem for four years, more or less. Our aim now is to keep them from seven to eight years in our ecosystem and being able to get more juice, I would say, from each and every car we deliver.
Through this, we will be able also to touch a new customer base, being able to propose cars, all the cars, all the long-term leasing contract to B2C customers who I'm convinced will be interested in this new offering. We will also develop the D'Ieteren brand. We, as I said, are rich and thankful to the portfolio of the Volkswagen Group. We need those brands to be able to work together, not against each other. D'Ieteren is the common thread, I would say, which links all of them and being able to move a customer throughout the time, maybe from SEAT way above to Audi or even Porsche, if possible. We will accelerate the second pillar, as I said, with D'Ieteren Energy and Umbrella. I'm convinced indeed that also D'Ieteren Energy will grow together with the growth of the penetration of the BEV cars.
Réginald mentioned the ratio of 60% of sales by 2030. Let me tell you already that by the end of this year, we will be close to 45% of our sales being in full electric cars. Costs, we will remain indeed very disciplined around costs because we will know there will be some crisis again ahead of time. We do not know which one, we do not know when, but we know they will come, so we need to be prepared for those. We need a retail, not only ours, but all our partners to be profitable. That is the best way indeed to make sure that we have strong partners being able to invest and attract talents to be able also to deliver great services to our customers. Electrification also presents a serious challenge in terms of after-sales.
A BEV car, in theory, is 40% less intervention in after-sales than a classic combustion engine. Our way to compensate this is to keep, as I said, the car longer in our portfolio on the one hand, but also being able to develop new services like Wonder Car. Their intention is to move from a 15% market share to around 27% within the next three to four years. Startups, I do not like to have startups anymore. I want to have scale-ups now. I want them to become more mature, being able to develop their portfolio of customers, but also being more disciplined, of course, in terms of cost and investment, particularly in marketing. At the same time, we will be keeping investing in our people and in our assets.
We will keep investing into the development of our talents and into our first and foremost, most important asset, our teams. I told you indeed that for me, the Volkswagen Group is the most, it's the perfect partner for us. This is what we know will come in the future as a new model on the market from the Volkswagen Group. Let me repeat, there is no other car group which can offer us this development in the near future. We cover all corners of the segments thanks to the Volkswagen Group, and it's our role now to take the most out of it. Of course, we are very much looking forward to the arrival of the small cars, the ID.2 and ID.1, which will help us conquer a new segment of customers. The life cycle strategy on paper is something which looks great.
Now, let's be frank, it's the execution which will, of course, be tricky because no one has been able up to now to be really able to deliver this. It is a challenge we will race to, and I'm confident we will be able to deliver this. Let me briefly explain. The idea is indeed asked from today to propose a new car through a long-term leasing contract to a customer. Then before the end of the contract, being able to already resell this contract a second and a third time to other types of customers, being able then to extend the life of this car within our portfolio up to seven, eight, or even nine years, because that's the beauty of the electric car, is that the cost of maintenance remains stable throughout the time, while for the ICE car, it's exponential.
At the end of the life of the car, there is still the value of the battery, which is and remains quite interesting for us as well. As I said, Wonder Car, we want to move up to 80% and more or less a 25%-27% market share. This is deeply important because it is a segment in terms of profitability, which is way above the average profitability of a classic dealership as well. We will keep investing and developing our young members in the family. I talked already about D'Ieteren Energy, but we will keep also developing the network of Lucien, not by buying new shops like we did in the past, but building them ourselves. We believe we have now the know-how to do that on our own. Poppy, we will remain active in the car sharing. It is break-even as we speak.
It will become profitable by the end of this year by its own merit, but it also develops profits, of course, at the importer level and on the second-hand car activity. Taxi remains for us important. We never know what can happen with the autonomous car in the future. It's important for us to remain active in this segment as well. Umbrella is certainly a Trojan horse for us. We are present today more or less with 85% of all social security companies which are calculating the salary of all employees in Belgium through Umbrella. It's really important for us to keep investing in this company. Réginald, let's share our ambitions in terms of numbers.
Let's go back to numbers and let's see, Denis, how what you said will translate into numbers. Let's start with the top line.
As you can see here, we have the ambition to keep our sales broadly flat over 2024-2028. Let's see for new cars, as you have seen probably in the previous slides, we expect to keep our market share at a high level in a market heading to 415,000 passenger cars and 75,000 units in light commercial vehicles. In terms of prices, again, for new cars, we, and I expect, a deflationary product mix with the introduction of smaller models, as just explained by Denis, in the coming years in the segments A0 and A00. This is typically the ID.2 or ID.1. ID.2, for example, we hope to be able to commercialize some orders in 2026, but the vast majority of ID.2 will probably be invoiced in 2027, impacting the average price of our sales.
Next to the new cars, we expect our other products and services to deliver sales growth driven firstly by increasing volumes thanks to the commercial traction, the very positive commercial traction and/or the expansion of our businesses, particularly in the bodywork with the franchising of extra body shops, as we just discussed. Secondly, by, let's say, some price inflation across the board. Okay. In terms of adjusted EBIT, we expect the margin to be around 4% by 2028, which is basically mainly driven by the return to normal conditions in our new cars business with more small models in the product mix. For CapEx, I think we don't see anything here, but I would like to share with you some information here in terms of CapEx.
We have invested significant amounts to sustain our future with the replacement, for example, of the upgrade of key software supporting our spare part logistics, our dealer management system in the retail scope, in the finance/procurement function, or even in D'Ieteren Park. In D'Ieteren Park, this is our new office gathering the import teams aimed at breaking the silos to leverage the ecosystem, our ecosystem of brands, products, and services, and cultivating this new way of working. You have a picture, if I'm not wrong, in the cover page of the slide deck of D'Ieteren Park.
In the next three years, we plan to continue to invest in our platforms, particularly within D'Ieteren Luxury Performance with the upgrade of several Porsche centers, let's say, to improve the customer experience, not only for the sales of new cars, but also for the after-sales and to capture the increasing car park of Porsche. We will also invest in the decarbonization of our business, so particularly the body shops. Here, I'm sure this will create a real competitive advantage versus the competition. In cruising speed, in cruising speed, I expect to invest around 0.4% of our net sales in CapEx. Working Cap, I expect to have around 25 days of net sales in cruising speed, assuming there are no, let's say, swings in the supply chain as we experienced over the last few years. 25 days of net sales.
Then all in all, a trading cash flow that should generate minimum EUR 200 million by 2028. CO2, I do not come back to this. I have already explained this because I think time is running. One last point, which is important, the funding. I do not spend too much time here. We have the right toolbox to manage our liquidity and particularly the swings of our working capital. We have the full equipment, Club Deal with four Belgian banks, a commercial paper if needed. Last but not least, a big, let's say, facility granted by Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance to fund and to finance the new cars in our retail business. Thank you very much, and I hand over to Denis for the conclusion.
The conclusion is going to be extremely fast because I think we want to move to the question.
I'm truly delighted that we have been able in the last five years to really deliver well above our historical norms. I still remember when I took over in 2012, the profitability was at 1.5%. It was 5.1% last year, and we are expecting 4% in the coming years.
We're going to talk first where we are. We're unique. We grow, unlock opportunities. We're ambitious and we create value. Before that, because it's my first time participating here, I'd like to give a two-minute introduction of myself and how I joined. My name is Carlos Brito. Most people call me Brito. I had 32 years in the beer business. I retired there. I saw this amazing, beautiful company that I never heard of, Belron. I knew the brands. Having lived in the U.S. for the last 16 years, I knew Safelite from TV.
Amazing enough, I've driven for 40 years and never broke a windshield. I'm the worst customer ever. The other day, I was driving in Germany at speeds that people thought were ridiculous, which I was driving 180 kilometers an hour, and everybody was blipping to pass me over in the left lane. In that drive, I broke the windshield. I was very proud because it was a SEAT automobile, and that has a contract with us, Carglass in Germany. I said, "Yes, here we go." My first experience was a positive one. What attracted me to Belron is many things. First, culture and people. I've always been very big on culture and people. I think what differentiates countries and companies is exactly that.
It's the people they attract, it's the values everybody holds dear, and that motivates them to make decisions and think about the future. I think it's no different here. I found a company that has cultures that were very cultural and principles that were very similar, if not the same, as the ones I was used to that I subscribe and that I identify with. I was very happy to find this company. I started meeting my future colleagues. I could identify with them. I could say, "Man, I have so much to learn from them. I respect them. I can see myself working and growing with them, more importantly." For me, that was a very easy pick. I think it was a different segment. After being 32 years in consumer segments, I wanted to learn something new. I'm a mechanical engineer.
It was a little bit of a full circle back to mobility. When I think about our business today, I think we're very fortunate to be at the intersection of two segments that are very active and growing and changing and new news all the time, which is mobility, as we've seen here before, all the different ways that people are moving from A to B, and very exciting, but also technology. We are Belron at the very intersection of these two very exciting things. That is why our business has become very profitable. That is why we believe there's still much more to do.
Another thing that attracted me very much in terms of the culture of Belron is this idea that everybody, and as I started traveling throughout the countries, in the first year, I traveled to all different corporate countries, I saw always this idea that we focus on our people first, second, a close customer, a close second. More than that, everybody truly believes that we can build an even better Belron, which for me was very reassuring to see that everybody thought that, yeah, the company is doing well, has an amazing business model. Guess what? Every place we look, we see gaps and opportunities to do things even better. That was a perfect combination for me. I am very happy I joined. Having a lot of fun, love it.
In terms of who we are, I thought the best way to show it to you is what we call our culture framework, which is a one-pager. I'm going to use some build. I know everybody hates build, but I'm going to use it just because otherwise it becomes too cluttered. I'm going to start from the purpose. Why do we exist? We exist because we're here to make a memorable difference with care. Every word here carries weight. Make a memorable difference. Why memorable? Just like our jingle, right? Whenever I go to the U.S. and people say, "Belron, what's the company?" I would say, "Safelite Repair, Safelite Replace." Everybody says, "Oh, I know." Memorable.
We want the experience to be memorable too because we want people to be—you have to think that people, when they come to us, our customers, they're in the distress type situation. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Okay, today I'm going to break my windshield and I have to replace my windshield." Nobody does that. For other consumer products, you plan your purchase. For windshield, it just happens. A lot of people get distressed because they have no idea how to fix it because the last time it happened to them, like me, was 40 years ago. You have no idea if you're going to be without a car for two years. They come to us, we fix it in two hours, and they're very happy.
The difference we're trying to make is to get them safely and quickly back on the road. If we do it with care, that's what they want because they're distressed. Our technicians are not only there to provide service, they're there to provide the comfort of the customer, to talk to them, explain what's about to happen, and then after the service, to explain what happened and show here and there what was done. That's what we think we do very well and our NPS is a testament to that. The way we measure that is what we call four quadrants. We want to make a memorable difference not only for our customers, our customer-driven, but also for our people. We say we're customer-driven because we go where they are. If they want to go digital, we go digital.
If they want to go voice, so if they want us to go to their homes, we go. If they want to come to us, we go where they are because that's where growth is. We're customer-driven, but we're people-powered. That's why we say people come first because we can do all marketing in the world. You can build brands, you can build brand equity, you can build many promises as you build brand equity. The moment of truth is the technician doing the job and talking to the customer. Our technician commands very high respect and trust from our customer. The technician is the hero of our business. You're going to see through the presentation how we celebrate them. We also want to be socially responsible. We want to be good neighbors. We want to be part of the solution.
We want to be in a community where when our store opens, people celebrate that as opposed to not. We want to be financially strong. We want to be resilient. We know that business has many cycles, and we like to think that our business has fewer cycles because it is more resilient, more non-discretionary. That is why we think it is financially strong. As Humphrey said, we have a beautiful business model, and that also helps here. All that is only possible because we have a culture, which we call the spirit of Belron, which has four pillars, which is driven, this idea that we dream big, and we are totally sure that we can build an even better Belron, that we are caring, not only with people, that caring is not caretaking. Caring is you respect people, but you also have tough conversations.
You say what needs to be said. Your accountability is there. That is caring, treating people with respect. We are collaborative. We work together. We try to understand that politics is nowhere. Leave ego at the door. Do what is best for Belron. Challenge each other. No hidden agendas. That is very important. And legit. We are genuine. When we say something, that is what we say, that is what it is. There is no something hidden. When you challenge and when we have tough conversations, all these things all tie together. That is our culture. All that is only there or sold there to get us to a dream. Our dream is to be the natural choice for our services. Again, nobody wakes up in the morning and plans to break a windshield. When it happens, we want to be top of mind.
We want to be the natural choice, not just for our customers, for our key account partners, our insurance companies, our commercial partners, but also for our people when they choose a company to work for. All that can be only enabled by inspiring leadership. We spend a lot of time trying to invest in our leaders. We know that everything from safety to selling VAPs to lots of things we are going to show here, NPS only happens if you have strong leadership at every level. Inspiring leadership, because we think one of the big traits of leadership is convince teams that they can do way more than they think they can. That is why we dream big, because of inspired leaders that we have at every level. That is why we say that we are one team.
We have one dream, and we win as one Belron. I thought it would be the best way to show what we're all about in one page. What we do, our business is what we call VGRRR, Vehicle Glass Repair, Replace, Recalibration. We also sell lots of the cross-sell opportunity we have, which is what we call VAPs, Value-Added Products and Services. Okay? We have three lines of business. We have replace and repair, and these are our 2024 numbers. Prime jobs are replace and repair. We replace close to 10 million pieces of glass. We repair 3.4 million chips, so 74-26 mix. We recalibrate 3.5 million times, or 42% of the windshields we had to replace were recalibrated. Not all prime jobs replacement are windshields. There are side glass, rear glass, but the ones that were windshields, 42% required recalibration because of the cameras, the sensors.
We have an attachment rate for VAPs of 24%. That is our business in big numbers. We divide our business into three regions: North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. Presence in 40 countries, so global business. Thirty-one countries we call corporate business, where we operate all the technicians that are our people or employees. We have franchisees, which is a great way to test new markets. It is a very asset-efficient way to enter a new market with a local entrepreneur. Humphrey will talk more about this. Forty countries. We are market leaders in countries where we operate, and we continue to expand geographically as we have done the last 30 years. The top 10 countries are here with all the flags that you can see here. We are unique. We like to think that we are unique because we have a flywheel that creates value.
This flywheel is based on five basic nuggets. At the center is our purpose of making a memorable difference with care. It all starts with exceptional customer service. That is what we pride ourselves in doing. That is done again through our highly skilled people. We also have trusted key account relationships, accounts that have been there for many years. We will talk more about this. As we serve more customers, we grow. We have accounts that scale, that we then apply to acquire more knowledge and capability because things are changing all the time. We invest in our brands. If we go one by one, you see that delivering exceptional customer service is always looking at the customer journey, which we are always trying to be, whether digital, face-to-face, voice, or omnichannel.
We're always trying to mimic, okay, if a customer comes here, the funnel, as we call it, what are the leakage points? What are the points where they stop and leave? How can we make this more fluid so they come all the way and we land your job, right? We're always trying to get our technicians to be the best. At the end, we measure that through the NPS, promoters, detractors, and the verbatims of what they are telling us. In terms of the second one, key accounts, we have long-term relationships with them. The repair first is a very important pillar of our strategy. For a long time, we as a company have said a windshield can be replaced or repaired. You can have a chip or a crack. Every chip will become a crack.
What we educate consumers is that if you see a chip, come quickly to us because then we can fix the chip and you do not need to replace the windshield. We have always been of the mindset that to repair is always better than replace first. That is worse for our margin, but it is better for key accounts, better for customers, better for the environment. 80% less emissions when you repair than when you replace. It builds our reputation. We are doing the right things, right? Repair first, it is a big thing that differentiates us from our competitors because again, if you are a competitor and you are just looking at margin, replace is way better than repair. You make much more money. The relationships and the long term of the business depends on you doing the right things always. Repair first is the right thing.
As we serve more customers, we gain scale and we invest in knowledge and capability. We have a global scale that we try to use to our benefit and the benefits of our customers and key accounts. We have automotive through Belron Technical, automotive technology that we continue to follow and develop together with some of our suppliers. We have strong legal advocacy so you can continue to have the right to repair. That is something that in Europe is being discussed now, and we are very active in that discussion. Number five, we have very strong brands, and that is very important because again, you do not plan for the purchase. You do not wake up saying, "I want to replace my windshield." When it happens, we want our brand to be top of mind. That is the TOMA, top of mind awareness. We invest a lot in marketing.
We have very strong brands. We have very big consumer awareness in our top three BUs, which is U.S., U.S., Canada, U.S., Germany, and France. We have also leading digital marketing capability. We used to be big in TV and radio, now more and more in search and going digital and being more localized. That is our flywheel, and it is a B2B to C business. Just one more, what circles this or enables this is leadership and cultural values. We will come now to that. In terms of the first one, delight customers. We have customer-oriented digital solutions. We go where they go. If they go digital, they go digital. If they want omnichannel, some customers are starting digital. At some point, they want to talk to somebody. The systems within our house should talk.
We shouldn't ask the customers all the information again if they already started on digital. Basic things. We're also telling customers, "You choose. You want to come to us, we can come to you." This is more relevant in some countries like the U.S., U.K. We have around the world that technicians perform their job the same way. We call it the Belron way of fitting. That's very important to guarantee quality, consistency. We provide, therefore, a positive experience, and that increases customer retention. You look at NPS, average last five years, 84, last year 86. Two percentage point growth or two-point growth. We're very proud of that. That's the first one. The second one, trusted partner of choice with insurance companies. Yes, because we provide lower severity, lower claims costs because we do repair first, among other things. We're very transparent with them.
If costs are increasing or inflation or tariffs, we don't wait until the last minute to talk to them. We are in constant touch so they can also evolve their thinking and understand the impacts. We have a higher policy satisfaction because it's interesting on glass. Maybe it's your experience. You pay insurance for 10 years, you don't use it. And when you use it, glass is, in terms of cost, way smaller for an insurance company in terms of severity and collision, but way more frequent. Sometimes for 10 years, the only experience you had with your insurance policy is the glass service. It better be good because you paid for 10 years. If it's good, you say, good. I will continue in this policy. If it's bad, you say, man, spent 10 years, bad experience. I'm going to change the policy. Very important for retention.
Of course, it's much cheaper for an insurance company to retain than to acquire a new customer. You see here the insurers we've been working for many years, more than 10 years, and they cover different geographies. Some of them are global. We have very good relationships with them. Number three, global scale, procurement and supply chain. We deal, of course, with our tier one suppliers. Here you see glass suppliers. You see adhesive suppliers like DuPont. You see Bosch tool manufacturing supplier. We are the number two windshield company in the world in terms of OEM aftermarket purchase. We do purchase large scale with these glass suppliers. We have these long-standing relationships. We work together with them on quality and availability. We have big European distribution centers. We have our own.
That's also a differentiating factor for us because of our scale. We have our proprietary supply chain network. We supply to our stores, to our vans, the glass that comes from our supply chain as opposed to buying it in a wholesaler or buying it from the dealer. That provides us a big cost advantage as well. Belron Technical is, with scale, we invest in technology and we invest in brands. Technology, that's very important. Belron Technical is a key pillar in our business, given that things evolve very fast. They look at future trends. They do a lot of glass research. They go deep and aid us because it's changing very fast. Belron fitting, I mentioned that tool innovation, trying to get technicians. What's happening to technicians all over the world is that population is aging. Technicians, of course, are aging.
You need to worry about their physicality or physical muscles and joints and everything as they move glass and install glass. We are always looking at equipment that will make their job less stressful on their body so they can stay longer. We can also attract more female in terms of upper body strength. This is a big focus for us. That is ADAS innovation. This is changing all the time, be it with Chinese or even with European cars being more and more sophisticated, more and more technology defined. A lot of this has to be recalibrated at some point. That is Belron Technical, a big pillar of our competitive advantage. Around that flywheel, you had people and culture. Culture already mentioned the four values. Engagement score very high at 88% with 90% response rate.
We have 30,000 colleagues around the world, and half of them technicians. You see that we have some events that promote that engagement. Spirit of Belron is something we do third week of September every year, which is about running, cycling, swimming. For every mile or kilometer, there is EUR 1. People also contribute, and we give back. Give back is a big activity we do as a company. We have also the Best of Belron to celebrate our heroes, our technicians, the best of Belron. It is an event. Has anybody been to the Best of Belron here? Best of Belron? Okay, some people. It happens every two years. It celebrates the technicians. You elect the best technicians of every country. You have 30 cars growing, but less than 30 cars, same make, model, year, everything. They compete on many different categories for two days.
At the end, we have a winner. You have winners by category and the total winner. We celebrate them. We use them in our conventions, the winner. These guys are really the ones that get our reputation up, our brand up by what they do every day. Our leadership team is really here. These are the people that get stuff done, the country leaders and the team, 30,000 people. Just to say a few words about my team, you have myself. Before that, I was at AB InBev for 32 years. I came here. This is my third year, so I've been here for two years. Humphrey has been here since COVID. Before, he was at Coca-Cola, Marks and Spencer, Dixons. He has a big experience in consumer goods.
We have our regional general managers between 14 years of service and 28. Gerard in charge of Europe, Nigel in charge of what we call rest of the world, and Renée in charge of the US business, our main business. Richard Tyler is everything that touches customer, driver. It's with him from sales and marketing, supply chain, technical. Susan, Chief People Officer in field, everything that touches technology. A very experienced group of people. Let me give it to Humphrey, and then I'll come back.
Thanks, Brito. Like you just said, been with the business five and a half years, loved it for two reasons, really. One, it's, and most importantly, the culture and the people. Brito, I spent a bit of time talking about that.
For those of you that have had exposure to Belron, I think it is a very unique and special culture. I love working in it. Secondly, as I like to say sometimes, it has a beautiful business model, which hopefully we've at least so far partially explained. It's quite, again, quite unique and interesting. Importantly, it's a business that has grown a lot and we believe will continue to grow in the future. I'll do a couple of minutes going through a few charts to look at what the drivers of that growth are and also the financial profile that that has produced. We operate in a segment that has consistently grown. You can see there an estimate of the market size back to 2011 and going out to 2031 with a CAGR of 7%, driven by a number of things.
The volume drive is principally around the car park and the miles driven. Obviously, that's come and gone a bit. In my first year in 2000, we had a few nervous moments where the mileage dropped fairly materially, but we've recovered and bounced back, and it's growing again. We have a car park that's gently growing. It varies a bit by geography, but overall is providing some level of growth. The breakage rates are fairly consistent. We've not seen any major changes in the way in which the road conditions or the weather. I mean, weather comes and goes, but in the long run, no material changes to breakage rate. And the propensity to repair, again, can come and go a bit, but overall is a driver of our volume. So volume's important, but probably more important are the value drivers.
One huge driver for us is the windscreen complexity. Actually, Denis was talking about the way that cars are evolving in the VW portfolio. We love all that stuff. All those new cars with more complex windscreens. I mean, Denis can confirm this or deny it, but I think windscreens remain a very important part of the vehicle. More things being put into windscreens. As I say, we love that increasing complexity. It drives value for us. Overall, again, Denis mentioned this, but the car park premiumization, the value and the value of the cars that we see is steadily increasing. Of course, there are the inflationary components and the price negotiations that go with that. I think we've demonstrated it's not easy, but we can ensure that we're able to pass on inflation as it occurs.
Underlying all of that, we've got this lovely new job that came in. I'll show you some stats in a minute. It really didn't exist hardly at all back in 2017. Now we're in the 40% mark of proportion of the vehicles that we see that need recalibration of their ADAS systems. All those factors are producing a market that is growing. Just a bit more on windscreen complexity. I'm showing you a 1990s windscreen, smaller, not much complexity to it, not much curvature to the glass, very basic by comparison. I'm sure we felt it was very modern at the time, but when you look back, not so much. It evolves through the two up to 2020.
To go to the current year, 2025, we've highlighted there some of the features in the windscreen and the proportion of the screens now that have those kind of features in, whether that's acoustic fittings or solar or rain sensors. All these things are increasingly being added in. The Belron Technical team that Brito talked about earlier keeps a very, very close eye on all the developments that are going on. Maybe with the exception of the solar fitting, we see all of the things that are good news for us increasing into the future. Back to that point around windscreen complexity and how much we love it, we don't see any material signs of that changing as we go forward into the future. A bit more on ADAS. This is something, like I say, that was introduced in 2017.
2% of the vehicles that we saw at Belron globally required recalibration. We identified that opportunity. I think we were reasonably quick to spot it and then made sure we had the capability, the equipment, the training, and the branches that you need currently to do recalibration. Now in 2024, 42% of vehicles require recalibration. As you can see on the lines on the left-hand side, we see that projecting forward inexorably rising as older cars are retired and the new cars come in. Pretty much all of those new cars have ADAS. That just means the proportion of vehicles that we see requiring the ADAS job will go up over time. We see no reason for that to change in the next number of years. There is also, as you can see in the words there on the chart, regulation which requires that.
We're confident that this will continue to be a feature of our business for the years to come, both in Europe and in the US. We also, as Brito was mentioning earlier, we do value-added products and services. This is a great cross-sell. It's amazing the number of people who do not replace their windscreen wipers often enough. The regulation typically is that you should replace them once a year. If I had more time, I'd do a show of hands around how many people think they've replaced their windscreen wipers in the last year. Not many of you, I'm guessing.
When people come in to have their windscreen repaired or replaced, we just encourage our technicians not to sell, but just to make an offer, which is, would you like us to look at your windscreen wipers, check that they're in good condition, and if they need replacing, we'll do it for you there and then. Interestingly, even when they say no to that offer, on average, their NPS scores are higher. The very fact that you've taken the trouble to inquire about their vehicle and to make a check of the vehicle for them actually shows a higher NPS score. It's not just windscreen wipers. We've got other opportunities like rain repellents. We've shown you cabin filters and tinting windows as well.
We're always on the lookout for opportunities to do that cross-sell, which we think we will be able to train our technicians to do. We can do it in the moment of replacing the windscreen or repairing it and where we are able to manage it operationally. We think there's a big opportunity. Back in 2017, we had an attach rate, so that's the proportion of jobs where we were able to sell some kind of VAP at 12%, and we've moved that to 24%. Really, we think there's a significant opportunity to increase that over time. If you looked at the best performing regions or countries, they would be much higher than that average. There's quite a big spread from the lowest to the highest. What's the difference there? Just management attention and training of technicians and encouraging them to do that offer.
What does all that beautiful business model add up to? A very strong and resilient financial profile. I've looked back to the year 2000 at our top-line growth up to now or to 2024. That is a 9% compound annual growth rate, very consistently delivered. If we zero in on the last three years, then our adjusted EBITDA margins have continued each year to progressively increase from 24% to 26% to 27%. That means that by 2024, we were generating EUR 1.7 billion of EBITDA. This is a CapEx-light friendly business model from that perspective, from a cash perspective. We've generated out of that EUR 1.7 billion, EUR 1.4 billion of trading cash flow. You can see there it moves around a bit, but always very consistently and high levels of conversion of profits into cash. 79% in 2024.
If we just drill down a bit into the numbers and what those have done over the last few years. I've compared here 2021 to 2024 with all of the things that we've talked about. That's generated a revenue growth of over 40% or a CAGR of 11.6%. Up to EUR 6.5 billion now of top-line number. Adjusted EBITDA has gone from 25% to 27%. That's a 14.1% CAGR and like I said earlier, EUR 1.7 billion of EBITDA. At the EBIT level, we've grown that 15.9% compound over the last from 2021 to 2024. Got to EUR 1.4 billion. Like I say, we cash convert well. That generated EUR 1.4 billion of cash, a 79% conversion. That's EUR 500 million more than we generated in 2021. I think really on all the metrics you could look at, that's a fairly good performance.
By the way, we'll come on to it in a minute. I'm confident we can continue to grow those metrics from here. We also, with that kind of cash generation, have, I think, a fairly clear and proven track record of rapid deleveraging. That has enabled us to make some really very material shareholder distributions. You can see there a number of times that we've done a dividend recap and provided a distribution. Every time we've done that, we've very rapidly, I would say, deleveraged from there. Yes, we had a pretty substantial releveraging last year, up to 5.5 times, but we've already reduced it down to 5.2 times. As I say, I'm confident that the deleveraging profile of the business won't change going forward. Now back to you, Brito, to take us through the next section. Thank you.
Thank you.
The session here is about unlocking opportunities. Sorry. What we did last year is we embarked on a five-year plan. We tried to do it the right way. We looked at external forces. We looked at our internal strengths and gaps. We looked at threats and opportunities, I mean, like you would do. We came with eight priorities. Not all countries will have all eight, just to be clear, but just some eight that will be covering our business, plus one, which is new markets with comfort we'll cover. Those strategic priorities have to do, the first four, with commercial strategies on relevant segments. Here you have insurance, commercial, and cash. Those are the relevant segments in our business.
You have delivered core VAPs, which is a cross-sell opportunity that we have in all of the three segments, cash, commercial, and insurance. Those are the commercial strategies. The enablers for that are conversion. That's the biggest opportunity we saw in our five-year plan is conversion. I explain. We service, as we saw, 13 million customers with replacement and repair. We have in total with recalibration, 16 million jobs. Let's say 13 million customers served. There are a couple of millions that we didn't serve that for some reason started the funnel, started the journey. At some point, there was a leakage left, or we frustrated them with not having the right glass, or they frustrated us by not showing up. The job didn't get landed. I mean, there's a lot to be done.
Those are the people that chose to work with us, many of them. Somehow it did not work. There is a lot to be done there. That is why conversion and delight in PS is a big one because those affect all four above. The other one is expand mobile service. Mobile service, we will see, is the ultimate convenience, right? Instead of you with traffic and everything, everybody has a busy day. Instead of you having to drive to one shop of ours, you have us drive to you. You used to have much more of that in some countries. With recalibration, we had to ask people to come to the shop because of light conditions, floor, the way you need to do recalibration. We are developing some new equipment that will allow us to do it in your driveway, at your workplace.
Something we'll talk about, but that's an enabler because it gives you a value proposition, competitive advantage on the first commercial strategies. And the foundations. We need to have the strong foundations. We need to be a lean, agile company, and we need to enhance our technicians because, again, they are the heroes. We need to increase retention. We need to provide a safety environment for them, and we need to have leadership to get this to work as a team and to train, to coach, and everything. The important thing here, though, is that technology is the enabler. Without technology, none of this happens, not at scale. As you've seen in our numbers the last few years, we have invested a lot in technology. Technology now, not now, but for sure now again, will be a very important enabler for all these metrics here.
Let's talk about each one of them, one page per initiative. The insurance segment will continue to enhance. When we look at insurance, there's a lot to do still in insurance. Conversion is one of them. I mean, we have to continue to do what we do, which is what we call a value proposition. We have customer service that's recognizable, and we have a trusted brand. We have repair first, I mentioned before. We have national service. We're not just in a region. If you're traveling and you have a problem, you can stop, and you are guaranteed we have warranty. We have high standards of quality. People use the Belron way of fitting everywhere. The glass we buy, we buy from the same manufacturers as OEM. We have safe and compliant job fulfillment.
We will continue to enhance that value proposition by continuing to innovate, by continuing to invest in technician capability, and continue to drive efficiencies in service we provide and our repair first. Okay, so that's some of the reasons we believe we can still grow in insurance and that for sure our first priority everywhere. The second one, and that's more country by country, is the cash segment. The cash segment is big in the US, but not big everywhere. In the US, for example, our main market, you see that insurance, where we talk a lot, we just talk, there's 40% quote unquote only of the market. Thirty rounding, thirty is cash, thirty is commercial. In cash segment, US is a key priority. This is the total market by jobs. We have what it takes to grow in that segment. We have strong brands.
Again, it's a B2C type service. We can do target advertising. It's a zip code by zip code type of business because you compete with your neighbors for cash customer. There's no national contract. It's a service model enhancement. Time to service is very important, right? Focus on higher value motorist. A lot of people think about cash as people that want to have money to have insurance. Not true. Or people that have older cars. Not true. There are a lot of people that have Porsche, BMWs, and all that, but for some reason don't want to use the insurance or they have a very high deductible, so they're going to pay cash. We want to track those high value-added customers or customers that found themselves in a situation where they're not the last price sensitive, but they want to solve a problem.
If you have a side glass broken, you cannot use the car because it is rainy, it is cold, you have kids. You need to fix it as soon as possible. That is what we want to do. We want to provide that service same day, next day, and not discount prices or anything. If you look at some of the quotes from our promoters, NPS, what is interesting, you see that they talk really well and nice things about our service, but they always say it is a bit pricey, which is fine because at the same time, they are happy because they recognize that we provide something different than the market and they pay for that. You pay for what you get, right? Or you get what you pay. It is something that is why we do not want to play with price.
We do not want to play with value and really understand what they want. If they want convenience, having our vans come to them is something interesting. If they want next-day service or same-day service, those are things we can provide that can make us grow in that segment. Okay? Commercial segment, the third one. This is a more complicated one because you have many sub-segments within it. You have lease, fleet, rental, car, networks, trucks. Every one of them with strong SLAs because they use cars, most of them for business. It is not for leisure. They need the car back in their car park to be rented or trucks back on the road to be running from country to country, taking parts. This has a very tight SLA. Used to be not very profitable business, but after recalibration, again, like most business, became interesting again.
We have different ways to deal with it in terms of safety of our people because it's higher up and people falling from heights is not something we like. This is where we see also an opportunity for us to play a bigger role here. I'm talking about trucks, but also cars and vans. Interesting thing about the segment is that because they tend to have a shorter holding period of cars, they buy and sell in two years or so, they have a very high recalibration rates, higher than the average of the car park. That makes the jobs more profitable. We have what they are looking for. They're looking for speed of service, geographic coverage, and technical knowledge. Because the cars are new, they need somebody who knows how to deal with new news. They have national networks, some of them.
They need somebody we can provide nationally, and they need speed. We can provide that. VAPs, another fourth of the commercial ones, the last one. VAPs, I'm always very excited about VAPs. I come from consumer goods. You're always thinking about line extension. This is a typical cross-sell opportunity. People that when you talk to people retail, that's all they sell. Talk upsell, cross-sell. You're going to buy a TV, they sell your warranty, they sell your cables, they sell lots of things that go with the TV. Here is the same thing. Somebody comes to replace a windshield and the wiper is in bad condition, that's going to scratch the new windshield. You can propose that. A cabin filter, I don't know if you've noticed in your car. I didn't know my car had a cabin filter. All cars do have a cabin filter.
It's supposed to filter the air that comes into the car when you have your windows closed, the AC working or heating. What you see is that because nobody changes it, it's always very filthy because it retains all sorts of bacteria, all sorts of things that come from the air. When you look and you show the customers, the customer says, "Oh my God, let's change that. That's horrible." Those are just some of the things we can help customers. That has to be with health and wellness. Wipers have to be with safety. Just because Bosch is saying you have to change it once a year, people say, "Oh yeah, of course, Bosch manufactures it and says we have to change once a year." No, thank you. If you tell them, which is true, safety starts with good visibility.
Ninety percent of your decisions while driving comes from your vision. You have bad wipers at night, rainy, with your family in the car and you cannot see it, your decisions would be either late or wrong because you cannot see it. That is because you are attaching that to a higher order of magnitude in terms of value, safety. Cabin filters, health and wellness. There are studies that show that if your cabin filter is dirty, the air you breathe in your car is worse than opening windows and breathing the air from outside. You see, sorry, you see that there is a big discrepancy between the people that within our company that do it best in class. Even here, you can segment further than people. Some people are ahead of 50% and people that do not do a very good job.
That has a lot to do with leadership. You would say, "Oh, financial incentives, the profile of the technician." When we do root cause analysis, it's normally the branch manager, the branch manager making their people understand this is important for the customer, for their safety, and they should do it not because it's selling, but because the customer will be safer. Drive conversion. I said that's the big word that came from the five-year plan. That's the cheapest one, doesn't require a lot of investment, and it's there for the grab. When you look, there are many initiatives. I'm not going to go through all of them, but they have to do with appointment convenience. They have to do with helping customers navigate the funnel easier. They have to do with technician capacity.
They have to do with AI and bots in the call centers and, of course, the brand. You see here examples on us reminding customers that they have an appointment today and reminding customers of the most convenient appointment if they have to come to our stores. Either the closest one, or the one that's a bit further away but has a sooner, an earlier appointment. For them to choose, so they have the visibility. We are one of the few companies that offer digital opportunities for you to go all the way and book your appointment. Expand mobile service. We recognize the importance of mobile service. It has always been a key offering that we had in our portfolio. We aim to reinvigorate. I told you that because of recalibration, a lot of people had to come to our stores.
Now we're developing a tool that will be able to do according to OEM standards at your driveway, at your workplace. That will propel us back to have a balance that's more in line with customers' expectations. They're the ones that can choose either one. We go to them, they come to us. We're very excited about this. Humphrey will talk about cost efficiency and some others. Oh yeah.
Yeah. Cheers. Yeah, just to talk a bit about another key pillar of the five-year plan, the driving cost efficiency. We do believe we've delivered a significant operating leverage. You can see that in the numbers in the past through leveraging best practice, scale, relocation of activities. We think there's still lots more to go for.
I would say we're still really, in some respects, in the early foothills of some of the work we're doing there. One of the critical enablers was to think about the way that we work. We have historically been a very, very federated model, each country running its own shop. That's not always facilitated the best and most efficient way of operating. Of course, we don't want to lose the real power of that local focus with our relationships with key accounts and the management of the army of people in the field, the technicians doing the work. We really want to protect that local focus, but to work in a more efficient way across the world. That was one of the critical enablers.
A lot of the technology investments we've been making in the last couple of years and will continue to make into the future are to ensure that we deliver best-in-class technology support for all of this. Those are the enablers. There are some big programs across the world. Indirect procurement is one of them. We'll actually organize this a bit more on a European level and a North American level. There are some global opportunities for us, but a lot of it can be delivered in those two big geographies. A lot of work around contact centers, particularly we're doing some initiatives in the U.S. now to look at how we get more efficient using AI.
Beginning to introduce more modern ways of thinking where we've seen other people actually generate really very material improvements in the efficiency of contact center operations, which is a big part of our operation. The IT costs. When you're running 18 owned or now 19 with Ireland owned business units or countries all running their own IT stacks, clearly that's not the most efficient way to do that. We've started the journey of integrating that more globally. There's a plethora of ideas and opportunities at the country level, which, while we will provide some global oversight, governance, and tracking, needs to be prosecuted by the local country teams. A bit back to the best practice sharing that Francis was talking about right back at the beginning of the day. Lots for us to do within Belron around sharing best practice.
We think there's a big opportunity still on cost. Underpinning all of this, and I think Brito said it earlier, although he put the pictures up of the senior team, the embarrassing photos, actually the real people that make stuff happen, the ones that create the value are the technicians. How we recruit, retain, and ensure that they have a safe working experience is really at the heart of everything we do. How we build that skilled and engaged technician workforce is really at the center of Belron. Of course, like everybody else, as we came out of COVID, there was a bit of a surge in turnover in our staff. We experienced that like everybody else. Really since 2022, we put even more effort into this topic.
I'm glad with various initiatives, including some pay adjustments, which you will have seen in our cost inflation, but also in how we recruit people, the processes we go through, how we select people, how we then nurture them in those crucial early weeks and months after they've joined us. All of those efforts have really seen some quite significant reductions in overall turnover and particularly in voluntary turnover. If you strip out the people that we've actually deliberately said, "This is not for you," and we terminate the relationship, if you strip that out and then look at the voluntary turnover, that's the crucial one that we want to have come down. We are growing our technicians numbers, but a long way still to go on that to broaden out the pool of talents. We need capacity. It's one of the crucial ingredients to growing this business.
That means we need to look in all areas of the workforce and attract everybody. We have got world-class engagement scores across technicians. It is remarkable, actually. They are very similar to management and more senior roles. Typically, you might see a difference in those scores, and we do not. Technology has improved it again. You have heard us talk about technology a bit to improve those processes. The training and the equipment, we are trying very hard to, excuse the noises off, to ensure that people drive safely and work safely with us. We have implemented cameras, for example, in the US fleet fairly recently, which we think will have very material improvements in driver safety. As I say, overall, we have managed to reduce churn quite significantly. You saw at the bottom of the strategic plan summary that Brito shared a plus geographic expansion.
Today we have a presence in 40 countries. Nineteen of them are owned by us and the others are franchisees. That is still only serving 50% of a growing global car park. Actually, the bit we are not in, if you look at most studies on this, is the bit that is growing faster than the bit we are in, which is maybe not surprising. We typically are in the more developed parts of the world, and we are seeing more growth in the half that we are not in. We think that that global car park, as I think I showed in one of the earlier charts, is due to grow pretty materially over the coming years. We continue to focus on new market opportunities. Where should we expand? We have come up with some criteria.
If you like the bits of the beautiful business model that you really need to have in place in any particular geography to improve the chance that this will be a successful, profitable venture for us. We need to understand the type of car park. We need to understand the insurance penetration. Is there a relatively well-organized market that we think we can partner with key accounts and clients that will enable us to deliver the service that we do? Are the necessary components of our business model present at this stage in this market that we're looking at? Of course, there are a number of them. We're doing those reviews all the time. We conclude now is not the moment. We need that country to evolve a bit more over the coming years before we consider coming back.
We consider, and this is the second point, how to expand. Maybe franchise is the right opportunity as a way of dipping our toes in the water, really understanding in a much more fundamental way because we're running an operation there, or at least facilitating a franchisee to run an operation there, to really understand it. We've done joint ventures on occasion. Ireland, I mentioned earlier, actually was a JV for a number of years. We've just recently fully acquired that. That's become our latest country-owned market. There are different ways in which we can do this and different people that we could partner with. We're very open, again, very dependent on the specifics of the geography we're talking about, the country we're talking about. What is the optimal way to do that?
There will be some markets which are very unfamiliar to us where maybe a partnership with somebody who has the local knowledge can ensure that we run the business in the appropriate way, that that would be the right way in which to enter a market. We continue to be focused on the opportunities to grow globally. As an aside, even within the countries we operate in, there are still great opportunities to improve the density of our operation. In the U.S., we routinely make pretty small acquisitions, bolt-on acquisitions, which enable us to improve the scale of our business and true also in Europe. Expansion is not just necessarily new countries.
To summarize all of that, I think what we concluded at the end of all of the work we did really mostly last year on the sort of five-year plan was that there's a clear conclusion that the VGRRR focus strategy in all the market segments, so that means not just insurance, but cash and commercial, provides us with a really clear opportunity to grow Belron again in the next five years and beyond. That was great news to conclude that, that the business that we're already in has still got lots of mileage for future value growth. That there's significant opportunity in our existing business units, whether that's operational excellence, whether that's new channels. A renewed focus on the cash segment in the US would be a great example. Customer opportunities, improvements in the conversion of customers.
It's an amazing opportunity, actually, when you look at the number of people that contact us. Therefore, they really probably have almost certainly got some work that needs doing. Why would you contact us if you didn't? The number of them that we lose is really quite significant. Despite all the success we've had in growing, we know there is a very significant opportunity if we can just improve the conversion in the funnel from when they first contact us down to doing the job and leveraging our core strengths. Back to my cost point, how do we work in a smarter way together around the world to leverage those capabilities, share best practice, buy better, and drive profitability improvement that way?
Thirdly, yes, we are focused on opportunities for selective geographic expansion only where it makes sense, as I say, based on the criteria that we have defined. With that, oh no, I have got one more. Sorry, I nearly forgot. Possibly the most important chart. It would be wrong to skip over that one. Yes, in terms of giving guidance for our ambition in the midterm out to 2028, we believe that there is a real opportunity to continue that sales growth that we have seen in the last many, many years, as I showed earlier, the mid to high single-digit compound annual growth rate, that we see further improvement in margins will be possible. We continue to see those healthy tailwinds of windscreen complexity, increasing penetration of ADAS, driving operating leverage, so using the fixed cost base that we have got more efficiently, looking for cost opportunities.
All of those things we believe will enable us to further grow margins to greater than 25%. We think that we will continue to be a relatively CapEx light model and that we will be able to continue to generate high levels of cash conversion. As I showed you earlier, we have a very strong track record of deleveraging rapidly that we will drive towards investment-grade territory in the coming years as we go through that deleveraging process. I do hand back over to Brito. Thank you.
Thank you. We are very happy with our five-year plan. Of course, the one thing we know is that it's going to be wrong in many ways because we cannot tariffs, for example, was not part of it.
It goes on like this, but the very fact that you force yourself to think about scenarios and you plan for them. Some are things that will happen, like mobility, like expanding segments. Some are like having the best technicians, some are no regret moves, of course, no matter where the world goes. That is the basic of our business. The hedge we have, I always say that the hedge we have in an 85-year plan is the culture, is our people, because things happen. There were not assumptions. They are different than our assumptions. The capacity to have a culture of no excuses, of no whining, a culture that you embrace the cards you are dealt with and you do the best with them, that is the culture that we have at our company. That is the best hedge for an 85-year plan.
Of course, a five-year plan is important, but even more important is how to deal with everything we know is not in the five-year plan and that will happen, and how we adjust and how we embrace it and not waste any time complaining about it. Just embrace it. If I had to summarize it, we're unique because of these things we said. We have leadership in VGRR, B2B2C, a big value proposition that differentiates us from others. Global scale, we are specialists in VGRR. That's what we do. Other companies do that as well. That's all we do. We have the density, we have the data points, we have the knowledge, and that gives us an advantage. We have Belron Technical, unique culture. That's our hedge, right? We have an inspired leadership team that has a track record of execution. I think it's very important.
A lot of companies have ideas, they have strategic plans, they hire consultants to do whatnot, but at the end, it's about execution. Day in, day out, embracing change, adapting, and coming up with an adapted plan, execute again, and that's what differentiates us. We grow. We have, as we explained here, an amazing business model. We are in an industry where some wins are in our sails, and we have some growth drivers. We have recalibration, VAPs, still some bolt-on acquisitions. We have a lot of things for growth, other than, of course, our organic growth and growing the segments we just showed you. In terms of opportunities, that's pretty much the five-year plan date that you saw. Again, not all apply to every country, but they give a flavor for the things we need to do as a group to create value.
Because of that, we allow ourselves to be ambitious because we know we can create value. We have a clear path to value creation and to our ambitious targets that we have in our five-year plan. Thank you very much for your attention.
For those who have not done it yet, I invite you to open the notebook, beautiful notebook that is in front of you, because we are going to talk about Le Petit Carnet Noir. What we will focus on in that meeting today, what I want to insist on is really the power of the brand. Okay? Moleskine is, in a way, a short Italian brand with a very long French heritage. We are trying to capture in three minutes what is the essence of the brand. Sorry, I should have said that we are going to follow the path that everybody else has followed.
I should have started that. Really what we want to express is there is a lot in this brand, and what will give you a chance is to discover. You should start with paper. Yes.
Culture itself changed when the most revolutionary artists began to leave their ateliers to explore, to travel, to interpret the world. The notebook became instrumental in this change, a notebook above all others, a small Moleskine-colored notebook produced in France, to which people like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Hemingway entrusted the expression of their creative thoughts. Until 1987, when Bruce Chatwin, the travel writer who had given the name Moleskine to these notebooks from which he never parted, discovered they would no longer be produced.
Ten years later, Maria Sebrango sensed that a new class of creative minds was spreading and decided to relaunch the legendary notebook and make it a cultural project, a symbol of creativity. Milan, the cradle of design, where the legendary notebook could only be perfected with ivory pages to avoid straining the eyes, an internal pocket to collect stimuli, a bookmark to find a thread of thought, a perfect flat 180-degree opening of the pages in fine paper pulp to accommodate writing effortlessly, an elastic band to close this treasure chest of ideas, and finally, rounded corners to fit without resistance into pockets and bags, because you never know when an idea will hit you.
Last but not least, in a tribute to Chatwin, who wrote in his book The Songlines that losing his passport was nothing in comparison to the tragedy of losing a Moleskine notebook, the iconic "in case of loss" found in every Moleskine product. Since then, Moleskine has been much more than a notebook. It has become a cultural project, the perfect tool for creative minds to unleash their genius. Today, it is more consequential than ever. In the digital world in which we live, Moleskine has become the standard bearer for a very important message about the centrality of man. Our brain needs pen and paper to function at its best. Science says so. Fine thinking goes hand in hand with the fine movement of the pen on paper in all areas of knowledge. Writing by hand, drawing, even doodling are our best gymnastics.
Because our world is no longer divided into analog and digital, Moleskine has created a unicum that brings together the best of all experiences. Moleskine Smart. Write on paper, digitize instantly, edit, send emails directly from the notebook, change font, change color, record what you hear, and much more. People simply get how both extraordinary and natural all this is, and how only Moleskine could have thought it up. How only Moleskine can spur everyone to let their unexpressed genius speak for itself while showing them the genius unleashed in the more than 1,600 author notebooks that make up the Moleskine Foundation collection. Moleskine has and supports a foundation that shares the very same cornerstone credo. The creativity has the power to change the world. Moleskine is an idea, a symbol, an icon of human thinking. Only we are the legendary notebook.
Marcello and I will talk to you about the magic of Moleskine. What you have to remember is that this is not a notebook. Moleskine is not a notebook. Moleskine is much more than a notebook. When you open it, you go into 100 years of history and you have seen the legendary users that made the legend of Moleskine. You go into the foundation, which we are working very well with, and you go into a community. That is the important point. There is an amazing relation between the Moleskine and the users that you see through those numbers. We have a level of loyalty that is unmatched in the market. When you go with Moleskine, you stay with Moleskine. That is really what is making the brand unique compared to other paper brands.
Not only do you have a high level of loyalty, but you have a very high level of intensity as well that you see through those numbers. When you look into the number of interactions per post compared to, I mean, to the competition, whether it is on Instagram or on Facebook, we are miles ahead of competition because the relationship between you and your Moleskine is incredible. What is making us stand apart versus competition as well is our commitment to ESG. We have been talking a lot this morning about ESG. We are very involved in that as well through the governance, the reporting, the environment, and the social. That is something that when you work like we do, when you're row, I should not touch the mic. Sorry for that.
When your raw material is wood, wood-based, of course, ESG is at the center of what you do. For us, it is really a commitment, and we're working very hardly on that aspect. To go on, this is the tribute and as an element of ESG as well to the inclusiveness or inclusivity of what Moleskine is for. I mean, this is the lead team that is working on the brand. When you see a variety of profile, of experience, of background that is making the richness of this brand. This is the lead team. We have still a vacancy on the CCO that we should close in the next couple of days. That gives you a view of who we have working on the regions, the functions, and the product, the business units.
This first part, I know it was very fast, but to give you an idea of why is this brand so unique, what is making Moleskine stand apart in the world of stationery. That is one element of what we want to talk about today. The second one is to talk about the market. Okay? What is the opportunity we have in front of us? A market is split into really two parts. One, which is the core business, paper. This is where the brand was born 100 years ago. You see that we have a balance between Americanized, EMEA, and APAC with faster growth in developing markets. We will cover that in the rest of the presentation today. The second part of the market that we are looking at is what we call the adjacencies, which is whatever you need to interact with your notebook.
You write on it, you put it in a bag. These are the two markets that we are representing here, which is making our market around $7 billion addressable market globally. Okay? It is a sizable business to go after. Not only is it a sizable market, but you see underlying forces that are driving the growth of it, starting from the rising upper class, which explains why Asia has a faster growth rate in the next years than you see in Europe or you see in the U.S. It is the need for education that has been driving a lot of the programs that we are working at. It is, and I know it may sound a little paradoxical, it is the digital world that we see as an opportunity. Personalization, particularly again in Asia, when you live in a market of 1 billion people, being unique is a luxury.
We see that through the relevance and the weight of customization into our stores in Greater China. The last one is the ESG impact, which is extremely important and very relevant, particularly to the young generation, which is one of the targets that we'll go after. I'm going fast just to leave you time for questions. Okay? We are unique. We have a very large market. The next question is that, okay, great, but how do you unlock this opportunity? We have a five-year plan. Brito was talking about the five-year plan. We did a five-year plan exercise as well. We started in 2020. During the transition of management, we had to relook at it. We assessed the relevance of the strategy we've done. What you have here is an extract of this five-year plan. I want to talk about three elements.
One is the way to play. We put here on the page the one that is the most relevant to us. Number one is the consumer. When you have a loyalty like the one of Moleskine, you focus on your core users. That really for us is the prime target audience, is to delight the loyal users, whether they buy into the Moleskine network or they buy into our partners' network. The second one is to attract the student. You see for two reasons. One, because education is the driving force of the market, number one. Number two, because the students of today are the loyal of tomorrow. These are the two targets we're working on: delight the core users, attract the students to the franchise, because when you're 18 or 20, you become financially independent.
This is where you're going to go in touch with your notebook and you can buy your notebook. It's a moment of conversion. It's a moment of going to the market that we want to intercept. This is the first one and the consumer one. The second one is the categories. No surprise, the lead is on paper. This is where we were born. Everything we do, the drive is on paper. We work on the adjacencies, which is, as I said, everything that you need to be able to write, to store, to carry your notebook. The third one is what we call hybrid paper. You've seen into the trend in the market, the digitalization. We have at Moleskine what we call Moleskine Smart.
I think it was into the video where it marries the beauty of writing on paper with the digital world, which is for us is the future, because you keep and you nurture what is good into writing and you make it relevant for the Gen Z generation. This is something that we have a lead today on that one and we want to extend that lead. The third one is a subchannel, the market approach. We are into many different submarkets, as we said. You can buy Moleskine into a bookstore, into a stationery, into a museum, into a university, into travel retail, into retail, into e-comm, into marketplace. We approach the market by subchannel with a dedicated strategy for each of them. Of course, one of the strategies we have is to drive retail because we are the only brand in stationery having our own stores.
Today, we have a network on 60. It's one of the driving forces for the next five years where you give to the consumer the best possible experience and interaction with the brand. The third one is, of course, is e-comm. We see e-comm as the door to the world. We are working with our partners to make sure that our e-comm website is available to them, which guarantees the best presence, the best assortment, and the CRM program. These are the top three where to play. After that, we have top three how to win. One, no surprise to you. You've seen that into the video. It's all about elevating the brand. The brand is by far the strongest asset of Moleskine. We do a lot of work into nurturing the legend of Moleskine. That's the first one.
The second one is elevate the product. Make sure that you have always the best possible writing experience. We also work on premiumization and luxurization of the line and the assortment. The third one is elevate the shopping experience, whether it is into Moleskine retail network or whether it is into bookstores or stationeries managed by our partners. We have a couple of enablers into that related to the organization. You have seen the lead team. We value, I know it is becoming less and less popular in some part of the world, but for us, diversity and inclusion, when you value human genius, it is not a policy, it is a way of being. Of course, we put a lot of attention into having a knowledgeable, talented, and value-driven organization. We are working on the supply chain, and we are leveraging technology as a way to gain efficiencies.
An important insight on supply chain excellence on a topic that we have touched several times in the previous presentation, that is tariffs. Three years ago, we started an important strategy in decentralizing the production that basically was based in China. We opened a new partnership to improve the lead to market to the US and also to Europe. Now, most of the SKU, about 80% of the SKU that we have in the US market, are already provided from the Ecuador facility. That means that for 2025, on that part for the tariff topic, let's say, we have already presented this in this strategy. I think it was an important topic because we touched it before.
Elevated the brand. This is the GIF. That is the campaign that we are running today. We have been running this campaign for two years.
We call it Unleash Your Genius. It's all related. We have been working with 14 researchers around the world, academic researchers about the benefit of writing. The campaign is about unleashing your genius because writing helps you to cool down, reduce anxiety, improve memory, of course, foster creativity. We are doing that campaign. That campaign is not only a campaign, but Unleash Your Genius is the campaign that we develop not only into advertising, but also into the product, into the store, into the windows. This is something that is transversal to all the touchpoints that someone may have with Moleskine. This one is the visual that we developed for Milan Design Week. We were in the Milan Design Week a few days back, a few weeks back, exhibiting the brand.
Thanks to that, we will now be, for those who live in London, we'll now be in September in the London Design Week. We have been asked to participate in it following what the London Fair have seen in Milan. That is the campaign. First is building the brand, nurturing the legend. That is the priority number one. The number two is to elevate the product. How do we do that is, as I was saying, focus on the core. The core is paper, notebook, and planners, which is 80% of our business. After that, as we are saying, the adjacencies. Writing tool. If you love Moleskine, you will love the Moleskine pencil bags. Everything I said that has a direct connection with your notebook. We have plans.
I will just mention that a bit later to extend the product, to premiumize the product, and to extend the distribution on those categories. Important as part of elevating the product, three things: upselling, cross-selling, gifting. Upselling, you see that through the personalization and the luxurization of the lineup. Cross-selling is obviously about the premium bundles and the boxes. Gifting, because gifting is 50% of the occasion to buy are gifting. Now, what you can do after today, you walk 100 meters to Regent Street, to Moleskine store, where you will have a chance to buy everything that is on that page. Okay? If you want to buy this one, then you have to rush to Harrods because it's exclusive to Harrods. It is a premium line done by a British fashion designer. Every notebook is done one by one, unique with flower patches.
EUR 700. Rush because I may not have enough for all of you. Okay? That gives you an idea of what we mean by elevating the brand. We do that across the categories, of course. Global presence, consumer reach. We have a strategy called Feet on the Street. We do not buy in the US the way you buy in China or you buy in Europe. To give you an idea of where we are, we have offices in the US, we have offices in Europe, and we have offices in Asia covering the market, so namely Japan, China, and Singapore for the eastern part. We are in New York with offices in New York and stores on the east and the west coast, and we are in the top five European countries with a direct presence. Of course, we are sold into more than 100 countries in the world.
This is because you may have questions about competition. No one, no one has the global footprint that Moleskine has. Competitor in the US is different than Europe and is different than in Asia. Only Moleskine is present across the three regions. I'm not asking you to remember that, but what I want to illustrate is the way we look at the market. Our strategy on elevating the shopping experience is to work not wholesale retail, but work by subchannels, a stationery, a bookstore, a travel retail. The consumer habit, the purchase occasion is not the same. Therefore, the assortment, the go-to-market will be adapted to each of them. For each of those subchannels, we look into the winners. The winners are the top account. They are just surrounded by what we call the local heroes.
The doors that you have to be in because in the city where you are, in the part of the city where you are, it is the place that gives Moleskine the right visibility and the right audience surrounded by the rest of the market. Of course, we work that the winners are managed directly, the local heroes with we work the commercial internally and the rest of the market we're working with partners. That gives you an idea of the way we look at the market and the way we segment our approach from a product and commercial standpoint. Of course, I'm telling you that I'm looking by submarket just to show you the numbers, wholesale versus retail.
My reporting is not yet to the level of the strategy that we have defined, but that gives you an idea of who we are working with around the globe. In the wholesale part, you have all the key doors, whether it is a department store like Lafayette, a bookstore like Barnes & Noble, strategic partnership, which is a third of our business. We customize notebook for premium companies like D'Ieteren that you see on your desk today, but also MoMA, Mandarin Oriental, or the Van Gogh Museum. We talk about retail and e-comm, which is driving the acceleration of the sales for us. Talking about e-comm and retail, we follow the same approach. We have a different model. We spend a lot of time defining what is a Moleskine store in terms of size, in terms of assortment.
We have KPIs in terms of what is the right environment, what are the right financials, what are the right commercial KPIs before you open a door, which is the way for us to drive not only the top line, but the bottom line. You have five minutes for questions. The key takeaway, what you remember, beautiful brand. It is a love mark, it is an icon in the market. We play in a large market and we have a unique positioning and go-to-market to be able to win and to grow over the next five years, which is summarized into that. You may want to cover that, Marcello.
Yes. Ambitions for 2028 on the mid-single digit for the top line with the companion average growth. For the margin, we misaligned and adjusted a bit of margin around 50%.
Trading cash flow was about EUR 20 million.
I think after this session, you will be happy. You will be happy that you stayed on because I think you probably will walk out and all of a sudden you will start noticing machines out there that you probably did not recognize or did not pay attention to. I hope after the session you think, I think there is a part of TVH in that machine. I think that is the objective. I am 23 years with TVH, so I think I am happy that I could be part of the journey so far. It has been a very interesting journey. I am here together with Carine. Carine joined last year, but Carine, I suggest you introduce yourself.
Thank you. Thank you, Dominiek. Good afternoon, everybody. Just like Brito, I am relatively new to the company.
I only joined December of last year. I thought I wanted to spend a few moments to introduce myself. So my name is Carine Van Landschoot. I am from Belgium. I now live back in Belgium, but I had the joy of spending the majority of my career internationally, coming across many different cultures and working with a lot of great people. That company I worked for for over 20 years was named Syncreon and was a specialized value-add logistics service provider specializing in the automotive and technology industry and was formed in 2007 after the company I worked for, TDS Automotive, merged with Walsh Western, which was an Irish-based family business. Our business was a privately owned business. The companies were put together.
The balance sheet was levered to fund the acquisition, and we decided to become a global value-add logistics player, moved our head office to the U.S. to have, besides Europe, access to the U.S. capital markets and to grow our footprint in North America, which we've done successfully, both organically and inorganically. Through that journey, we did a number of capital transactions, both on the debt side and on the equity side. We sold the company three times, sometimes partially, sometimes fully. We ultimately ended up in the hands of DP World in 2021. DP World is a large port operator, global presence, and has the ambition to become an end-to-end logistics service provider. In light of that strategy, they acquired our company and another company.
I helped them with that transformation for the last three years out of Dubai and more recently out of this very town. I spent two years in London before I joined TVH. When the TVH opportunity came across, I just want to share just like Brito what attracted me. I was impressed, and I heard that so many times today by the culture and the commitment, by the great company that our founders have put together, and by the values that they still live today with the founders and afterwards with the management. I stand here very humbled next to Dominiek with 23 years' experience. I stand here with five months, but I was very much impressed by th e company, by its track record.
For me, it feels like coming home, and I'm very excited to help the company with its international presence to the next phase in its evolution.
Yeah. No, and I flip it back because I'm happy we could convince Carine to join. TVH is a global company. What we really have to do is continue to build the leadership team, and then international experience is key. I told you the ambition that I had to kind of convince you that there is a part in a machine that you probably didn't pay attention to. There is one thing I question a bit, and it's the fact that Francis said, I think it's alphabetical. Personally, I question it a bit because it started with cars. It started then with glass on a car. Then it went for the independent aftermarket.
Basically, my story is forget all that and we go for everything else. Okay, I can't bring TVH here, so I would like you to watch a movie. If you talk about the agenda, you've seen it, you know it. I think we will talk about the business model. We will talk about how we have grown. We will talk about the opportunities that we still have to grow and the ambition that we have. Again, first, a very, very short movie about TVH. Yeah. When I see the movie, I smile. I see a lot of smiling faces in the room, and I think that's TVH. We are passionate people. Five thousand passionate people, I think as a leadership team, we are also committed to TVH. When I joined, when I joined TVH 23 years ago, the profile was different.
We were actually only focusing on a forklift. Then we had strong ambitions, and we wanted to go two things. We wanted to go global. What can we do with a forklift, spare parts for a forklift? Can we do it global? Second ambition, can we do it in different markets? I think, yeah, if I have to start an elevator pitch, then I say, and I keep it brief, then I say TVH is aftermarket and TVH is everything about off-road machines. That is why I am saying it is basically not about cars, it is about everything else, something that is not on the street. Over the years, we moved into what we call four markets: material handling, construction equipment, industrial equipment, and agriculture equipment.
If to make it very concrete, so a forklift, warehousing equipment, then the scissors, the skid steers, the bobcats you might call them. The industrial equipment, cleaning machines, and actually a tractor. You probably have flown or you probably took the train. For instance, if you take an airport and the luggage, the cars, the tractors that tow your luggage to the plane, there is a likelihood that there is a part from TVH in that tractor. Okay? You might think about it, but it's very real. The numbers, you can basically throw a lot of numbers, but this is just a very, very brief selection of numbers. It first starts by recognizing the part. You have to know, you have to have the knowledge. 50 million references in our database about hundreds of brands. That's where it starts.
You have to recognize the part. You have to know what the customer is talking about. Second thing, you have to be able to deliver from stock, 1 million items on stock. We have those items. That's a big, big number, and we buy them from, I think you've heard the numbers from PHE, but 7,500 suppliers. It is because we are active in all these markets, and it is because we develop the parts as well. We ship those parts. One number that is not here on this slide is from 90 plus locations. Over the years, we have evolved and we've built a network closer, as close as possible, to the customer base. We try to be close to the customer, and we try to do it by speaking their language, by trying to understand their culture.
Fifty-five languages, seventy nationalities, and we do that with 5,000 people. Okay? We do this on a global scale. If I say TVH is unique, then it is because of the markets that we cover, the four markets: material handling, construction, agriculture, and industrial. The four markets, I do not think there is another player out there that dares to take on that challenge. We do it on a global scale, network of warehouses globally, customers globally, 170 countries. A very large customer base. What is the challenge? I think you have heard Stéphane talking about it. For instance, in COVID, in COVID, it became crystal clear. When a machine stops, and if we as TVH would have decided to also stop, I think after this session, I think you will be happy.
You will be happy that you stayed on because I think you probably will walk out, and all of a sudden, you will start noticing machines out there that you probably did not recognize or did not pay attention to. I hope after the session, you think, I think there is a part of TVH in that machine. I think that is the objective. I am 23 years with TVH, so I think I am happy that I could be part of the journey so far. It has been a very interesting journey. I am here together with Carine. Carine joined last year, but Carine, suggest you introduce yourself.
Thank you. Thank you, Dominiek. Good afternoon, everybody. Just like Brito, I am relatively new to the company. I only joined December of last year. I thought I wanted to spend a few moments to introduce myself.
My name is Carine Van Landschoot . I am from Belgium. I now live back in Belgium, but I had the joy of spending the majority of my career internationally, coming across many different cultures and working with a lot of great people. That company I worked for for over 20 years was named Syncreon and was a specialized value-add logistics service provider specializing in the automotive and technology industry and was formed in 2007 after the company I worked for, TDS Automotive, merged with Walsh Western, which was an Irish-based family business. Our business was a privately owned business. The companies were put together.
The balance sheet was levered to fund the acquisition, and we decided to become a global value-add logistics player, moved our head office to the US to have, besides Europe, access to the US capital markets and to grow our footprint in North America, which we've done successfully, both organically and inorganically. Through that journey, we did a number of capital transactions, both on the debt side and on the equity side. We sold the company three times, sometimes partially, sometimes fully. We ultimately ended up in the hands of DP World in 2021. DP World is a large port operator, global presence, and has the ambition to become an end-to-end logistics service provider. In light of that strategy, they acquired our company and another company.
I helped them with that transformation for the last three years out of Dubai and more recently out of this very town. I spent two years in London before I joined TVH. When the TVH opportunity came across, I just want to share just like Brito what attracted me. I was impressed, and I heard that so many times today by the culture and the commitment, by the great company that our founders have put together, and by the values that they still live today with the founders and afterwards with the management. I stand here very humbled next to Dominiek with 23 years' experience. I stand here with five months, but I was very much impressed by the company, by its track record.
For me, it feels like coming home, and I'm very excited to help the company with its international presence to the next phase in its evolution.
Yeah. No, and I flip it back because I'm happy we could convince Karine to join. TVH is a global company. So what we really have to do is continue to build the leadership team, and then international experience is key. I told you the ambition that I had to kind of convince you that there is a part in a machine that you probably didn't pay attention to. But there is one thing I question a bit, and it's the fact that Francis said, I think it's alphabetical. Personally, I question it a bit because it started with cars. It started then with glass on a car. Then it went for the independent aftermarket.
Basically, my story is forget all that and we go for everything else. Okay, I can't bring TVH here, so I would like you to watch a movie. If you talk about the agenda, you've seen it, you know it. I think we will talk about the business model. We will talk about how we have grown. We will talk about the opportunities that we still have to grow and the ambition that we have. Again, first, a very, very short movie about TVH. Yeah. When I see the movie, I smile. I see a lot of smiling faces in the room, and I think that's TVH. We are passionate people. So 5,000 passionate people. I think as a leadership team, we are also committed to TVH. When I joined, when I joined TVH 23 years ago, the profile was different.
We were actually only focusing on a forklift. We had strong ambitions, and we wanted to go two things. We wanted to go global. What can we do with a forklift, spare parts for a forklift? Can we do it global? Second ambition, can we do it in different markets? I think, yeah, if I have to start an elevator pitch, then I say, and I keep it brief, then I say TVH is aftermarket and TVH is everything about off-road machines. That is why I am saying it is basically not about cars. It is about everything else, something that is not on the street. Over the years, we moved into what we call four markets: material handling, construction equipment, industrial equipment, and agriculture equipment.
If to make it very concrete, so a forklift, warehousing equipment, then the scissors, the skid steers, the bobcats, you might call them. The industrial equipment, cleaning machines, and actually a tractor. You probably have flown or you probably took the train. For instance, if you take an airport and the luggage, the cars, the tractors that tow your luggage to the plane, there is a likelihood that there is a part from TVH in that tractor. Okay? You might think about it, but it's very real. The numbers, you can basically throw a lot of numbers, but this is just a very, very brief selection of numbers. It first starts by recognizing the part. You have to know, you have to have the knowledge. 50 million references in our database about hundreds of brands. That's where it starts.
You have to recognize the part. You have to know what the customer is talking about. Second thing, you have to be able to deliver from stock, 1 million items on stock. We have those items. That is a big, big number. We buy them from, I think you have heard the numbers from PHE, but 7,500 suppliers. It is because we are active in all these markets, and it is because we develop the parts as well. We ship those parts. One number that is not here on this slide is from 90 plus locations. Over the years, we have evolved and we have built a network closer, as close as possible, to the customer base. We try to be close to the customer, and we try to do it by speaking their language, by trying to understand their culture.
Fifty-five languages, 70 nationalities, and we do that with 5,000 people. Okay? We do this on a global scale. If I say TVH is unique, then it's because the markets that we cover, the four markets: material handling, construction, agriculture, and industrial. The four markets, I don't think there is another player out there that dares to take on that challenge. We do it on a global scale, network of warehouses globally, customers globally, 170 countries. A very large customer base. What is the challenge? I think you've heard Stéphane talking about it. For instance, in COVID, in COVID, it became crystal clear. When a machine stops, and if we as TVH would have decided to also stop.
Anyway, ESG has, of course, been an important component in the last couple of years.
We're actually in the last year of what was a five-year plan of an ESG roadmap that we've been working on. It's one where, first of all, as an investment company, we wanted to make sure that at each step of our "investment cycle" from screening to the diligence to decision-making to active ownership, that we're properly addressing the ESG dimensions. We are part of the PRI, Principles of Responsible Investment Forum. Of course, we've leveraged very much that. Going beyond that, I would say, especially on the last part of the four, the active ownership, we spend a lot of time, of course, in making ESG not just a theoretical focus, but a very practical focus.
Governance, we very much made sure that we have a clear and sufficient governance in place, both at the group level and each of the business levels when we talk about it. We also made sure there is an ESG strategy, both at the group level and at each of our individual businesses there. That was not the case five years ago. We made sure that on the way we report about ESG, we are a publicly quoted company. We have the appropriate reporting that is robust in the way we collect the data and the way we also do external audits around that data. We report it at the group level and coming from the different businesses. Of course, the CSRD reporting that we did in 2024 was kind of the first, let's say, end-to-end test to make this happen in 2024.
We've done this also on a specific number of KPIs. There's always a mix of KPIs that are important for us as a group. There's three of them: CO2 emissions, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. Of course, also on whatever KPIs each of our businesses have chosen ESG, and they are different business per business. Lastly, we've also selected and we keep on tracking and working against a number of ratings. There is no real magic rating existing yet, I would say, in the world of ESG, but to pick two that we've been following for quite a number of years and that we find are relatively stable because some of them seem to move back and forth depending on the different years. One is on the MSCI rating, where we have a double A, and we've had that for quite a number of years.
The other one is on Sustainalytics, where we have a score, and we were in the kind of low-risk category, always around between 11 and 12, more or less. The lower the number, the lower the risk is with Sustainalytics. That has been the roadmap we have been working on, and I think it really set all the bases in place. One particular item we focused on in 2024 was the so-called double materiality analysis. Of course, many companies have been working on that. So have we. It is actually in 2023 and 2024, I would say, that we have been working on the double materiality. It is really looking at the ESG impacts, risks, and opportunities that are there for each of our businesses and then consolidating that at the group level and using that to define our next year's roadmap for the years to come, really.
Some of the big risks, impacts, and opportunities that came out, of course, with climate change, no surprise. Waste management. We have quite some businesses that somehow get in contact with, while they're repairing or servicing, with waste or in packaging, of course, no surprise. Health and safety. We're in service businesses. We have thousands of employees around the world that are doing lifting, repairing, that are working in real physical environments where health and safety is absolutely important. I think the level of awareness has really raised a lot in the last couple of years. We still have a way to go in multiple of our businesses, but health and safety is an absolute proof that you really care about your people, that they at least get home without any accidents or any incidents. Training and development.
You've heard a lot about the importance of culture and the importance of our people, whether we're blue-collar or white-collar. Training and development is absolutely crucial. Governance, business conduct, no surprise. We are all working in ecosystems with thousands or millions of customers on the one hand and with hundreds or thousands of suppliers on the other hand. Having, let's say, well-functioning business conduct practices in our companies is absolutely crucial. Actually working on the sustainability of the value chain, given the place that we are, often a distribution part of a value chain, engaging in dialogue, many oftentimes in the upstream side towards the supplier side is an absolutely important aspect as well. As I said before, we've disclosed for the first time, according to the CSRD rules, our sustainability report per business, both quantitatively and qualitatively. We've done the external assessments.
Of course, it's a learning process. It's a journey that will take multiple years, but it was an important milestone to get it published only a couple of weeks ago, really, on the 2024 report. What will this new ESG roadmap be all about? There are four areas that were identified that we're going to be working on in the years to come. One is on climate action. It's one of the things that came out of the double materiality analysis. It will basically be sure that the Science Based Targets initiative, where already three years ago we engaged ourselves that all of our businesses will somehow have targets proposed and validated by 2027. We're continuing to work on that. We've made nice progress, by the way, in the last couple of years. You've heard it throughout the presentations today.
Belron, Moleskine, as well as D'Ieteren Automotive already have submitted and validated their SBTi targets. Not surprisingly, TVH and PHE, they've talked a lot more about scope one and two, under which they have a bit more control than scope three. Scope three is more complicated because you have to deal with, in the case of PHE hundreds, in the case of TVH thousands of suppliers. Making the right choice of how to go about that and how to have a meaningful influence over the long term is, of course, something which is still under discussion. I'm sure we'll make progress in the years to come around that as well. Of course, climate-related risks and opportunities continue to be analyzed and looked upon, and that will be a focus for the years to come. The second area is circular economy.
Some of our businesses are active in circular economy, and you've heard several examples of that today. At the same time, we believe we can still go further on circular economy, not just by the business we're doing, but also looking at the raw materials, the pieces of equipment, the waste, or whatever happens that come out of our service and/or remanufacturing operations and recycle them, reintroduce them into our procurement one way or the other, either directly or indirectly. It's something we, of course, need to study still. There's a lot of stuff to be done before we can come to commitments and concrete actions. Circular economy is an area of focus for us in the years ahead. Sustainability of the value chain, I already talked about it. It's given our nature of business as distributors a crucial part of it.
How can we more systematically screen and engage in dialogue in a meaningful manner? That is both good, and I think we've heard it in some of the presentations. When ecology and economy go hand in hand, it's easier. When they don't go always hand in hand, it's a bit more tricky. We have to make sure we do the right thing there. Last but not least, ESG governance. We already have installed everything, but we can do more, I think, still to trickle it down and cascade it down, lower in different organizations, to make sure that it not only is there, but also really comes alive. Four areas of ESG that I wanted to point out. That, I think, is one point of attention I wanted to do.
I think it came more alive through the different presentations today that it's not just about processes and about reporting, but it's about real business decisions that actually also contribute to us as a, let's say, responsible actor in the ecosystems in which we operate. That was one thing. There was a second thing that we want to do to complete. I'll pass the word to Édouard for that.
Thank you, Francis. Indeed. If we go back to the metaphor of the handful with Francis' six fingers, number six is Immo, indeed, the real estate division, which is a bit of a historical element, right? It's part of our segment, corporate and unallocated, which has both the corporate team and the Immo, D'Ieteren Immo activity, which historically was the real estate of D'Ieteren Automotive. So 100% Belgium-focused.
Immo was created as an autonomous entity around 10 years ago, and D'Ieteren Automotive remains, by large, the main customer. Around 80% of the assets are rented by D'Ieteren Auto. As you can see, there are 38 sites in Belgium, 24 in Flanders, 7 in Brussels, 7 in Wallonia. The axis Brussels-Antwerp in Belgium is important simply because economically it's an important axis. Fair market value of slightly above EUR 400 million. From a CO2 perspective, they have also been quite dynamic at lowering their emissions. As you can imagine, the tenant always benefits from lower charges, while at the same time, especially at the beginning of that curve, it's quite easy to find the low-hanging fruits, right? As you make progress, it becomes sometimes a bit more challenging. D'Ieteren Immo has generated in 2024 a net rental income of around EUR 26 million.
That, as we said, together with the corporate team that Francis elaborated about this morning, is our pole corporate and unallocated. That is our, let's say, group entity. With this, we do indeed have a complete picture of our group with its six fingers. We can now look at what is the joint outlook of this all in our midterm ambitions. Very importantly, I mean, there are no surprises on this slide, right? I would like to take a second to say congrats and thank you. It's very humbling, actually, everything that has been prepared for today. I hope it was clear and appreciable. Intense work, definitely. Congrats to all the teams, both in the businesses and within our team.
If we look at the top line, we can say that across the board, we have indeed, as was introduced this morning, solid growth platforms. We see a lot of mid-single-digit top-line growth. Belron, which is often top of the class, definitely here also in top-line growth with mid to high single-digit. Same thing margin-wise with this greater than 25% ambition that we have seen in the past. Overall, possibilities to have clear margin development in the different businesses, right? This has been elaborated in quite some detail. Overall, definitely margin development is very important as part of the value creation story, right? This operational leverage, it was said growing for the sake of growing is definitely not the goal, right? The goal is profitable growth. Finally, trading cash flow. Solid across the board, I think we can say.
Indeed, with around 60% for PHE, 70% for TVH parts. A nice commitment by D'Ieteren Automotive and by Belron and Moleskine. There, again, a confirmation of our asset-light businesses, right? Good cash generation, which is quite fundamental for us. As a reminder, we have a target for a minimum, let's say, cost at our corporate and unallocated of between EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million adjusted EBIT level by 2028. How does this summarize for the different group targets, indeed? Not so creatively, you could say. If you do the sum of the parts, you get to indeed mid-single digit for the adjusted EBIT. We're talking group share level and as well mid-single digit for adjusted PBT group share. Let's look a bit more at how does that look like across the period, right? Because we are talking 2024, 2028.
What kind of ambitions do we have here? Definitely, first of all, on this slide, you see on the left adjusted operating result group share and on the right adjusted profit before tax group share, our core KPI, right? First, as was said this morning, the track record of 2022 to 2024 has been pretty strong, right? It is a very strong CAGR across the board. Of course, it was strongly helped by the fact that PHE joined the group during that period, but also very strong performance across the board by multiple of the companies. Going forward, we can confidently refer to our ambitions. Mid-single digit, both on the operating result and on the profit before tax.
Of course, important to flag, especially in 2025, simply the weight of the leverage at both Belron and D'Ieteren Group following our very successful shareholder reorganization last year, right? Related to this, we'll talk more about that in a second, the rapid deleveraging, which is ongoing at both levels. Important to flag that in 2025, on this roadmap, let's say from 2024 to 2028, of course, on the operating result, what we had said is that we expected a slower growth than the average in 2025, right? With a small increase on the operating result side. As you can see, and as we have explained, simply a decrease on the PBT side due to leverage. Logically, between now and 2028, we will deleverage and hence you will have an acceleration.
Another way to say it is that, of course, if you look at the growth rate expected between the end of 2025 and the end of 2028, logically, it will be significantly higher, right? The logical question is indeed, what about leverage? The whole idea is to have a leverage which is consistent with the cash generation in the different businesses. This has been touched upon throughout the day. First, let's remind an important point, the fact that the businesses are financially ring-fenced. In other words, they finance themselves on own merits. This is actually also the case of Immo. Following our transaction last year, it's a bit of a detail, but we decided to have Immo also finance on its own.
As you know, if we look at the long-term leverage targets that we have, Belron, clearly, we have a target, a direction of travel, let's say, which is towards investment-grade territory, right? This has been elaborated upon following the recap of last year. In the coming years, the focus at Belron is deleveraging towards investment-grade territory. For the other activities, the levels that you see here, we see as reasonable given the characteristics of these businesses. Indeed, we talked about the trading cash flow ambitions by 2028 that you find there again. This leads us actually group-wise to our, let's say, group cash ambition, which is to generate a cumulative trading cash flow over the period, so from January 2025 to the end of 2028, of above EUR 5 billion. What is this trading cash flow?
Clearly, it's the cash flow before all the gray buckets below, right? Before debt servicing, M&A, investments, management incentives, others. It's quite high, right? It's a trading cash flow. EUR 5 billion as cumulative generation over that period is quite, we believe, a decent and nice ambition, which shows the solid cash generation of our portfolio, of the fact that they are asset-light businesses. This is very much a characteristic we appreciate. Finally, after their own usage, all these gray boxes are there definitely as well to ensure that they continue to grow, to create value on one hand, and to contribute a little bit also to the group by paying their dividends, right? That is a bit the end of the loop. Let's talk for a second about these dividends. We do definitely have dividend policies in place with the different businesses of the group.
They are completely aligned with the growth ambitions and the growth contexts of each business, right? A more mature business, let's say, is likely to be expected to pay a higher dividend. A business which has more growth opportunities will potentially pay a much lower dividend. An example of that, quite schematic and simple, is to take PHE. PHE, you've seen, I think, that very fragmented market, solid track record, clear cost synergies. A lot of opportunities for them to do significant M&A and to grow this ink spot growth here in Europe. On the other hand, D'Ieteren Automotive, which is in a pretty stable environment, right? 24% market share in Belgium, active 100% in Belgium. Hence, they can contribute to the cash upstream. Belron, as we said, in terms of dividend, they are deleveraging.
We can expect them to be conservative or very conservative even in terms of dividend until they reach, let's say, this investment-grade territory, the focus really being on deleveraging at Belron. What does this give us for the group picture now in terms of leverage and situation? There as well, we believe the leverage is pretty consistent with our cash generation. We talked a bit about the dividend streams, right? Which is the main, any cash at the group level will be cash upstream from the businesses, right? Today we have a situation where I think you all know that we have EUR 750 million of debt. We had EUR 1 billion last year in two tranches, right? One five-year tranche and one two-year tranche that we had called the bridge to cash as part of the transaction.
We have already repaid half of that bridge, EUR 250 million in March. We do indeed commit to reimburse fully that bridge in 2025 with cash upstream from the different businesses. Let's talk for a second about, yeah, let's go back to our transaction of last year. We defined a clear deleveraging strategy, which we are right now executing. As I am now on the left of the slide, right? If we were calculating at the end of April, our leverage situation with these EUR 750 million out of our market cap, we were about 8% of debt to our market cap, right? Which falls within that range, but we could say with a clear objective of deleveraging.
That is why we are saying near term in 2025, in the middle of the slide, the goal will be to deleverage and to repay the bridge, hence EUR 500 million remaining, this TLA five years amortizing starting in 2027 if we do not refinance it. Just to be for the sake of completeness, we have also refinanced. We were financing Immo, like we said, right? With a shareholder loan. We have simply replaced that with a bank loan so that they now function fully as on their own merits as well. This will lead us to around 6% of our market capitalization in terms of debt. In the future, what is important to flag, and by future we mean the coming years, right? We might have some remaining debt, right? At the group level. Why is that? Because, like we said, right?
The TLA is a five-year debt that starts amortizing in 2027. The cash upstream that we have is the upstream cash by our businesses, dividends or other types of cash upstream. That debt that is likely to remain at the group level has to be a reasonable amount of debt at the group level. What we are saying is that we could consider to have additional debt, but very important here, the words have been carefully selected, right? Potential additional debt that would be temporary, of course, and for the acquisition of cash generative assets only. Let's remind one thing as well. We did two investments, PHE and TVH, right? Two successive years. Before that, we had more than five years, I believe, without an investment, right? Before the investment with Moleskine.
You know as well that for us, and for us to find, let's say, an important investment to be done at the group level, it's a bit like it takes two to tango, right? Conclusion, most important is to have a deleveraging that continues to progress smoothly. The operation last year was a big success. The deleveraging is going according to plan as defined at the time. For sure, in 2025, we continue to deleverage and going forward. This was really for the sake of completeness that I wanted to share this. To take it from another angle, what is our D'Ieteren Group capital allocation? How do we plan to enable this future value creation? As we said, the current focus is on deleveraging, right? Following the transaction last year.
It is the case both at the level of the group and at the level of Belron. Current focus is deleveraging. You have seen the caps in all the businesses as well, around three times and even less for D'Ieteren Automotive. For that, we are using cash upstream by the businesses, mainly dividend. Practically, it means repayment of the remaining tranche of the bridge loan, EUR 250 million in 2025. Maybe I repeat myself, but it is clear. In what are the next elements in our capital allocation? M&A, as we said, for sure can be important for future value creation. Two types of M&A possible. Either something supporting our portfolio companies, mainly probably TVH or PHE, right? Both of them do bolt-on M&A of a certain smaller size.
If there were some possible larger M&A transactions, value creative, we talked about not growth for growth, but for example, cost synergies that we like, real value creation, potentially we could be very interested to support, for example, TVH or PHE in realizing these transactions, right? Another possibility would be to add really an additional growth platform. It has been elaborated upon a bit this morning, the characteristic that we like, fragmented markets, of course, growth, asset-light kind of businesses. We said it is particularly important if we were to consider a transaction in the coming years, right? Third, a shareholder remuneration. We have had now for a long time a policy of a stable or growing dividend per share each year, of course, as the business allows, etc. You have seen that we have rebased this dividend significantly following our transaction last year.
We also had, Francis said the amount, right? EUR 109 million of share buybacks over the three-year period, which is likely to be more ad hoc, but depending on valuations, etc., it might also make sense. Finally, last element, philanthropy. Philanthropy is small but important. We talked a bit about purpose and how important purpose is for the engagement, right? As you probably know. Both at the D'Ieteren Group level and at the level of the businesses, we have some purposeful or philanthropic activities. At the group level, we talk of around EUR 250,000 a year. We have a small team, and actually it is very good for the motivation of the teams, etc. In summary, capital allocation, main pillars, deleveraging in the short to medium term. The dividend and shareholder remuneration broader is an important piece. Then M&A, I think no surprise, right?
This has been actually the two buckets of business services and light industrials are a focus of our historical four buckets, right? It is aligned also with the increased coherence, let's say, within our portfolio. We definitely hope that today's presentations have convinced you actually about these four important aspects, right? Our uniqueness. We do have multiple growth platforms across the board. The portfolio is quite balanced and consistent, we believe, right? Clear differentiation of the activities, also clear diversification. We have, in terms of uniqueness, of course, our financial discipline and a strong people-oriented culture. This was said many times as well, right? The importance of talent, but as well, definitely this entrepreneurial dynamic, right? The key to have good talent across the organization, both for execution, for culture, for growth, for value creation. Two, yes, we grow.
Definitely, the group has grown strongly in recent years and has built a solid track record. We delivered on our commitments. Our businesses have grown and are generating solid free cash flow. We have generated significant shareholder returns. Yeah, this solid track record, I think, is very visible. Third, unlocking the opportunities. We talked about our clear capital allocation strategy. The fact that value creation, this is where the whole balance is, right? Is there to support the businesses, to help them to create value, while also allowing the group to continue to grow and to invest smartly. Supporting the businesses, aligned with our capital allocation strategy, and benefiting and using our knowledgeable teams at the group level while continuing the origination efforts. Finally, definitely, yes, we are ambitious and the goal is to create value. The soft synergies were elaborated upon this morning.
The element of active owners, I think you could read between the line, right? Long story short, as you know, it's control or co-control, which is important. We talked about execution. Yeah, definitely that's part of the logic. We have set, we believe, strong ambitions for the group.
There's only one thing that remains to be done then to wrap up this day. It's to extend a very big thank you to a number of group of people. First of all, to our CEOs and CFOs that were here today, to allow you to meet them in person, to see them in action, and to ask your questions to them. A very big thank you to all of you. A very big thank you to the whole organizing team who made this day possible.
We had a bit of external support as well from the agency with Media Tree, but a lot of internal people helped a lot, both from our corporate team in preparing the material and the discussions. Of course, also the organizing committee that organized this day. A couple of people to point out is, of course, Nancy and Anne-Catherine, but very specifically also Bran and Stéphanie from our investor relations team. Also to all of you to have made the effort to come here today. Let's all give ourselves a big round of applause and a big thank you. I wish you all a safe journey back home or to wherever you're off to. Have a great evening. Bye-bye.