All right. A very good warming up video and a very warm welcome to all of you on this Investor Day 2022. It's really been a while, actually. We've been trying to do an Investor Day in 2020 and in 2021, but I think given COVID, that was not a good idea. Finally, we're here, and very happy to be here, and welcome to all of you. Also welcome to people that will be following us on the live streaming that is also going on at the same time. Yeah, an eventful day, lots of stuff to do, lots of stuff to take you through.
It's mainly a purpose to give you the opportunity to give you a better sense of what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, and at the same time, who is doing it. It's an opportunity also to meet the people, and to hear the stories about behind the numbers, very important, and to discover the businesses. I think this morning, for those who could attend already, we wanted to give you a bit of a flavor of what a recalibration is at Belron. One way to discover what Belron is, and we'll hear a lot more about Belron, a little later today. You've also seen, and you will see there's lots of stuff of Moleskine, beautiful products of Moleskine around here.
Take the opportunities during the breaks to have a look. You got a Moleskine on your seat. That's the one for you. The other ones are there to look at and explore. Quite some new stuff actually from Moleskine to explore, and we'll hear a lot more about that as well this morning. TVH has put some displays at the entrance as well. Of course, TVH being a new activity at the beginning of this afternoon, Dominiek and Mark will tell us a lot more about TVH and TVH Parts. To incentivize you to stay until the end, also De'Longhi has a little surprise for you at the end of the day. Don't worry, everybody is well-represented in discovering the businesses.
As I said, the most important thing is to meet the people, and therefore, the welcome, if I push correctly on the button, is first of all on behalf of the corporate team at D'Ieteren. We are, as you see from the picture, a relatively small team. It's about 20 people. Arnaud Laviolette and myself, of course, and it's on our behalf that we welcome you here. About 10 investment professionals. I think our team has steadily been growing every year, 1 or 2 additional people. People with a background of investment banking, private equity, consulting, line management as well. More and more diverse team. Then about 10 experts. In our expertise, we have developed over the last couple of years beyond the tax consolidation, legal, financial reporting, non-financial reporting.
Of course, ESG has become more important, and we have now a team of two people dedicated to ESG. Digital, we have just added a new resource. I think Even is in the room. Catherine and Célia are from ESG. Of course, our assistants, which are crucially important as well to our team. Lean and mean team, I would say, but on behalf of all of us, very welcome. Most importantly, today, I would say also very much a welcome on behalf of our CEOs and CFOs who are here today. I think that's really the opportunity for you to meet them and to listen to them and to ask your questions. We have Daniela Riccardi and Marcello Treglia from Moleskine, who actually kick off the sessions of the companies this morning after my introduction.
We have Gary and which you already heard this morning, and Humphrey, CEO and CFO of Belron, we'll also hear about this morning. After the lunch break, we will have Dominiek and Mark from TVH, so Dominiek Valcke and Mark Oosterlinck. Last but not least, Denis Gorteman and Réginald Gillet, CEO and CFO from D'Ieteren Automotive, this afternoon. Again, welcome also on behalf of all of them. PHE, as you have noticed, the activity that we have announced earlier this year, but not yet closed. We have not yet invited them to present to you today because we are not yet the owners, right? Not being the owners, we cannot have them kind of already tell all their plans.
We will have a little bit on PHE later on, because after the sections of each of the companies, we will have kind of a consolidating financial section that Arnaud will lead. We will talk a little bit about IMO and about PHE there, as well about a consolidated view and a section on ESG that I will do myself. Then, of course, we'll try and wrap up the day by around 5:30 P.M. at the latest. We have a lunch break around 12:40 P.M. We will actually lunch in our D'Ieteren Gallery, which is just a walking distance, a couple of yards from here, which you hopefully while eating discover some nice cars as well. We'll have a coffee break in between the afternoon as well.
For those who need to do other things in between, there is a lounge area there if you wanna somehow be able to do something on your laptop or what have you. Also important. If you have any questions, we have Dimitri and the hostesses that you have seen around. Ask them any question, and they will be able to assist you. All right. If there are three key messages, because I will give in my introduction a little bit of a sense of where we come from, what we've been working on in the last couple of years. Three key messages, looking backwards, it's results, it's resilience, and reinvention. Results, and I'll give you a bit more details in a second. We made some promises in 2017, in December, with a medium-term outlook. Well, we delivered.
We actually over-delivered as a group. Resilience. These have been quite a number of unusual years. Lots of unexpected things, COVID to just name one, but there's been more than that, of course. I truly believe that we come out stronger out of this period of uncertainty. We have strengthened our resilience during these turbulent times. For whatever turbulence that will come, and I'm sure many will come between now and 2025, which is a bit the horizon that we put in front of us today, we feel resilient to work in such a VUCA world, if you like. Reinvention, the third thing. Well, I think the D'Ieteren Group today is a very different D'Ieteren Group from 2017. We have added two new exciting growth platforms.
Yes, PHE still has to be closed, but hopefully in a couple of months, that will be behind us. Therefore, we are now a handful of businesses is something we had always wanted and strived to do, but we will keep going. To go a bit maybe in a bit more depth on the results. As you know, we made some promises in 2017. Top line, bottom line, return and free cash flow. Across the boards, for sure, Belron in the middle, we promised 2-3% mid-single digit growth. We smashed that and it's 7% growth. We had EBITDA growth outlooks, smashed that 44%. The return has been substantially higher than the 15% we mentioned.
The cash flow generated, the idea was to have more than EUR 200 million on an annual basis. I think already since 2019, that has been the case and going forward. Also, D'Ieteren Auto has basically over-delivered on all of them with one caveat. It's maybe on the top line because, of course, if you go until COVID, I think the top line was going clearly above the target. But the number of cars and the people not being around and being in their houses was just really less car sales in the market overall. So I think that would have been an unfair comparison. But nevertheless, on EBIT, on return, on free cash flow, D'Ieteren Auto has also over-delivered and on free cash flow, for instance, already since 2020.
It's true that Moleskine, and we talked about Moleskine in 2017, it's a different Moleskine today than in 2017, and there we have not fully delivered. If you take the total of everything together, we have over-delivered. Also within Moleskine, even if the top line has been less than what we thought, and even if the margin has gone down before it's now going up again, we have generated positive free cash flow, and it's over EUR 50 million in the last couple of years already. Overall, I would say we clearly over-delivered on our promises. You can see that in our group KPI, the profit before tax group share, which we always publish and report about every six months in a year, and it has more than doubled in the last couple of years.
I mean, we've shown here a line going back to 2011, but if I take from 2017 onwards, it's a more than doubling that we have seen since then, and that's really good. That has been translated as, no surprise, I think in terms of total return to shareholders. Of course, it's a combination of dividends and the stock price evolution. The dividends has also more than doubled over the periods, and we were still below EUR 1, and we are proposing to our general assembly this year EUR 2.1. Then the stock price as well has of course evolved, as you can see from the little drawing. It's about a 300+323% total return to shareholders if you calculate it from the end of 2016.
If I take 2017 still fully included till more or less where we were the day before yesterday, I think these are the numbers from from Tuesday evening. So this is one thing I think we promised and we delivered. Now if I zoom in a bit more on the other two Rs, they're really very much to do with what I and the team have been focused on in the last three years. I'm zooming a bit from 2019 till today. This is the time where I took over as the CEO since July 2019. What I really tried to achieve, I could categorize in three buckets. 2019 was really about kind of setting clear basis. 2020 was to accelerate transformation in very unusual circumstances.
2021 was really about capitalizing on our strengths. Of course, in 2022 we keep working on that. In 2019, setting clear basis is first of all was about clarifying our mission. Our mission, you'll hear more about it today, all over, is quite simple. It's to build a family of businesses that reinvent industries in search of excellence and meaningful impact. So it's to build. Yeah, we're not just a holding, so to say. We try to build, we like to build, we're entrepreneurs. It's in our DNA, it's in our values, and we want to continue to build a different group that blossoms and that can grow. It's a family of businesses, which means it's a limited number of businesses.
It's not 10, 15, 20 investments that we do, but it's a handful. Because then each family member can have the right attention, the right energy. We can understand them, we can invest in them, and we really see them and feel of them. We are a family business, but we see it also as a family of businesses. Each and every one of them can start from D'Ieteren Automotive to PHE. They either invent or reinvent industries. Reinvention is of course something you do not just once, but you keep doing. As a leader in the industry, and I think all of our activities are leaders in their industries, that's exactly what you do.
It's in search of excellence, and I think you will hear that today, I'm sure, from the management teams that on everything they are doing, on every aspect, it's financial, non-financial, in marketing, in operations, supply chain, in support functions, towards the people, towards the customers, towards other stakeholders. Looking for excellence is just everywhere. To have meaningful impact. Yes, financial impact, but also non-financial impact. I think of course, everybody's now surfing on the ESG wave. Non-financial impact to people and customers remains very important. I have a bit of a cough, I'm so sorry for the voice. All right. That's the first thing we did. The second thing we clarified is how do we add value to our activities and to our businesses? Well, we have a relatively simple way that we use actually in our corporate team.
Twice a year, we go through each of our activities and make ourselves a bit of a reflection, to say, well, on all the key dimensions, from strategy to execution, to people, to the organization, to the reinvention. We ask ourselves each time three questions. It's seven times three questions. Are we improving? Are we where we wanna be? Or is this something that we think can improve? We use that as a basis for a continuous dialogue with the management teams, not just formally in the boards, but also informally in BRMs, in one-to-ones, in workshops, and so on, how is this being addressed, and in many cases it is being addressed. What agenda setting do we find important in the six months to come or in the year to come?
This is a continuous dialogue that we do, but it's a very useful instrument for us to not just be all over the place, but try and focus on things that can make the difference jointly between us as an active shareholder and the management teams and the companies. That, of course, leads us to also be able to contribute actively to certain elements, whether it's on an M&A file, whether it's on a question around digitalization, whether it's on topics of operational excellence or revenue growth, whether it's on talent selection. Sustainability, for instance, has been a topic very active in the last couple of years, but it allows us to add value in a quite focused manner. I mean, it's subsidiarity principle, so we are not there to run the business or manage the business.
We have fantastic management teams to do that, but we can actually, yeah, inject some suggestions, being a sparring partner and help basically develop the companies, 'cause that's what it's all about. The third thing we did is to also clarify our investment philosophy, our investment criteria. Now, if you're only looking for a handful of businesses, you of course want to be careful in what you select, and we have clear criteria. It's around the markets. We like large markets that still have some growth potential because there are tailwinds behind them, but also have still consolidation potential because there's a level of fragmentation in place, and so this is something we clearly look at. We also look at the business models that are there.
We like business models that have been proven, that work, that have some uniqueness to it, that therefore there is a yeah a sustainable competitive advantage that is not just easy to disappear or to attack. These are really things that are important, and that actually have the ability to make a difference to customers or to do something different with suppliers, or to interact differently with different stakeholders. We love it when management teams are strong and ambitious and have a long-term focus, 'cause that's the long-term focus is of course something we have as a family-based and listed company. At the same time, we also like to clarify that and anchor that in long-term programs and long-term incentives, and that we all feel shareholder or share owner somehow of the businesses that we and the management teams act in.
Last but not least, the deal structures, we have some criteria, but we're quite flexible, as you may have noticed. We typically like majority situations or a road to majority, but we're also very comfortable in being in a significant minor minority position, which we have, for instance, with aviation to be alongside, the founding family or one of the two founding families there. That's something we look at. We like, because we do limited number of businesses, yeah, tickets that are quite big, they can of course go from, I don't know, EUR 100 million, a couple of hundred million to EUR 1 billion, if you like.
It allows us to make clear choices and to really focus on a deal structure that each activity can have the optimal financial structure for that business and not necessarily what, I don't know, whoever would wanna have, but something that makes sense from an equity and from a debt point of view for that business in itself. By the way, we have no leverage at the group level at all. That is kind of a no-go for us. Clear investment criteria, that's the third thing we did. We use that, fourth thing, to also organize ourselves quite differently in the way we do origination. Since 2019, we have identified four what we call fishing ponds. It's one around business services, and we consider Belron business services, we consider TVH business services.
Around mobility data and services, I mean mobility, digital automotive is mobility, but lots of new things going on in the world of mobility as well. We clearly have a fishing pond focus on that. Industrials. We believe industrials in Europe 'cause European decision centers is something we like, even if the companies are global. Industrials, yeah, I think the industrial footprint will definitely evolve over the decades to come, around circular economy, around Industry 4.0, and this is clearly a fishing pond that we're actively looking at. Lifestyle goods and services. Of course, we started out with Moleskine, but we continue to look around more broadly around lifestyle goods and services where there are opportunities to invest there. Those four fishing ponds are basically served by quite nimble but very agile and dedicated teams from our investment professionals.
Each time two, three people focusing on them. They combine that typically with the following of the activities that we have, but it's a good, let's say, way of systematically in a disciplined manner, explore opportunities, build the deal flow, explore opportunities, and then eventually either do a deal or not do a deal, as we have done in the last couple of years. That's the fourth thing we did. Then the last but not least thing we've really been focusing in the last couple of years is on ESG. I'll talk more about that this afternoon. But we have set the basis for an ambitious ESG program since 2019. It started around reporting, integrated reporting, the GRI, the standards we are using actually to change our annual report and the way we report about non-financial issues.
We've taken that then to start selecting three core KPIs for us as a group that we're actually now tracking in all of our activities. It's around employee engagements, around customer satisfaction, and it's around CO2 emissions. We had it at the group level. We track them, we measure them, we assess them externally. We started doing limited external assessments, and we're expanding that in the years to come. We've also signed different charters or different investment approaches, PRI, most notably.
Of course, we're following everything that's going on in ESG, either in the European level or at other international standards. For instance, the science-based targets is something we really start using around CO2 emissions in the years to come, at all of our activities, and I'll talk more about that this afternoon. Basis started to set in 2019. Then came 2020, with COVID, and of course, things changed a little bit. I think looking now with hindsight, and it was not that obvious, I think, at the time when you were in the midst of it, well, all of our activities have really used the crisis of COVID as an opportunity to accelerate the transformation that was either already going on, yeah?
I think in all instances it was already going on, or to actually really make sure that it was a full transformation going on. I think to give some examples, Belron had already embarked on transformation with Fit for Growth, but it was used as an occasion to really create a global program and to accelerate and rally all the countries around the transformation program, Fit for Growth. Or Auto basically was embarked on a multiyear transformation program, used it to accelerate it, and there was a bigger restructuring to some degree, you can call it, but it was also a broader transformation that was done in one go, and it was in 2020, a very important year.
I think today, with all the uncertainties that we have in the car market in Belgium and beyond, we're quite happy that we did it in one year rather than spread it out in three years. Thirdly, there was kind of a reset, a big reset at Moleskine because Daniela started on April first, a couple of weeks into COVID at Moleskine. Basically, the crisis was used as an opportunity to turn every stone of the company and create a fewer, bigger, better strategy that we'll hear more about in a second. Then in 2021, because 2020 was actually a good year for us as a group, and in 2021 we capitalized on our strengths. Capitalizing on our strengths, we did it in multiple ways.
Just some examples I wanna quote here. The setup around the shareholders at Belron during 2021 has really been strengthened additionally. We were already in with the founding family, the Lutgen family from the start, and ourselves as D'Ieteren, of course, being majority. We had already CD&R since 2018. Then last year, H&F, GIC and BlackRock were added as three reputable investors, and we're very happy to have them around the table. Another example is D'Ieteren Automotive, which had always been kind of intertwined with the D'Ieteren Group in kind of one legal entity. It'll be a cleaner and a better setup for the future to have D'Ieteren Automotive a separate legal entity, and also within D'Ieteren Automotive to clearly organize the different métiers, as you can call them, one by one.
I think it's now a setup that actually allows to capitalize on the strengths and the professionalism of each of those métiers, which are a little bit different in nature. We hear more about that from Denis and from Reginald. I think it's an important step that started on January 1, 2021. Last but not least, we did add some new growth pillars, TVH last year, and then this year, PHE, will come. This is the focus, I would say, of the last three years. Stepping a little bit back, if you compare 2017 to 2021, I mean, our businesses are truly different, yeah. You'll really hear more about that.
If I just take kind of a couple of one-liners, if you like, around that, I would say Belron between 2017 and Belron in 2021, well, Belron has entered the Champions League. I think this is the one way to mention it. It's you can see it's not just because they were number one in VGRR, and they are number one in VGRRR, recalibration being the third R. Yes, there are some more countries and so on, but it's a different type of market that we have today. There was a lot more focus on relatively low volume growth markets, but today we are really talking about substantial value growth markets, and this will this is here to stay for years to come, and this is a very different market in which to operate.
The setup of Belron has fundamentally changed. There was quite sort of multi-local setup. Yes, there were regions, but they were just very emerging. Now we have really these regions very established and a global way of transforming the company. Yes, there was already a lot of focus on NPS, on people engagement, on giving back and good strong values. Now we have on all four quadrants, and you'll definitely hear about four quadrants later, including the financial performance. I think a major step that has been made, and you really can call Belron best in class or becoming best in class, on all fronts, and this is really fantastic. Then the numbers will of course say that it's bigger, it's more profitable, no surprise. Also, D'Ieteren Automotive, 2017, and D'Ieteren Automotive, 2021.
Yes, we were basically mainly an importer and a distributor and a retailer, majority-wise. Today we are a resilient mobility player, yeah? Importer and retailer, plus, I would say, with higher market share, by the way, in the smaller markets, yeah? You may like it or not, Belgium was a bit of an island within Europe of very high penetration of new car sales, very high levels of sales. I think now the car market is smaller, so you have to adapt to that. To grow market share within that and to strengthen your leadership position within the smaller markets is exactly what D'Ieteren Automotive is doing. As a separate legal entity, they're using that to also go into new forms of mobility.
You've been following it, I'm sure, in the last couple of years or even the last couple of months and weeks. We are adding new forms of mobility, going into bikes, going into taxi services and the like, at D'Ieteren Automotive. There again, the revenues may be quite similar, but I think the profitability profile is a different one. Now we have taken this 3% mark, and we're gonna go beyond that, going forward. Moleskine 2017, Moleskine 2021. Yes, it is a smaller maybe company in terms of revenues. Yes, it does not necessarily have the same level of profitability as it was when we bought it, yeah, but it's going back up again. It is a more focused company, and I think that is strategically the most important thing.
It's focused not just in strategy, but it's also focused in execution. That's really the most important thing. It's a lifestyle brand. We'll hear more about that. It's a global brand. It's in a notebook market which is growing. It's a slowly growing market, it's a growing market. That market has unfortunately not yet fully recovered from COVID. It's a market that's where you see people are not yet back to their normal consumer behavior, between online and offline. But I'm sure that, if you take it out a couple of months, we'll be back into normal territory there. I think the way Moleskine is acting is very different today than 21, and you'll clearly hear that from Daniela and from Marcello.
We were very much in a retail expansion mode and adding categories, adding complexity, all kinds of go-to-market things, and I think Moleskine was a bit overstretched. Today, Moleskine is a lot more focused on core product categories, on having a retail network that makes sense, on partnerships that make a difference and indirect channels of course, where there's also lots of evolution around who will be the winners of tomorrow. It is a smaller company in terms of FTEs, revenues and profitability, but as I said, the free cash flow and the EBIT is going up again. We have also added two new pillars. We'll hear a lot more about TVH of course, in the beginning of this afternoon.
We're very happy that the Thermote family selected us to be their long-term partner of the future. Because TVH is really a leading global one-stop shop company for the aftermarket in number of equipment markets for spare parts. What we like in the company is that it's a consolidation platform. It's a large market, it's growing markets, resilient markets. There's a very customer-centric approach in TVH based on data, based on customer centricity, based on smart pricing.
Actually allows, if you combine that with a strong leadership team, to something where there's lots of potential to strengthen the leadership position further, to continue to offer services beyond the categories that exist today, but also to combine that with a very ESG approach, which we believe is in the heart and DNA of TVH, almost by definition. PHE. Again, we're very happy with PHE. It's a leading Western European player based in France, but operating in six countries on vehicle spare parts, majority cars, also a little bit of trucks. Of course, very much based on a strong distribution capability because the granularity of delivering in a couple of hours, 90% of the pieces requires you to have a logistics excellence really in place.
Again, these are predictable markets where you have a visibility on the car park for many years ahead. Quite resilient, growing market, highly synergetic. Yeah. It's as you add customers and volumes, you have real economies of scale. A fantastic management team that we're discovering as we speak, of course, in the last couple of months very actively. Digitalization is already playing a crucial role in the way they're being set up. We see lots of opportunities to continue to expand the core business, to expand the footprint, but also there to work on ESG, because as we all know, they're mainly working in the aftermarkets and especially in times of inflation and today, affording an affordable or supporting an affordable mobility next to a sustainability is even more important.
Almost last but not least, I would say if you look at us as a group, we look quite different as well now beginning of 2022 compared to a couple of years ago. I haven't talked about D'Ieteren Immo because we'll hear a bit more about that this afternoon, but it's also clearly part of us. It's not all 100% activities, it's a 50 or just majority, I would say at Belron, it's 40% at TVH. But we're very, very comfortable in those situations and setup.
Also on the anchorage of our shareholding, I think there we have had stability for quite a long time and will continue to have stability for a very long time with, of course, Nicolas D'Ieteren and Olivier Périer are two family shareholders, with the free float and some own shares that the company holds. For me, if I have to summarize it, those 3 years or those 5 years, if you like, four and a half years since the last Investor Day, are for me the proof that our unique positioning works. Yeah. We are a bit of a strange animal. People may say, "Well, you're not private equity at all. You're a family business, but you have multiple businesses.
What are you really?" Well, yes, we are a family controlled listed investment firm with a handful of growth platforms that we understand and develop and work with. The long-term focus is important for us. It's patient capital. It's focusing on doing the right things for the businesses, yeah, that ultimately results will follow. If you do the right things for the businesses, that's the one focus area we have. We wanna be a responsible investor. Yes, shareholders are absolutely crucial, but there's more stakeholders around to really and we fully embed them in everything we do and we think of. Yes, we wanna generate attractive levels of free cash flow by definition, because that keeps fueling the growth engine, I would say, of the group. We do this with strong management teams.
We do this together with families, like the Thermote family in TVH. We do it with private equity where appropriate. Yeah. We've now worked with private equity within Belron for a couple of years, and it's been a fantastic experience of partnership. We do this based on our values, and our values are quite simple. It's as a seventh generation, Nicolas and Olivier keep saying, we need to remain entrepreneurs and to keep being entrepreneurs. We should do this with curiosity, looking for opportunities and businesses that fit the criteria that we look for. We do it with courage, making investments when it's required.
In tough times is when to accelerate, but also with care and with respect, because at the end of the day, this is all that matters. With that, I would say, this is the end of my small introduction, and I would like to basically hand over to. Well, we're gonna start right away with Daniela and Marcello on Moleskine. All right. Let's. Well, we're gonna dive in right away because we're perfectly on schedule. Excellent.
Good morning. Thank you, Francis. Made me feel more proud to belong to this family. I'm gonna present today, and talk a bit about Moleskine together with my colleague Marcello, our CFO, who joined the company two months back. Two words about me, and how did I end up here. I started my career at P&G. I'm Italian, and so I'm back to Italy after about 35 years of working abroad in different companies. Started in P&G, 25 years there. Well, basically, my career with P&G was around the world. I did 10 years in Latin America, 4 years running Eastern Europe and Russia, 5 years in China. Then I've been the CEO of Diesel, the denim company, for 3 years, and the CEO of Baccarat for 7 years.
This opportunity came and the beauty of the brand. The brand, an Italian brand, an iconic brand, and the family, honestly. I was very much focused at, as Francis said, in building brands that last. That concept resonated a lot with me and the pleasure to go back to Italy and lead not only Italian brand, but also Italian talent. As you will see, I mean, one of the ambition is to make us, like, not only a successfully growing brand, but also a very high performance organization, like, a point of pride for the Italian leadership and management. We're gonna talk about this very unique brand, the legendary notebook. Why it is the legendary notebook?
Because the Moleskine of today is the heir of the so-called Petit Carnet Noir that was used by many thinkers and artists and creative people in at the beginning of 1900. The founder of the brand, as you know, Maria Sebregondi, had taken this heritage and recreated a Moleskine. Actually, Moleskine was the name of the material, Petit Carnet Noir. Moleskine because Moleskine is the material, but Moleskine then became the brand, and today it's the brand famous all over the world. It's a very unique brand, as you can say, very different from the rest of the family, but I think fitting with many of the values that D'Ieteren as a group has and that Francis illustrated again for us. First of all, it's a cultural icon.
I mean, it was born really with an intent of being a tool for expressing knowledge, creativity, unleashing the power of ideas. You will see in one of our displays, our mission that is, in fact, unleashing the human genius through pen to paper. There is a lot of science and literature that talks about the importance of handwriting and sketching to continue developing the human genius, intended as intelligence and creativity at the same time. That, despite everybody talks about and use digital devices, those cannot replace that very important moment of the human genius that is only transmitted in its best way through handwriting and sketching. It's therefore an identity maker, like people goes around with a Moleskine, a bit like you go around with a Gucci bag.
If you use a Moleskine, you make a statement on who you are, and so a person that is in search of vector of excellence and the brand Moleskine itself portray that. Of course, it's a symbol of creativity. You know, Maria used to tell me we were born, as you know, Moleskine was launched in the 1990s at the same time where there was a digital explosion. All the famous digital guru men all have always a Moleskine in their hands. You see pictures of Jack Ma from Tmall or the people from Amazon or from Google, and they always work with us because they always keep a Moleskine in their hands.
It's, you know, all the big ideas, all the creative steps that we have done in our jobs started taking notes or sketching ideas on a Moleskine. We have a very unique and attractive product range. We try to express it more than in the slide, in everything that you see around you. Of course, our core business is made of notebooks and planners. We have expressed the brand also through bags, eyeglasses, recently launching the writing tools that, of course, are the vital component of a notebook. We play in a huge market. The paper market is huge, but we play in the top of the pyramid in the premium segment.
We are among the most expensive or the most expensive, if you exclude Moleskine and others, even more niche. It's over a EUR 1 billion market, and that portion of the paper market is clearly growing through premiumization, but also through new brands that try to join, and many that try to copy us. It's true that from a product point of view, you can find a lot of imitation around, but our consumer and people know very well what is Moleskine and what are the others. Often when I go in the stores, and I meet the customer, he say, "But why you have all this brand?" "Don't worry, ma'am." They come here, and they ask Moleskine.
I think that is true, and I think it's a big testimony and of the importance and relevance the brand has created throughout the years. We have added also a little space there, circle, because now entering the with a high quality offering, and a collaboration with the Kaweco family on writing tool, we will also start playing in a more active way in the writing tool segment, premium writing tool segment. We are a global brand. We are in maybe we are the most global brand of the family because we are in over 100 countries. We have offices in six locations, and including also retailer staff people, we have about 400 employees.
We also play multi-channel, say from the beginning, the biggest part of our business is with the top retailers of the world, top bookstores, top stationery stores. You see a picture there, which I think shows the consistency. I think that is taken in KaDeWe in Berlin. It shows the consistency of our look and feel across the world, and whether we are direct or we are through clients. Of course, our biggest global retailer client is Amazon, but the second would always be Barnes & Noble in the US, Waterstones in the UK, Fnac in France, and so on and so forth. And we are present in many, many 30,000 points of sale.
The second channel in which we play used to be called B2B, now we call it strategic partnership, and the idea is to be very strictly linked to three domains that belong really to our DNA and to our world, to our cultural background, that are top museum of the world, top educational institution, universities, design school, and so on and so forth, and top iconic brands. I think you will see around some examples of what we are doing, for example, with the National Gallery in London for collaboration with top museums or the Missoni limited edition that we did with a top iconic Italian brands. We have 48 own stores today.
We will see later that this has been screened over the year to make sure that we are only in profitable locations. That was a bit of a problem of the past. That has worked pretty fine for us. E-commerce, we have our own website. About six or nine months ago, we have relaunched it completely with a more professional platform with OSF and a front-end presentation of the brand that makes us very different from Amazon. Of course, the challenge of today in this type of world is a bit different from the one of my colleagues is what are gonna be the channels of the future? Where are we gonna be present? What is gonna happen to e-commerce, not e-commerce?
E-commerce is very important for us, and e-commerce is very important in our segment, as considering Amazon again is our best client. People also want the physical presence, so we try to balance very well what you can get from Amazon, but also what you can get more in our stores in terms of experience and even on our e-commerce. Our customer base, one of the first questions I asked to Maria Sebregondi, the one of the three founders of the brand, is, "Who is the Moleskine user?" She said, "Moleskine consumers have many faces and many sides and many ages." In fact, you see from the numbers, I mean, we are from children to 90 years old that still writes their story and their life and the birth of their grandchildren.
We have writers, painters, designers, but a lot of professional. In fact, say over 50% of our consumer space is made by people like you that carry a Moleskine around on any type of profession, and they are extremely loyal. They're even maniac, I would say, about Moleskine, and they live with this, and there are so beautiful stories. Wherever I go, people say, "Oh, yeah, I work at Moleskine." "Ah, I love Moleskine. I collect every Moleskine of every single year of my life since I was a student," and they keep them for life. They go back, they open, and reopen them, and it's very nice. I think it talks about, again, the sustainability of this type of business that is not gonna wait, despite there are a lot of digital devices.
We were created to live with the digital devices, and we're living with the digital devices today. We have over between 10 and 15 million consumers per year that buy our products. We have a higher share among the female segment, where I thought being a black book, I imagine it was more a masculine product. In fact, not true. We see around, we are giving more opportunity to women, which in general tend to spend more than men on everything, even on car, I guess. For sure, on clothes, on bags. You know, I am also on the board of a luxury brand, of company, Kering, and I mean, men try to catch up with women on how much money they spend in general on everything.
I have discovered that in reality, it's the same for Moleskine. We have a balanced distribution among age group and 50% of our business is actually made with millennials, so a pretty interesting group. We have over 8 million visitors on our e-commerce every year and about 1 million of people on the social media, where we are very active. All our advertising and communication is done through social platforms, both the European ones, but same as the Weibo, the WeChat in China, the LINE in Japan. Of course, also our engine of growth for many, like many other companies, are the Gen Z.
Honestly, one of the product that you see in the back that is called Spiral, that is an innovation we launched. We never had a spiral product. Maria Sebregondi, the founder, said, "No, you cannot have Spiral because we are kind of made natural, more plastic and metal. We don't want it." We managed to do a spiral that is made of cork, and it's all made of natural material. It's been in the stores only for a week or so, but apparently all the younger generation and students also because the content of that planner is designed for students and younger generation, and it's doing very well.
What made and makes Moleskine successful, of course, as you can hear, I mean, understand from what I'm saying is the power of the brand. The product is great, but the brand is much bigger than anything else. I think largely because it's a mission-driven brand. I mean, unleashing human genius to pen to paper is relevant. Creativity for social change is extremely relevant. I think that makes a big difference for our consumers and for sure for our competition, because none of them, despite many people try and copy, none of them can manage to copy the identity of the brand. As I said before, we have a very unique but also millennial and young people relevant positioning. We have a global footprint as you've just seen.
We have also a distinctive and qualitative design. It's pretty simple. It's very essential. But it was curated a lot from the beginning. Again, to replicate a bit of the idea of this particular Noir, but every single element from the corner of the book to the materials and to the way it is bound has been trying to use the best-in-class and mimic in its shape what were the first laptop at the time, which were being expanded and launched at the same time at Moleskine. So the Moleskine, there are many pictures where you open a Moleskine and it feels like a laptop inside. And then last but not least, extremely important for us is the fact that there is a Moleskine Foundation.
The Moleskine Foundation is actually headed by the same people that created the Moleskine. They are the key board member of the Moleskine Foundation. The Moleskine Foundation is the owner of the Moleskine collection. That is an amazing collection that I am bringing all over the world today of over 500 notebooks that are being transformed into pieces of art by very famous world artists. It has been in a case, I think for many years, I think 12 years. Last year we brought it back for the first time to Shanghai in a K11 shopping mall with a space dedicated to the exhibition.
It has just been in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo, exposed for a month and now is touring in other places in France. Next week, I think is gonna be in New York, exhibited again in the Orchard Center, a pretty spectacular collection that honestly people is shocked by the beauty and the expression of what Moleskine really is. But most importantly also for me is that the Moleskine Foundation is our partner, biggest partner in the mission statement of bringing social change through creativity. We have a program together that is called Creative Tool for Social Change, where we connect with underserved communities, mostly of children or young adults and young females.
We provide both the Moleskine itself, but also training through the foundation. That has two important module, one is called Creativity Pioneers, and the other is called At Work, to actually coach and teach with high-level people this underserved community on how to develop and thrive. This is a program that we are expanding together that of course is a major portion of our ESG program and something we are very proud of. Okay, now looking a bit at the numbers because that was not the nicest part when I took over the job. I worked on turnaround and I have to say this is not a true turnaround. It was, I mean, I think the performance was a bit softening to use a nice word.
It was very obvious to me that ticking the right boxes and putting the house a bit in order, we will be able to go back to the numbers that justify the acquisition at the time. What has happened throughout the years? We said in 2017, probably where you have seen the peak up to 2019, there have been the numbers have grown and the sales have grown through the expansion, a heavy expansion of retail. Not always done wisely. Launch of new category like bags, and a lot of accessories, iPhone accessories and so on and so forth. That was partially right.
I mean, I think we still have bags today, and they are over a EUR 10 million business despite we didn't do it in the best possible way. So, a Moleskine, those who are fanatic of Moleskine will buy backpack, and by the way, they buy the most expensive part of the lineup, EUR 200-250 segment is where we do better. But honestly, it was overdone. It was pushed a bit too much, and the product was not always of the best quality. The accessories honestly didn't really fit. So that part of the business, agree was not very. Agree the numbers was not really very success, sustainable.
It implied a lot of CapEx spent, and of course, it translated also into a degrading working capital because of inventories and receivable problems. In 2000 again, in that period, and in fact, I took the business, I looked at the EBITDA situation and what happened, there was the impact of erosion on EBITDA due to the opening of unprofitable stores, gross margin erosion because of categories that were not as profitable as paper is beautifully profitable, our paper. There was an aggressive increase of account, which not only was not good for the financials, but also transformed into many small fragmented jobs, not very meaningful, so also pretty high attrition and increased complexity.
That shocked me a bit when I arrived because we had over 6,000-7,000 SKUs that I know for you guys from the other industry is nothing, but for us was like for me uh-oh. We sell basically one of each, not good. All this translated into brand dilution and also offer the side to competition that started invading our space. April 2020, we started a new chapter, and I spent, you know, as Francisco said, I joined the company April 1. I was in France, in Paris, because that was my previous assignment with Baccarat, and I couldn't move. Lockdown. On top, I took COVID in the first week. I say, "Wow, nothing can be worse than this." I used the time to really learn a lot and talk to people.
I talked also to the founders a lot. I came up with understanding what had to be fixed and what will be the priority moving forward. I created this mantra that we use a lot, which is fewer, bigger, better. I will illustrate a bit what that means from a category point of view. Number one is fewer. Refocus on the core. I think to expand these things, we had discontinued paper. We're no longer growing in paper. In terms of markets, we need to focus on markets where we still have huge opportunities. We call them turbo market. In China, we are tiny small, and we have a lot of opportunity to grow. In the US, we have a very good presence, but honestly, we can do much more.
Same is in Japan, U.K. and France. These were called out like the turbo market because for one reason or the other, we are clearly underdeveloped toward, versus the market potential. We then have a profitable experiential retail. Retail have been a bit like the soft, negative spot of the brand. Too many stores, not very profitable. I insist, and we need retail because it's the side where we can share the experiential part of the brand, the value of the brand, the worth of Moleskine, but we need to do it in a wise way. Honestly, I mean, there is a way to make retail profitable, and we have done a lot of work, and we are in much better shape today.
I think we have only 5 stores that lose money, and some of those are because we need to wait for the ending of the contract, and then we will close them because they are not in the right place. Wholesale is the biggest part of our business, and as you have seen, we have 30,000 points of sale. Good Pareto analysis shows the so-called winners. There are a handful or two handfuls of clients globally that make the bulk of our business, the Pareto. We call the strategy win with the winners, and we are very focused to grow with them. I think results show that also this is working, and they are growing at a much higher pace than the rest of the business.
B2B, I mentioned, we call this strategic partnership, and we are focused on, again, fewer important partnership, and some might be with some of you around the room, of iconic brand, educational institution and do bigger projects together. Not just selling notebooks, but doing important projects that build each other, that strengthen DNA. We are also doing a big piece of work on supply chain and strategic sourcing. We are moving to more suppliers closer to the most important markets as opposed to mono supply, which was a bit at the beginning. It's very dangerous, and I think the last couple of years show that the logistics problems and other type of problem can put at risk your business if you don't have a more optimized supply chain.
Bigger. What does it mean, bigger? It's bigger in everything we do, but I started with the brand. Reenergize the brand. I think in the push for sales, we forgot that the biggest asset we have is the value of the brand. We are investing. I hired a creative director. I think it's the first time that we have a creative director in our company, so it's opposite as the classical marketing and communication because there is so much to communicate of the world of Moleskine and, well, the difference, if you follow the social, you will see that there is a much better, much nicer, much lively communication of the brand. Delight. I mean, from a consumer base, I mean, of course, we need to focus on our loyal user.
You have seen it's a significant number of people. We need to inspire also, at the same time, new customers, and we have special program. I have a board called a Gen Z board. So I have a group of about 10 youngsters that joined the company, that come from different parts of the world, and they are my board. So they inspire us to think and what does it take to make Moleskine relevant for that generation. E-commerce, I just mentioned before, I'm not gonna say more. Strategic adjacencies, we have focused on two major things. I mean, try to understand how to handle more smartly bags, but I think the biggest adjacency that we launched is the pens that you will see in the back, and they are doing great. Last but not least, innovation.
We were doing a lot of small things, and we are now trying again to do fewer, bigger, better also in innovation. We have a clear prioritization on what are gonna be the three fundamental growth driver in terms of innovation for each year and the five years to come. Honestly, the first one is Smart. You will see it there. It's always the magic Moleskine where you write on it, and it's gonna go immediately on a digital layer on which you can expand. The second is Spiral, that which I mentioned before. The third is Kaweco for this year and the upcoming year. Then better. I think, you know, again, trying to do too many things, we were not doing anything in the correct way.
Simplification, we have streamlined dramatically our SKUs, and we have created a concept called NOS, Never Out of Stock, which are the highest velocity item that are really going and growing very fast. Leaner and stronger organization. We have fewer people, but better people, new competencies and bigger jobs, so that ought to help the work satisfaction. We are going through a major digital transformation, okay, every single element of our pool. You will see in a second full-fledged ESG plan, smart pricing, smart spending. This is my team. Over half of it is new, or is got into new job. Very great talent, I would say, very accomplished team. I leave the word to you, talking a bit what happened to the numbers.
Thank you, Daniela. Good morning, everyone. Following up the 2020 changes and the key initiative described, what is 2021 delivering? The five-year plan delivering is that revenue grow by 19%. The operating result increased to EUR 12.3 million, 10% of revenue. CapEx discipline to EUR 5 million cap and overachievement also on cash conversion. A follow-up of this is what we are delivering now for 2022. The first quarter of 2022 show a very good increase versus 2021. We have a +29% versus last year. The sales are in line with the pre-pandemic 2019, if we do a like-for-like comparison. We noted a shifted from.
We registered the shift from Amazon and e-com that, of course, during pandemic went up to the traditional top retailers and to our direct retail. APAC, of course, the Asian part with China are suffering because of the new pandemic restriction. However, that's been compensated by traditional market. For instance, as Daniela mentioned, in particular U.S. with very good performance. All in all, this lead to have the Q1 2022 EBITDA to be two times what we have registered in Q1 last year. What are the ambition going to our plans for 2025? To continue to grow the top line growth with a low double digit and approximately to get to the EUR 200 million sales and revenues.
Of course, to continue to focus and improve profitability with an EBIT margin up to and above 25%. Of course, also focus on streamline of the working capital, trying to keep it to 20% of sales and CapEx below 4% of our turnover. This will lead at the end to overachieve for the cash conversion and to double the 2021 free cash flow to above EUR 30 million in 2025. This is the recap of what happened in 2021 after the change management 2020, what we registering now in 2022, and the ambition for our plan to 2025.
Thank you. What are the focus now? It's a good team and a good plan, and it's working, and it's delivering results in some of the metrics, honestly, even better than what we had put in our ambitions. We're gonna keep going. Now, these two years, the objective was to recover 2019 as most of the companies in our sectors, but also in the luxury sectors put as an objective to recover by 2022 the level sales level of 2019. That's our target for this year, and we are on track. Top line growth is the real priority. We have done a lot in cost savings.
We will continue to spend, and actually, we are spending more in marketing communication, but we do very smart spending, very ROI driven. We have taken back the innovation leadership. Again, if you go around, you will see a lot of what we are doing that put us again head and shoulders above our competitors and very, very focused on a high performance organization. I would like an intense chart, but ESG for us has become a strategy. We have always been a compliant brand. We were born compliant. But we have decided with the five-year plan we put together when I arrived to elevate ESG to a strategy and embed it in everything we do.
We have an environmental footprint, a policy of zero waste that we are working on which we made a lot of progress. We are working very actively on repurposing, recycling, giving a second life to our product. For example, giving it to underserved community or to create new products or to recycle into other product when we have to. Of course, we have a program aligned with D'Ieteren on the CO2 emission. Very important for me, this program of bringing social change and using truly the power of idea and creativity to be an engine of a better world, both external with the program I described before, but also internally. I mean, we have an ambition to become best employer to work for, and we are very focused in developing our talents.
That was not the case before, and part of me here, for me, it's also important to know my colleague because some of my talent could be your talent tomorrow. And of course, a lot of responsible governance in all ethical and reporting system in the products and in the way we work with our supplier that are all Sedex members, and need to follow our guidance. Moleskine. Thank you. I think we have 10, 15 minutes for questions.
Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah. David Vagman from ING. Yes. Maybe a first question on the re-energizing of Moleskine. How should we understand the operating leverage that we should see in the coming years? What I mean is to restart the growth at Moleskine, do you want to spend more on marketing? Do you need to, let's say, reinvest in the team, et cetera, or local setup, local organization? That's my first question.
Thank you. Yes, we are. In fact, the numbers you have seen already reflect that, both in qualitative energy on the brand, from the type of innovation we do to the type of communication we do, but also in the money we spend. Typically, in our industry, spend about 5% of the revenues in marketing and communications. We were well underspent, and honestly, we didn't have meaningful messages. That has already happened and honestly is included in the numbers that you see that anyhow, I mean, our EBITDA rate has been continuously improving quarter to quarter from the first quarter despite the pandemic. I mean, we were on a much more positive glide path. The same from an organization point of view.
There have been several changes, fewer, bigger, better jobs, fewer, bigger, better talent, with fewer better competencies. We are a pretty different business from the rest of the group, as you can imagine. Honestly, in some of the important aspects of the brand, we didn't have the competencies, and so we are also bringing in new competencies. In all this, we have been reducing both number of accounts significantly, because we have eliminated a lot of unprofitable jobs, too small jobs, and also we have reduced the people cost as percentage of the revenues. I think we are managing the balance, the quality and of both the communication, the marketing and the talent, but still staying on our glide path of reduction of expenses and grow EBITDA rate.
Thank you.
Thank you.
My second question, if I may, on a bit more of a nasty question, I would say on e-commerce. I've lost track, I would say, on the number of times that Moleskine has tried to relaunch its own e-commerce platform. I'm not referring to Amazon and so forth. What is the strategic importance of e-commerce to do it yourself? I'm not talking about Amazon. Strategic and financial.
Well, when I arrived, I found an e-commerce, and I honestly think it was the first and only one that it was done, and honestly, it was suboptimal. It was suboptimal because it couldn't reach many countries, because the platform itself was not very stable and not very agile. I think we need to be on e-commerce. Again, in our segment, the best-in-class companies manage to get 20% of their business on e-commerce. In our industry, again, it's different, I'm sure, from the rest of the group. We need to be there. It is. We have seen the importance of that during the pandemic. Thank God, we were quite prepared for that. It needs to be different from what Amazon does, okay?
Amazon is a very functional purchase, so the strategy for me on my e-commerce, it needs to be a richer experience. That's why I invested also in the development of the front end, the part that you see where. It's not only little figurine or what you buy, but we express the brand in a better way with the opportunity also the consumer to customize, to personalize, which I didn't mention, but it's a very important trend. It's been, in some months during the holidays, the highest revenue item, the customization of the product, both the printed letters but also the charts that we created that have had a huge success.
We believe that all this is what justifies, and our clients expect from us, both in our retail and on our e-commerce, to be treated a bit in a special way and with a better experience.
Thanks. Last question from my side on the wholesale, and I guess this is the most material driver of your growth and profitability for the coming years. Could you tell us a bit more about your strategy to win with the winners?
Mm.
What can we expect actually from?
Mm.
From you know the outlook in wholesale, also from you know the Barnes & Noble, the Fnac and so on. They do not always seem in the best position to grow in the coming years. Yeah.
Well, our traditional presence has been in bookstores. That's where we were born, and we were born there because Maria and company will present the brand saying, "We are not a notebook. We are the book yet to be written." That's what made us famous, and that's why we always had a very privileged position in all these accounts. I met, I think, most or all, the CEOs of the top accounts existing and the ones that I would like to have in the future. I think we should expect that most of the growth is gonna come from there. It's true that some of them are continuing revisiting their strategy, but it's also true that during pandemic, all the reading segment in general and bookstores has seen a big growth.
I think my strategy is that I need to look as good as I look in my stores, in their stores. I mean, often they are the biggest presence of Moleskine in a market is represented by them. That's why I have created this joint business planning top-to-top meeting and development of five-year plan with each of them. You should progressively see that they are contributing disproportionately and grow faster than the rest in our business.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Thank you. Hello? Working? Yeah. Thank you very much. Roberto Casoni from Otus Capital. Part of my question was already asked, but it's possibly if you can elaborate a bit on that, an easier way to look at what is your plan re-energizing and simplifying is to understand what you expect in the evolution of the gross margin of the company, and what is left in terms of pricing to extract EBITDA growth, i.e.
Mm-hmm.
If you can elaborate on that, please.
Beyond what I said is, Moleskine has a very healthy gross margin. I think it's one of the beauties of the business. Okay. Normally, north of 70%. It depends how good we are. It's my obsession, gross margin. You touch a point that is very relevant to me because, I mean, that is, of course, a goldmine for us. It's also the reason why it's important to stay focused on paper and continue to grow paper because, honestly, not many businesses have this type of gross margin. Where is the space? I mean, there is space to grow gross margin in many ways. The simplification in general across different pools, so not only of the SKUs, but also the number of doors.
The clients we go to, with some client, we have better relationship and better deals, so the gross margin is higher. Of course, the gross margin of our direct business, okay, then it needs to be managed in the cost area, right. I mean, normally, our gross margin will be significantly higher, almost twice as higher when we sell direct. If we do that balance right, again, there is space. Premiumization, as I mentioned before. When I arrived, we were essentially selling a product at EUR 17-EUR 20. Today, I don't know, the bestseller of last three months has been Sakura, the Collector box that is sold at EUR 75. You will see the Chinese New Year limited edition that was sold at EUR 100.
I think there is opportunity also to grow gross margin by going higher in the lineup. There are also opportunities. I don't know, when America, U.S. applied duties to China, I mean, they affected our gross margin. We diversified our supply chain. Now we have supplier in Ecuador for the U.S., and that is giving us back some of the money we're spending on duty. Every single opportunities, and there are many opportunities, we are catching it and working on it. I honestly have the ambition of continuing seeing the gross margin growing while also the cost pools continue to be smart spending focused. Very ROI based. The profitability is coming. Honestly, as I said before, we are seeing it quarter to quarter. We are trending up to the levels where it used to be. Thank you.
Hi, good morning.
Sorry.
Romain Guintz from Kepler Cheuvreux. Just a single question more on the short-term headwinds that you see in the industry, maybe on supply chain and input price inflation that impact your industry, I guess.
Yeah. Good question. It was a bit of a challenge also because we tend to transport everything by ship from the different parts of the world. It was just before last year holidays, it was a big challenge. I made some crazy choices, but however, it turned to be right to fly the product. Because our gross margin allows, because we have premium price product as part of our pool of innovation. Because I didn't mention it before, but over 50% of Moleskine business is made for gifts. People buy a Moleskine as a gift, and it's a beautiful gift because it's a gift with a mission, not just an object, but it's just to write your story, the story of your life, your children, of your trip.
The holiday season is an important season. I didn't wanna end up without product on the shelf and, but we flew the product. Honestly, that was a successful move because we managed to still keep the cost under control and mixing and matching from where the product was coming, which one we're flying or not. We were one of the few products that were branded a product on the shelf at holiday. Moving forward, again, part of the supply chain optimization is to figure out how to control the situation, simplify all the logistic system and number of warehouses. For this year we have managed because also I mentioned before, we created this pool of product called NOS, Never Out of Stock.
That because they are high-velocity items that are the best seller and the fastest seller of the company, we have created an average stock of about four or five months in the regions, so that if should happen, we can still supply the market and be able to manage in the most cost-effective and efficient way. Thank you.
Yeah. Hi, Bjorn here from Lupus alpha. I was just wondering, when we look at Moleskine in the group, in D'Ieteren Group, it is a sort of different animal, you mentioned it, and maybe you can elaborate a bit, what does the group bring to you? And on the other end, what does you bring to the group? And what is better being in this kind of group than being standalone?
Well, being a bigger group is always better because they're bigger shoulders that can protect us, and they protected us in the moments of difficulty and of course, with the standing and the critical mass and the credibility they have in the market. But I think, you know, it's a good question because I asked the same question when I come first, "Why did you buy Moleskine, and how do I fit in all my colleagues?" You know, take care of cars and spare parts, and I take care of unleashing the human genius. But I think, Francis mentioned it before. I mean, one of my interviews was with Nicolas D'Ieteren, and I asked him the question because he's a family at the end.
He told me, you know, "My, I think grandfather said that we had to diversify the business and add more children in the family, but all with the same values of being brands built to last, not short-term businesses, and also that add a value not only to the business but to the society." I see a big attachment to Moleskine, I have to say, from all the team. I mean, they also have. I have a great team, but, I mean, the team you saw before the 20 people that are in the headquarters are a bit the extension of us. We can also have access to more talent, more experience, more thinking. We've been working with a new digital guru that arrived to help me figuring out.
I mean, we have a big venture with the digital in general for the smart project and the apps that I didn't mention, but Moleskine has very successful apps that have a very successful penetration, and that we are integrating with the business. I have access to somebody that has a much bigger experience than what maybe the people in my team can have. Same when we were in difficulty with the banks. Now we are very good with the banks. They love us. We're probably gonna give the money back faster than what they expected. Of course, in the critical moment, I mean, the family helped. Thank you for your question.
Yes. I, Guy de Clercq, ABC Securities. Just a bit on, you know, first quarter was good. We come out of two difficult years. Normally we should have the pickup now that COVID is over. Since the second quarter, we have consumer confidence coming down a bit, China in troubles. How do you see this in the start of the quarter? Because you are such a large gifting business, I would assume that there'd be some impact on that. Maybe also on the e-commerce end.
As you have seen from the numbers, in fact, I mean, we are even accelerating our growth in quarter one, and typically quarter one will not be a big quarter for us. The biggest quarter of the year is quarter four, just because of gifting, and the two seasons in which we also sell planners on top of notebooks, which are seasonal products if you want. We have not seen any slowdown, you know, and even for gifting, at the end, it's an easy and relatively cheap gift, okay? I think with EUR 20, EUR 30, EUR 40 you can do a beautiful gift with a meaning. For now, no problems. Honestly, the way I've seen the quarter starting, despite China, it's clearly unmanageable at this point in time.
Our people cannot even have access to food, our own people. We are trying to organize to deliver food to their homes because they cannot go out. The country's clearly in big difficulty using TVH and our business too. We have, honestly, the European markets and U.S. particularly. I mean, Belron's U.S. is booming. I'm going very often there because I think we just need to fuel the growth. I mean, it could be twice as big what they are today, so there is a lot of space for us.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks.
Just wanna follow up on the supply chain in general. You said already that you're moving from a mono supplier to multiple suppliers. You already mentioned Ecuador to the US. Can you give us some more clarity, some more insights on the-
Supply Chain
Number of suppliers, where they are approximately?
Today we have one in China, one in Vietnam, one in Turkey, and one in the Ecuador for the US. This should be pretty much the setup. We are thinking the Turkey supplier to supply Europe, the Ecuador supplier to supply North America and Latin America, and the other two, I mean, we use them as tank because they are the biggest and the one that have been working for us longer. I'm not sure we're gonna need more. We might need better, so we continue interviewing and seeing. I mean, we have a pretty strict system, so we don't own the supply of anything, but, you know, we buy the raw material because they need to be your.
We ask our supplier to buy that specific raw material because need to be the quality standard that we require. I think where there is more work to do now is in the logistics part and I think we still have too many warehouses, too many distribution centers, too many distributors in between. The plan honestly is to feed the big clients directly. We are already doing it commercially, and we are preparing through EDI and others to also serve them directly from a delivery point of view.
All right. Great. Thank you.
I have a question on the you touched upon the adjacency of pens. Can you give a little bit idea of the potential and how can you diversify from other brands actually in that category?
Good question. I mean, I thought about pen, and we thought about pen because as I said before, it's the vital component. I mean, writing tools in general are a vital component of notebook. You need a pen or a pencil or to write on it. We had pretty bad, you know, those products that I don't wanna show because they were pretty ugly in quality and everything didn't fit with the. We were selling many, surprisingly. I think we had a business despite the product was not good at all, was not to our standards. Together with the help of Fré, it's again one example of how the family helped. We have been scouting and interviewing every single CEOs of the big writing tool company. I think we've seen all of them.
We chose the one that we thought best fit for our brand, both from a DNA point of view, but also the availability of following our guidance and in design, in typology of product. Kaweco is the company that we have chosen, is a very small company, but it's a bit like the DNA of design. Pretty essential design, but very high German quality. We launched them during holidays. I said, "Let's start in our channel and see if it works or not." They've been out of stock since first two weeks. We are now preparing the expansion. How big can it be? I don't know.
I mean, I don't wanna be too ambitious, but LAMY is a EUR 150 million company, so it could be as big as we are. You have seen the size of the market that we are attacking with entry. I think it can be a meaningful business for us. For sure it's a strategic adjacency, meaning it's not just a product that's nothing to do with our DNA and essence, but it's strictly linked to us. Consumers, I think what we are seeing and hearing from consumers, they really appreciate it. The product is great. You can try it in the back. Thank you.
Can I have a financial question? You just said that, of course, you have to borrow the money currently a lot of the money, the debt from the D'Ieteren holding. You said you may be able to repay that earlier than they thought, but are you thinking about refinancing and when will that be possible?
I think it was not a primary objective. They were very generous and the banks at the beginning when we had to present the five-year plan, they were a bit skeptical because they're not seeing what they expect in the previous year. I think now they are pretty well convinced of our solidity and of what we are doing. For sure, I think we are showing that we have the cash flexibility to repay the bank faster, then it's gonna be a common decision whether we do it or not. Whenever they don't want the money back, we will also be ready for that. It depends, I mean, what they want.
I mean, I feel very comfortable, as Marcello explained, I mean, the proper management of the business and attention to EBITDA margin, gross margin, cash flow is paying out, and it shows that we are getting back to what we used to be pretty fast.
Thank you.
I think I ran out of time. If there are no more questions, I thank you all for your attention. I invite you in the break to explore the world of Moleskine and hopefully to become our clients if you're not yet. Thank you.
We're totally on time.
Right, good morning again for those of you who I didn't say hi to earlier. It's a pleasure to be at this investor day. As Francis said, the last time I did this was literally five years ago. It's not because we haven't wanted to, but COVID certainly didn't allow us to do that. I find talking about Belron and talking about our business in 45 minutes to be an impossible task. I'm gonna try very hard, and I'm very much looking forward to both sharing the Belron story, but also having some time at the end to answer any questions, and I'm sure a lot of you have got a lot of questions.
Just to remind you, Humphrey, who's our CFO, and I are gonna be doing the presentation today. Humphrey will introduce himself in a little while. As you can see on the slide, I've been with Belron for 32 years, 21 of those as CEO. Previous to that, I ran our UK business, I ran our European business. Actually, the truth is, I've actually been in this business all of my life. I've only been paid for the last 32 years. Actually my grandfather started the business more than 100 years ago. My father was the CEO for many, many years. I grew up as a child, being part of this business, working in the business.
It very much is in my blood, but more importantly, it's in my heart. It's a business that is very, very close to me. Let me tell you what we wanna talk about today. I think I'm gonna try and talk really about who we are, what we do, and our positioning in the marketplace. Some of you will know that pretty well, but we'll go through that fairly quickly. Humphrey will talk about our performance, ambition, and our current performance. I'll just summarize at the end and hopefully can show you some nice videos similarly to what we heard from the Moleskine team. That's the agenda today.
Let me start out with talking about Belron and who we are and what we do. As Francis said at the beginning, we're the number one VGRR business in the world, so we talk about vehicle glass repair, replacement, and now increasingly recalibration. Just a few things that I wanna focus on. We did nearly 12.5 million jobs last year. I'm gonna explain a little bit more on the next slide, exactly where those came from. We have nearly 30,000 incredible members of staff around the world. The thing that I'm incredibly proud of is our Net Promoter Score, which is our measurement of customer satisfaction.
I would challenge any of you to find a company that operates in as many countries as we do, multi-site, that is doing work on a daily basis, that has consistently maintained an NPS score above 80% now for probably 5 or 6 years. I'm gonna explain in a little while why that is so important. It's not just about putting it up on a presentation. Our NPS score and our focus on customers is a key part of what makes Belron tick. We're currently in about 37 countries. You can see there, North America is our biggest region, with obviously the U.S. being the biggest part of that. For those of you who are not from continental Europe, where I hope you know our Carglass brand, we have a number of other brands.
In the US, it's Safelite. If you come from Australia, it's O'Brien. Smith&Smith in New Zealand, and in Canada we have both an English-speaking brand, Speedy, and a French-speaking brand, which is Lebeau. In the UK, I know there are some people from the UK, the brand is Autoglass. What do we do? There are sort of three key parts of our business. The first one is what we would call our VGRR services, and that's replacing or repairing car glass that's in cars. Replacing is fairly straightforward. If you crack your windscreen, or if you have the side glass broken or the back glass broken, we would replace that. We also repair, which means we don't actually replace the full windscreen.
If the chip is small enough, we are able to repair that through our patented GlassMedic technology, and that is really the biggest part of our business. You can see from the presentation that, you know, 84% of our business currently is coming from this area. The big growth area is recalibration. We talked about that a little bit earlier. Currently 80% of our business, but growing significantly. Many people ask, are we a branch business or a mobile business? Well, you can see it's about half and half, but it's becoming more branch-based. The reason it's becoming more branch-based is because of what you saw outside. We need to be able to do these recalibrations in our branches.
There are still countries like the U.S., the U.K., Australia, which are still more than 50% mobile, but as time goes on, I expect that will change. Then in terms of who are our customers, if you like, predominantly the insurance industry is our major B2B customer. We also do a lot of commercial work. Commercial, by commercial, I mean things like lease companies, fleet companies, car rental companies. Then there's a small element of cash as well. By cash, I mean somebody comes in, they're not insured, they have to pay for the job themselves. But the insurance sector is obviously the key sector for us. On the top right-hand side, you'll also see something that we're talking a lot more about now, which is called VAPS, which is our value-added products and services.
That is when we sell or when we do a job, there are huge opportunities for us to sell things like the obvious thing, which it makes up the bulk of our business is windshield wipers. Obviously when you're having your windshield changed, you should have your wipers changed. This is an exciting opportunity for us to be able to sell a product or a service at the time that we do the job. Because of the way that Belron do this, it actually gives us even higher customer satisfaction scores when we sell a windshield.
The reason for that is people feel like, which is what we are doing, is that we're taking care of them, that we're thinking about not only replacing their windscreen, but actually looking after them, as we move forward. This is something you can see. We call it an attachment rate 21, which means that 21% of all jobs that we do, we are able to sell a windscreen wiper or a glass cleaner or an air filter or a variety of different products as well. There's some markets, like Spain, which have an attachment rate of nearly 50%, so there's a big opportunity for us in this area as well.
I wanna spend a little bit of time on this, but not too much because this really in one page captures what Belron is about. We start out in the middle of this diagram with our purpose. What Belron people like to do when they come to work in the morning is they wanna make a difference. They wanna put a smile on someone's face. We've got to remember that nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, "I'm really excited, I'm gonna go and buy myself a new windshield." This is something that happens to you very seldom. I've personally had one windshield replaced in my life, and I'm only 25 years old. It happens very infrequently, and when it happens, most people don't know what to do because it's a distress purchase.
Actually what Belron people wanna do is we want to solve your problem. We wanna make a difference. We wanna take something that actually is really difficult, really irritating, and put a smile on your face. That's why the purpose of Belron is actually about making that difference. What's even more important than making a difference is the way we do that, and that's with care. If you have the opportunity of having an experience with us, you will see that from the minute that you contact us to the minute that we say goodbye, our people are trying to make sure that you are taken care of because of the situation that you found yourself in. Very much our purpose is around making a difference with real care. Everything that Belron does is done through four lenses.
We think of things in every part of our business through the customer's eyes, through our people's eyes, through society's eyes, as well as through our shareholders or our financial thing. We'll talk more about that. Humphrey's gonna give a little bit more detail about that. Belron is a business that is totally focused on customers and on people to begin with. We also feel that we have an obligation as an employer, as a business to society. We believe that if we get those things right, we will get the right returns for our shareholders from a financial point of view. That's the way we look at it from the beginning. What is our mission, if you like? We wanna be the natural choice in VGRR. What do we mean by the natural choice?
If I say to you, where do you go to do a search? Most of you will say Google. What I want Belron to be is if you break your glass, if you need your glass fixed, there is only one place to go, and that's the Belron brand, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. Around the entire organization is this idea of the spirit of Belron, our culture, our values, the way we do business responsibly. ESG is a new term. In Belron, this has been part of us forever. My grandfather started this idea of behaving responsibly as a business. The ESG agenda has been helpful for us because it's just accelerated something that we've done forever. It's put a much more professional way around it, and it's something that I'll talk about in a little while.
Clearly, none of this can happen without a great leadership team. We're a people organization, 30,000 people, and actually, if we don't have inspiring leaders at every part of our organization, none of this is gonna work either. This is a diagram that we use frankly internally within our organization, but it quite neatly captures what it is about Belron that makes us quite special. I talked about the natural choice, and this is, I think gets to the core of what the Belron commercial strategy is. We call it a pull and push strategy. On the left-hand side is the pull, which is the brand. We invest heavily in all of our brands, and I'm hoping that everybody in this room has at some time heard our ad, seen our ad, hopefully even knows the jingle.
Our ads, as I'm gonna show you at the end, are very similar across the world, and those ads are all about creating awareness for what happens on that day that you break your glass. Where are you gonna go? That's what we call our pull, pulling consumers to us. On the other side of the diagram is the push strategy, which is the relationships with our insurance companies and key big lease fleet companies. This means that we have to go to those people and really, prove that we are a worthy partner for them to recommend to their policyholders to come to us. You've got these two ways of getting to Belron. The one is come to us directly through the brand.
If you don't wanna do that, go to your insurance company, and we would hope then that the insurance company would recommend us to you. You know, those two things are not enough because you can do that, and many of our competitors try both of those things. Actually, where this all comes together is the moment of truth, which is the service, the customer service that we provide. Now we try to give you a little bit of a flavor over there, but the service is a complex one. It's about getting the car in. It's about making sure that we have the right piece of glass, that we have the properly skilled technician, that we do the job in the right time, that we don't inconvenience you, that we get
That whole experience has to be fantastic. It's that where we measure our NPS score, and that's why this is so important that we deliver a brilliant service. That I think in a diagram really captures our, if you like, our commercial strategy, and that's how we become the natural choice. We have to have the brand, we have to have the relationship with the insurance company, and we have to have the brilliant service that we're able to provide. Let me try and take that in a little bit, step by step.
First of all, the first step is you have to contact us, and we are investing EUR millions at the moment, and have done over the years to make sure that when you contact us through whatever channel, whether it's on the phone, whether it's on your phone, on your device, whether it's on your laptop, that you get a seamless digital and personal experience. We're available 24/7, 365 days during the year. The second thing that we have to do is we have to determine where the job needs to be done. Is it in a branch or is it mobile? That means we've gotta have things like scheduling systems. We've gotta have routing systems. We've gotta be able to know exactly where our vehicles are, where our technicians are.
Quite a complicated thing, all done in our back office. We then have to have brilliant technicians. You've met, hopefully, Stephan and Olivier. Both of them are ex-technicians. They're now both trainers. But we have the best technicians in the world, and we, as I mentioned outside, we train them in the Belron way of fitting. The beauty of our business is that a VW Golf windscreen in Auckland, New Zealand is exactly the same windscreen. It looks exactly the same in Stockholm, in Sweden. The way that we fit it, the way that we remove it out of the car, and the way that we put it back into the car, the steps that we need to take, the tools that we use, the polyurethane that we use is identical.
We are very strict about that, and I'm gonna tell you how we actually monitor that on an ongoing basis. All of our Belron technicians are trained in the Belron way of fitting. We have the digital ability so that if someone anywhere in the world, one of our technicians doesn't know, does this clip go over here or over there, we have a database that they can look up and see where that is. Very important part of the Belron story. Then what we also know is the positive experience, the great NPS score, make sure that customers talk about us, customers tell their friends about us. You know, a distress purchase, we know this. You typically don't know what to do.
Often what you do is you ask your family or your friends, "I've broken my windshield, where can you tell us?" People talking about us is really important, both personally, online, et cetera. NPS drives that, as well. I don't wanna talk a lot about this because, well, I don't, I'll be honest, there's a lot of stuff here with the insurance companies. What is our positioning with insurance companies? I mean, essentially what we're going to them is, we're saying, "We are able to manage your claims cost. We can do that with transparency, and we are unique in the way that we are able to do that." Some of the advantages to an insurance company is that there are no fraudulent claims.
I can tell you that when I started in this business and when we started out in France, we did a survey, we went around all the French insurance companies and we asked them, "How much glass do you replace per annum? How many vehicles did you replace last year?" When we added all of that up, it turned out that according to the insurance industry, they had replaced every single windshield in France in the year. Why? Because there was massive fraud going on. You used to go into your little local garage, you used to want your brakes fixed or your tire fitted. Because windshields are insured, the invoice said, "Windshield insurance." We eliminate fraud overnight if an insurance company deals with us because that's all we do. It's a very, really important part of our message.
We don't only do that. We are able to repair first. When I talk about repair first, I talked about the little chip on the windshield. We inject the resin into that. That saves the insurance companies. A repair, on average, is about a quarter of the cost, 25% of the cost of a replacement. Not only that, it's fantastic for the environment. We're not taking the glass out, and using all the energy, et cetera. So this is a huge point for insurance companies. I'm proud to tell you that Belron has the highest repair rates of anyone in the world with our insurance partners. This builds huge amount of trust because when we first started doing repair, people used to say to me, "This must be commercial suicide.
You swapping what was a replacement now for a repair." Our view was we are here for the long term. If the insurance companies trust us, they will give us more work, and that's exactly what has happened. We also are able, as you can see here, to do a whole lot of other things with our insurance partners. You know, the products and services that we do are to the highest standard. They're worried about their policyholders. We are able to provide service right across the world. We have huge investment in branches. We have huge investment in vans. 18,000 technicians, as I was talking about earlier. And we are able to do this with advanced technology as well. Many of our insurance partners partner with us from a technology point of view as well.
We share our expertise. So if you go onto an insurance website and you go into their glass portal, it'll be really. We will have white labeled that. So that's a very important part of our positioning as well. Then I guess for us, the real big deal here with insurance companies, and we have evidence, we've done research to prove this. If a policyholder has a good claims experience, this is true, forget about glass. If a policyholder has a good claims experience, they have a much significantly higher propensity to renew their policy. Now, insurance companies spend billions on advertising to try and get people to renew or to come to them.
We say, and we've shown them, that if they deal with us and their policyholder has a good experience, the chances of them renewing are significantly higher. This is a very big part of how we talk to the insurance industry as well. I wanna talk a little bit about our purpose and why that's so important to us. I've talked about, you know, the fact that we are a purpose-driven business, that leadership, and the way that we manage our people is critical. Why is it critical? If our people are not engaged, it is not possible for them to deliver a brilliant service. The two things are very, very much linked.
We have to have the best possible people in our organization because at the end of the day, it is them that are sometimes going out at 2:00 A.M. to fix a piece of glass or a car that has been broken into. That's our brand. That's not me standing up here. Our brand is Stephan and Olivier who are doing the work. That means that we spend a huge amount of time on our culture, on our values, on engaging with our people, and we have this hugely important focus on our people. Now, I wanna talk a little bit about that because this is something I'm very proud of. We've just literally last week done our latest. In the same way as we measure customer service through NPS, we also measure people engagement.
Willis Towers Watson do a people engagement survey. These are the results that came out last week. 86% of our 30,000 people are engaged. Now, again, I would challenge you to find many companies that have that level of engagement. Before you think, well, how many people responded to the survey, I can tell you that the survey response was 83%. 83% of our people responded to the survey. Again, I don't put this up like NPS because I like to boast about the numbers. This is key to our success. If we haven't got this engagement, we will not be able to get the high NPS scores that we do. We do lots of things with our people. One of the things we do is we do a Belron Exceptional People Awards.
This is where we identify and recognize our people, the most exceptional people. We've just finished doing that. This year, we recognized 95 people from, I think, 29 different countries. I personally hand over a prize to them. We celebrate them. We give them a, you know, real spotlight. There's more stuff that we do. Coming up next month, almost six weeks' time, we have our Best of Belron competition. Our Best of Belron competition is my favorite two days in my business career, because this is where we recognize our technicians. This is a competition that we hold for all of our technicians worldwide to find the best technician in Belron, and in my opinion therefore, the best technician in the world.
The way we do that is we have national competitions, so every country will elect their Best of Belgium technician or Best of Netherlands or Best of Germany, and they will send their best technician, in this case, to Barcelona, to the Technician Olympics, if you like. We will have in Barcelona in six weeks' time, we will have nearly 2,000 people there, including all of our customers from around the world. Not all of our customers. Many of our insurance customers. We will have our people, and they do a two-day competition. I'm sorry you can't see the diagram very carefully, but that's what it looks like. It's like an Olympics, and we then crown the winner the Best of Belron champion. The winner, by the way, gets one year's salary as a prize. It's a huge thing.
Why do we do this? We do this because we want to recognize the heroes of our business in a way that you're not able to do. These guys are doing the work where nobody is looking. They're doing it in branches. They're doing it on the side of the street. This is our opportunity to do that. This creates something really special. Even more than that, we can see the Belron way of fitting. If you were at this competition and the flags were taken away, there would be no way that you could tell who was from which country, because the way that they do it, the way that they're judged is all exactly the same. That's one thing that we do, and, I'm loathe to say that I'd like to invite you.
I would like to invite many of you, but we've got a lot of people coming, so maybe some of you can come along to join us. Another thing that we do, which is about giving back to society, is what we call our Spirit of Belron Challenge. That'll be done in September this year. This is a way of getting engaging again with our people to do some exercise, to do some, triathlon or a half-marathon or a relay. We do this to raise money for a charity that we support in South Africa. South Africa is our root. That's where the business was started. This year, or last year, we did it. We had to do it virtually.
We had 7,500 people competing from around 26 countries around the world. We raised nearly EUR 2.5 million for this charity. Again, if you come to this event, we're gonna have the event in the UK this year, we get about 1,500 people. We're gonna have another, hopefully 8,000 people online. You will feel the spirit of Belron. Belron people doing something for other people, taking care. Then finally, we have a very unique foundation as well, which is named in honor of my father. It's a foundation that was actually set up by us, by the leadership of Belron. It's not financed by the company. It is funded solely by the senior leadership of Belron.
Over the years, we have given away millions to hundreds, literally hundreds of charities around the world. Anybody in Belron can apply to support a charity, and we obviously prefer those charities that they are personally involved in. As you can imagine, our people are involved in all sorts of things, and they love the fact that their company will stand alongside them, support them, and we do this. We've done this and given millions away over the years. Carrying on ESG, you know, we do all the normal things. We are signatory to the UN Global Compact. We are very strong on EcoVadis. In fact, Belgium, where we are now, we are a platinum holder, which puts us in the top, I don't know, 1% of Belgian companies.
We have 11 of our business units which are gold, which means that we're in the top 5%. It's important this when we're talking to insurance companies. Many insurance companies are insisting now on ESG credentials being part of this EcoVadis thing. We're moving that even further. Our glass recycling, we're up to 72%. Well, we're up to even more. Last year, last month, we were above 80% for the first time. We will get to 100%, in time as well. I've talked about our giving back. That's how much money we've given, over the years. We will be giving probably EUR 2 or 3 million every year, to worthy charities as well.
We have a huge focus on our CO2 emissions, whether that's around waste, whether that's around route optimization, eco-driving, how we're thinking about all of that. That is a key focus for Belron right now, and a renewed focus as well. In fact, we don't call it ESG, 'cause I forget what it even stands for, ESG. We talk about doing business responsibly or responsible business, but this covers the entire ESG agenda. On the one hand, it's around the sustainability of our products and services. This is all about our recycling, about driving down emissions, whether that's putting in, you know, solar panels in our branches, clean energy, et cetera. Sustainable procurement, we are doing now hundreds of audits with our suppliers as well.
This is a key part of our sustainability drive. In addition to that, we also are investing in our people. The diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative is a huge part of what we're doing. The giving back, safety is all part of that responsible business. All of this is underpinned, obviously, by very strong governance, by leadership that is totally committed to what we're doing in this area. Our values really lend ourselves to all of this, and very strong now reporting and measurement. Certainly, we are totally aligned with the D'Ieteren Group in terms of their reporting. You will see that, I mean, I think even in the latest annual report, you'll see a number of these measures. We've still got a long way to go.
This is not an initiative in Belron. The responsible business, as I described on that diagram, is a lens through which we look at everything. It is part of us. It's not a project. All of us are part of the responsible business agenda within Belron. Just very quickly on my team, the only reason I wanted to show you is that not everybody's as old as me, and not everyone's been in this business for a long time. I'm very proud of my team. I've only got one of them here today. We've got a really good mix in the team of experienced people who've been in our business for a long time, as well as some newer faces. Humphrey's relatively new.
Susan, our Chief People Officer, has only been with us for, you know, less than three years. Phil Pavitt, our CIO as well. Very proud that Renee Cacchillo, who's our new CEO of our biggest business, Safelite in the United States. She took over in March. She had been with Belron, she'd been with Safelite for 10 years, but she's just been promoted as CEO and is doing an amazing job. Let me move on to our positioning in the market. Again, our track record is pretty good. This is the size of the segment. People often are interested in how big is this market? We believe last year it was about 8.8 million, sorry, EUR 8.8 billion in sales.
You know what our share is, and you can work that out. The drivers of our market, a lot of different things. Miles driven, obviously, you can't break your windshield unless you're driving the car. The perfect scenario for me is you're driving along, the weather is freezing, there's lots of stones on the road, and up they come and break the windshield. That's what we love. We love the heat as well, by the way. We love the summer, because in the summer, your car's sitting outside, it's boiling hot on the windshield. You get in the car, you turn on the air conditioning, and if you've got a small chip in your windshield and you haven't repaired it will crack, and we will come and replace it. Miles driven is important.
The breakage rate, which is driven by weather, but it's also driven by road conditions. It also depends on whether you wanna fix it. Many people drive around with the damage on their car, so that, you know, that depends. That's about the number of jobs. The more interesting thing, I think, is what is happening to the value of those jobs. As you can imagine, this is a key part of our business. The truth is that average job price of a windshield is growing. That's not because we're putting the prices up, it's because of the complexity of the windshields. It's because of recalibration. It's because of how big the pieces of glass are getting. I'm gonna show you some pictures. It's also about labor.
It's about how much time we're spending, how much we're spending both in time and cost. Obviously, it's also about our negotiating skills with insurance companies as well, because they do have a choice, and it's about relationships, it's about building trust, et cetera. I just wanted to give you an idea of this, because this is the big thing that's, you know, we talk about the tailwinds in Belron, the drivers of our growth. This is a very big part of this. This is what a windscreen would have looked like in the 1990s. By the way, this could have been a Mercedes. Well, I better not use Mercedes. An Audi. This could have been an Audi A4 windscreen. It was a fairly standard thing.
The way that it's developed, for example, into the 2020 windshield, we talked about some of these things. Pretty much every windshield you know, that you all drive cars, all have a rain sensor. So when the rain come. Now, where is that rain sensor? Well, it's embedded into the windshield. The solar glass so that, you know, you're protected from the sun. Well, that's putting the prices up. The ADAS bracket, we saw that the where the camera's being held. The fact that it's heated so that you can heat up, you know, when it gets very frosty, you can heat up the windshield. All of these things, acoustics is a huge part of it. So the windshield or the glass in the car operates as an acoustic barrier. That's why cars are so much quieter than they were before.
All of these things, it's exactly the same car. It's the Audi, still the Audi. Look how much more technology there is in the windshield itself. Where's that heading? The great news is it's just gonna become more complicated. There's really interesting things coming up now, particularly things like heads-up display. Do you know what a heads-up display is? That your all the information that you want will be actually projected now onto the windshield when you're driving. You can imagine if the windshield cracks or breaks, we're gonna have to replace it, we're gonna have to recalibrate not only the cameras and stuff, but also the heads-up displays. I think my message here is that technology is driving complexity in a good way. It means cars are becoming safer, cars are becoming better.
That's good news for us. It plays, if you like, to all of our strengths as a really professional business. The insurance companies love this. ADAS, we talked about. This is all this technology. I'm not gonna go through this slide in great detail, but I think the thing to pay attention to is the right-hand side, which is this penetration. I talked earlier that currently you can see our penetration of these, what we see is 24%, but there's the trend lines. Every car is gonna have ADAS equipment in it. Every single car. Therefore, I don't know, in 2030 or 2040, it won't be 24%, it'll be 80 or 90, and eventually 100%.
That means that we have you know a long trajectory of this type of growth. In terms of our lots of people like to ask about our global reach. I talked to you, we're in 37 countries. We have a mixture of corporate and of licensees or franchisees. Obviously, the big bulk of that is corporate, and we operate in obviously all the big Western economies from a corporate point of view. But we have many franchisees as well, and very good franchisees in Eastern Europe, in Mexico, in Chile, as you can see, South Africa, North Africa. This is an area that offers, again, huge opportunities for us in the future.
We're the market leaders, which I think is the most important thing of all, in our top 10 countries. You can see there, those are our top 10 countries by size, and we are the market leader in every single one of those. I'm gonna pause now, and I'm gonna hand over to Humphrey to share some of our performance. I will come back and take any questions. I'm sure you've got some questions on what I've said. I'll be back.
Thanks, Gary. As usual, he's taken up more than his share of the time. Never mind. Yeah, I just wanted to share with you what all of that's kind of added up to in terms of the numbers. I know this audience will be particularly focused on that. We're very proud of a really remarkable track record of growth that's been driven by that complexity dynamic that you heard Gary just talk about and what that's driven in sales growth. It's also because we gain share, so we've pretty consistently in all our markets gained share over those years. We've also, in that long time period, done quite a bit of geographic expansion. Safelite was acquired 2007, if I remember rightly. M&A has played, you know, a reasonable part in that growth.
It is quite a spectacular track record of growth, only broken when I arrived with COVID. As you can see, we bounced back quite spectacularly from that position. We're very proud of that track record. Just to give you a bit more detail around the acquisitions, we pretty consistently buy typically quite small businesses. In the US, we are vastly bigger than any of our competitors. What's left is principally mom and pop stores. We bought the number two player, TruRoad, back in 2019. They were the number two player, and they turned over, I don't know, $120 million-$130 million, and we were a couple of billion in the US at that stage.
That just gives you a sense of the scale differential between us and the others, particularly in the US. There are opportunities, as you can see there, to buy businesses around the world. To be honest, the constraint now is partly regulatory in the sense that we are, you know, we have decent market shares, and that doesn't always allow us actually to acquire players. That has led to a really outstanding performance over the last number of years. We've gone back to 2017 to compare to when we last spoke with this particular audience. You can see that sales in that period have grown a CAGR of 7.5%. That's 30% bigger from back to 2017.
We're 2.2x our adjusted EBITDA, so we're up to over EUR 1 billion now in terms of the EBITDA. I said margin of 24%. We've over quadrupled the EBIT, so we're now up to 19%, EUR 880 million. We've gone six times, can't even remember what the word for that is, sex-something. Six point three times the amount of trading cash flow. That is our underlying EBITDA less any changes in working capital and CapEx, so 6.3x. Converting at 79%, so this is a strongly cash generative business. You can see that we've returned a very, very substantial amount of money to our shareholders over those years, so a cumulative EUR 3 billion.
That means our leverage has come down, and is as at the end of last year at 3.2 times. In my thirty-something years of doing this type of work, I don't think I've ever had quite such a spectacular set of numbers to present to an audience. How do we do that? I think this is important. It comes back to what Gary talked about earlier. We always talk about these four quadrants, and we know if we take care of customers and our people, and we do it in the right way in the societies in which we operate, then the financial rewards will come. That, I think, is what we've demonstrated consistently over many years, but perhaps particularly in the last number of years.
I won't repeat what Gary talked about, but it starts with customers, delighting our customers, you know, sometimes in difficult circumstances. I was riding with a technician last Friday, actually, in the UK, and the first job we had to do was a warranty job. We don't always have all the parts we need, particularly in these quite challenging supply chain environments. The way that he, Stefano, dealt with the customer, calmed them down, apologized, just did it in the right way, turned what could have been a difficult situation into a positive one. For me, that was a real example in real life very recently of how our technicians do such an outstanding job.
It means that we've also, with customers, got penetration rates of recalibration rising, and I won't go over the ground that Gary already covered, but that's a really important tailwind for us that's just gonna keep going. We have an attached rate on VAPS, so this is selling the wipers principally, but other products as well, which continue to increase year by year. With the right kind of management focus, we know we can do an even better job. We've got examples in Spain and in France, where the attach rates are much higher than the global average. Opportunities actually in the U.S. in particular to attach at a better rate. We know we can do it because we're doing it in Spain and France.
We know if we apply those best practices, then we will get to the higher levels of attach elsewhere. Record levels of customer satisfaction. We've got consistently extremely high levels of employee engagement. Again, the numbers that Gary talked about earlier. I think it all came together and was demonstrated for me in my first year through the COVID crisis, the way that everybody pulled together. I guess those extraordinary events can either blow you apart or they can bring you together. It felt to me, as a new person in the organization, extraordinary how everybody really came together.
We did a very special thing recently where we made pretty much every single employee, so all 30,000, gave them the opportunity to be a shareholder in the company, really as a recognition of a thank you for everything that we'd been through over the previous few years. We now have gifted shares to our employees, so they are all now shareholders in the company, to enjoy the success that we're really confident we can deliver going forward. Society is a huge focus for Belron. You've heard of the events that we run, the amounts of money, which is just extraordinary, that individuals in the company are generating. This is not, you know, company-funded giving.
This is actually employees doing this and raising money from their friends and their family and doing the events that you've heard about already. That has resulted in, as I say, truly spectacular results where with the levels of EBITDA, the margins we're getting, and the cash that we're throwing off the business. We're not satisfied, though. One of the things you might have caught on the charts earlier amongst the values that we focus on is drive, and we're very driven to keep going. We think there's a huge opportunity to do that. We're very clear on what the drivers of our performance are. You can see on the left-hand chart side of the chart there. At the heart of it is the VGRR job, where that complexity means we are driving value every year.
As those cars get more complicated, the windshields get bigger, and the stuff that's in them gets more and more complicated. That's the core drive of the business. On top of that, we've now got recalibration, and we're hopeful there might be other similar things with heads-up display that enables us to find new pools of profit going forward. We have the VAPS opportunity, as I described. You know, we're doing a good job, but there's just tons more we can do in that area.
We think there will continue to be a stream of smaller M&A in many of our markets, particularly the U.S., that we can keep adding into the model that we run. Now, on top of that, I think an area that's probably of more focus of late than it perhaps had been in the past, and we see real opportunities is around working together to transform the business, particularly focused on, we're really focused on all areas of the business, but around the operation that we give to our customers and also what we do behind the scenes, and continuing opportunities around productivity and procurement. We've got a lot of cost efficiency items that we're now very focused on too.
Just to dive into that transformation agenda, it's a busy old chart, that one, but really trying to explain that everything we do, we are now looking at in terms of modernizing the technology, making the processes more joined up and seamless, ultimately making it easier for both customers and people to enjoy the experience with us. We think there's real value in that. The context here is that we've historically run all of our 18 owned businesses, corporate businesses that Gary referred to earlier, very independently. They've ended up with their own technology and their own ways of doing things locally, and we think there's a huge opportunity to do that in a more standardized, centralized, modern way, and we're busy doing that now.
What that means is we think we've got a forward-looking agenda which is really very positive. We think we've got strong foundations. We think that we've got some real tailwinds that we've touched on today. We think we've got significant opportunities in areas which we have, you know, more control over. We think there's a significant opportunity around cost efficiency. We think we can modernize the technology of the business materially. The fantastic thing is, there's nothing radically new in there. It's really about how we focus on delivering many of the things that we've already been doing. We think that those opportunities go way beyond, you know, a five-year time horizon that we've kind of focused on in the numbers today.
Really well beyond that with things like recalibration, taking a number of years to really play through the system fully. We think it's within our control to deliver that. It's really about the execution and making sure that we're really focused. What that will mean in terms of our ambitions numbers-wise for 2025, we think we can carry on as we have been with high single-digit compound annual growth rate on the top line. We think we can further improve the adjusted EBIT margins up to greater than 23% of sales. We will continue to be very careful about how we spend our CapEx in the range excluding lease payments, so if you like, real CapEx at 1%-1.5% of sales.
We think we can convert to cash at greater than 85%. We think we can deliver a free cash, at least based on today's interest rates, tax rates, and what have you, 'cause this free cash number is after those items at greater than EUR 850 million by 2025 in that year. In terms of how we allocate capital, we're committed to getting down to a trajectory of 3x levered. You can see we're already quite close to that. We will, we think, deliver substantial returns to our shareholders based on that deleveraging profile and would expect to pay dividends and recap as we have done historically. I think with that, I will hand back to. Oh, sorry, current trading. Don't forget current trading.
I think we've had a good start to the year. You know, it's been strong growth in VGRR jobs, combined with continuing growth in AGP, increasing recalibration, penetration and VAPS contribution. It begins to be quite repetitive, the story that we're telling, and I'm glad about that, 'cause that means, you know, we're clear on what we're doing and it's driving the performance every day, every week. We've reported sales growth of 18.4% in the first quarter, actually 21.1% on continuing operations. We do still see within that number some continuing challenges. If you like, the good news is that number is still somewhat affected by COVID. It comes and goes.
It's not anywhere near as big as it was historically, of course, but there is still an impact, we think. Both in terms of the market, so consumers being affected by varying degrees of lockdown, but also continuing on the supply chain and the labor market. We do see some of those pressures, as I say, much more manageable than they have been historically. We are very focused on this new world that we now appear to be in, a very inflationary environment, and it's super important that we are very focused on delivering price increases at a significantly higher level in that environment, and we will do that, we are doing that. I think now I genuinely am handing back to Gary.
Great. Thanks, Humphrey. Just a couple more slides and then we'll take some questions. Look, hopefully we've given you a quick run-through with Belron, where we, where we've come from, what we're doing, what our position is, and clearly the performance of this business has been pretty good. Humphrey went through all of that. What I'd like to leave you with really are the following takeaways, and I think we've covered all of these things. You know, the fact that we're the global leader, I think is an important thing. It gives us the opportunity to not only leverage our scale, but more importantly, to leverage our competencies.
The way that we are able to share across the world, the right things, best practices, a key part of the success of Belron, and that will continue to strengthen. We are in large markets and the structural growth is there. It's clear. I mean, we can see that every day, and it makes sense. The fact that we are in all the large markets of the world, I think is a really big strength of ours. We talked about the branding, and I'm gonna show you some examples of that in a minute. This is an important part. Our brands together with our insurer relationships are a pretty unique combination that allows us to get and to continue growing our market share. I really believe this.
The culture of Belron, the values, the best-in-class way that we do this is the key to our success. I often reflect why is it that Belron is the size that we are, and that there isn't a competitor that even comes vaguely close to us. It's not because we have the best glass or the best polyurethane or the best branches. I think it is about our people. I think it is about the way we organize ourselves, and it's the way that we have set ourselves up to be a pretty formidable organization because of our values, because of our culture. Recalibration, VAPS, and our Fit for Growth program, things that are in our control to a large extent are a big part of performance going forward and will definitely accelerate as we move forward into the next few years.
Our financial profile, you know, even if I think back five years, to see the progress that we've made, whether that's in our margins, our cash flow generation, our ability to control our capital expenditure, I think is a huge strength. The fact that we are able to do that not only gives us firepower, it enables us to do acquisitions, it enables us to invest in the areas that we need to invest. It's an important part of that growth story, going forward as well. I would say this, but I believe this very importantly. Humphrey mentioned it. Our challenge as management and as leadership is about execution. There's nothing fancy in the next few years about what Belron's gonna be doing. We're just gonna continue doing what we do even better.
Every day I wake up, I know that there's more stuff to do even better. We never, ever get complacent. We never rest on our laurels. There are so many things that we can do in a better way right across our business. The great thing is, if we carry on doing that, I think that you know, the kind of ambition that Humphrey put out is definitely achievable. You know, I like to say that it's taken us probably 30 or 40 years to become what some people think is an overnight sensation. These things don't happen. Our performance over the last few years has not just happened in the last three or four years. It has been built on foundations that were set tens, maybe even 100 years ago.
I think that's the biggest strength of Belron, is that our foundations, our heritage, our culture, that's the thing that's gonna make sure that we continue the story as we move into the next few years. A big thank you for listening. I'm gonna take some questions. Before I do that though.
O'Brien.
Do you mind just going back to the first one? They're just for 30 seconds. That's all. They're 30 seconds each. Just to give you a flavor of our branding and our advertising. The first ad that I'm gonna show is about ADAS, about recalibration, and it's from our Australian business. I want you to watch out for a couple of things. One is the technician that we use, the people that you see are our people. We don't use actors. We design these ads. We've been doing this for now 25 years. We've got it down to a fine art. These ads work. I'm gonna show you, firstly, the Australian one.
There's always a jingle at the end. That's a bit unusual. You'll hear the similar ones in a minute. This one is a French one. You've all heard that one. That's a good example of VAPS, of using. We always do it with a good brand, CarShare, as you heard over there. That's one of our French ones. The next one is German. Apologies, we did have some subtitles on there. That was an ad which is actually a recruitment ad. One of our issues right now around the world is recruiting people, and so we're using ads, similar kind of thing with our technician, the jingle at the end.
It's been amazing actually to see how successful this has been, not only to get people in to work for us, but actually to get more jobs, as well. That was a good example which shows a bit of our diversity. You probably didn't notice, but we've got a woman technician there, and we've done that as well. I've got two more quick ones. This is our latest one in the US.
Yeah.
Safelite.
This is obviously responding to COVID, to lockdown, but also our digital offerings. You can do this on your phone. We come to you, et cetera. Then the final one is a Swedish ad, which I'm afraid is in Swedish, so I'll just. This is about recycling, and you'll get the picture here. This is about how we make sure that we recycling and doing business responsibly.
Good. I just wanted to give you a bit of a flavor. As you can see, all of our ads have a theme. They’re very similar. We monitor them. We track them. They give us a massive return on investment. We don't see advertising, by the way. We see advertising as an investment. That's it. It's very simple. If we have the technicians, if we're able to do the job, we will continue to advertise. I'm gonna stop because, as I said, I could go on forever. We've got time still for questions, yeah, before lunch. Good. Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes.
Hello. David Vagman from ING.
Oh, there you are. Hi, David.
Hello, hello. Hi. First question on the value opportunity for Carglass until 2025, but also beyond. Could you explain to us what is your capacity to actually capture this value opportunity? I mean, in terms of basically gross margin. Meaning that, I guess, you've got this increase in the complexity of glass-
Yes
This increase in price. How would you, let's say, negotiate that with insurance companies in the sense that you could have now some windscreen costing a multiple of what they used to cost, let's say 10 years ago.
Yeah.
They could argue, for instance, that the service that you provide hasn't really changed. That's, you know.
Yeah.
That's my first question.
Yeah, good. It's a great question. The good news is we don't have to negotiate with insurance companies if their mix of vehicles is changing. To give you an example, if you just insuring very small cars, and then you decide to insure much bigger cars, the price is the price. All we do with insurance companies, we just negotiate annual inflation kind of things. But if the complexity of the windshield is growing and the cost of the windshield and the cost of the service is growing, insurance companies are paying that. By the way, as you know, they're putting up their premiums as a result.
It's not, you know, if you're in an accident today in exactly the same car and you were in an accident five years ago, the cost of the repair is significantly higher. It's not because the body shops have increased their price. It's because the cost of the parts is different. It's because the time that it takes to fix it is different. Insurance companies understand that. We call that mix inflation. We don't call it price inflation. It's not. We don't even call it inflation. We just call it a mix effect. It's about the mix of vehicles that are becoming more complicated. We don't see that as an issue at all, frankly. Insurance companies accept that.
The only negotiation we have with them is what is the sort of annual inflationary cost, so, you know, energies and that, and that kind of thing. Yes, that's a negotiation. To answer your question directly, we feel very confident that we're able to capture that value.
Thanks. On the transformation plan, Titoun has come with some nice guidance, and I guess you gladly accepted that we should see an improvement in the EBIT margin by 2%, you know, by 2025.
Yeah.
Could you come back on this and give us a bit like the key drivers behind that 2%? There are some significant investment in the business and more than EUR 200 million of investment, which seems really quite steep, quite significant, I mean, on IT, et cetera. How confident are you on this transformation plan?
Yeah.
Thank you.
I disagree that it's a lot of money. I mean, we are big business now, you know, and EUR 5 billion in sales. We, you know, we spend a lot of money. It's, it certainly is an investment, but if you look at our CapEx, for example, over the years, it has come down dramatically because partly because we are able now to use systems in a much better way and not having to go through that. To answer the question, it's gonna come partly from that, certainly, that we will become more efficient. We'll modernize our systems. We'll spend less on technology. We'll spend... we're, you know, we're using standard systems now.
Right now we have so many bespoke type systems, you know, we're going with Salesforce, with Workday, you know, just with standard kind of things. We see that there'll be a definite improvement in that. We don't have to do things 18 times, as Humphrey was saying, the opportunities to regionalize things, to globalize things. There'll be some opportunities coming from that. But equally, there are opportunities coming from the stuff that the real core of the business. VAPS, if we increase our attachment rate, we'll see an improvement in margin. Recalibration, definitely, we will see an improvement in margins, hopefully as more of that comes just because they're higher priced products. But also, remember, we're not just looking at growth on the top line.
We're a business that focuses on our costs, that makes sure that we're being as efficient as we can, whether that's the way we build our branches, whether it's the way we advertise, whether it's the way we share practice, whether it's the way we negotiate with our suppliers. Remember, we are a huge buyer of things like glass, of polyurethane.
Yes.
of Bosch equipment. We have purchasing teams around the globe who are focused on making sure that we do that. There's not one single answer to why our margins can improve. It's a whole lot of, you know, very important and many hundreds of initiatives that will make sure. The last thing I would say is we've got a track record now. I think you should be confident we can do that.
Thank you. Very last question from my side. Zooming, sorry, on 2022, there seems to be a very significant increase in CapEx, maybe working capital, I don't know.
Yeah.
You're guiding to flat free cash flow this year. Denis Gorteman had explained to us that this was related to ADAS, quite a bit of replacement there.
Correct. Yeah.
Expansion of the footprint.
Yeah.
I wanted to better understand.
I'll let Humphrey talk about the numbers, but in terms of expansion of the footprint, it's sort of what I was talking about earlier. As more ADAS, more recalibration come. You know, in the US four years ago, we were doing 95% mobile. We just can't do that. It's not because we don't want to, we just can't do that if we wanna do recalibration, which means that we have to invest in branches, we have to invest in stores, but we also have to invest because of our growth in things like warehouses, distribution centers, all of that sort of thing takes some investment. Partly that's that, but I mean, if you wanna comment on that.
The only other bit I'd add is that, there's an element of catch-up. We ran it very, very lean, certainly in 2020, but still actually in 2021 with the crisis. In no way did we constrain, I don't think at any stage, what the businesses wanted to invest to do the right thing, but you know, it wasn't the right moment to do that. You know, we were all distracted with other things. An element in what seems like a step change up is really just us getting back to normal. Then you combine that with the Bosch stuff you saw earlier. There has definitely been, and there is, we're in it now, a wave of investment behind the recal technology.
As you say, branches, which is becoming a bigger share of the CapEx mix.
Okay. The footprint is related to, let's say, more fixed repair.
Totally. It's 100% related to that.
Okay. In the mix, let's say, of type of repair mobile versus.
Exactly.
In the UK and the US, which are the two big mobile markets, you're seeing quite a marked switch away from mobile into in-store. We're having to provide the footprint to do that because so many more vehicles now require that static recalibration where you need a level floor and you need the right conditions. You can't do that on the roadside.
We took a decision in 2012 or 2013 to go complete 100% mobile. We shut every branch in the UK. Well, it was a good idea at the time. We now. We can't do that. Now we're rebuilding. We have to open new branches. We have to do that. Now
Thank you very much.
I'm gonna ask for some other questions.
Good morning. Chris Gibson with Free to Camp. First question, and I quote you here, "There is no competitor coming vaguely close to Belron.
Yeah.
We've recently had the IPO in Scandinavia of Cary Group.
Yeah.
To what extent is this for you, let's say, a situation whereby consolidation will be an interesting driver? Or is it also, from a competitive perspective, a risk for you?
First of all, I never take any competitor for granted. Any competitor, whether it's the smallest mom and pop to the bigger competitors, we take them very seriously, and in every market. When I say they virtually don't, I'm talking just in pure size. The Cary Group, I don't know what their sales are, EUR 130 million or EUR 140 million compared to us. In terms of scale and size. The Cary Group are a very professional organization. I admire their business, particularly in Scandinavia and in Sweden. To answer your question, of course, they're gonna be competing with us. But the fact that they're listed doesn't really make. You know, they were competing with us before.
We are competing all the time with all sorts of now private equity groups, private equity-owned businesses in North America, across Europe. What can I tell you? This is our life. I mean, you know, we compete every day of our life. That's the way we operate. We never take anyone for granted. Is it gonna be more tough in the next few years? I don't think necessarily. I think it'll be as tough as it's always been. I don't know if that answers the question.
Well, yes and no, but okay. I understand. Second question, just if you look in a post-COVID world, and we've seen it now, working at a bank, we are allowed to work at home two days.
Yeah.
Two days a week and things like that. What do you think is the long-term risk on the volume impact on the total market? Probably it's different from market to market, but what's the impact on that?
I think it's just too soon to tell. Listen, it would be completely naive if I said that it's not gonna have an impact on people. You know, we rely on people driving cars. If people are not gonna be driving cars. You know, the behaviors have changed so much. For example, during COVID, even during 2021 and 2020, lots of people didn't fly. You know, people were driving on holiday, even if they might not be driving to work, and we saw that, and that was actually good for us.
It's hard to tell, you know, we still don't know how many people are gonna return to public transport, because that was also a big shift during this period, in that people moved away from public transport and used their cars. You know, what's weighing up against each other. Overall, we still believe that our market is gonna grow, and whether COVID happens, I mean, whether those COVID things last for a long time, we still think that there are opportunities for market growth.
Okay. Just a last question on the geographical footprint.
Yes.
We've got a very interesting North American situation. Europe is a bit scattered. Okay, fine, but you've got nice positions. What about the rest of the world? Or you've got more aggressive plans there on certain areas, or?
I wouldn't say we've got aggressive plans, but we've got passive plans. Passive plans means that we have a team full-time who are constantly focused on looking for new opportunities, new markets, new geographies. We're not driven by putting flags on the map. It's just that is not interesting to us. We will go into a new market if it makes sense, if we can make a difference. Remember what I mean by make a difference. Make a difference for our people, for our customers, for our shareholders, and for society. There will be some markets, I think, in the next few years that are gonna become more interesting.
Right now, we have all of these licensees and franchisees who are fantastic, bit of research for us because we have great relationships, and if we decide to buy one of those, that's easy to do. Asia is the obvious place to go, but the environment has to be right. We have to have insurance companies there who are operating in the way that we are used to. We have to have consumers, motorists who want to pay for a premium service. We never pretend that we're the cheapest. Our service is premium. We wanna. All of those factors we are looking at all the time, and we'll move when we need to, but we're not in a rush to do that. It's not aggressive, it's passive is what I meant.
Thank you.
Hi, Patrick from Merlin. First of all, congratulations on a fantastic track record.
Thank you.
I was just wondering about the changing environment. Are we coming out of a non-inflation environment? We're now in the middle of an inflation environment.
Yeah.
If I'm an insurance company.
Yes.
Luckily I'm not. If, you know, if your prices are not going up and you're making more money, you're sort of, the insurance company probably can live with that. Now, you're making 20% margins, and you're very public about it. With inflation coming, if I was the insurance company, I know what I would tell you. What is gonna? What's pricing power do you have to get away with increasing prices given the margins you're already making?
Yeah. I mean, we don't have any pricing power is the truth. Let's be very clear about this. The insurance companies, glass represents firstly 5% of their total claims cost. 5%. Let's not blow this out of proportion. It's not like they're seeing this massive spike in their claims cost. They've got EUR billions of claims cost, and glass is a small percentage. We don't have any pricing power. All we can do is go to insurance companies. We're not different to anyone else. We're the same as any one of their other suppliers. We can explain to them how our labor rates are going up, how our glass prices are going up, how our energy prices are going up, and we can ask them to share that burden with us.
By the way, they also have price power. They can put up their premiums, which they do. Well, they do. I mean, if you want me to predict what's gonna happen to insurance premiums, I promise you they'll be going up higher than the glass costs. I think. Listen, it's a negotiation. It's a negotiation insurance company by insurance company. We are firm. We don't believe that we should be subsidizing the insurance industry with costs that are beyond our control. Frankly, energy costs are beyond our control. Labor costs are beyond our control. We can do all of these things that we're trying to do to improve efficiency, to pass that on. Again, we have a track record with insurance companies.
It's not a surprise that every insurance company wants to work with us, wants to partner with us, wants to deal with us. We have so much more to bring than just the cost of glass. Technology is a great example of that. The ability to handle claims for them, the ability to take costs away from them, that they are using big call centers to do stuff that honestly we can do as well. You know, we like to look at our relationships with insurance companies much more in a partnership way. Of course, there are gonna be negotiations about price and about inflation, but I don't see that as a huge issue. Listen, again, you're right. There's more inflation, but negotiating with insurance companies is what we do every day of the year. Got two here.
Iman Khalek, Kempen. My first question is on ADAS. The ADAS margin is extremely high. We have discussed already profitability and competition. Don't you believe that in the long term, that is the key risk that the price for an ADAS job will come down substantially?
I don't, no. I don't agree that the ADAS margin is very high because what depends how you define a margin. The way I define a margin is what investment have you put in and what continuing investment do you need to put in? Yes, you could say, well, you know, you don't see the price. You don't see the cost of this equipment in our gross margin. Well, you don't because it's been capitalized because it's so expensive. The cost of getting into ADAS and the cost of being able to do it is significant.
Therefore, I think that the price that we charge, and the price, by the way, that the industry charges, go and have a look at some of the OEM dealers and see what they charge for recalibration if you wanna really get an idea of high margins. I don't think we are charging high margins, and I don't think that there's a risk of this. These windshields are getting more and more complex. Honestly, as I was saying outside there, going to an insurance company because what are we doing here? We're preventing the car having an accident by recalibrating properly. Not having an accident is firstly the cost of the accident. More importantly is the personal injury claims. You know, that someone gets injured. That's the real cost to insurance companies.
Honestly, for EUR 200, this is cheap at the price in my opinion. You know, you see, sadly, I've been around for too long. We've had. You know, we've never been the cheapest. Never, ever in my life. We've always had competition. There's always somebody who can do it cheaper, and in the future there will always be somebody who can do it cheaper. I think insurance companies and motorists are not always looking for the cheapest, and so you've got to look at it in that context. We are responsible. We don't price gouge. We explain. We're transparent. All of those things are important for us with insurance companies. For that reason, I think we feel very confident that we're not gonna suddenly see someone coming. Well, I don't know.
Listen, someone can come in tomorrow and say, "We're gonna halve the price of Belron." I mean, that will have no impact on our business, in my opinion.
Is there a risk that an ADAS job can be done in the future in another way, i.e., automatically?
Yeah.
Via machinery or something?
Yeah. Again, we have something called Belron Technical, which is a business unit within Belron, which does nothing else than monitor trends, make sure that we have the right equipment, make sure that we have the right tools to do this. Our view is, for as long as a windscreen is gonna need to be replaced by a human being, you're gonna have to recalibrate the windscreen. I just can't think of a scenario whereby that's not gonna happen. This idea that vehicles are gonna become self-calibrating is very difficult. Because what happens if the windscreen isn't fitted correctly? You know, I mean, you can self-calibrate and say, "Well, you can't drive the car." Well, you still gotta come back to us and.
This idea of calibration and, or recalibration and replacement, for me is one service. No, I don't see that. We don't see that. That's not because we're trying to bury our head in the sand. It's genuinely the job that we do is a physical job which takes skill, and I don't know. Unless someone's gonna come up with a robot who can. Well, anyway, I'll be dead by then if they come up with that, but it's not gonna happen. No.
Another one is on the profitability per region. Are there huge gaps in profitability per region? Because I'm a bit surprised by the profitability of Cary Group, which is much, much smaller company versus you.
Is it-
The profitability is quite similar, I would say.
Sorry, you’re surprised by?
That the profitability of Cary Group.
Yes.
Versus Belron is quite similar.
Okay.
Uh-
I don't know which metric you're looking at. What? EBITDA margin?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, EBITDA.
Yes.
Yeah.
You're saying do we have differences? Yeah, of course we do. We have differences right across the world, and it's not necessarily a regional thing. It's almost a country thing. It depends on a whole lot of factors as to how profitable a particular country can be.
Yes.
because it's about what's going on in that particular market.
What do you believe is the main reason why the profitability of Cary Group is quite similar to the one of Belron although in terms of size you're substantially-
Because from my knowledge, but I don't know, I think that a vast majority of their profit comes from one country. So it's not comparable at all.
All right. Maybe the very final question from my end. There is potentially a new group of sales that can come up. I don't remember exactly the name, but it's the kind of stuff that is shown on the windows.
The-
HUD.
Oh, the heads-up display.
Yeah. Yes, it is.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah. That's the one.
HUD. Yeah.
Yeah. What is the kind of potential you see from that market? Is that something that could become quite similar to ADAS over time?
Well, for me, it's a bit. It's part of ADAS, but I think what it'll mean, it's just gonna be more stuff for us to do because this is stuff that is actually, you know, projected onto the windshield and gonna provide you with all of your information. If that's not working, it means there's something wrong with the windshield, which could mean, I don't know, that you don't even have to break the windshield. If the heads-up display stops working, what are you gonna do? You might have to replace the windshield because there's something's gone wrong with the windshield other than a breakage. Maybe. It's too early to tell. All I can say is that this is definitely, 'cause we know that, this is in the design of all new.
will be in the design of all new cars. All I think I'm saying is we see it as an opportunity rather than anything else. I can't quantify it in any other.
Thank you.
One or two last questions and then we should.
I thought I was gonna get an easy time here today.
Heads-up displays are expensive.
Hello. Yes. Yeah. Heads-up displays are expensive. Humphrey Singer. The value of the windshield goes up, so that's a great. Now it's back to the inflation question.
We have a new question from the online audience. Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I have one question, Carey.
Yes.
Ludo. First, congratulations.
Thank you.
with your multi-generation family company. I think that deserves really, you know, some respect. Coming back to ADAS. If you look to the slides, it represents 15% of your volume, and your current penetration is around a quarter, 24% to be exact. How do you address the maturity or the start of that market? Because every repair and replacement is pretty mature-
Mm-hmm
Growing at 4% per year. You indicated that you expect 2% growth on ADAS. Is that not an underestimation versus the total addressable market? Because there is 8 million jobs out. Today, you do 2 million. Is that market not significant bigger in the next 5-10 years? Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah. I'm not sure that we said 2% on-
We were confusing with transformation.
Yeah.
The 2% comment was related to the transformation program, not to recalibration.
Okay.
Yeah.
Recalibration is growing.
Overall, we're obviously talking about growing the margins quite a lot more than 2% over the next five years. Part of that 2% that we think will be from the transformation program.
Yeah.
Which is a combination, by the way, of both revenue and cost opportunities. Recalibration will be quite a significant part of that growth, as will VAPS growing. All of those drivers of growth that I showed earlier is what builds up to the overall margin target that we've set out there. Yes, we think recalibration will, you know, inevitably grow year by year. We've seen it this year again, and will eventually get to 100%, and we think we're in the box seat to take that market.
Could you give them maybe an indicative figure of what you expect to growth? Last point is your penetration is a quarter.
Mm-hmm.
Do you have a kind of internal improvement plan to increase that penetration? Because that could drive real value.
You mean the 24%?
Yes.
I'm afraid that's got nothing to do with us.
Yeah.
I wish it did. The 24% is essentially how many vehicles right now are driving around with ADAS windscreens. That's purely a function of the car park. Each year, 'cause now every car in Europe, every single car in Europe has ADAS. That's gonna go. In 2015, we did 15,000 recalibrations. Last year, we did nearly 2 million.
Yeah.
This is going like. It's got nothing to do with us, I'm afraid. I wish I could take credit for that. All I can take credit for is grabbing the opportunity, seeing it early, training our people, investing in the equipment. That's what we did really well. I mean, we showed you some lines. I mean, you can, you know. The OEMs are the best people to ask, as to. I mean, you could ask Tony later. He'll be able to tell you. I mean, it's going like. It's a straight line now, you know. It's. Yeah. There was one more, I think.
Yeah, from the online audience.
Oh, we got
Go ahead.
Very popular.
I don't have the mic. Physical has priority, right? Sorry. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry for this late one. I'm just trying to understand if there is any legal framework which is changing around ADAS and recalibration. I mean, I'm just trying to understand. Is recalibration now becoming compulsory?
Yes.
I don't understand if it's coming from country laws or from insurance companies. At the moment, you are one of the players with which insurance companies-
Yes
Companies are operating with.
Yes.
They operate with all the rest.
Yes.
Would it be the fact that you are investing in recalibration and you can guarantee objectively?
Correct
that the car is recalibrated, is it a driver for you?
Yes
...to gain market share against those who can't?
Definitely.
Can you explain about that?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you saw in the Australian ad, we actually give, you know, if you need it, a certificate. Because it's all now on software, we can provide to regulators. Because if there's an accident and it turns out that the windscreen was replaced but not recalibrated, the insurance company's got a big issue, and we would have a big issue if we were the people who did that. When you say regulatory, absolutely, there is. There's, you know, whether it's actual law in a country. Yeah.
Going back to the French market.
Yeah
The French market in the future will not be seeing 100% replacement of the car park every year.
No, no.
Because that needs to be recalibrated.
Correct
They will all come to you or equivalent to you.
I believe. Yes, I hope so. Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
That's very interesting. Thank you very much. We did show this in one of the charts. The European Commission legislation says that by mid-2022, cars must meet a minimum ADAS standard. It varies by market, but there is very clear legislative requirements.
We do audits all the time in our business of this. I mean, this is about safety, and so we take this really seriously. We have to recalibrate properly. Stéphanie.
Yeah. I had a question online. If you could help, elaborate on the supply chain and labor pressures that you are seeing currently.
I mean, I can elaborate, but I think we're seeing what every other business is seeing everywhere in the world. On labor pressures, people talk about the Great Resignation. Yes, we're seeing that. We're seeing our people being choosing to go be an Amazon driver, for example, instead of staying with us. We haven't seen a big increase in staff turnover, but it's a competitive labor market out there. What is competitive labor market mean? It means rates go up. That's just part of what we're doing. On the supply chain, yeah, we've had. We had our challenges, particularly last year and particularly in North America, whether that was driven by the chip shortage, whether it was driven by the container issues.
You know, we ship all of our glass around. That's starting to get a little bit better, but there's still a lot of challenges around the supply chain. Again, our scale, our size, our relationships with our suppliers is a huge advantage at times like this. You know, we're trying to optimize as best we can. But I'm afraid I haven't got anything unique to say. I mean, you all deal with other businesses. We haven't escaped what the rest of the world is going through at the moment.
I'm gonna have to be very rude.
Well, with pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We have a lunch break now until 1:25 P.M. We'll be doing that in the D'Ieteren Gallery. I think the hostess will put you in the right direction, and you still have opportunity to ask informal questions if you want in the process of eating. Back here at 1:25 P.M.
If everybody can come back to the presentation room, please, that would be great. We wanna get started with the afternoon program. Trying to get people from the coffee machine. All right. We'll get started to the afternoon program. Two more businesses to go, and then we'll have a short coffee break, so the people who are impatient can still get coffee then. We'll have a consolidating session on financials, ESG, and wrap up. Very, very happy that for the first time in our Investor Day, we have our most recent fully closed collaboration with the TVH Parts, and that Dominiek Valcke and Mark Oosterlinck are here. Without further ado, I'm giving the floor to them. Dominiek , the floor is yours.
Good afternoon, everybody. I think it's an honor to be here. I think you all could experience a wonderful story brought by Daniela, but I think also the amazing story of Belron. I try to keep it as inspiring as they could bring it, because I think the story of TVH is, in my opinion, a very beautiful one. I've been working for TVH for almost 20 years. It went by like, how do they say, in a finger clip. Every day was a beautiful day, a nice day.
Every year was a good year in which we could do a lot of interesting things. Contrary to what the other people did, bringing a video at the end, I want to bring it in the beginning. People that have to give a presentation just after a lunch don't always have the best moment. I think if you see the video, I think it gives a good feeling what is TVH, what are we doing, and then I try to explain it. All right. I have also with me, of course, Mark, but I think Mark will introduce himself in a bit. I would suggest enjoy the movie. What you see is what it is. You see passionate people working every day on parts.
The passion and the people is really what makes the difference. The downside of showing this video is that you think we are box movers, and we buy products, we take them in stock, and we basically ship them to our customers, but that's not the case. I will try to bring to you in an hour. It will be challenging, I know it for sure, but I try to keep a focus. What we are, what is TVH? Where are we in the market? What is our market positioning? What's our ambition? That's current trading. Mark will give an update on current trading and sustainability, and I think what you should remember after this presentation.
To start it, TVH keeps you going and growing. That's our purpose. That's our purpose in life. It means we want the machines of our customers that they keep going. How do we do that? Of course, by selling spare parts. If our customers are doing a great job, they will grow, they can attract other customers, and as a result, we, TVH, will grow as well. The keeps you going and growing is important. We give a service. In the end, we give a service. A customer needs to be helped. We want to make it easy for our customers. We want to make sure if they call us that, without frills, in the end, the parts are shipped as quick as possible. It was not built overnight.
Our journey is one of almost 50 years. 50 years, if I take, if I go back in the past, we started in the market we call the material, MPA. Because TVH plays in four markets. The material handling, MPA. We play in CPA. We play in APA and IPA. What do I mean with that? It's basically the machinery for which we have parts on the shelf. It started with the material handling. That's our core market. That's, I think, where we excel. That's where we truly can say a one-stop shop solution. Dear customer, don't worry about it. We know what you're talking about. We know your brand. We know your equipment. We know what parts you need, and we can ship it. We have it on stock, and we can ship it overnight.
That's where it started. As you try to do a good job for your customers, you see your customers evolving in new markets. You see them basically trying to, for instance, take on another line of equipment, for instance, cleaning machines. They could be active in forklift trucks, and then they say, "Okay, why don't I do something else? Maybe it's cleaning machines, maybe it's access equipment." We, TVH, evolved with our customers. We said, "Okay, we can help them because we understand what they need, because we have also maybe these parts already on stock." Gradually, TVH moved from, say, the MPA market, for instance, into the IPA market. We saw that it was working, and we said, "Okay, let's try to do another bold step. Let's try to go into other markets." We did an acquisition, Reparco.
We went into the spare parts, the aftermarket for agricultural machinery. Recently, deliberately, we went into what we call the CPA market, and because we were already entering that market by selling spare parts for access equipment, but now we also do it for small earthmoving, SEM. Basically, the four markets in which we play, and I think you see the equipment. Just to make it more tangible. The forklifts, the cleaning machines, the tractors, the agricultural tractors, and the skid steers, the mini excavators. Interesting enough, if you start to plot it on a map, it's basically what I would say, the journey of our life. We have spare parts that touch the machinery to grow crops.
We have spare parts that you need to build infrastructure, to maintain infrastructure. We have spare parts to do a fantastic logistics. Everywhere that you can look around, there is a spare part in a machinery. It made us, TVH, it was crystal clear during COVID, an essential business, for instance. Spare parts, that's what you need to keep machines going. Right. Okay, where does this bring this TVH today? At TVH, we quickly saw if you want to grow and you want to stay in Belgium, yeah, you might not grow big. We quickly said, "Let's go international." We quickly went for an international customer base, quickly going to 180 countries. On an annual basis, we sell spare parts to customers in 180 countries.
I would say that's a very international business. We followed our customers, we worked on our footprint, and over the years, we've built branches in 30 countries. We became a truly global player, having a physical presence in a country. With sales people, with stock. Basically very close to our customer, because that's important. A customer cannot wait. If the machine is down, he wants the part as quick as possible. Today, 5,000 people working hard every day, working hard on what? On technical knowledge, for instance. TVH is adding on a daily basis references to its database. We know the machines, we know brands, we know the spare parts on those machines. We know the technical drawings. We have pictures. We do that, and you have to say, we have it also in stock.
Today we have almost 1 million references on stock. Not sure if you can capture that. Dieter was asking, "Okay, can you present something, Dominiek ? Can you bring some spare parts?" I said, "That's a difficult choice you ask," so we didn't do it. Okay. We have selected markets, and I think it's important. I think that's an ambition. You want to be a leading company in the markets that you've chosen. We, because it was our core market, that's how it started. I think we dare to say we are a global leader in the material handling. We are also a leader in the MEWPs, mobile elevated work platforms, and in telehandlers. That's what may be a niche market, and we are definitely also a challenger if we talk about spare parts for agriculture machinery. If I would, I would twist it around.
I would twist it around. These icons that you can see is an illustration of the markets in which we play, but more on an equipment type. You see the market in which we have, I would say, a good market share. On the right, you see small earthmoving. For those, if I talk about a skid steer or an excavator, if I talk about tractors, differently, what it means. We have grown. I think the business of TVH is one like you, every day you make a small drip, and then all of a sudden that becomes an ocean. We kind of seek how we can grow with our customers. We started in EMEA in material handling.
We started in EMEA in material handling, and then we went to the access equipment, for instance. We did some acquisitions. We went to the Americas. From one thing comes another. You have to understand, it's like a very intertwined. It's on a daily basis, because at TVH, what that is is, every day, we have to kind of work to perfection. We have to add the right parts to our offering, and we need to ship them. The chain of things that happen between buying a spare part, putting it in stock, make sure that if a customer calls us that we understand what he's talking about, make sure that we pick the right parts in the right quantities and ship them. It's a very small.
It's a lot of small steps that makes TVH successful. We do that every day, and that's how we became, what should I say, a market leader in EMEA and a market leader in the Americas with still opportunities to grow, for instance, in APAC. If I talk about APAC, in this case, you need to read Asia, Oceania, definitely growth there. China, that's a different animal. It's for sure a big market. It's a market in which today we have deliberately said we only want to be a niche player. It's complicated. Our core markets are EMEA and the Americas. That's where the big dollars are, and that's where we have to go after.
I said in the beginning, and I've kept it saying it a couple of times, TVH cares about the customers, and I haven't said a word about it. Let me try to explain the customers of TVH. We are B2B. We are a business service, B2B. We don't sell to everybody. We sell to the professional people that know how to repair a machine. We want to keep their machines alive, and we want to keep the machines of their customers alive. That's the core market. The professional people, the professional repair companies, but of course, over time it has evolved. It has evolved so we are also active in, what I would say, the resellers, people that buy from us and that could sell to an end user.
One that is an important one and a growing one within TVH is the rental houses. The rental houses is an interesting customer base because they have a big variety of machines. It's, I think, it's also to the core of TVH. We can help them with a broad variety of machines, whether it's access equipment, whether it's a skid steer, we believe we have it, or if we don't have it, we should have it. To be complete, we have a couple of small manufacturers or manufacturers to which we sell and in some countries, Belgium is the exception to the strategy, so to speak.
In Belgium, because of the fact that we are here, yes, people could walk and we have a counter and we could sell to end users. We could sell to people that own the machine, the production company. That's more an exception. The B2B is what you need to remember. What does that mean, giving a good service? I tried to explain it. Our vision, we are committed to deliver the parts and the services to keep their machines running smoothly. That's in the end what we do. I said we are a service company. We are not a box mover. I want to zoom in on 2 topics, and it's for instance, technical services.
If a customer comes to TVH and he does not know the part, we will help him identifying the part so that we can ship the part. If a customer calls, he could say, "Okay, this is my brand, this is my model, this is my type, and I have a problem. Can you help me?" Yes, we will try to help him, and I know we will help him. We have a lot of people, not only in Belgium, in several countries, identifying the parts for a customer so that we are able to make a quote, hopefully can make a sale, and can deliver the part. Another one is TVH University. As TVH, we have the technical information, but we also give the technical training to customers. Customers that say, "Okay, I have technicians. The machines become increasingly more complicated.
Dear TVH, can you give our customers training? Can you give them training how to do error code analysis, for instance? Just a small one. We give training to customers, for instance, to make sure that their people in the after sales department do an excellent job. We go very wide, and in the end, of course, we want to sell a part. Impossible to give you a flavor of what we have in our offering, but just list a couple of things, coolings. We have it from something very small to a mast to big attachments. Tracks, forks, tires, you name it, we have it on stock.
Something that you can put in a bin location in a small shelf to something that doesn't even fit on a pallet. A very big variety of parts, sizes, dimensions, weight. We need to have it on stock. If we don't have it, if we can't buy it new, we also do repair. We reman. There are customers that are saying, "Good, a new part is perfect, but maybe my machine is has an age. Maybe I don't need a new part. Maybe I need a reman part. Maybe I need a part that has been remanufactured and that has the same quality, but it's not new." We repair axles, transmissions. We repair, and I think that's something where I think we are unique in as well, we repair joysticks.
Technical electronics, we repair 100,000 a year. We have a big team in Belgium. We have a good team, a big team in the US. I think that's definitely what makes us unique. To go one step further, in the last years, we also ventured into the telematics, so the track and trace, the monitoring. That just gives you the flavor of the TVH. TVH is not just a box mover. We give a service to our customers. Our market. Where does TVH play? It's a huge market. If you go to the left side, that's not my number, that's what the research companies say that it is. It's a big market, but I would like to go to the right, and that's a number that TVH kind of.
We calculate and we try to assess our own market. I would dare to make a statement, it's actually understated. That's a number that we dare to commit it, but it's an understated number. Why? Because for some of the equipment that we have in our offering, we do not have the data. We don't know how many machines are sold into the market on an annual basis. We also carved out three countries which are in our market, also big, Japan, India, and Russia. Why? TVH, we have a presence, we sell there, but it's not our. It's not the biggest market of us.
If you really want to make it a fair number, we said, "Let's take it out." Just to understand where does TVH play, we play in the aftermarket, so we play once the warranty period is over. That's an important one, once the warranty period is over. Also that is being taken out. Although we, for sure, sell parts to machines that actually are just being sold, simply because the customer wants the part, he can't be helped, so for sure an opportunity sell, we do. How does it work? A machine, some explanation, otherwise. A machine is being sold. Typically, a customer, he can have, say, two or three years warranty period. In that warranty period, the parts are not his problem. For TVH, when does it become interesting?
Once the warranty period is over. If the warranty period is over, this is the market in which we want to play. We want to understand which markets, which machines are being sold. That's, I think, important in order to prepare our offering, but it's not our market. Our market becomes interesting when the machines have a second life or maybe a third life. Really long time. Forklifts, how long can they last? 10 years, 15 years, even 20 years. Tractors, agricultural tractors. It's very hard for a farmer to basically take out his tractor and to bring it end of life, so to speak. The more machines in the market, for us, the more interesting, because they have to be kept running. Again, this.
In my opinion, an underestimation, but nevertheless, it gives you the flavor of how we see the markets evolve. I would say, have a look at the big buckets. The big buckets. The big bucket is the material handling. That's where we play. That's where we have a good market share. Then you see two markets in which TVH starts to work. CEM and tractors. Almost equally market size like the material handling. It just gives you a flavor of what we believe are the opportunities still to go after. Yes, telehandlers and UTVs, I said we have a good market share as well, but just try to understand how much smaller those markets are. Okay? TVH has a unique position in the market. This might look like a complicated slide, and actually it is.
It's not easy to explain where we play and so it's a simplified slide as we try to do our best. How to look at it? You have the two axes. One is the number of markets in which we play. Remember, we play in four markets. It's the product offering. The product offering from very narrow and focused to very broad and deep. If you go to, let's say, the blue boxes at the bottom. The blue boxes at the bottom, just as an illustration, typically an OEM plays in one market or in a couple of markets that they've selected. Of course, they need to be able to sell spare parts for a period of time.
If you sell a machine, okay, there is a certain commitment. The OEM needs to have the spare part. The OEM is at the right side for a market in which the OEM is playing. For its own brands, they have a good offering. On the left side, there are some players in our market. If I say our market, I mean the aftermarket, because this is an illustration of the aftermarket that have a focused offering. For instance, they decide, "Okay, we want to be an aftermarket player, and we only focus on one brand or maybe even on one type of machine." That's at the left, that's on the blue.
You have aftermarket companies, or you have spare parts companies, and they could be either a manufacturer or they could be a distributor, and they have maybe, they are active in multiple markets. If you are a filter specialist, you offer a wide range of filters, and you offer it to anybody who knows about filters, but you have no focus on the market. In the end, you sell to a lot of markets. What TVH tries to do is do a combination of both. We play in the upper right corner. We say one-stop-shop. We try to have a broad offering. The one-stop-shop promise is a promise that we try to make alive every day. When we go into a market, we want to...
Hard. It's hard for us to say, "No, we don't know what you're talking about," or, "We can't help you." We really, really have to make a difference, and so it means we have to invest a lot. And/or if we make a selection or a decision to go in a market, we have to invest a lot to basically make sure that the offering is broad enough so that the one-stop-shop promise is alive. 'Cause it's difficult to explain to a customer if you give a perfect service, for instance, in material handling, and then he contacts TVH, and then he says, "Okay, can you help us on construction equipment?" That there is an imbalance. Because we will start to destroy our promise. That's why TVH plays in the upper right corner.
We have competitors out there that, for instance, could select one market, and there they also have a broad offering. I'm trying to explain that there are multiple combinations possible in the market in which we are active, and that TVH kind of goes for the most complicated one. This one is even worse, I guess. What I think you need to remember here is that TVH is kind of a spider in a web. We buy original parts from the companies that manufacture components for machinery, but we also buy from alternative manufacturers.
We have a very broad supplier range, and it's the knowledge of the people of TVH to understand, okay, this part I can buy, or I have to buy, or I want to buy from a specific supplier, and more often have choices. Of course, it goes without saying that, the more we buy from alternative manufacturers, the better the margins. Okay. In the end, I think what is important, it's not about selling a cheap part, it's about selling the right part. The fit, the form, and the function is important. We don't sacrifice. We will not go to an alternative manufacturer for the sake of saving margins because that's a very short term. We try to buy from the right supplier, the right parts.
The spider in the web is that you see, okay, the market has evolved. The market becomes, what should I say? Agile, manufacturers try to sell as deep as possible in the market. Even the manufacturers of components tries to sell. We buy, we try to buy from everybody, so to speak, and try to sell to their professional customers. If I say TVH has a unique presence in the market, I would also dare to say that TVH has an unique operating business model. First, it's about part availability. We've never sacrificed, so to say, on working capital. Mark will explain. Having the part on the shelf is where it starts.
It's good to know to say to a customer, "I know what you're talking about," but if your lead time is a couple of days, if your lead time becomes a couple of weeks, forget about it. The chances that you do the sale drops heavily. So having it on stock is key. Having the part on stock. Just to give you an illustration, we cover more than 600 brands, so gives you an idea of the knowledge that we've built up over the years. If a customer calls, and I think we give you one data point, for instance, on the material handling, this is the offer rates that we have.
It gives you a feeling of the knowledge that we have and the fact that we can make the offer because we have it on stock. Parts availability is one. I explained about the fact that we know a lot of suppliers, so the parts sourcing is another one. The parts sourcing is something that the people we call the technical people in TVH do. We call the team the materials team, that's what they do every day. Trying to understand what are the potential suppliers out there? Where can we buy? Where does it make sense? And if we can't buy it, what can we do internally to also help a customer? For some items, we have workshops, we have a couple of workshops.
We will mill a part if it's needed and of course, if we have the internal capabilities. Parts availability, parts sourcing, key digital capabilities. TVH, we started in the early 2000s, went for e-commerce, developed internally what I would say an e-commerce platform. The digital capability of TVH is one that is important. I explained the fact that we have a deep knowledge on spare parts. We have 44 million references in our database. If you know how many thousands we add on a monthly basis just to make sure that we understand what the customer is talking about.
Once you have such a huge database, you have to invest to make it easy for the customer to buy a part from TVH. That's the digital capability where we heavily are investing in. You see the pricing engine. That's something that we've developed internally as well. I think that's I would call it state-of-the-art and a differentiator. The telematic solutions I also have mentioned already. You understand. The parts availability, the sourcing, the digital capability, and the supply chain. I started the presentation by showing you a movie. Again, in my opinion, a nice movie. You saw the degree of automation that we've done, for instance, in Waregem and for instance also in the U.S. That's an automation we don't do on every site.
I hope you realize that. In some countries, we have a branch, and we have wonderful people there that pick the parts on a daily basis manually. The fact that we ship so much to customers and that the customers expect to receive it next day means you need to be able to process the order in a very short period of time. The customers, they wait because they might need another part, and they keep waiting. There might be commercial reasons why they keep waiting. For instance, if you reach a certain threshold, it's maybe freight free. Whatever, there could be good reasons for our customers to wait, but then the customer expects that he receives it, if possible, next day.
95% of what we sell, we can ship the same day to arrive the next day. Of course, if it's bulky stock, forks, masts, no use. You can't ship it because it becomes way too expensive for us or for the customer. Again, the fact that you're able to process orders in a very short period of time is important, and that's why we've invested heavily in automation. All right. If I say TVH has a unique model, I dare to say that, but I think it's also supported by what customers are thinking. This is, for instance, one of the latest surveys that we've done, in the course of 2021, and it gives a flavor of what is important for a customer.
The wide assortment is very important. The quality is important. People might say, "Oh, you're not, so to speak, genuine." In reality, that doesn't work. We have to sell a quality part. Attractive pricing is important, but yeah, it's not necessarily even at the top. The availability is important. Knowing it and having it on stock. To have the trust of the customer that in the end they will receive a quality part is important. Why is that important? Because yeah, a filter of EUR 10-20. Yeah, it's maybe not a lot of money, but in the end of the day, if the customer has to go back to do a replacement because it was not a good product, costs a fortune.
He has a customer that is unhappy, so it kind of spirals even to us. We need to make sure that the customer trusts the quality of a TVH part. Two other ones, outstanding technical expertise and an enjoyable customer experience, very important. You see the ranking, you see TVH has been quoted either number one or number two, if you talk about those criteria. You could say, "Yeah, Dominiek , you're talking about the technical knowledge of TVH," but it's actually the lowest percentage. Why? Sometimes it's the perception. Again, our competitors or the OEM, and I'm sure they should know better about their own brands than TVH. I think it would be almost a very big surprise.
Nevertheless, we every day try to work to give an excellent technical service there as well. It may be not the Belron NPS score, but I think we're getting there. I think it's one to be proud of. I think 46 percent and... 46, not percent, 46 and increasing, I think is a good job. I had a discussion at noon. Yeah, what do you think about the 46? Again, I say it's understated because I know, because we see we track it on a monthly basis. So we do survey relationship surveys with our customers, and we also ask feedback. So next to the score, we also see the comments.
Sometimes they say, "Why would I promote TVH so that my competitor can do a better job than me?" We lose points for sure, because of that. I think one of the other things, TVH is, in my opinion, a unique company, if it's about the culture of TVH. The culture of TVH is something that we have been working on for many years. The We Are One baseline is one that everybody at TVH knows. The We Are One was introduced because we became an international group.
We were coming from Belgium, and we were kind of saying, "How will we educate them in how we want them to be as a company, how we want them to be, the culture of the company?" Because they will have to hire people, they have to search for people. How will we explain the culture that we would like to see, within our companies? We Are One is the baseline. The acronym is PARTS. We revamped them a bit, to make them a little more stronger or bolder. You see them pursue excellence, act with joy, remain open-minded, take initiative, and show courage. That's kind of what TVH stands for, again, under the umbrella We Are One. TVH is a young company. You could say 50 years, but that's.
No, actually it's a young company because a lot of things are happening in the last years. A lot of changes are happening in the last years, and one of them is what you see, creating a leadership team. I can only say I'm happy with the team that we have on board. It's a good mixture of people working many years for TVH, knowing where we come from, knowing what we've been doing for many years, knowing what makes us successful, knowing the pitfalls, and it's strengthened with young people from the outside. It's, in my opinion, a very good combination. No politics, I think. I love working with them. Completely different topic. It's about M&A.
I'm not sure. I'm trying to take away that TVH is something that has been built, like a combination of acquired companies working standalone. That's not the case. If you would drill in our financials or in our figures. The M&A is something that we do to basically accelerate what we do. Accelerate the market in which we want to play, maybe enlarge the customer base, maybe enlarge the knowledge base that we have, and it's something that we've been doing for all the years. Within the TVH organization, everybody understands the value of M&A. Just to give you a flavor, on an ongoing basis, we are having, say, 150 targets on a watchlist.
Companies that we've met in the course of our life through fairs, whatever, and start to interact with. In the end, they are not all active. 10 plus minus are companies in which we are having an active dialogue to try to understand, okay, what makes them unique? Are they interested to join TVH? If they join TVH, what strength do they bring to the organization? That's you see the flavor pretty international and also pretty diverse in the markets in which we play. All of this, of course, is part of a strategic plan. Maybe I bring all of them. Every part counts is the baseline of our strategic plan. It's basically 11 building blocks clustered in three pillars.
One is about strong foundations, the other one is the must-win battles, and we're sure that in the end, this will deliver a profitable growth. Strong foundations. People. What does TVH have? It's basically people. People that have knowledge to do something. So we definitely invest in people. Okay, just again, I don't want to make this a competition with Belron, but the employee engagement score, for instance, of TVH is 80. So just to give you the feeling that it's important and that we try to take care of the people of TVH. We have nudge programs. We try to motivate them to keep moving, to stay healthy, just you name it. We invest in our people. Sustainability.
Sustainability is actually at the core of TVH. We keep machines going. As long as we keep them going, they won't end up in a scrapyard. Sustainability is at the core of TVH. Of course, we can do much more. Mark will explain much more about this. The third foundation, if I may call it, is the one way of working. It's one way of working to try to explain to the people you have to work with excellence. You have to strive for excellence, not only customers, but also employee. Excellence in the way we do things. The must-win battles, omni-channel. If I say TVH is digital, you think about e-commerce. 80% of what we sell is online. 80%. But omni-channel, we can do much better. We can do much better.
We can make the journey for our customers much more aligned, digital, smoother, more efficient. That's one. But if you want to do it right on the omnichannel in our business, data is important. If the picture is missing of a part, if the picture is not clear, if the data, the technical data is not in your system, it could make a customer doubt whether to place an order, yes or no. Technical knowledge, we should never forget where we come from, so keep investing in the technical knowledge of TVH is instrumental. Then you see a last one, TVH Innovatis. TVH Innovatis is a big program. We want to do a step back as well because we believe we can better streamline our processes internally.
We also should do a step back to try to think where do we want to go to. TVH Innovatis is actually about how can we keep on growing as a company. That's the need of Innovatis. All of this to realize profitable growth in the core markets. Again, the core markets or the four markets that we've selected and the core regions I've explained to you, Americas, EMEA, that's where the profit pools are. And on top of that, we want to accelerate by investing in SEM, small earthmoving, and the Reparco, so the agri booster. All these things are additional layers on top of core growth. Finished for me. Mark, give you the floor.
Thank you. When Dominiek was referring to the young people that joined the management team, I was thinking that he was referring to, amongst others, myself. I joined in 2018, so it's been almost five years, and I can say it has not been boring years. Back to the, I would say, to the presentation, the content. Sustainability, and it's been said this morning, and I think it's been said as well in the other presentations. TVH is a family-owned business, and thinking long term and thinking sustainable is something which is part of our, I would say, the way we do business. It's also, I would say, in our business. Dominiek has referred to it. We are keeping machines going longer, decades.
When you think about TVH, the core of our business is actually doing things sustainably. When we repair parts, we are working on a circular economy. In and of itself, I would say our business is about being sustainable. We realize as well, in recent years, I would say we were gently pushed by external factors into saying, "Let's raise our game." In 2021, we explicitly said sustainability is part of our strategy. We hired a sustainability manager and put in place a program. We're fully busy doing that. We've selected a number of sustainable development goals as the ones that we wanna focus on.
We're busy on baselining KPIs on that one and working out the initiatives that will support our goals. As we speak, I would say this is taking quite a bit of our attention at the board and the management level to make sure we are clear on what we want to achieve. Now, also a little bit about my core area, on financial performance. I want to say we're not a company that exactly is sort of like has a culture of saying a lot to the outside world about our numbers. If I'm bringing some news here, I hope I will, I would say, happily surprise you. If not, sorry for that. A word about our history in recent years.
In terms of turnover, we are a growing company. If we take a longer-term view, since 2005, we've been consistently growing at around 8% up until 2019. In fact, I mean, I would say we were used to a long-term growing and long-term growth. In 2020, COVID hit us, and we did take a hit. At the same time, when you look at our business, we see ourselves as being fairly resilient. If you compare ourselves to OEMs, we did in fact pretty fine. We did not have a single month in 2020 when we had to worry about a negative bottom line, we pushed it through.
In 2021, as you can see, we've rebounded quite nicely with 17%. Bottom line, EBITDA, we've also taken a hit in 2020. I would say not surprisingly, but also not dramatically. As you can see, we still finished the year with 80.4% EBITDA margin. In 2021, we rebounded, and we rebounded with an even higher rate than our turnover. All in all, our operating leverage increased. The way we think about it, the way we handled in 2020, we took a, I would say, through the cycle view. We did not push down our investments in people.
We did continue to work on our strategic plan, and luckily we did so because the growth that we've seen in 2021 would not have been possible if we would have not been able to keep our people on board to handle everything. Overall, I would say we look back on a 2021, which was quite nice. A little bit on our mix of business. On the left-hand side, you can see the mix by region. We think of ourselves as a globally diversified group, and that is the case.
At the same time, you see that there are two main regions, EMEA being the biggest one, and maybe surprisingly as well, the one with the largest growth from 2018 to 2021. This is in euro terms, of course, so there's a bit of an effect on the US dollar sometimes year-on-year. Overall, I would say we see our core market in EMEA growing very nicely. Americas as our second biggest region, growing close to 5%. Of course, we have the much smaller regions of APAC and China. On the right-hand side, you have it split out by equipment market. Our core market historically keeps on being MPA.
It's the largest spare-market segment, and it shows slightly slower growth than the other segments. Construction and industrial, and agri are markets that are growing much faster than MPA. Historical CapEx. I would like to say when you can make a comparison, when we think about CapEx, it's everything. Generally, we've been spending 3%-5% of our turnover on CapEx with a little reduction in 2020 or lower spend in 2020, but which wasn't maybe more a timing effect than a deliberate delay of investment. When you think about CapEx in our industry, it's three things. The main thing is warehousing. We own the largest part of our warehouses ourselves.
In all our strategic sites, we own the warehouse or the office building. It's a deliberate choice, a historic choice of doing that, and it's been paying off. On the second category is IT, and then there is warehouse automation, what Dominiek has been referring to. Warehouse automation and equipment is becoming increasingly a big part of our CapEx. When you look at the building today, some of our newest warehouses have the two-thirds of the value of that building or almost more is in the automation and not in the building itself. That's, I would say, looking back. Working capital, it's also been said, TVH is a strange animal in some ways when you're looking at it from the outside.
The way we look at it is inventory is key. In the aftermarket, inventory availability is absolutely needed. We did not stop and did not cut back on inventory in the last few years. We expanded our range. Expanding our range means increasing inventory, and it's been paying off in, I would say, particularly in the last 18 months for various reasons that the availability of our parts actually has driven our sales, nothing else. Today, when you look at our overall working capital, 43% is by all standards a high ratio, but it's something that's, I would say, that's part of our DNA and of our business model. I would say today is maybe slightly above our historical levels, but we're very comfortable with that number.
Net debt, we are at EUR 760 million net debt, so very comfortable at around the 3 times EBITDA range. Overall, I would say nothing exceptional. Now, a few words on the ambition. The first one is about turnover. Our long-term growth rate is 8%. That's what's in the plan. You've seen the market growth, you've seen our historical growth. In fact, what we're seeing is we know how to deliver growth. We've always been able to do that, and we will continue to do that. It will come from the largest part in absolute numbers from MPA, but also from the faster-growing other segments. This 8%, I should say, excludes any additional uptick we could get from price increases.
So, if we, I mean, if we need to, we'll increase the prices and that will create additional growth. Of course, M&A is an additional booster. Overall, our EBITDA margin long-term, we say above 18%. That's the main goal. And also, I mean, as you can see, we are able to get that number. CapEx continue to be at 3%-5%. We are a growing company. So CapEx is, I would say, an important part of the way we will allow that growth. We continue to invest by 2025. Working capital at the 43% I just mentioned is even for us on the high side. We see potential for driving down to below 40%.
Overall on cash flow. We have ability of cash conversion, which is quite high. Overall, I would say our free cash flow is expected to grow in line with EBITDA, so around EUR 170 million by 2025. A few words on our first quarter. It's, I would say, not surprising if I've seen the numbers of the other companies this morning, but we've also had a very, very strong first quarter. Overall, we are growing 24% versus last year. Of that, the largest part is pure organic, 16.5%.
We have an additional booster from the strong US dollar, and we hope that I would say that continues to be the case because it's a nice, I would say add-on. That's not depending on us. Then lastly, we have the effect of our inorganic growth from acquisitions we did last year. March was the best month ever in the history of TVH. On a per working day, we are at an all-time high, which is a good indication, I think, of how the business, the speed at which we're continuing to work. If that continues for the next few months and the remainder of the year, we'll have a very nice result.
Overall, if you look at markets and segments, America stands out. There's a bit of a US dollar effect, but just generally America's doing very, very well. EMEA as well. EMEA sees generally a very, very good first quarter. Having said that, we are also active in CIS, Russia amongst others. It's clear that, I would say, we're seeing a March that is much lower than January and February, and there will be some effect from that, for sure. That's, I would say, the main thing on the first quarter. Of course, I would say I did not include the bottom line here, but I can say that the bottom line as well, I would say, is as good as the top line.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you. 2022, what keeps us busy, and maybe some other takeaways. That's how I would like to finish. I repeat what you've been hearing, and I say what you know is that it's complicated times in which we are working at the moment. It's complex times. Supply chain, it started in 2021. It continues in 2022. Inflation, the same. It started in 2021, and it continues in 2022. On top of that, as Mark has mentioned, we have the war in Ukraine and Russia. We have to navigate through complex times. At the same time, we keep focusing on bringing the growth in the market in which we play. The markets are good.
The markets are strong. We definitely have to continue. We have a strategic plan. I think it still stands. Nothing is happening that makes us doubt about the strategic plan. I would say just execute. Might be oversimple, but that's what it is. Try to explain to the teams, try to repeat to the teams what makes the difference, what makes us successful, and drive it. TVH Innovatis is definitely on the agenda. It's a big program. NPS and employee engagement score. The service, and we are a service business, so that is important. Keeping focus on what makes the customers happy, keep focus on what makes the employees of TVH happy, and in the end, we believe we can deliver the results.
At the same time, we keep watching for opportunities and strengthen and build the TVH organization. What do I mean with that? We see the growth. We have to win the war for talent. We still have to attract lots of people to be able to grow. Key takeaways. I bring you the three buckets immediately, because time is ticking. Because of the fact that we are playing in different regions, we have core regions and in different markets, I think. That's an interesting combination. There is always one market doing better. There is always one region doing better. But in the end, these markets are growing markets and big markets. We want to make the difference, so we aim where we can be a leader, or we aim, or we work where we are the leader.
If we are not a leader, we want to be the good challenger. We have a proven business model. Keep on working is the mantra. Mark explained about the financials. Yes, COVID hit us. 2020 was not the best year. After the financial crisis, we also had a dip. All in all, we are a resilient business, so we bounce back quickly. Growth is there. M&A can only fuel the growth. Of course, where are you without the team? We good people, a good team. Sustainability, that's something you should keep in mind, is part of our DNA. We keep machines going. Thank you very much. I'm not sure there are questions.
Iman Khalek. Two questions I have. The first one is on the margins. The margins are definitely very high if you would compare it with other kind of similar companies. Still, I think in your long-term guidance, you include a small margin dilution, if I got that right. I would like to understand why that is. The second question is on M&A. I would like to better understand a little bit how you create value with M&A. Is it because you can buy companies at a much lower multiple, and then you can increase profitability levels massively? What do they really bring you that creates value? Thank you.
Okay. Maybe on the first question, the margin, is there a tendency that it diluted? Go back to the fact that we work in four markets. Each of these markets has, first of all, a different price point and a different margin. You have this mix effect. If we believe we will continue to grow strong in MPA, but we believe that we will grow faster in some new markets in which we are active. These new markets typically are at a lower gross margin per percentage point. In the mix effect, you have this slow kind of perception of erosion.
We believe that absolute figure is also important, so that's why we said, "Okay, let's go for those markets, anyhow." In the current economic environment, yes, inflation. We're also impacted by inflation, so what we try to do on a daily basis, our teams are trying to find on a part-by-part basis almost, see where we can find an uptick, see where we have the room to basically increase prices. In the end, we want to sell, right? So in the end, we want to sell. So part of our strategic plan is that there might be some erosion, but we believe that in absolute terms, in absolute figures, the growth is there. The second question was on M&A.
I think over the years, we've done, give or take, 80 acquisitions. It's difficult to say if you could kind of say that there is a perfect, what should I say, roadmap. We try to find a good company. We try to find a good company with good people that we can basically integrate, because in the end, we want to integrate as much as possible. Integration could mean increasing our footprint, basically, and entering in a new market, or it could be acquiring talent that has a knowledge on a specific range of products or on a brand. So there is no one fits all, so that's why I can't give you a good, precise answer.
Nevertheless, we believe that doing M&A is kind of a good booster on our business. Because in the end, you can always. You could argue and say, " Dominiek , within TVH, there are enough people, so can't they, basically, do it? Can't you do it yourself?" If you know how much time it takes to understand a certain market, if you know that it took us, give or take, I say something, 40 years to build our knowledge on spare parts for material handling. Okay, we don't want to wait 40 years. We don't want to do it internally. That's why we believe that if we find the right opportunities, it gives an accelerator to TVH.
What is the kind of multiple that you pay?
The one that makes the deal happen at a and still be interesting. I'm not sure if that makes you happy. Strangely enough, the aftermarket is perceived as an interesting market, so we are not the only one there. There are several private equity players out there trying to find the good opportunities as well. Could vary 7x, 8x, 10x if you want to have a multiple. If you think about it, that's not a low multiple for a small business that we sometimes acquire.
In terms of profitability, can you move that up after the acquisition?
Typically, yes.
How? What are the main components?
Depends whether you can integrate them or not. That's an important one. Sometimes we have done acquisitions that we kept them aside, trying not to lose the DNA of that business and try first to generate some momentum and try to grow maybe the business by itself and then later on acquire them. We've not always looked for the quickest gains. We again, acquisition by acquisition, try to make the right decision and the right strategy.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Hi there. Patrick from Merlin. I've got two questions. First one is, I don't know to what extent it's actually the case, but OEMs tend to try to capture more of the value chain over the lifetime of a product. If you take cars, the OEM wants you to service the car with them, and sometimes it's contractually negotiated. To what extent is that a threat for your business? Is it happening in the different industries that you're active? My second question is, what are you doing differently since D'Ieteren came on board as a shareholder?
I try to start with the first one. That's the OEM. I'm 20 years with TVH, the story that you're saying is the story that I've been hearing, 20 years. Everybody tries to do the right thing to try to grow their business. A couple of things. First of all, a customer typically does not have one brand only or one type of machine only. That's kind of the fact that we play in different markets and could help a customer on different brands and different type of equipment is a differentiator. That's one. Talking about OEMs. Yes, they are competitors, but some OEMs are also have become partners.
They see TVH as a partner because they also want to win the game, so they want to gain market share. If they gain market share, that's what they want to kind of, what should I say, try to serve machines of a competing brand. Difficult for them to go to the OEM of the competing brand to ask for parts, so they kind of say, "TVH, can you help us?" That's kind of where we have a unique, what should I say, relationship with OEMs. That's one. I think it's and it's working well. I can only say that. But I think the main thing you need to remember is that a customer has a diversified fleet, or the customer. A rental house is a clear example. Or the customer of a customer has a diversified fleet.
If we can make it easy, we can. We have the warehouse, we have the inventory. They don't need to think about it. They just need to say, "Okay, I trust TVH. If I go to TVH, they have the part." It kind of makes everybody happy, I would say. Your second question is a delicate one. What should I say? No, I can only say, no, I'm saying, Francis, I was kind of thinking if I say a lot or not, but I'm trying to say it has been a good journey. If I give you the answer, it feels like it has been there for many years. That's kind of how it is. There is a good collaboration. They know the business.
You clearly feel that they have the sense for what we're doing. Whether it's again on a board level or whether it's more informal, there are good discussions happening. Definitely they support what we try to do.
Yes. Hi. Guy De Clercq, KBC Securities. I'm thinking, looking a bit at your growth trajectory, 8% organic. If I look a bit at the trends of the overall market, that's 5%. Should we consider the rest all market share gains or-
Yeah.
That's about it?
Yeah. That's oversimplified.
Yeah.
What it is. Okay, how you do it, that's another thing. That's what we believe. It's a combination of trying to still be the market leader, trying to keep the market shares that we have in our core market, fueled with entering and maybe become a consolidator in the new markets in which we play. All this together gives us a belief that we can deliver higher than what you would think is the market growth in general.
Yeah. Maybe a bit of a tricky question as well, given that the deal is not closed, but yeah, your new shareholder recently also or is at the point of acquiring another stake in PHE. Some say there are a lot of overlap or similarities between TVH and PHE. How are you looking at there? Where could the two companies, if the deal is closed, help each other out in terms of platform sourcing? Some view on that.
I'm sure if we will meet with the management of PHE, I think we will have a very interesting and inspiring conversations. How do they see the business? How do they make the difference? How do they accelerate their business? How do they digitalize their business? I'm sure it will be a good discussions to have.
Okay, great. Maybe one final question. You already mentioned that you automated the warehouses here in Waregem, also the one in the U.S. How many warehouses are there that still needs to be updated in the upcoming years? And is it already included in the CapEx guidance that you have, as you mentioned just before?
We have, again, in Belgium and in Waregem, in Belgium and in the US, we've invested already heavily in automation. The discussions that we will have or should have is, okay, what's there to build to continue the growth actually beyond the strategic plan? Because, yeah, building a box is easy. Building a box with smart automation is much more complicated. Before you have actually the warehouse operational, it takes years. We are not there yet. The fact that we are actually going faster than what we had in our strategic plan kind of is we need to think about it. I think the guidance that you have seen is a fair guidance.
Okay. It would be included already.
Yes.
All right.
Thank you. David Vagman, ING.
First question on the, let's say, the equation between growth and margin. As we understand, you're planning to grow faster than the market and take share. I wanted to better understand, you know, how much of this share is rather in material handling, so your core market. I understand you also see faster growth in the other segments. We understand that it's dilutive for margin. How should we think about that equation, so growth versus margin, even beyond the current, let's say four-year plan, so beyond 2025? What are the kind of initiative that you can take to improve the margin in the new segment and the core business, let's say in MPA?
Mm-hmm.
That's my first question.
Remember we have a large pool of suppliers. Entering into a market is something that goes in with evolution. You're not always automatically, immediately with the best supplier. You typically go through a journey where you might buy from suppliers that are not always at the best price point, but still you want to buy from them because still you want to give a good service to your customer. That's kind of where it goes in waves and that we try to optimize, we try to do better sourcing. If you do better sourcing, you can basically protect your margin. That's a journey. That's something you have to work on every day.
That's kind of where we believe it should all be very okay and potentially give even upsides at a certain moment. We have seen this in the past also. We have seen this if we, for instance, entered into the market of mobile elevated work platforms. It might be a niche market, but nevertheless, it gives a good illustration. Initially, the margins might be compressed, much lower than you want. Over time, as you go, as you grow, and as you know much more about, okay, who actually could also manufacture the part for us. Because that's what it is. We send drawings, we send specs, and they manufacture for us, then your margin starts to see an uptick again.
That's actually what we will do, and that's what we have been doing for 50 years and continue doing.
a very quick follow-up on that one. Do you see any structural reason why your new segment, if I could say, would be structurally lower margin than your core business in material handling?
We dare to say that because we collect a lot of data points, what the price points are. So we kind of can have a feel that it's actually a lower margin market, but nevertheless, big markets. Remember how I think you saw it in the presentations, those new markets actually have the size of our core market, so too big to let go.
Thank you. Second question on the, maybe on the technology. Do you see any, be it electrification or hydrogen or do you see any need to make significant investment in the coming, let's say 5, 10 years that would require a step up in R&D, in reverse engineering?
Actually, the electric forklift already exists many years. For us, it's not new. It's already there. Yes, it might increase a couple of percentages, but we do not expect that it will materially shift. In our core market, we believe it's there. The IC, so internal combustion, will remain. Yes, maybe there will be a couple of more machines, electrical or warehousing might increase further. It's not like it's different. Okay, lithium could be an interesting one.
Where I think you have to see the change is that in other markets in which we become active, so like in the agriculture equipment there potentially will be a drift towards electrification, or in the small earth moving as well. I think there will be a bigger change. Okay, but electrification is not new for us.
Thank you.
If you look at our product range and what we sell, engine parts is just one. Cabin parts, other parts are, I mean, whether or not the engine is electric or not, will continue to provide business for us.
Then the last question on the new market opportunities. Do you see the need at some point to do one or several very significant M&A acquisition to really accelerate the development, take an interesting position and given that they are bigger markets?
The need, I think if we can do and if it makes sense, if the board supports it, we would consider. If not, we just continue our strategic plan. That's, I think, what it is. It's not so much a need.
That was nice of you. One more time. One question and we have to pass the microphone. There will be more opportunities.
Okay. Thank you.
Hello? Yeah. It's Roberto Casoni from Otus Capital. I had three. I just reduced it to one. Okay? You're welcome, Francis. My question is, it's very simple. I mean, how inflation impacts on your margin? I mean, you present the story and you also, if I saw correctly, you mentioned an intelligent pricing model. If I look at your balance sheet. Basically, your net debt is not exactly equivalent, but is very close to your inventories. Basically, you have six months inventories, basically, which is equivalent to EUR 650 million. So if I'm not incorrect, I mean, you have been buying most of the inventories at a pricing point which is possibly better than what it is today. So how do you deal with that?
It's important for me not to understand Q1 or Q2, but of course, to understand the reverse of this trend. How does it work, basically? Thank you.
First of all, we are fortunate that the OEM drives the price. For the OEM, it's important that the price for the parts is attractive. For them, it's an important bucket of profit. We could kind of surf along. That's an important one. That's probably the key one. Having said that, yeah, we also need to be, what you can say, accepting of the fact that the pricing of spare parts is increasing. Yes, we can't be in denial, and we have to just act upon it. It's a mixture of both.
The one that you really need to remember is the first one is the fact that we don't set the price, we follow the price, and we see that in the current market, we see the OEMs heavily increasing the price, which gives basically a room for TVH to follow.
It's also beneficial for margins in the short term.
Helps on a lot of things.
Thank you.
All right. Thank you very much. Let's move right away to Otto. First of all, a big thank you to Thomas. By the way, now we have a coffee break after that. No coffee break now, but right away to Otto.
Okay. Let's start without delay then. I'm delighted to have the opportunity during the next hour to share with you the story of D'Ieteren, a story around mobility, about building fluid and sustainable mobility for everyone. I will not be alone today, of course, because you need numbers, and this story needs also numbers to be credible. That's why Reggie, our new CFO, will be with me today. I'm not going to talk a lot about the agenda. It's the same one as the other activities that you have seen as well. What is our ambition and our strategy? Our mission is quite comparable to what you heard from Gary. Some of you might know I've worked three years at Belron, so I've taken a lot of best practices there and tried to put them back into D'Ieteren.
What we try to do, of course, build seamless and sustainable mobility for everyone, is mainly accompany the way our customers in Belgium are evolving in the way they move, how they go from point A to point B. By this, we also want to become the natural choice for our customer when they think about mobility. If they think about Belron when they break a glass, I hope they think about one of our products or services when they want to move from point A to point B. For this, we are working with four very strong pillars. Product and services are, of course, extremely important. You might have read in the last days or weeks that we are completing this sort of portfolio of services with new ways of moving.
Customer experience, we will talk a bit about NPS, and I'll be very transparent right from the start. We are not at the level of Belron, though we do not have a bad one, far from it. What we are busy really doing right now is building a mobility ecosystem. To be very transparent, we have today a lot of pieces of the puzzle. We do not yet have one complete image for our end customer. That will be when we meet next time in two years, then I will be very happy to be able to present it to you. This is thanks to the 2,300 people working every day at D'Ieteren, and who get up every morning with a smile, helping our people to move themselves. Today, D'Ieteren is made of different métier, six.
Of course, the automobile is still in the heart of everything we do. Why? Simply because car is still central in the transportation of our customer. We represent the brand of the Volkswagen Group in Belgium since 1948, so we enjoy 74 years partnership with the Volkswagen Group, and this is not going to stop, rest assured. We have added lately, and we are very proud of it, a super car, an electric one, the Rematch car, which will be present in Belgium in May. All those cars will need to be distributed, of course, to end customer as well as spare parts as well. For this we work with 20 importers in Belgium representing our brands and our services. One of them is owned by us, Sofadis, which is busy on the AGPs Brussels, Antwerp.
There we delivered around 23% of the cars to end customers, except for Porsche, where we have a penetration of 70% of all cars delivered to customers. All of our customers need to finance their car, and 1/3 chooses our affiliate or subsidiary or joint venture between Volkswagen Financial Services and D'Ieteren, which is called Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance, which is of course also a loyalty tool for us, not only for sales but also for after sales. Since we see more and more the average price of our car going up and B2C customers, some of them leaving the new car business, there is more and more importance for the second-hand cars. Hence, for us, the investment in Wondercar, where we start to recreate everything that we have built around new cars, around second-hand cars.
We have there a trading activity, after sales, both in body shop and mechanics. As I said, more and more our customers are wanting to experience new ways of moving themselves. We have created or started Lab Box. I'll talk a bit more later afterwards. The last baby we created, Lucien, around e-bike or bikes, but mainly e-bike. I'll come on that later as well. If we talk about the value chain and markets, we are importer, as I said, of the brands of the Volkswagen Group, and we also deliver them through our own retail. It is still significant in our sales. It is even more than 80% of our total sales.
After sales, which we delivered for spare parts, but for all our dealers, but also of course through our own one as well, represents around 10% of our sales as well. We also distribute spare parts and accessories for all brands through our Wondercar franchise. Second-hand cars, which is a business that is growing, represents already around 9% of our sales through label, which is known as MyWay in Belgium. In other countries, you may know this as Das WeltAuto, a very German name. By the way, we started MyWay first. The German colleague from the Volkswagen Group came to look at what we were doing in Belgium, and they did it in other countries under the name of Das WeltAuto.
The new mobility, which is really at its start, is good for a bit more than 1% of our sales. Let me talk a bit more about our startup studio, Lab Box. LabBox, that's where we try to disrupt ourselves and also understand how we can help our customer in moving in a better way through it and sustainable. I have here highlighted two examples. Poppy, which is a vehicle sharing company, and we are very proud there because we were the first in Europe to offer three types of different vehicles on a single platform for sharing. We have got 8,000 vehicles, 1,500 cars, the rest being electric scooters, bikes or mopeds, I suppose that's how you call them. EDI, Electric by D'Ieteren.
You all know that the electric car is of course the growing segment in our sales, not only in our sales but in sales of our competitors as well. EDI aims at helping the customer moving from the ICE world to the EV world by making their journey easier. We implement charging station for private and semi-private customer. Last year we installed more than 5,600 of them, and this give us a market share of 15%, making us the clear leader, knowing that the number two is at 8% there. I'll point one or two other initiative as well. LEASY, that's where we really try to disrupt ourself because that's an online leasing company based on second-hand cars with absolutely no interaction with the dealer.
It helps us understand how customers react if they want to buy directly a car online without any interaction with a salesperson. The last acquisition, Taxis Verts, a cab company, 65% penetration in Brussels, but more important, wide range of services for disabled person as well in the Brussels area. The ESG agenda has helped us structure our approach because everything that is now called ESG we were already doing before but without knowing it. Building seamless and sustainable mobility and being a leader in electrification in Belgium, when I say leader, we have a 30% market share in this segment. By the way, we also have a 30% market share in B2B as well. By pushing electrification, of course, in the market, we help also to have a sustainable mobility for the customers.
We are also aiming to have one customer out of four who is using different kind of services that we do offer. Improving the life of our customer, it's having an NPS above market, and I'm delighted that last year, for instance, Audi was number one on the Belgian market in terms of NPS. Environmental impact, we want to reduce our CO2 emission by 2025 by 50% compared to 2019. We already reduced them by 32%. We all know that the last percent are always the more difficult one, but we will get there. Since 2021, we are also carbon neutral. We also measure very strongly our people engagement, and there I'm quite proud from what I hear from colleague.
We've got 88% of the 2,300 people who participate in November in our survey, and we've got an 88% engagement rate as well. Diversity and inclusion, that might be a number that which might surprise you. Only 25% as objective of women in management committee. Jesus, that's low. Yes, it is low. We come from the car business, which was originally not very attractive for women. On the other side, we have a very high loyalty rate from our employees. Unless I shoot men, there is no way I'm gonna increase the rate of women in our management company. This is also unfortunately reflected in the management committee where we have only one lady amongst us. By the way, she used to be my first boss when I started at D'Ieteren 34 years ago, ironically.
We have there also quite a diverse competencies and people coming from new businesses like Réginald, who came from Carrefour. Giovanni Palmieri, who used to be the IT manager of the national train company. Very complex IT system, and he even tells me it's even more complex in the automotive sector and so on. We have a very strong and very competent management committee, but also very competent 2,300 people with us. Last year, we conducted a survey where we interrogated 2,000 B2C customers and about 200 B2B customers to understand the impact of Covid on their mobility. What they told us is that car will remain central in their needs in the future, but less than today.
It should represent 56% of the trip by 2030, knowing that we come today from around 73-74%. There are two clear winners. First, bike and electric bike, hence Lucien. Second, car sharing, vehicle sharing, which would be good for 2%-12% of the trip in the future, hence Poppy. When we talk about accelerating everything, all our trends that you see here were already present in our strategy. It's just that everything has moved faster, because of COVID. I won't say thanks to COVID. Globally, we expect the number of trips to be reduced by 6%, compared to before COVID. This is due mainly to home working. That was a question, I think, which was asked before to Gary. This is, of course, for the Belgian market.
Please do not extrapolate this for all markets. More than two-thirds of sales will be on 100% electric cars by 2030. As well, B2B customers, they are leading the charge. Our market has completely changed before and after COVID in terms of volume. We were indeed on a high before the COVID crisis. We enjoyed a market of around 550,000 new cars for a country of 11 million inhabitants. That was the highest ratio after Luxembourg. We have now rebased this market, and we expect it to stabilize around 435,000 units in the future. What you see, of course, for 2021 and 2022 is thanks to the first chips crisis and then the Ukraine war, more production-driven than demand-driven.
Those numbers do not reflect the actual underlying commercial activity. In terms of light commercial vehicle under 3.5 tons, where we are active with the Volkswagen brand there, we see a more stable volume around 75,000 unit. As you see on your right side, we increased indeed our market share, and we expect our market share by 2025 to go around 26%. This is due to electric cars and B2B customer, where you heard that we have a privileged position on the market already today with, of course, a very attractive portfolio of models throughout the different brands of the Volkswagen Group and in all segments.
The good news there is that also the fiscal environment has been cleared last year by the government, who has taken a strong position for the next 10 years. We are, for the first time ever, in a very strict framework, which give us some comfort and some vision for the future and reassure us around company cars for the 10 years, like 9 years remaining to come. What we have also developed to push our market share further, not only for cars but for all our services, is that we have now one single point of contact for all our B2B customer, for all our products and all our services, which is called Group Mobility Solutions.
Meaning that one customer can have one point of contact for his car and for all services from LabBox. Shortly for his bike as well, and second-hand car, if he's looking for one also. We are the only one in Belgium being able to offer such a complete services to our customer. Our customer today are extremely digitalized. More than 90% of them start their journey when they start looking for a car online, but they still, most of them, they still do want a physical contact with the salesperson. When you see the complexity of an electric car being a Q4 ID.3, I understand them. I understand that they want to have a discussion with the salesperson to make sure that they make the right choice before pushing on the button.
Nevertheless, we have taken the advantage of the COVID time to extremely push our digital dialogue with our customer. Today, digital represents more than 50% of our investment in marketing. We were forced to have. You know that Belgium is famous for its motor show. We didn't have motor show in the last two years. We had digital motor show, and we had two extremely successful ones, thanks to the way we handle, indeed, the database of our customer, but also how we work very closely with partners like Google or Salesforce. We generated, for instance, last year, more than 90,000 qualified leads in through our dealers. We signed last year 705 contracts totally online.
Might not be immense, but knowing that the year before it was almost zero, it is quite a significant increase. This system is still only valid on cars which are in stock. I also have one complicated slide with me, just to be clear about after-sales. Today, we have about 1,200,000 customers using our cars every day. The loyalty of these customers mainly depends on the age of their car and whether they are the first owner of their car. We enjoy very high loyalty rates from 0 to 4 years, and it goes down with time. Globally, we had a 45.5% loyalty rate throughout our car parc.
Although we will be selling many a majority of electric cars in the future, if we talk about car park, it will only represent 7% of the fleet in 2025. Although an electric car demands less after-sales, it still demands after-sales. This doesn't mean that we won't see those customer. It will just be a bit lower, 40% lower than ICE car. 2025, we will maintain the loyalty rate on a higher car park than today, so we are confident also in this activity, which today represent about 1 million throughputs a year for mechanics, about 65,000 in body shops. Don't forget that we are also investing through our Wander label into the second-hand car market to develop the activity for customer who are not loyal to brand-related dealer as well.
As I said, second-hand car is becoming more and more important. If you look at the size of the market, you see there that there is a clear shift between the fall that we have seen in new cars going to the second-hand cars. There what's important for us, the segment we are looking at, it's zero to four years old. Why? Because there is also in Belgium a fiscal particularities that as a private customer, if I sell my car to another private customer, there will be no VAT on this transaction. Trying for us to enter all the cars, we lose our competitive advantage also. There we aim to sell around 30,000 cars per year on top of our new cars in the future.
As I said, also Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance is a very important marketing tool there. Almost 1 customer out of 3 finances its cars through Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance, meaning that we have all his customer data. We know when he needs to change from car. He's loyal in after-sales, both in mechanics and in body shops, as well. We enjoy almost 50% penetration in the B2C segment. Lucien, by the way, why Lucien? Everyone knows about Eddy Merckx. Lucien Van Impe is maybe less known, but he was also a very good Belgian cyclist. To be very frank, it's the surname of the grandfather of Nicolas D'Ieteren, our president. That's why it's Lucien, as well. The bike business is the growing mobility segment, with e-bikes being the clear winner there.
Luckily, e-bikes are approximately four times more expensive than a non-electric bike. We have today nine stores. One of them will open next week here downstairs. By 2025, we should enjoy 25 stores, an omni-channel offer with a very diversified portfolio and, of course, service also sales and after sales and close link with our B2B activities, more and more B2B customer asking not only for car, but also for bike as well. What did we do in the past to be where we are today? First of all, we completely reshaped our network since 2014. Back then, we had 1,071 partners. Today, we have 20, one of them being us, as I said.
This makes us unique in Europe, and we've been able to go through all crises, diesel, COVID, chips, without having a dealer. With all dealers being profitable, sorry, and none of them having EUR 1 debt towards D'Ieteren. We have also worked on our own dealers to make them profitable. This was called Pole Position, and to transform internally our culture and to revamp the creativity within D'Ieteren, we led a program called Powered By You. In mid-2019, we presented the conclusion of our strategic study, Magellan, to the board, which then generated the launch of Wunder and Lab Box. 2020, we had to accelerate our plan, and unfortunately, 300+ people had to leave our organization at that time.
We decided also to close the sites of the different centers in Brussels which were not profitable, this one being one of them. We were hit by the COVID period in terms of deliveries. We had to close all our dealerships for many weeks. The chips crisis doesn't help us as well. We remain strong, I believe, at least in terms of ratio, way above the 3% return on sales, despite those strong headwinds. We are sure today that we are stronger than we were before this COVID crisis. We are better armed to face the future than we were. Now, my friend, it's up to you.
Thank you, Denis.
There you go.
Thank you very much, Denis. Hi, everyone. I think now it's time to share with you our ambition for the coming years. As you can see from this slide, we have several engines that I would like to discuss with you in further details. First, let's start with the market of new cars. As explained by Denis, the market of new cars will recover, and we expect to gain market share thanks to the superior product pipeline of VW Group, particularly in BEV, so the battery electric vehicles. The electrification of the market as well as the ADAS technologies more and more embedded in the new car, so we discussed that this morning extensively, will also drive the price growth. ED, Electric by D'Ieteren, has also a very good positioning to capture the growth resulting from the electrification of the market.
We have the used or secondhand cars. Here again, this market is expected to grow, particularly, as said by Denis, once again, particularly the young used cars, so I mean, the cars between one and four years old. There, we are currently scaling up our platform to sell 30,000 cars by 2025, not only in B2B, but also in B2C. The after-sales market, we've just seen that. The after-sales market can rely on a large and growing car park. In mechanic, we will increase the penetration of maintenance contracts. We will also increase the loyalty to the official network, thanks to a better or premium customer experience, thanks to targeted loyalty schemes, and thanks to a dynamic pricing policy.
In body shop, we will continue the rollout of the multi-brand franchise Wondercar concept, which offers both traditional and smart repair to become the national body shop leader in Belgium. We can also say that Wondercar will also play an active role in the consolidation of the body shop market in light of the forthcoming electrification of the market. As said by Denis, beyond the official network, we are also about to launch the franchise concept, WonderService, targeting the second tier and multi-brand after-sales. Next engine. We have the launch of our national bike chain aimed at capturing the fast-growing e-bike market. We have already completed acquisition of 9 stores as I speak, so between Antwerp and Brussels.
I think we can say that we have a very strong pipeline of store owners who are eager to join the growth story, our growth story. Lab Box will continue to successfully develop its initiatives in the new mobility, notably Eddy, that I have already mentioned, but also Poppy, for instance, to catch the expected increasing penetration of car sharing. Remember the Polaris survey explained by Denis. Last but not the least one, this is GMS or Group Mobility Solutions. Group Mobility Solutions will also drive additional growth with our B2B customers, thanks to bundle packages combining all of our products and services to serve the fleet manager from A to Z for their all mobility needs in, let's say, in every sense.
This is to say, of course, the cars under VW Group brands, but also the mobility solutions, for instance, Lucien for the bikes, Wondercar for the body shop, but also the full range of Lab Box solutions. Now let's start having a look at our financials, and let's start with the new cars segment. This is a chart for the new car segment. As you can see here, we expect our new cars sales to grow with a CAGR of +10% between 2021 and 2025 to reach, sorry, a turnover of EUR 3.9 billion in 2025. This +10% growth is driven by the volume and by the price.
First of all, the volume, as you can see from the bottom left chart, we expect to reach 122,000 cars in 2025, which is a CAGR of +7% as from 2021. As you know, we've seen that the COVID has rebased the new car market from 550,000 cars to 435,000 going forward. Of course, this explains the drop of our volumes you see in 2020. Next, the circumstantial, if I can say so, supply chain issues have pushed the market, the new car market further down in 2021, where you can see it here, where we delivered only 93,000 new cars. However, we expect the new car market to rebound gradually over time as the supply chain issues disappear step by step.
We will gain market share thanks to our better commercial offer, as I've told you, particularly in BEV. The second driver, this is the price. As you can see here, the price, we expect the price to increase with a CAGR of circa +3%. This is driven by the electrification, the ADAS technologies, and the product mix, including the upselling. This is important to note that the CAGR 2019-2021 that you see here at +7% cannot be extrapolated for the future. Actually, over the last two years, the mix of cars we delivered was particularly skewed towards, let's say, higher-end models, implying a very favorable price growth, as you can see here. This very positive price mix will decrease step by step over time once the cars we deliver comes back to a more balanced, mix between brands/models.
Let's continue with our financial goals for 2025. First, our top line. We expect to have a CAGR 2021-2025 of more than 10%, driven by around 10% for the new car segment that I have just explained you. For the other activities, I mean spare parts and accessories, used cars, bikes, new mobility, we expect to achieve a CAGR of more than 20%, notably driven by the volume, okay? Then all in all, our top line will grow with a CAGR 2021-2025 above 10%. As you can see in the next bucket, we expect to achieve an EBIT margin in 2025 above 4% versus 3.2% in 2021. This means an EBIT in absolute value above EUR 200 million. Of course, we have various drivers behind that.
First and foremost, this is the volume. We have the positive mix, as some activities will become more and more accretive over time. We also have initiatives to boost the gross margin, like the dynamic pricing policy I discussed for the spare parts, for example. We also have initiatives to contain our cost, not only the volume of our cost, but also the price of our cost. Last but not least, we also have, for example, the benefits resulting from the closures of two loss-making sites of D'Ieteren Center we did end of last year. We have the profit of our equity accounted companies. Here we talk about VDFin, so Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance. But today, we also have, in that line, we also have Skipr, we have LEASY, we have MyMove, and we expect all of them to contribute significantly over time.
In terms of cash, you can see here that we model around EUR 20 million cash, sorry, CapEx over time. This is around 0.4% of our sales. I'll come back to that in a few seconds. In terms of trade working capital, we expect to have around 34 days of sales, which is, let's say, a significant improvement versus what we used to have, historically here at D'Ieteren. This is, let's say, on the back of a much bigger awareness of the business to the cash conversion cycle. All in all, we expect to generate a free cash flow above EUR 165 million in 2025, which is a cash conversion, an EBITDA cash conversion of around 70%. Here, this is, a quick summary of our value creation over time.
You can see that a big chunk of this value creation is driven by the volume I have just explained to you. We have, let's say, gross margin ratio initiatives and cost initiatives that I have just highlighted. A few words for the financial policy. In terms of CapEx, in terms of CapEx, you can see here that as from 2018, we started reinvesting in our key IT platforms, and we will continue to do so until 2023, and it will weigh a bit in our D&A charge for the coming years. We started doing that to, let's say, to sustain our growth for the future. We have also some specific projects over 2022, 2024 with two big projects, so a new retail outlet in Brussels for almost EUR 5 million. This is the so-called Mobilis project.
Then we have another big project. This is a new campus in our historical site in Oude Kwaremont for an amount of EUR 26 million, mainly consisting of fit-outs. This project actually aims at gathering our teams, a big part of our teams, around 500 people in Oude Kwaremont, and at changing the behaviors and the mindset to, let's say, to break down the silos within the company to, once again, to boost our growth. Going forward, as I've told you, we expect to have around EUR 20 million, excluding IFRS 16 impact. Here I talk about tangible CapEx. In terms of funding, I think this is self-explanatory. We have raised a new funding end of last year, so EUR 325 million, one term loan, one RCF, which is, by the way, undrawn at the end of last year.
This is unsecured. This is a sustainability-linked loan, and we have a coverage leverage covenant, sorry, below three times. In terms of dividends, our dividend policy is a payout of 75% of our net income back to our shareholders. A few words on the current trading, which is also nice, like the other companies. Basically, we've had solid commercial dynamics for this first quarter. First of all, as you can see here, from the bottom left, we have delivered 24,600 new cars in the first quarter. Actually, this is a drop of 14% year-on-year. Like the last quarters, our volumes continued to be impacted by the supply chain issues. I mean the chip shortages, as you know.
Now we have to add the war between Ukraine and Russia also hitting the numbers of cars produced. Secondly, on the top right chart, we have our market share in new passenger cars. Our market share reached 21.7% in the first quarter. As a reminder, the market share measures the total number of registrations of D'Ieteren brands versus the total number of registrations, sorry, for the market. As you can see here, we have increased our market share by 10 basis points. This is very important to note that this market share you see here is underestimated. It's underestimated because of the lack of deliveries resulting from the supply chain issues I have just explained you. This underestimation of the market share is clearly reflected or measured by the very high order book you can see here.
We have an order book. I think this is an all-time high, 94,000 cars in the order book at the end of Q1. This is a level, as you can see here, which is much higher than the order book we had at the end of Q1 2021. This one being already a high comparable versus Q1 2020, which is, I think, Denis, much more in line with the usual level we should have in normal market conditions, okay? Something around.
55,000.
55,000. At some point in time, this order book will translate into deliveries once the supply chain issues will be solved, hence leading to a higher market share for D'Ieteren. Let's finish with our revenue numbers. The total net sales of D'Ieteren, as you can see here. We have increased our sales by 6.7% year-on-year in the first quarter. The new car segment rose by 2.3% in spite of the challenging context in terms of volumes. If you do the math very quickly, this implies a very nice double-digit price growth, okay? Because we have minus 14% drop in volume while the sales in value rose by 2.3%. This is a very nice price growth, implied price growth.
This is once again resulting from a mix which is particularly favorable in this first quarter with much more premium brands slash models in the mix. We actually have the same, let's say, experience we had in 2020 and 2021, but very complex to extrapolate that. This is very circumstantial. Our other activities in red posted a growth of more than 30% year-on-year, notably supported by the used car segments, enjoying also very nice price effects, more than compensating the big pressure we have in volumes in used cars as well. Last but not least, it's interesting, sorry, to note that the weight of other activities reached 19% in Q1. This is increased penetration versus Q1 2021, reflecting the expected diversification of our revenues.
Thank you very much for your attention, and I'll hand over to Denis for the conclusions.
Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Without the production issue, we estimate our market share should be somewhere around between 23.7%-24% today. What do you need to remember today? First, we have an extremely strong brand recognition, and we are also building an extremely strong EV ecosystem, not only thanks to the brands and the models of the Volkswagen Group, but also what we are doing with Electric by D'Ieteren, and also our dealers who are trained. We were talking about training when we were talking about ADAS for Belron, for instance. For us, training around electric cars, both for salesperson and after salesperson, is very intensive as well. We have a profitable network, which is a very strong pillar on which we can build for the future.
We have professional partners in Belgium, which means that what you see in other countries regarding the contract around distribution is not taking place in Belgium for the moment, that's for sure. We still have a lot of potential in the used car market as well. We have accelerated our transformation, and we are diversifying our portfolio of services thanks to a very strong future-proof innovation lab hub called Lab Box we have talked about. This make us absolutely unique in the Belgian market. There are two remaining independent importers in Belgium. All my competitors are subsidiaries of the OEM. They don't look at how people are moving from point A to point B. They are selling cars. We sell mobility. Thank you. I'm now ready to answer your question.
Hi, I'm Patrick from Milan. I've got two questions regarding what you said about the Q1 numbers. First is you said that your market share is affected by the lack or by supply chain issues.
Yes.
Does that mean that the Volkswagen Group has more supply chain issues than the rest of the market?
Asian brands enjoy a favorable position for the moment. Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, certainly, and Tesla as well. We were at par with others regarding the chip situation. We are hit a bit more due to the Ukrainian war like the BMW group. Yes, we are hit a little bit more than the others.
My second question is regarding the price effect. I think it's common knowledge that the car manufacturers are
Sort of giving priority obviously to the premium segment.
Yes.
-because of-
Yes.
There's a lack of components. At some point, we should expect that price mix effect to reverse?
Yes. If you take, for instance, the Q1 numbers, we had a ratio of 35% of LD, you know, deliveries in Q1, which is an absolutely abnormal ratio. One day we will start in getting back also Volkswagen, Škoda and other brands hopefully. This will indeed re-equilibrate price. This will happen during hopefully at the f- it will start during H2 this year. Now if you 'cause I know that's one question of you which is burning for everyone. What happens with production? I'm not going to say that your guess is as good as mine, but almost because the answer is based here really about this conversation about different plants in the Volkswagen Group. We hope production to come back to more normal level at H2 2023.
This being said, once they start building again, producing again, first they need to bring back the order book to normal level. This is going to take certainly one semester. Then you need to rebuild stock, which will take another three months. We do not expect to come back to normal before the end or the first trimester of 2024.
Just one more question. Given that delivery times are increasing, does that lead to over-ordering? The moment that the order delivery times come back again, could you see a deflation of your order book because suddenly people can get the product quicker?
For the B2B customer, there are certainly some customer who have ordered cars that they will only need really in a year of time. B2C customer, no, it's not in their habit. Today, B2B segment represent more than 65% of our orders. That's it. Oh, I was surprised.
Okay. Yeah. Just a bit of a question on my end. One of the important things that is changing in the whole automobile manufacturing scene is of course that customers or that they are looking to engage with their customers directly. I think everybody is pioneering with it, also Volkswagen. I believe in Germany already electric vehicles are ordered directly with the manufacturers. Can you give a bit your view on that and how this could impact your dealerships, your customers as well in the future?
Very good question. You refer there to the agency contract, which is indeed the model chosen by the Volkswagen Group for electric cars, but also for B2B customer for all its affiliates, so all the large countries in Europe. This doesn't take place in Belgium for different reason. First, we already exchange the customer data with the Volkswagen Group and with our dealers. It flows throughout the value chain already. There we do not need to change the contract for that point. Second, our dealers are profitable, which it's not the case in every country, far from that also. Third, we are an independent importer. We are the representative of the Volkswagen Group in Belgium, so we have already those data. There is also another point regarding the agency contract.
It's about the selling, how you sell cars to end customer. We have, for instance, in Belgium, something which is called the fleet convention, which has been in effect for more than 25 years, I believe, where we give very strict guidelines to our dealers about rebates that they can give to end customer according to their potential. Our dealers respect those guidelines. We do not need a contract like the agency one, thanks to the way we manage our dealer, our dealerships already today. As I said, the manufacturer has already its data from our customer. Why should they need to contact our customer since we are doing it so well already? What do they add to our customer that we do not give to them at the end of the day?
Can you please ask one question? Thanks.
Yeah. Just one question. I'm done. In the plan to basically to 2025, I understand, so you want roughly, let's say, to double your EBIT to-
It's a very good summary.
There is quite a bit of volume growth in the assumption, plus 7%. What makes you so positive? If I go back to, I think two years ago, you were much more careful, prudent on volume. Is it-
As you've seen, we expect indeed our market share to be around 26% by 2025. Everything being, of course, settled regarding production. Why do we aim for 26%? First because of the electric share in sales, which is fast growing faster than what we expected two years ago. Second, because of our market share in B2B, which is way higher than what we had on average. When you combine those two elements with the unique proposition that we can make to our B2B customer, thanks to the other services that we are offering, we are convinced that we can significantly gain market share and move towards 26%.
Okay. Thank you.
This is for new cars. Mobility is also.
The other activities.
Which one? I'm sorry.
New mobility, which will contribute even faster than the new car segment. Thank you.
All right. I think everybody's understood.
There are still eight minutes, Francis.
Yeah.
There is a general interest question.
Thank you.
You don't want to copy the one question.
No, just one question. On the working capital.
Yeah.
I think in your guidance, you expect that the working capital trends will be more favorable versus the past. Could you explain a little bit more in detail what will be different this time versus previously?
We have learned the COVID crisis has also told us that we do not always need to have cars in stock to push them toward customers. Our customers and ourselves have learned to sell cars without having all of them in stock. To be honest, before we thought we needed Polos galore, Golf in stock to be able to push them into the market. It's not true. Indeed, we have learned to manage our stock better. This is something that we'll keep doing in the future. We will not be as lean as today, that's for sure. We want cars in the showroom. We have learned new ways to sell which we thought were not possible.
Thank you.
Yeah. This is, if I may, part of the answer, so increasing the stock rotation, of course, and we will do much better thanks to our collective intelligence on that. We make the business much more aware of that, the cash conversion cycle. We push our teams to cash in the receivables much more quickly than we used to do. We have started discussing the payment terms for our payables with the factories, for example. This is all these kind of things that will help to decrease or to rebase our working capital expressed in days.
It's been higher and larger than it used to be.
Thanks.
Maybe the gentleman here, because he had your previous question.
Sorry. It's a quick one. I mean, once we are talking about when production will come back to normality, in the financial market, we are actually thinking about when demand will slow down to normal circumstances. Because what is happening today will have a reflection down the road in terms of how many will be able to pay such higher price and what inflation will be leaving in our pockets. Do you have any sense, second derivative data, order cancellation? Are all orders from your network firm orders, or do they see something and, you know, as that could somehow help or not help my idea?
I can honestly say that we haven't had, since the first of January, more than 10 cancellations. Guess what? We are very happy if a customer cancels today because we can make another customer directly happy as well.
Yeah.
This is absolutely not an issue. Now, you were talking about price increase. This is factored indeed in our projection. You saw that we talk about the market, 435,000 from a base of 550,000. We know indeed that part of our customer that we enjoyed in the past will not come back to new cars, hence the focus we put now on second-hand cars. Regarding the price increase in our portfolio, yes, we are able to push the price increase in the market. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, it does. You don't see any sign of slowdown.
Absolutely not.
in terms of interest by customers.
Thank you. I don't know to what extent there is a residual value risk in your financing business, but if there is, how do you deal with electric cars? Specifically, I mean, for the moment, these electric cars, they have a limited range. My assumption is that in three or four or five years' time or five years, whatever, the range will be much higher. Therefore, the second-hand value of current existing electric cars may be severely affected.
The joint venture we have with Volkswagen Financial Services is at 50/50 plus one share for Volkswagen Financial Services, meaning that the risk of the residual value is on their shoulder, not ours. The fleet is on them. They own the cars. There is a risk, of course, in the 50% of the EBITDA results.
Yeah.
of Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance. This being said, Volkswagen D'Ieteren Finance sells its cars through the Volkswagen's network for second-hand cars. We sell our cars throughout Europe. We are best placed to know the evolution of our prices. When do we need to bring a car back to make sure that we optimize price? There is a risk, it's correct. But we do not expect this, certainly on electric cars, to be as high as what you expressed. I'm a bit more worried about diesel car, maybe, if we could have that discussion on if eastern countries start to behave like western regarding legislation around ICE car, there might be some trouble regarding residual value for ICE cars. I'm not afraid for the electric cars.
What do you think of the business model that Cazoo has?
We try to do better in Belgium by trying to copy a bit what they are doing.
You think it's a viable model?
I think so. Let's go for a coffee then. Trust me, there is no question. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
On a encore et demie, including wrap-up. Mon wrap-up, vraiment 5 minutes. Moi aussi.
Welcome back. I've got good news for you. We are a little bit behind schedule, but we'll catch up. It is the last leg of the day. I hope you are not too tired, exhausted, that you're energized by the presentations that we've had. Good afternoon. I'm Arnaud Laviolette. I'm the group CFO. I will go through the presentation about some other activities which we are not able to present today. The first one is D'Ieteren Immo. Then I will share with you a few slides about our new acquisitions, which is unfortunately not yet closed, which is PHE. We'll give you a little bit of how we allocate capital, which is the policy around that.
Francis will take the relay and speak about the ESG policy at the level of the group and how we cascade that down at the level of the activities. I will speak about the ambitions. But that will be a relatively easy exercise for me because it's just adding some numbers and a little bit of subtraction too. But that should be fine. Of course, Francis will be. I will do the current year trading, and Francis will share some concluding remarks. D'Ieteren Immo. You know we've got 5, nearly 6 companies, activities in our portfolio. We are not giving a lot of information about D'Ieteren Immo, but it is, you know, fully part of the family.
It has very long-standing roots, you know, because the place you are here today, you know, we started with an industrial activity here, and we expanded to the place we know today. This place, by the way, will change dramatically in the next 5-7 years. 7 years because it takes time before you do a renovation or a total renovation in Belgium. The real estate portfolio, we speak about 37 sites in Belgium exclusively. They are, by and large, you know, occupied by our activities in Belgium, essentially the automotive activity of Denis and Reginald at around 90%. Okay. It's an important portfolio because it's more than 800,000 square meters.
Just this place here, it's 65,000 square meters in the middle of Brussels, in a very attractive neighborhood, and some potential to be redeveloped. It's mainly in Flanders. Mainly in Flanders because of our economic footprint. You know, I think it represents a good representation of the footprint we have of our activities in Belgium. But of course, it is a bit skewed by the importance of the Erps-Kwerps location, where we do all the car handling. You know, where the cars arrive from Germany or elsewhere, and we redistribute them across Belgium. We have, on an annual basis, around EUR 22 million rental income. We have a few charges, so the EBITDA is around EUR 15 million. Then with a lot of depreciation, you know, we maintain and invest quite significantly in our real estate.
After depreciation, we go down with a net book value of EUR 7 million. The book value, this is what you see in our accounts, you know, the total portfolio is just above EUR 200 million. We believe that the fair market value is above EUR 300 million. The strategy there is we are happy with what we have. We try to develop it, you know, to enhance the value of the real estate by investing. We invest sustainably also. You know, nearly 50% of the energy we consume in our buildings, you know, is self-produced, and we intend to go much higher than that in the next few years.
We divest, you know, when we believe that the asset is either non-core or if it is totally mature and that we have an offer that we cannot resist. We could look at opportunities outside of the core automotive activity, but that would be a bit opportunistically. It's essentially business occupation. But we have built three years ago, and it's fully rented, an apartment building with apartment flats, you know, which is fully rented. We look at that kind of opportunities too. This is for real estate. The next one is the next growth pillar, the next platform of growth for the group. You have heard during the whole day the ambition of management teams. You know, we qualify that, or someone has qualified that as a realistic ambition.
You know, we want to continue on that trajectory with the acquisition of PHE, Parts Holding Europe. This is a slide you've already seen because this is more or less the slide we presented when we did announce the acquisition. The good news is that we have signed now. When we announced, it was not yet signed. The bad news is not closed yet, you know, because we still need to have the green light of the commission for antitrust potential issues. Okay? What is Parts Holding Europe? It's active in a market we know extremely well. You heard Dominiek speaking about spare parts. You heard Gary speaking a little bit about spare parts, you know, glass spare parts. You heard about Danny speaking about spare parts.
It's a segment of the market we know extremely well, so we feel extraordinary comfortable there. We have with PHE a consolidator in the market. It's still a hugely fragmented market. You know, it's a big, big market in Europe. It's over EUR 80 billion of sales in aggregate, you know, and PHE is only a EUR 2 billion company, growing fast, organically and with some external growth, but it is a very attractive market for us. It's mainly B2B at 80%, with six countries, France having the lion's share of the sales and still growing. We are number one by far in France. Then we are number two in Italy. We are consolidating that market. We are number two behind LKQ, continue to consolidate that market.
We are number two in Belgium, with some interesting positions. We are number one in Catalonia, and we are looking at extending, reinforcing our position in the Iberian or in the Spanish country, with a few LOI already signed. Number two in Italy, I've already mentioned. It's a wide base of customers, so it's very granular. You know, we are not dependent from any customer. It's a very well-distributed customer base. We've got around 70,000 customers, so it's very large. We deal with kind of affiliated garage, which have normally, you know, the brand of Autodistribution. So we do not own those garage, but they are affiliated to our network, okay? This creates a lot of stickiness, and this base is increasing.
Maybe, you know, I will say some things which will not please Denis, but the growth of what we call the independent players in your sector is growing by the year. You know, it's close to 60%, a little bit above 60%, in France, for example, and expected to continue growing, you know, because there is, you know, some price inflation, there is some. So those players are working under the umbrella of the OEMs and the OEM dealerships, you know, which creates a quite nice environment for the smaller players to thrive relatively well. Okay. So that's all the B2B. We've got an important activity in B2C called Oscaro in France. It's fully digital. You know, it's a website which is selling, distributing spare parts for the individuals.
You heard about the SKUs of TVH, so we are not that far with PHE, because we've got 600,000 SKUs for the B2B, and close to 1 million SKUs for the online platform that we have. Quite complex. Probably not the same long tail as TVH. A little bit more concentrated, but very deep, you know. We work with an exceptional logistics platform, logistics platforms. We've got a very granular distribution center whereby we can nearly distribute every two hours or three hours or multiple times a day. It's a little bit like the pharmacies. Okay. Revenues, I will come back on that, EUR 2 billion, and I will give you a little bit the performance of 2021, end of the first quarter.
What do we like here on this platform? First, we feel at home for the reasons I've mentioned, for historical reasons I've mentioned, but also because we see a lot of drivers which are not easy to capture, of course, but, you know, that will come to us. The first one is, you know, growth, top-line growth of the business. We still see a lot of opportunities in a very fragmented industry to continue to grow market share, because we've got best practice. Because, in fact, we impose to the market, or we try to be in a kind of, not subscription model, but imposing a fast delivery makes it more difficult for competitors. We've got the network, we've got the systems allowing to do that. It has a value for the customer.
Imposing fast delivery is something which helps us, you know, defining the market, assuming our leadership, and increase market share. But on top of that, you still have huge or big acquisition opportunity, and we are very disciplined there. It's, you know, it started with France and then all the adjacent countries, except more the eastern part. But, you know, we've got a strong position, as I've mentioned in Belgium. We are present in Iberia or in Spain with a local presence in Catalonia, and we expect to expand that very quickly in other Spanish regions. We have created a strong position in Italy, still more to come. A lot of potential opportunities. Mom-and-pop shops or small distributors, you know, that we can acquire because there will be challenges for them and because there is some generational changes.
On top of that, you've got big markets which are still untapped by PHE, Germany, Switzerland, the Central Eastern Europe, you know, where there again, a lot of things to be done, you know, service to be improving. Every time we do an acquisition, you know, it's accretive in terms of margin because we have great purchase conditions. We can immediately compare prices, and that's, you know, the second driver of value in terms of profitability. You know, we continue to increase our size organically, so this allows us to have better purchase conditions.
There are some scale effect. By doing acquisitions, we always enjoy, you know, purchase benefits because we compare the listing price, you know, and we know it's generally more or less the same products we can compare and by definition, we'll get higher purchases, better discounts, and better negotiation immediately. On top of that, we invest massively in digitalization, which is helping our processes, which is lowering the cost to serve the customers, and we exchange best practice by implementing them. It takes a little bit more time, as you can imagine, than just negotiating better terms when you buy for the purchase goods. Implementing best practice, looking at the time to serve, looking at the cost to serve the customer, and making sure that we implement the best practice over there.
In terms of cash profiling of the activity, it is a relatively high generative unit. You know, we have relatively limited CapEx. It's around 2-2.5% of sales, and a model in terms of working capital, which is a little bit less consuming than the TVH one because we are around 20% of sales. You know, the ESG journey is also important there. As for TVH, you know, we are extending life of vehicles. You know, the best thing to do is to do that, you know, to extend the life of those vehicles. We create also affordable mobility for our customers because very often, it is a case in France where the age of the car park is much older than in Belgium. You know, there is an affordability...
You know, you mentioned that, you know, affordability of newer cars. Extending the life of old cars of the parc, you know, is really important. We see that trend clearly playing out now, and especially in the southern countries. You know, France, Italy, Spain, we anticipate electrification to have a lower impact than in Belgium, which is essentially corporate car, where there is a clear corporate policy. In those countries, it will take much more time, okay? We see that also as very attractive. ESG's journey, we are accelerating there. When I say we are accelerating, we are not yet all in, but it's really clear, very high on our agenda, okay? We believe that the contribution of that activity by 2023 will be closing probably, hopefully before the end of the third quarter, okay?
The contribution to 2022, we'll see, you know, in function of the timing, but we are pretty sure to close before the year end. For 2023, we believe that it will at least contribute to EUR 100 million to the result of the group. Nice accretion. For 2021, robust performance. You know, and even if you look the performance between 2019, 2020, 2021, you know, you've seen the business was relatively resilient. You remember, you know, what happened in France, the country was more or less blocked. We were perceived as an essential service, so we've been continuously trading.
The performance in 2021 was solid, you know, with a top-line performance of 14%, 14.1%, but with an organic growth with it, which is double digit at 11.8%. Robust growth in 2021. With some confirming or confirmed M&A opportunity, we made a few acquisitions in Spain and Italy. You see them, you know, in the middle part of the slide with two acquisitions in Spain, one acquisition in Italy, and more to come. Those acquisitions have contributed approximately to EUR 40 million to the top line of the company. It was not only a top-line growth, but also, once again, with the operating leverage, not yet really full benefit of the acquisition, you had an improved profit.
You know, with the improved profit margin, and you see here, you know, that EBITDA has been growing by 20.6% at EUR 246 million EBITDA last year. Okay. Quite a nice growth, you know, in a catch-up environment. You know, more to come as you will see later on when I will show you the contribution to the first quarter results. Let me now go through. This is a question we often receive from you know, the investment community about our principles of capital allocation. You heard it from Francis, you heard it, of course, you know, even because Francis was a kind of promise, you know. You heard it from our leadership teams, you know, that we have great leaders.
Once again, this is key for us. You know, it start with the people in all our organization, selecting the right people in order to deliver on really ambitious plans. It start with having leadership management, developing leaders in their industry. Sorry. Investing in large and growing markets, and I hope you are convinced, you know, that all the activities, all our businesses have very, very big area to develop themselves with potential consolidation, as I've just mentioned with PHE. With proven models. You know, we are not specialist of turnarounds. We invest once again in proven management teams, in proven models. We reinvent. That's part of our mission. You know, we try to reinvent some of the industries, but that goes along with the management teams.
You know, we are not imposing our view there. It's making sure that we can really reinvent and scale our business. We often, you know, are in competition with private equity or we partner with private equity. Very often a question is, "But how do you incentivize management?" Okay, that's part of the way we manage our activities, you know, is making sure that there is a clear alignment between the management teams and the shareholders. That we create the right incentives as we've done for D'Ieteren. All our activities have a management plan in place, which hopefully will be, you know, making them very successful, not only in their business but financially. We are very happy to share part of the value creation on that front.
This leads also, you know, to a very high level of engaged personnel. When we assess the performance, when we scan, this is something very, very crucial for us. It's to feel the energy in the room when we go to a meeting. You know, okay, what's the drive? What's the energy in the room in order to be convinced, okay, there is something unique in this organization. This leads to, I think, in terms of value creation, very, very clear levers, you know. It's about top-line growth, it's about margin protecting, improving the margin, you know, as much as we can, with a clear attention to capital intensity, but in a smart way, you know, because you heard it from Dominiek and Mark, you know.
The most stupid thing we could have done entering into the capital of TVH is to say, "Okay, your working capital on sales is much too high. It should be 20%." You destroy the franchise of the company. You destroy the culture. It's something we are. Relatively low capital intensity because we are in the B2B2C in the service industry, which is relatively low capital intensive. Of course, with manageable working capital requirements, which is part of also the capital intensity of the model. You know, it's relatively simple after that. We try, well, we do not try with D'Ieteren, which has been put in a separate entity, pushed down in separate entity. We ring-fence those companies. We ask them to be so self-financed, either with their own equity or with borrowed money.
They deal with the banks, they deal with the financial sources, and are fully independent to do that, of course, with certain guidelines that we are discussing with them. We put some caps on the leverage. The leverage you will see here for all activities, you know, it's not a target leverage specifically. It's a kind of limit and for some of them it can be a leverage going forward. Let's look at D'Ieteren. You know, we set ourselves a kind of cap to 2x EBITDA because of the nature of the business. This does not mean that Réginald will have to work with 2x EBITDA in terms of leverage, okay? He has to have big projects and ambitions, and he has in terms of M&A in order to leverage the company at that point, okay?
Because the free cash flow will be, you know, will be more or less equal to the net profit, more or less. Big part of that will be distributed without really impacting the net financial debt, okay? For Belron, you remember the trajectory we had. You know, before we did the transaction with CD&R, we leveraged the company to 4.25x EBITDA before the entry. For us, that was a hard cap because we believe that we should not overburden the company with too much debt, okay? We could have been much higher than that. We could have gone to 6x, but we believe that it was not the adequate structure for a family-owned company and making sure that we can resist to any kind of stress test in the organization, okay?
We have decided now, and this is a conscious choice that we've made together with our joint shareholders to cap the leverage of Belron by 2025 at 3x EBITDA, okay? We are currently at 3.22. That was the leverage at the end of last year. The cash flow, the EBITDA will continue to grow. We'll be generating, as you heard, Humphrey, you know, significant free cash flow. There is a capacity for us to leverage the business, but we will be converging to 3x by 2025, okay? For TVH Parts, you know, the max leverage. It's not maybe the max leverage because at some point, if there is a sizable acquisition, we can force ourselves a little bit, you know, making sure that we'll be deleveraging fast after that, you know?
We can go over that if banks or the market help us there. You know, having that kind of hard cap at 3.5x, once again, we are in partnership with another family. It's important that the management team has the right means to develop the company. You heard the ambition of the management team there. For Moleskine also, you know, we need first to turn the EBITDA around. You know, to get to a much higher level of EBITDA and making sure that it is sustainable. Then, you know, we've got a lot of options in order to leverage the business. You know that part of the financing of Moleskine, you know, it's around EUR 44 million of bank debt. We've got EUR 44 million as we speak of cash, so we can reimburse the banks tomorrow, okay?
We have not leveraged really the working capital in terms of we have other ways to create cash. We'll refinance that at some point. We've got a bit more than EUR 250 million of shareholder loan that we want to refinance of course at some point. We'll be knocking at the doors of the banks in order when the EBITDA will be at the right level in order to do a kind of dividend recap, which is a reimbursement of all debt. That will occur in a few quarters probably. With that kind of model whereby we've got leaders, they reinforce their position, they are growing, they are increasing, hopefully, their margins, and they are relatively not to spend too much into capital.
This generates, you know, platforms of relatively important free cash flows, okay? You've seen the numbers presented by the management teams, by the objective by 2025, which are quite nice. You know, we are happy about it. Those really will. That shows you that they have all the means, you know, in order to continue on their own trajectory of M&A. They are able to, you know, face some demand from the personnel. They can give back to society, and you heard all of them, you know, have that kind of project. Of course, that we can continue to delight the customers, and that there is something for the management team, as I explained, with the management reward plan.
There is also something for the shareholder, you know, for the D'Ieteren Group, making sure that, you know, we have our share of the value creation. So we've got in place clear dividend policy. You heard it from Réginald for D'Ieteren Automotive. You haven't heard it from Dominiek and Mark, but we've got a dividend policy in place for TVH. We've got one for Moleskine by, you know, diminishing the shareholder loan, and we've got one with Belron with a clear intention, you know, to distribute large part of the net profit and do dividend recap with the leverage going down, you know, and bring back to the adequate level. Once again, free cash flow is recycled for dividends.
We keep some cash at the level of companies, so they will be delivering through, and we create value with dividends received for us and value creation in the business. I've mentioned, you know, the journey for the portfolio companies. For us, frankly, you know, we are very, very happy about, you know, the handful, a little bit more than handful now or tomorrow of activities, but we want to do more. You know, when we say a handful, Francis you know tells you know we've got two hands. We intend to continue going forward to redeploy capital in new activities, in new growth platforms. This is, I think, very, very exciting for us. For the shareholders, we continue.
We've got a very clear dividend policy, which is, you know, in broad line, it's at least stable and increasing when we can. We've been able to increase, as shown by Francis in his introduction, quite significantly. We still have a relatively modest dividend policy. It's around between 25% and 30% of net adjusted profit. And as you've seen, we expect our profit to continue to grow quite significantly in the years to come. There is room there for improved distributions in the future. We have reinstated our share buyback. You've seen that. It's a relatively modest program, you know, which we intend to end, hopefully by the end of the year or maybe extend a little bit, and we'll see what the future will bring.
More acquisitions, more platforms, better remuneration for the shareholders, and philanthropy. You know, we want to give back to societies, you know, and support good causes. This is a good transition, I think, for you, Francis, to speak about ESG.
Thank you, Arnaud. I think ESG, everybody has talked about it already today, both in introduction and in all the company's presentations. We've really upped our game, I think, around ESG, across everything that we're doing. To become a little bit more concrete, it starts of course, with the investments that we're doing and our origination work that we're doing. As soon as we signed PRI, the Principles of Responsible Investments, it basically allows us to be involved in ESG along the whole value chain of origination. It starts with screening, and we actually included even in our fishing ponds, if you like, business services are large fishing ponds. Well, ESG is also a business service to some degree. We've also identified it as a potential investment theme. Who knows?
We've also excluded some sectors that, or either business services or industrials or others that we would not want to invest in. We've also limited here and there our fishing ponds around a number of things more linked around armaments and, gambling and things like that and so on. Second, and most importantly, is that within our due diligences that we do, and of course, we have a kind of a four-stage process where we go deeper and deeper and ultimately go to maybe a non-binding offer, maybe a binding offer. Once it gets really serious on a particular file, we do a due diligence, just like we do a commercial one and a financial one and a legal one. We also do an ESG due diligence.
It's of course, an exercise we do as kind of outsiders from the outside in, either on our own or with help from experts, including, for instance, a materiality analysis that we kind of do from the outside, desktop-based, including risks and opportunities that we're looking at as we can understand the potential acquisition target, and look at that. Also have an impact thesis to say, "Well, what could be improved?
What could actually be worked upon so that it's really a positive ESG story if ever we were to do that acquisition?" Around the time of the decision-making, if we get to that point, we actually wanna already have an ESG action plan, kind of in our pockets so that, on day one, so to say, we have a couple of working hypotheses on what we really think the big levers are for ESG for a particular, company. Once we are there and we're signed or closed and so on, well, we're not waiting necessarily for closing. We wanna make sure that a number of things already start being discussed with the management, and that can involve putting in place a responsible for ESG, which in some cases exists, in some cases does not yet exist.
It's important, I think, to have that as a dedicated accountability to actually confirm or change the materiality analysis and really make it a joint exercise, including risks and opportunities with management and of course, the stakeholders, because that's what the materiality analysis does, is actually interviewing all the stakeholders, mapping that, comparing it to the management's view on the business and the ESG aspects, and then making a kind of mapping. Translating that into a sustainability strategy for the activity at hand, and then progressing on it and monitoring the progress along the way and reporting on it. Now, the second thing, of course, we do is once we're really in our active ownership of all of our activities, we really have three things we've been working on.
One is that we make sure that the ESG value creation drivers at the group level are very clear and very concrete. The second is that within each of the businesses, the sustainability strategy becomes into real pillars, and I think we've heard already a lot about that today. Thirdly, our overall reporting and communication keeps evolving every single year, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve in the years to come. First of all, at the group level, we have identified three KPIs. I think I mentioned that already this morning. One is around people engagement, one around customer satisfaction, and one around CO2 emissions. As we have started to do that, we have basically started to measure.
I think for 2020 and 2021, not all the boxes are already filled with numbers, but we have started to progressively start filling the boxes with numbers that are there, that are measured, that we are starting to submit to external assurance, and we've done a limited external assurance already. I think all the boxes where you see little green X's behind it, and I think you heard some of those numbers. You heard about people engagement scores of 88 in Auto in 2021. 88 in Immo, by the way, as well. Around 86 in Belron and so on. Moleskine uses a different score. But also in customer satisfaction, NPS scores you've heard a lot about. Some of them have already been externally validated, others not yet.
In CO2 emissions, it's a journey, of course, because you started with Scope 1 and then we went to Scope 2. We want to, of course, reduce the CO2 emissions very clearly and work on that. Also there, we have started to do some limited external validation already. I think the comparisons between 2020 and 2021 were quite good. We can actually see declines of -17%, -25%, -34%, -11%, and so on. This is really a journey to go on.
What's very important, I think, that we have now also committed ourselves to the science-based targets initiative and to say, well, we will ensure we have a science-based target identified, validated by the institute that does that, and that we can work on that, and that each of our activities that we currently have in our group will drive us by 2025. That at least we are on that way, we're on our journey, and there is, quote-unquote, no way back because it is an important thing to work on. Secondly, on the business-specific sustainability pillars, I already talked a little bit about it. We start with the materiality analysis, risks and opportunities, translate it into strategy, into ambitions, into progress.
You've heard, I think, in each of the four presentations today, exactly what's been going on in that already. This is becoming very concrete, with ambitions and with progress. It will continue to work on. Yeah. We've identified already last year that through the TCFD, so the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures, there are additional requests put upon groups like ours and many corporations, of course, to look at additional items. The climate risk and the fact that you are in a particular business, and there are still different definitions of when a business is included or eligible to be part of that and when you're not eligible, and so this will keep evolving. Some of our activities are already eligible, some of them not yet.
When they are, we of course look at the climate risk, and we involve in that, and we include that into the business-specific sustainability strategies going forward. This is really important that these business-specific. Because that's where the action is, really. If you think about it's in the businesses that it is. I'll give you one example, this in Auto, and I think some of those ambitions were mentioned by Réginald and by Lenny. Well, there are very clear sustainability pillars. They are translated into specific KPIs. It's either on the GHG emissions, or it's on the share of electric vehicles and registrations, or it's on employee engagement scores, or it's on the share of women in CVs, or in recruiting, or in management positions.
We have a value of 2021, and we have a target for 2025, and they are quite ambitious. They are partly linked to hard stuff. I think, Réginald mentioned that we have a sustainability-linked loan at D'Ieteren Automotive. Well, there are actually two targets specifically linked to be reached by 2025. One is a 50% CO2 emissions reduction, and the second is a 28% of fully electric vehicle in the sales of new cars in the year 2025. This is relatively in line with the ambitions that we've seen. Might even go a little bit faster, hopefully, on the sales of the battery electric vehicles. It shows you that I think it's not just a bit about what we are today. It's also about ambitions of 2025.
They are concrete, and they can be linked to very hard things like loans. I think it's a very good thing. We have this, by the way, increasingly at all of our activities. Last but not least, this all leads as well to more and more ESG-rated reporting and communication. I think this is quite important because you may have seen this today, but I think we have started to do that systematically, not only in an annual report, but mainly through that we give detailed disclosure on each of our businesses. I don't necessarily think everybody does that, but we think it's important to be as transparent as possible about it, because that's the name of the game around ESG. Of course, try and quantify it more and more as we can.
Some things are still qualitative, but we wanna be quantified KPIs more and more. We will include the TCFD I already mentioned. The EU taxonomy keeps evolving as well. Every year there's new things, and so we keep monitoring. We keep saying what is valuable, what is value add, and then we will include when we think it is so. Then we put, of course, external assurance on that. Also there, we started limited, and we will expand that over time as well. As you see this in our annual report, which is just coming out, I think has been coming out as we speak online and will be available, you see that we report about this quite extensively and for all to look at.
This is, I think, ESG in a nutshell. I'm sure we could talk a lot more about it. I think we take it very seriously, and it is all over the place within the D'Ieteren Group, both at the group and at the activities. With that, I give back to Arnaud to give us a bit of an outlook on what are our ambitions for 2025, Arnaud.
Thank you. Indeed, a few numbers. You know, sorry for that, but I hope that it will be energizing, inspiring for you, as they are for me, at least. You heard it from the activities. The level of ambition is there, no doubt about that. You know, the commitment to deliver, you've heard them all. You know they're on them. They are focusing on execution, which is really what matters now. What does it give? You know, we wanted to summarize and then add up all those ambitions in order for you to have a clear picture of where we want to land by 2025. You've got here a summary of our activities. You know, starting with D'Ieteren Auto, you heard it, you know, sales growth of 10%.
Who in this room was entering the room by believing that that activity would be growing by 10%? You heard why we believe it's really well-substantiated. You know, we are down the valley, you know, and we see with order book, with the quality of the order book, with the mix of the order book, that it is highly achievable. On top of that, we've got the growth of the new services because we want to provide a better sustainable mobility for our customers. Then the margin. You know, we are not in a. We do not believe that the margins will be diminishing. On the contrary, we are managing for value more and more. We are looking at cost opportunities. We are looking at pricing opportunities. The new activities should be enhancing that margin in the future.
We strongly believe that we'll be over the 4% EBIT margin by 2025. In terms of free cash flow, it's really an ambitious target, that one, you know, because you remember what we've generated the last two years. That's sometimes the beauty of activities when business, you know, the environment is a little bit more, a little bit tougher. You know, we generate massive free cash flow the last two years. I think it's close to EUR 270 million of free cash flow generated by that activity alone, and we expect it to continue because of the improved profitability, because of the discipline on CapEx and on working capital. Then on Belron, you heard it.
You know, the ambition is there too, and it's a continuation of what they've been doing the last years, you know. About top line, you heard it. We do that for the last 30 years. It's a continuation of what we've been doing, and the opportunities are there. The opportunities to gain market share, the investment we do in digital, the more complex job that we are performing create a higher barrier of entry for our competitors. We believe that we'll continuously be able to translate that into higher AGP, the average job price. We continue to gain market share. ADAS is a clear tailwind. You know, you've seen the demonstration there. It's the penetration rate of 24%. We know mathematically, arithmetically it will continue to grow, you know.
The same for VAPS, because we know that by benchmarking the countries, it's an organization, you know, when you tell them there is an opportunity there, they grab it and they go for it, okay? High single-digit in terms of sales. The margin more than 25%. 23%, sorry, by 2025. You've seen the trajectory. We were quite low, frankly, you know, in 2016, 2017. The trajectory has been extraordinary, and we continue to believe that there is more to come because of the value mix, because of the way we will improve the productivity of our technician, because of the way we'll improve all the operations, the back office, you know, with the transformation plan, because of top line and because of ADAS and VAPS, which have a relatively good contribution, as you can imagine.
Okay? In terms of free cash flow, it's also there. Even if we are investing quite heavily in new tooling, you heard it, in order to reinforce our competitive position, we'll be hopefully generating EUR 800 million, more than EUR 850 million a year, and that's the net cash flow. It's with the current interest rates we know, with the current tax rate we know, but it's quite significant. This includes, by the way, some M&A spend, you know, in that number. For TVH Parts, you heard it, you know, 8%. 8% before inflation, okay? It's a kind of not only volume because there is some value there.
There is some value and there is some volume, but we are not in that number capturing the opportunities that an inflationary environment brings to us, you know, and our capacity to translate that into higher prices. 8% a year. You know, this is what the company has been achieving for the last 20 years, okay? Once again, no revolution, no big change. You know, it's just continuing to execute in a market full of opportunities. Operating margin above 14%, which is, you know, for a distribution company, it's quite extraordinary. You heard Dominiek , you know, about the impact that the mix of segments could have, you know. We'll see. It's probably, you know, it has to be managed. We hope that by gaining market share there, we'll be able to improve potentially.
Still, quite a comfortable EBIT margin and a free cash flow, you know, targeting EUR 170 million by 2025, and investing heavily in our footprint. You heard it, you've seen it. You know, we've got more than 300,000 square meters of warehouse. We continue to build on that because it's a critical, you know, advantage for us to be able to have the right footprint closer to the end customers with the adequate technology in the warehouses. Substantial investments there. Once again, that will reinforce the position of the company going forward. Maurice, you heard it, you know, low double-digit top line growth, you know. It's probably just above the one of D'Ieteren, with an adjusted EBIT margin above 25%, you know, going back to a historical level.
You heard the relentless focus of Daniela about gross margin, you know, growing top line in the adequate products, you know, in the adequate categories, in the adequate segments of the market, you know. We believe that we'll go there and hopefully higher and with an adjusted free cash flow by 2025 above EUR 30 million. That will also help, you know, in deleveraging the company, not only for the bank debt, you know, but reimbursing cash to the end owner. The next exercise is relatively simple. You know, as I mentioned in my introduction, it's just adding numbers to give you a flavor of where we would be landing in terms of EBIT if everything comes to fruition by 2025. You see where we...
Well, the trajectory has been fine till 2021, and we continue on that trajectory. We believe that our activities combined at the group share, you know, will be over the mark of EUR 1 billion EBIT for the group share. Okay? This is without the contribution of PHE, which, you know, you've seen what we expect for 2023. By 2025, it hopefully will be much higher than that. Quite an ambitious plan, realistically ambitious, you know, and we like to have that kind of challenges in front of us and hopefully to deliver and even do better than that. You know our KPI, the profit before tax group share. There, we just miss the mark.
You know, we've been maybe a little bit too conservative there, but we just missed the mark of EUR 1 billion by reaching hopefully more than EUR 950 million. Sorry. Yes, thank you, Francis. By 2025, there is also a guidance for 2022, and I will come back on that. This is a consequence, of course, of what you've seen before. You know, the EBIT, we've got relatively low financial charges, and so the adjusted PBT just below EUR 1 billion. What about free cash flow? You heard it. You know, we tried during this presentation to be relatively systematic on some financial KPIs, you know, and free cash flow is an essential dimension for us in terms of value creation.
If we add up all the free cash flow of our activities, you know, and this is the equity free cash flow. It's after, you know, paying taxes, interest, working cap, CapEx, some M&A for Belron. You know, we expect to be close to EUR 2 billion, you know, in accumulated free cash flow for the period, which is quite significant and which will allow the companies to have potentially, you know, some strategic M&A to be able to deliver on that one. But it will also allow the group to capture part of that free cash flow. When I say the group, it's the entire group by increased dividends from the activity, dividend recaps, as I mentioned, for some of them.
Happy deleveraging at the level of the companies and a dividend policy which is very clear, which will be upstreaming the cash at the level of the group, which is, you know, always welcome for you as shareholders, for us as management, and making sure that we continue on our journey around, you know, building a portfolio of companies. Now, I move to current trading. You heard it also from the activities. We are quite pleased, even if the environment, you know, in terms of inflationary pressures, and there have been a lot of questions around it, and I fully understand. Once again, I hope that you have perceived that all our activities, because of their leadership positions, because of the strength of the brands, because of the discipline, and the skills of the management teams, it's...
We are kind of, you know, paranoid about that, you know. It's a topic we discuss with all the management team, making sure that exploiting is not the right word, you know, but we are not complacent with inflation, and we can reflect inflationary pressure in our prices because we deliver extraordinary services. Okay. That's very, very clear, you know, that we should not be shy about that because it's the right thing to do, because we face inflationary pressures and some of those inflationary pressures, we do not even see them today. There will be some lagging effect, you know. Salaries, you know, are not adjusted immediately, so we'll see that maybe more in the second half of the year. Some material costs, you know, we see them relatively quickly. Transport, we saw that already, you know, in 2021.
Once again, the message there is to the management teams, and they do not need us to do it, you know, it's not to be complacent, making sure that we, you know, capitalize on our strengths, you know, and that we increase our prices. Okay. Strong brands, distribution models also, you know, you heard it's essentially distribution models. When you've got inventory and the management and fortunately, you know, D'Ieteren could not move up its inventory because we are not receiving the cars. For the other activities, I think we played it relatively smart. You know, you heard Daniela speaking about the Never Out of Stock. We built quite considerable inventory in order to be sure that we can deliver.
You heard Dominiek and Mark about anticipating, you know, because we knew that after a crisis, it comes back, you know, and investing in inventory way in advance, and we reap the benefit of that today. Same more or less for Belron, which is even, you know, it's a little bit under tension always, but also anticipating relatively well on the inventory needs. You know, I will not be repeating what you heard from the activities, but this is an obsessional, you know, discussion we have, making sure that we can reflect inflationary pressures on our sales price and potentially benefiting from it. Trading level of our activities. You heard it, so I'll be summarizing there again. Once again, the D'Ieteren has had an extraordinary performance.
I think that we should recognize that, you know, in such a tough environment, you know, where the cars are simply not there. The customers are queuing, you've seen the order book, but we cannot deliver. By the way, you know, I've got a lot of sympathy for the teams there, the commercial teams, which probably have on the phone their customers waiting for their cars and not getting them. Frankly, the performance during the first quarter has been extraordinary in those very, very tough circumstances. Volume down and sales up 7%. Volume down close to 15%. Okay. Positive mix impact, so we are pleased with that. As you can imagine, sales diversification starts to bear benefits and fruits and, the order book, you know, is just incredible with very, very low cancellations, as mentioned by Danny.
Belron, again, you know, what a quarter. Not in such easy circumstances, especially for Europe, you know, because the weather, we do not blame the weather anymore, you know that. It has been a relatively mild weather. While it was better for us in the US, but again, you know, what a strong performance. You remember when we presented the guidance for the year, we said that it would be more volume-driven than anything else. You see here the contribution of high volumes close to 10%, but also of course, the tailwinds, you know, the famous tailwinds of ADAS and VAPS continuing to contribute and some price, of course, some price increases and a little bit, well, relatively strong dollar helping the performance with +4%.
TVH Parts, wow, what a quarter, you know, +23%. Of course, there were positive tailwinds from acquisition and from FX. Even before that, after that, you know, look at the performance. It's mainly volume and some price, nice price actions, you know, tactical price actions which have been taken here. We believe that we are gaining market share. We've got the inventory, so it's a great opportunity to capitalize on that and really reinforce our positions in the market and, you know, quite impressive performance by the team there. Once again, just imagine, you know, get out of COVID. You've got people coming back at work and generating those levels of performance, of growth is really, you know, highly demanding for the organization.
We keep very high engagement scores, so I think full credit for the team. Same for Moleskine, you know, back to growth, you know, +29% with some positive tailwind from FX. Once again, U.S. are back on track. You know, we see some traction there. Same for Europe, you know, recovering progressively. The retail segment progressively also recovering, not yet totally where we were in 2019, but it bodes well, you know, for the rest of the year with a positive FX impact of +5%. PHE. You know, I mentioned the performance of 2021, but look at the start of the year. You know, in a sector you know, probably would not imagine that, you know, this is the kind of growth we could see.
Once again, strict discipline on price, market share gains, good volumes, you know, and little help of acquisitions. Organically +9.4% and M&A growth +5.1%. Very solid numbers indeed for the first quarter. I know that this may be for you the disappointing part of the presentation here, you know, by confirming the guidance. Once again, we are not in. You know that. We are not publishing any quarterly results. We will be potentially guiding the, maybe guiding a new or having a new guidance when we'll be publishing the first half results. Indeed, the business has been performing well, you know, very well during the first quarter. We are happy about that. The world is incredibly uncertain and volatile outside.
We want to remain relatively cautious. We want to have the first half of the year under, you know, in the bag before reassessing potentially, you know, the outlook. I will not read it, but you know the outlook we've given when we provide the guidance, when we announce our yearly results. We stick to the guidance as of now. You know, it's a growth of minimum 25% of our as-adjusted growth, adjusted PBT group share, and it is, of course, before PHE. Francis?
We have time for questions, if you want.
Oh, of course. Any questions?
Thank you. I guess you've said indeed that the activities will generate very significant free cash flow and quite a bit of that will be upstreamed to D'Ieteren. You've mentioned something which I found interesting, that there will be room for strategic M&A. Do we have to understand that you could basically reinvest, for instance, in TVH in case you would have like a beautiful and significant acquisition there?
Yeah. Well, you heard it from the manager. You know, if there are nice transformative M&A, and it's the case for TVH, it's the case for Moleskine, it's the case for D'Ieteren, also it's the case for Belron. You know, for all our activities, you know, we would not be shying away from strategic M&A, making sure that they are value creators, because, you know, sometimes strategic M&A is a word for value destruction. Yes, we'll be-
And if you-
You know, we'll seize opportunities if they are relevant and value creative.
Over the next, let's say, four years, what is, in your view, the likelihood that you actually invest in a handful of new activities? I understand one, two, three, four, or rather reinvest in the business.
You need two to tango, you know, and we need to be sure. Well, there will be opportunities, okay? The question is the valuation good for us? That's a challenge even in the current environment, you know. The valuation, the public market has been declining a little bit, but not on the private side. You know, M&A remain relatively intense. Private equity has a lot of firepower. They are looking at all the opportunities, and it's still a very competitive world there. You know, we would welcome a crisis there, you know, a kind of crisis on debt, you know, because all our activities are very well financed, you know, which will probably, hopefully mitigate the appetite and the firepower of those private equity houses. You know, we...
Once again, you heard the criteria from Francis, okay? We have a very disciplined approach in terms of screening, and we see a lot of opportunities. It has to meet some criteria about management teams. The intention of management teams to work with us, that for us, it's one of the most important criteria. That is, their desire to enter into a company, a family-owned company, listed family-owned company like D'Ieteren, you know, because this is a different trajectory than being owned by private equity. Okay? We need really two to tango in making sure that the valuation compelling, that we can create value. I guess you know that you heard the growth prospect of TVH. You know, the multiple was relatively rich, but you hear the growth prospects. You know, it's
We'll have forgotten about that multiple very, very soon. Then for PHE, you remember the multiples, you know, 7x EBITDA. It seems to be very compelling for management team, where we believe that we have a lot of things to do together for the coming years.
I think that was my last question. On PHE indeed, it is, if I'm correct, the first time that you buy actually a company which was owned by private equity. Can you tell us more about the incentive structure that you have in mind for this management team? What kind of dilution should we have in mind, thinking about Belron here, of course?
I will not enter into too much detail about the capital structure. The good news is that the management team is reinvesting more than we expected, you know, in the equity of this transaction. The equity of this transaction is around EUR 540 million, okay? Maybe more, maybe a little bit less, you know, in function of some reinvestments. The management is reinvesting a higher percentage of what they have, that they will receive, you know, when we'll do the sale. That's the first point. Then, you know, we create kind of curves with them in order to say and we create kind of synthetic exit because we'll not be exiting that activity. You know, we are not sellers of assets.
We create kind of synthetic exit with applying the multiple of entry to the EBITDA minus financial debt. We look at the value creation in terms of equity in five years with the management, and in function of the multiple of our equity, you know, we'll share a more than proportionate share of of the value creation with them. I will not give you the detail of the curve. Nobody's quite a nice one, you know, if they're able to double, triple the value of the company.
Next question.
Yeah, a question from the online audience. Did you already have a long-term leverage target in mind for PHE? Will this be in line with your existing portfolio company?
It's a very good question. It's a relatively highly leveraged company as we speak. For us, it's a kind of cap, and we're expecting their free cash flow and their growth, you know, to be able to mitigate, to diminish that. On top of that, we are trying to put in place a financing where we could temporarily go above the current metrics. You know, we would like, in 5 years, for example, if I'm projecting myself in 5 years, you know, to have a lower leverage, you know, and probably go at around 3x, 2.5x for that company.
All right. One more question.
Yeah.
Iman Kempen. On PHE. Maybe I heard it wrong, but I think during the presentation of D'Ieteren Auto, I think it was mentioned that if you move towards electric cars, that the impact on spare part business could be 30%. I know that this is really long-term trajectory, so it would only impact PHE probably in more or less 10 years. Still, I would be happy to hear how you believe you can manage that.
We strongly believe in electrification of the car park and especially new car sales, you know, will be. You heard the targets of Denis about that. We believe that electrification will be impactful. The countries we're in France, in Italy and in Spain, which are the three largest countries, you know, we believe that that trend will be there, but not as aggressive as in Belgium. In our analysis, you know, by 2030, I think we believe that this could have an impact, you know, that the electric cars in the car park, because the car park in France is relatively much older than the car park in Belgium, that it could have an impact of 6% of the car park being electric in France.
The impact will be much more modest at that time. On top of that, you know, electrification increase dramatically complexity, increase also dramatically the competencies you need to have in order to work on those cars. This will bring us other opportunities. We'll broaden the scope, the range of products. Once again, due to our size, you know, we'll be, you know, one of the only being able to provide service and parts for that activity. On top of that, you know, in the current mix of activity of PHE, the internal combustion engine represents only 25% of their sales. The parts to be replaced for the engine represent only 25% of the sales. It's relatively modest, you know, at the end of the day, the impact by 2030.
After that, it can increase, you know, because the penetration rate will continue, but we'll be managing that.
Thank you. Another one that I have is on TVH. Could you disclose the dividend policy?
You know, we've agreed on a payout which is just north of 50%.
And then, uh-
I think you allow me to say that. I've got the Chairman here.
a final question I have, not sure if it's too important, but I think I was a bit surprised to hear that at Belron, this is the only asset where in the free cash flow guidance it includes some M&A.
Yes.
Is that because it's not too much? Or because if I look back historically, I think M&A could be around EUR 70 million per annum.
Well, it depends on.
Of course, there were some big transactions in that. If you excluded it.
Yes. Yeah, you know, because you had to hold on that numbers, you know, which was the largest acquisitions with Eviden. In fact, that is a little bit skewing the numbers. No, I think it's a realistic number. M&A, you never know. We've taken a kind of average, you know, what we believe we'll be delivering and doing there. It's a guess, you know, which is educated, but you know, with some volatility in that number.
That's rather EUR 40-50 million included for M&A.
Yes.
Yeah. Thank you.
All right. Let's try and wrap up. Yeah. One more question? Sure. Sorry. Two questions then. Okay. Two last questions.
Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I was wondering if I can come back on PHE. Because one of the striking element to me when I'm listening to the presentations is there is one common factor between the different businesses. One of them being logistic flows management and competencies on logistic. When I'm hearing you on PHE, I think that you mentioned that you do not expect much synergies between PHEs, TVH, and the others. Is it because it's not closed yet, and therefore should we expect any updates on the synergies that you can extract from the different businesses on this element? Or how do you see the synergies between the different businesses?
Well,
I mean, if I may start, maybe you can follow up. As you know, we don't look for hard synergies between our activities. Each family member has its own identity and has its own strategy, its own approach. Nevertheless, you can do lots of best practice exchanges. If you talk about that topic, it is clear that given our portfolio today and tomorrow even more, there's lots of stuff to learn from each other. Fully realizing that even if it's the word logistics, what the logistics is supposed to do in PHE is not the same as what it's supposed to do in TVH or what it's supposed to do in D'Ieteren Automotive or in Moleskine or in Belron for that matter. It's not the same.
It has the same word, logistics, but what's behind that may be very different realities. There's lots of learnings, per definition, lots of learnings. That goes without saying that we will exchange either bilaterally or multilaterally on topics that are pertinent. As you know, we don't look for hard synergies between the activities because that's not the nature of our group that we're building.
Perfect.
It's good, huh? Yeah.
Well.
I would hire him, yeah.
No, I have, if I may, three very short questions. Two are very smart and one is stupid, and we're never gonna answer that. The first two are on PHE. Can you help me reconciling the 2021 EBITDA with the pre-tax profit? I mean, because it's your 2023-
Pre-tax profit expected is far below what I would imagine being the 21 pre-tax. What is EUR 100? Is it EUR 150 that you expect, but you say EUR 100 so you don't disappoint the market? The second question, I give you all the questions.
That was a smart question or?
Yeah, this is a smart question. The second question is on Belron and their recalibrations. I mean, you've always been talking about 2% increase in the percentage of recap.
No, 4%.
1%.
4%.
4%.
1.1% for quarter, 4% per year.
Yeah, 4%.
The contribution to sales, you know, you've seen it is 2% incremental growth.
Yeah. Eventually, during today's presentation and stuff, you made us understanding that this could actually be a bit better than that. The acceleration can be even greater. On your forecast, you remain more or less, actually a bit less, than this 4% increase. Is there any sense in that or I've been reading
No, no. I mean, you see the curves. Management showed some curves for some of the key countries. Not all countries, but some of the top countries.
That is the curve.
It's
No, no, that is the curve of cars having.
No, penetration of.
Of ADAS in-
ADAS within replacements
Within cars. Yeah.
Within cars. Yes, exactly. You have to still translate it.
Okay. Within cars. There's a market share that.
Yeah
Due to legislation.
Yeah
due to that you naturally gain.
Yes
which is not included.
No.
Maybe.
That's right.
PHE.
PHE, I'll try. Maybe I will need the help of my team here. But, you know, Well, they published, you know, EUR 246 million of EBITDA. You've got a relatively high right of use, then you've got the real depreciation, so you can deduct a little bit more than 90 million out of that to get to the EBIT level. Okay. This brings us, let's say, to 150 million. Then you've got 60 million, a little more than 60 million of financial charge because they pay relatively high interest rates. You get to 90, a little bit more, less than 90 million.
Maybe I was missing the right of use and.
Exactly.
Okay. The last question, the most stupid, where there has been no answer. What the potential way out for Belron private equity is? I mean, have you? Because as-
It's a good question.
We are shareholders of the holding company, and we recognize that that asset, which currently representing 70% plus of the overall value in our eyes, is underrepresented by the current share price of D'Ieteren shares. One way of unlocking that value would be just to ask the market to value it. Yeah. You can do it one way, two ways. They sell it to the market as an IPO. You do the IPO, you give us the Belron shares like Ferrari with the Fiat did in the past, yeah?
Like Porsche with Volkswagen.
Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Well, you know, how many times? It's
No, it's. You know, it's not a stupid question at all. I think, you know, we've got. We are very happy about the shareholders who are sitting around the table next to us. You know, we were very happy about CD&R. We are very happy to have. Can you imagine, you know, we've got the best of breed, I think. You know, with Hellman & Friedman, BlackRock and GIC. It's a very, you know, fantastic club of shareholders. We know for sure that they will be exiting at some point. What we've created with this transaction, you know, it's creating more optionality. You know, we give a little more time to CD&R. We institutionalize the shareholder base of the company, and that could be a trajectory for the future. We don't know.
It could be an IPO, it could be another round with private equity, with financial institutions or with institutions, you know, entering into the share ownership of Belron. By the way, it allows us to come back on this transaction, you know. Once again, this is a demonstration that Belron is one of the best service company in the world. I know that some of you knew that. You had anticipated that. You've seen the multiple, you know, it's a quite nice multiple. I mean, it's not stretched, you know. We've got probably the most astute investors in the world having paid for that. Okay? I was a little bit upset by the comment we received, you know, when we published our annual results.
You know, kind of discussing about the performance of the second half. They are not looking at it, you know. They are looking way further, and we are happy to have them on board.
Thank you.
Yeah. Really gonna have to stop the questioning. Is it a very short one?
Just a quick follow-up on the PHE.
Okay.
Sorry. You said EUR 90 million PBT for PHE. I think you said CapEx was about 2.5% of sales. Is that right? Cash flow.
Yes. Without right of use.
Okay. Which is a cash line.
Yes.
Okay. Is there much difference between the cash flow and the PBT, I guess?
Yes.
But-
There's a big difference between which cash flow and the PBT?
Well, free cash flow and net income. Is there much?
Yes. That's the best proxy you can have.
They're about similar.
Yes.
Okay, thanks. All right.
All right. It has been a very intense day. I'll keep it quite short. I have three key messages looking backwards. I have three key messages looking forward. What I would like you to take away from today, it's another ESG. It's the E from execute, the S from share, and the G from grow. We've seen ambitious medium-term targets, and so a lot of focus on execution in each of our activities with, of course, the strong management teams, but also with the best practice sharing, which I think you can really now start doing a lot more between the activities. Execute is absolutely key. Share. There's lots, I think, if you look at those plans to share in the years to come with management teams, with the personnel, towards society, but also with you shareholders.
I think you've heard about the dividend policy for us as a group, and the way that we will be able to create some momentum around that going forwards. Growth is that we want to continue to grow, yeah? Of course, first of all, help each of our activities to grow and to have the means to grow, but also to continue on our own journey. We don't have two hands, actually, we have one big hand. We'll in the family add one family member at a time, and we'll keep doing our origination along that matter. I can say our mission is very clear. Our focus on excellence is very sharp. Our hunger for meaningful impact is absolutely intact.
There will be lots of uncertainty going forward, I'm sure, but we're very excited for the years ahead and look forward already to the next investor day in a couple of years from now. Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. There is one thing I can do as a CEO and also as chief thank you officer, and it's to thank actually not only the management teams that were here today. I know you're all in very, very busy agendas, and to actually consecrate a day and all the preparation for this day towards our investors, really appreciate it. To see the people and to hear the stories behind the numbers, very important. Thank you all very, very much for making that time. That deserves an applause.
Last but not least, a big thank you to all the people involved in the organization of today. I do have to look a little bit at my list, so that I don't miss anything. It starts with the D'Ieteren events team under the leadership of Aurélie, who has been really behind the scenes working day and night to make this happen. Dimitri and the hostesses, who have been very helpful throughout today. Pierre and the whole team of technicians on everything that worked for both here in the room and for the live streaming. My real boss, of course, Nancy, who has been very much active day and night as well in planning and executing this big event.
Anne-Catherine from communications and ESG, yeah, because together with Celia, our ESG team, I know there's always been a nightmare as well in getting everything ready, but it's in perfect execution. All the colleagues from the corporate team and all the people from the businesses who have helped prepare the presentations, because also making these presentations in more or less a comparable format that would be hopefully understandable for you has been quite some work. Then last but not least, of course, Stéphanie, yeah, our investor relations person, who's really. This is more than day and night. Really, really thank you. You're really here now. Fantastic. Thank you very much, and I wish you all a fantastic evening after we thank all those people.
By the way, there is still something on the way out that you should pick up. There's a little surprise from D'Ieteren Automotive. Then you can walk out either through the ramp, which is the way out, or the stairs to the showroom downstairs to find back your way. You drive out if you have your car.
The Bugatti.
Even better.