Good morning. I am Benjamin Péhau , in charge of financial communication at Econocom. Many thanks to everyone: historical partners of the group, investors, analysts for your presence today. We are delighted to welcome you in Brussels for the presentation of our full-year 2023 results. The presentation will be made by Jean-Louis Bouchard, Chairman and CEO of the group, Patrick van den Berg, Angel Benguigui, our Managing Directors. We will proceed as follows: Jean-Louis Bouchard is going to start with an introduction. Patrick and Angel will comment on the core presentation, including financial and ESG aspects, and a short outlook for the short term. We will finish this session with the traditional Q&A. People attending remotely have the opportunity to ask questions in parallel, directly on the platform. A cocktail will be served after the presentation, which is also the opportunity to meet and discuss with Econocom's management.
Let me start with a video for the 2023 highlights of the group. Many thanks again to everyone.
So it's in English. Okay, I'm going to try to wake up. Hello, everyone. I have not rehearsed in French. I'm going to try to explain to you we came here about three months ago to expose our strategic plan. And yesterday we had a board meeting, and one of the questions of the board which I found was interesting is, you know, a strategic plan, you talk a lot about numbers, numbers everywhere, growing, ratios, and everything. But what is the main difference between before the strategic plan and what do you hope to be after the strategic plan?
To help me to expose this, I will propose you a chart of the history of the group in the last 12 or 14 years, and to outline the main trends so it can be more clear to you where does our strategic plan stand and why have we chosen to grow more organically than to grow by acquisition. Is this the way to do it? Okay, it works.
Does not always work, but it does. I don't have a microphone anymore, so I'll do it without the chart.
Okay. So you see, on the left you have 2009, and then on the right you have 2028. And you see that we have grown a lot before about 10 years from 2009 to 2019 with a microphone.
It can be easier.
It works. It works. Thank you. I cannot do anything without Angel, huh? It's obvious. Okay, thank you. Okay. I will point out with this because otherwise it cannot be read, really. What you have, this is year 2009, and then we grew, we grew mainly by acquisitions. Then at this stage, which you might remember, we had a lot of satellites. We had about 30-35 satellites. Some of the satellites were companies that were acquired for technology in the tech world, and some of them we merged with our main activities, and some we sold, mainly making profit. And only out of 36, three bankrupt, but the 33 were successful, and about 20 of them were very successful. So we were able to sell some of those companies without maintaining revenues quite at a high level. If I need three hands now.
But as you know, with numbers I've been a magician for 50 years, so I'll try to be for 51 years to show you some magic. So let's okay. Here I point out the EBIT. As you can see, this is the orange curve. So by acquisition we grow the EBIT to a high number, EUR 154 million, but we maintain all the time in the last five years above EUR 100 million EBIT. So even though we sold some companies, we were able to maintain a quite strong revenue and a strong EBIT. But why did we sell those companies? First, because some of them we did not need, and then to do those acquisitions we had to increase our debt. So I'll show you the debt curve. You see the debt is in yellow, and the debt from almost was positive there.
Then we grew a lot of debt, and at some point in time, five years ago, there was some questioning of are we able to pay back this debt. Unfortunately, some of our competitors are not able to pay back their debt, and then they disappear. So it was an internal contest, and we sold some of the companies. We increased our way of operating. We ameliorated our way, and we achieved at the beginning of the COVID, which is a good coincidence, the fact that we had no more debt. And then it was no sense at that time, remember, the cost of fund was almost nil. So we started again to invest, mainly in our main business, which is financing technical equipment and strategic technical equipment, and not really buying companies. We stopped buying companies, but then we went back to normal debt.
As we'll be exposed later on, we have announced that we are divesting three companies, and mainly this debt will go back to a very low number. It could go back to zero if we wanted to, but now we are going to invest into two directions. The first one is internal organic development with hiring a very strong new salesforce and training this salesforce, which is quite costly. And at the same time, we'll start again buying companies to achieve about a EUR 400 million business in acquisition, and we already have started this process, and Patrick and Angel will describe to you later on. So you see there is a main change of strategy: organic growth, acquisition not organic growth, excuse me, acquisition growth, external growth, flat, and now we're stuck again with an organic growth. Why is that?
Because first, it's almost impossible to do well the two things at the same time. I'm trying to do 3 things at the same time. I'm not very successful, but when you do it with 30 companies, it's quite difficult and it's straining for a lot of people. Secondly, if we go back to our main activity of Econocom, we are sales. We don't manufacture. We don't develop software, except for very small parts of the group. And we help our customers evolve in the tech world. Tech world is changing. Econocom is 50 years old, and I've been involved in this business for more than 50 years, and it's changing all the time. And for all our main customers, first they are becoming European, so they are getting bigger every time, and then they have to cope with all the tech changes which are happening.
It's more and more complicated. I'll give you an example. Today we talk a lot about remote working, okay? But remote helped us a lot in 2021, 2022 because a lot of people equipped themselves with PCs and laptops and so on, so they were able to work remotely. In the coming year, very soon, next year, the year after, this is going to explode again with the artificial intelligence. I don't know how you say in English, IA, probably. Okay, mainly with the IA because the laptops will have to be much more powerful to cope with IA. So there's going to be, again, a huge change. But at the same time, the remote working used to be personal remote working. Now remote working is group remote working.
And all the group European companies, for example, are asking us to propose some meeting rooms, some of them thousands of meeting rooms, equipped with reliable equipment, not this kind of equipment where we can have one, but I tried it earlier. It does not really work when we propose this way. And if you are a tech chief of a large group and you have to equip your group throughout Europe with about 2,000 or 3,000 meeting rooms, then you need to address security. You need to address equipment. You need to address audiovisual equipment and transmission equipment. And it must work because you're online and seen by everybody in your group. So there's a huge market in front of us.
Our job is to propose to our customers the equipment, the security around the equipment, the operating of the equipment, and the financing of the equipment. So you see that it's very complicated and then that we have to choose. And we have chosen this time to do it organically and not by debt because we still want to remain independent, and every time you have some debt, you lose a part of your independence. To finish this chart, let me show you that as a shareholder I've been a shareholder for a long time, as you know. The number of shares decreased from 181 million- 173 million. So this development was not done by dilution of the shares.
People that were shareholders kept their shares, not only still have their shares today, were not diluted, but the earnings per share went from EUR 0.03 to—again, this year we will propose EUR 0.16 for the shareholder, when the company profit is about, per share, EUR 0.37 or EUR 0.38. So the company remained quite profitable, and this is what we forecast. We forecast the debt to go down this year, probably go back a little bit again with acquisition, and then still going down. We want to keep independence. And the EBIT itself, we foresee the EBIT to grow steadily to close to probably around EUR 200 million in five years from now, three and a half years from now. So what behind it, behind all this, behind those numbers, what are the main changes? The main changes are it's like the we're here in the center of Europe.
The customers are becoming European. They want to be represented everywhere in Europe. The suppliers, our partners, banks, suppliers, equipment, they want us to be European, and we need to be European. For example, if we negotiate to buy 40,000 screens of this type, it's better to buy it on a Europe level than at local level. Same thing when we need to develop tools. And this is behind the numbers. When you have to develop tools in every country, it's better to have the same tools for the same activity than to develop 17 different tools in 17 different countries. It's costly at the beginning, but then you make profit at the end. So these are the big changes behind it. Also, the big changes about it, if you want to grow organically, you need to train people.
We have set up training sessions, and we will train our sales force throughout Europe all year round to have a steady track. Last but not least, to make sure that this works, we have set up a new branch we call BDS, which is Business Development and Support, to make sure that in every country they get the right support and the right access to the main development which is being sold to the key clients. So I hope this helps you understand where this strategic plan stands for and why we announced it three months ago and where do we stand already after three months. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Jean-Louis, for the introduction. Up to me to talk to you about the results of 2023. When I arrived this morning, I had a talk with some of you already, and some said, "Well, a couple of changes in terms of the presentation of the results." That's something, of course, which we anticipated as well as a question. I'm going to start with that because it is directly linked to what we presented at the Capital Markets Day. We talked at the Capital Markets Day about the focus of the group, and saying focus also means that you have to sometimes question what are you going to do with some of the activities that you identify basically as non-core for the group. We identified that we would sell off three companies in 2024.
One of them already included in discontinued activities before, and two others, Les Abeilles and Absolut & Data, both in France. We included them into discontinued operations at the end of 2023. That's basically what we're showing here. Departing from the EUR 2.718 billion of revenues that we reported and published back in 2022, we took out the EUR 127 million related to those two activities mainly to get down to EUR 2.591 billion , sort of the restated 2022 revenue level on which then we will develop also on the next slides the revenue growth that we realized, which, of course, also includes the revenue growth linked to the acquisitions that we did back in 2022. The EUR 57 million that you see here, which is mainly the revenue contribution from Semic and Lydis to Products & Solutions activities that we acquired back in 2022.
In the same logic and also looking at the operating margin, we also, of course, applied it. So the operating margin back in 2022 amounted to EUR 139 million, a EUR 25 million reclassification into discontinued operations in 2022 linked to the two main companies, Les Abeilles and Absolut & Data, to get to a restated 2022 operating margin level of EUR 114 million. It's important to start with that because the presentation, as we will show it to you, is, of course, based about what we call the continued activities of the group because that's our focus going forward, and that's exactly where Jean-Louis referred to as well as part of his explanation in the beginning about the direction and the strategy plan for the group.
So if you then look what that brings in terms of development on revenues and operating margin between 2022 and 2023, the total revenues of the group increased with 3.5% from EUR 2,591 million to EUR 2,681 million. It's a 1.2% organic growth and the difference, of course, then being linked to the impact of the 2022 acquisitions. The operating margin also slightly increased from EUR 114 million to EUR 160 million in 2023 with a stable profitability rate at 4.4% in 2022 and 4.3% in 2023. And we'll go into the activities individually to give you some further background on that. Starting with the Products & Solutions activities from a revenue point of view, still the most important activity within the group with EUR 1,207 million of revenues in 2023 where we encountered a distribution market which developed a bit negatively in 2023.
We realized a negative growth of 2.5% there, total growth, and -6% growth from an organic point of view. But you have to put that percentage into perspective, mainly talking about two items. First of all, the growth realized in 2022 in itself. So realized 15% of organic growth in 2022. So the -6 has to be put into perspective against this +15 plus the market. If you look in general to the workplace market, the B2B workplace market, what we see from talking to our partners, talking to the market, that the overall market trend in 2023 has been rather -15%. So we seem that we do better than the market trend in 2023.
So overall, this revenue development for us is satisfying, also knowing that looking forward, as Jean-Louis mentioned it already, that for 2024 and especially 2025, we see strong opportunities with companies reinvesting post-COVID into a new cycle of hardware and also new technology trends pushing companies to keep on investing in hardware to keep up basically with the software requirements and the tool requirements that are currently in the market. Profitability at 3.6%, EUR 43 million contribution of this activity, slightly down on 2022, which was at 4% at that time, which, of course, linked to the fact that when you have some volume pressure in the market, there's a bit more competition.
I think that the normative sort of profitability rate of this activity should be a bit higher and more in the region of where we were back in 2022, something which we will show as well going into the future. Then the financing activities. Strong growth realized in 2023 with a EUR 1 billion revenue number, EUR 998 million, 11% up and a trend that we have seen across the year 2023 along the different quarters.
Strong revenue growth realized in Germany, in Italy, and other countries as well, driven as well by the fact that with the increase in interest rates, our clients are looking for also alternative financing solutions, have a more cash-focused approach, and basically boosting as well in that way our business opportunities, also supported by the way how we developed our offers over the last year. We talked about the offers at the Capital Markets Day.
We are integrating into the offering much more also a sustainable approach, including refurbish opportunities, replying much more also to the needs of our clients in that respect, which also helps us developing the finance activities going forward. A strong step up on the operating margin towards EUR 47 million, which is more than normative level in terms of percentage, 4.8% in 2023 than in 2022 where we had some one-off items in the first half year that we accounted for. So in terms of operating margin levels and also in terms of percentages for the business, it's really 2023 where we should look at. Then on the services activities. Services activities where in 2022, we still had some negative growth.
We turned that around into 2023 into a positive growth, something we indicated already at the start of the year, but you realized as from the second quarter, in the end realizing EUR 476 million of revenues and a 4.6% growth, which is full organic growth in the year. As mentioned already back in July 2022, on the other side than on the TMF side, we had some positive one-off items. So there again, the 2023 operating margin is the one to look at.
What we said already back in July as well is that we had at the start of the year some challenges in relation to pushing through the cost increases relating to personnel, to energy cost towards our clients as well, something which we managed very well in the second half of the year, increasing the operating margin level from 4.3%- 5.3% for a full-year basis. If you increase it 1% just in the second half of the year, it basically means that the second half of the year in itself brings an operating margin level above 6%, which is really the level at least where we target for also into the future.
So we're very happy with the move and the push that we made there in the second half of the year and to also reconfirm our commitments that we took back in July on this activity. If you then look overall from a simplified income statement point of view, and we mentioned the revenues already with the 3.5% growth and the almost EUR 2.7 billion of revenues, the operating margin, which slightly increased. Just to mention that in our operating margin, we also have the cost of factoring that we use in the business and, of course, also as a result of the increase in interest rates, there was an increase in that cost as well for a bit more than EUR 4 million, EUR 4.4 million. So you have to take that into account also when looking at the operating margin level. Then the operating profit.
So the operating profit from our continuing operations, you see a very strong step up there from EUR 85 million last year to EUR 105 million this year. And that's linked to the strong reduction in relation to the other operating income and expenses. When we presented our 2022 results, we had a quite significant number of other operating expenses. The net amount was around EUR 26 million-EUR 27 million, which decreased significantly to EUR 8 million over 2023. Again, a commitment we took back in February 2023 already that this number would decrease significantly and it would help us also in basically boosting the net profit from our continuing activities in 2023. And that's what we realized.
If you then look at the net profit level from continuing operations, of course, that's impacted by tax impacts on the higher results, also impacted by the increase in interest rates, so EUR 4 million higher net tax charges and around EUR 6 million increase of the net financial interest expenses directly linked to the increase, of course, in the interest rates, but still showing a strong step up on the net profit from continued business activities from EUR 49 million in 2022 to EUR 59 million in 2023. Now, rounding off with the net profit and the net profit being impacted by the impact of the discontinued activities, and where we had a higher contribution, significantly higher contribution in 2022 compared to the more normative contribution in 2023.
But as said, those discontinued activities are the companies we're going to sell off at the start of our strategy plan, mainly 2024, as presented already back in November. So what is key for us mainly is to follow the trend on the continued activities because that's where we're focusing on the future, and that's also our future growth and future profitability will come from. Then on net financial debt, this slide basically to show you at the end of 2023 what is the mix between cash and the funding elements. EUR 225 million of cash. You see also the EUR 200 million of bonds financing, which was secured at the start of 2023, still at very attractive rates at that time. So that helped us a lot as well.
Basically showing you that we have a very flexible financing structure in terms of the financing lines that we have put in place, both confirmed and confirmed lines, which would also help us in the future, especially thinking again about also the investments that we have planned for this year to optimize the net financial debt and thus also optimize the financial interest expenses going forward. What is important to mention, if you look to the net financial debt level, I'll go to the next slide, the net financial debt that increased from EUR 143 million in 2022 to EUR 181 million this year, that there is a EUR 70 million lower level of deconsolidated factoring and reverse factoring at group level.
So basically, that EUR 70 million should be included and offset against what you see here in the free cash flow, the -EUR 56 million of working capital movement, showing that on an adjusted basis for the factoring, there's actually a positive working capital impact, EUR 14 million, which goes in line with what we presented last year already, our objectives to optimize the cash management and the working capital potential for the group. So if you look at the free cash flow from last year, which is presented here as EUR 67 million, this year -EUR 14 million, you have to adjust for this EUR 70 million of difference in the deconsolidated factoring levels for the group.
For the other items, I think it speaks rather for itself, especially also on the cash-out items linked to the dividends that were paid, the share premium refund, and the share buybacks that we did also during the year 2023. But as mentioned, EUR 181 million of net debt today is the starting point before also doing the investments that we have planned.
Rounding off on the financial debt, we always talk to you like in the previous meeting about the operating cash surplus, which basically means starting from our net financial debt, we adjust that number for the discounted future cash flows from our own book lease operations. So lease deals where we decided to invest in ourselves in the last years and representing a EUR 209 million of future cash flows for Econocom, which basically means that on that adjusted basis, there's a EUR 28 million of operational cash surplus.
First, it's important to share that with you to show what the impact is of the investment that we made in our own book deals as Econocom. We talk a lot about financials, but of course, we also want to talk about our non-financial performance with a couple of key achievements on the ESG, starting with investing also in more utilization of green energy. So in 2023 in France and in Spain, we decided to go for almost fully a green energy solution, where in 2022, we were not yet using that. We made that move.
We are increasing the number of refurbished equipment, which increased by around 20% over the last two years, of course, also helped by the acquisition of EcoFactory, the reconditioning activities that we did back in 2022, and that will help us boosting that number even further in the future, and investing in our gender equality as well by increasing the ratio from 83- 86 on 100 in France. These are also commitments that we took in the strategy plan and that we'll keep on investing in as a group in the years to come. Our EcoVadis ranking, that's where we made a move in 2023, moving into the gold status, as you will see here. But what's more important is to show the speed and the rhythm at which we are progressing. So back in 2022, we were still, let's say, only at bronze level.
We stepped up very quickly to silver levels and to gold levels over the last couple of years, confirming our ambition to have a platinum rating by 2028 at the end of our strategy plan. Also in 2023, we were for the first time also listed in the Financial Times Diversity Leader listing, which is also an important topic for us where we continue to focus on into the future. Before handing over to Angel to talk about the developments also around our strategy plan, I'm going to show you a quick video in relation to our impact report, our impact report, which was a hardcopy document which we launched every year, a quite static document. I wanted, of course, to make that more dynamic and make that also more sustainable and economically friendly, environmentally friendly.
So we decided to change that into an impact website, which allows us to be much more dynamic in sharing the different initiatives that we take as Econocom in relation to sustainability with the market, with our partners, and have really a dynamic environment to do so and not just, let's say, a static environment. You're going to see a small video on that. So as said, the report will be available in this digital format on the website by the end of March. I'd like to hand over to Angel to give us an update on the One Econocom strategy plan.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, everybody. It's a pleasure that all of you are here with us for this results presentation. I will tell you about what we are doing in 2024.
As you know, we expected to start our strategic plan with around EUR 2.7 billion turnover, 4.3% of operating margin on revenue, and more or less EUR 63 million net income. Our starting point is the one we planned in October. This is the first good news. We are starting where we wanted to be. We are, of course, maintaining all our objectives in our strategic plan. As you know, for 2028, it is to double our net income, to get EUR 4 billion revenue, and to improve our profitability rate. As we told in November, EUR 900 million of this growth will come on organic and around the EUR 400 million coming from acquisitions where we need to improve our capabilities and where we can't do it on our own.
So coming back to these main levers for reaching our targets, the first one and the main one for improving our organic growth is, of course, to strongly grow our salesforce. And then we started a strong program into the group in order to very ambitious in order to develop our salesforce with agents and the sales, all the countries, all the activities. And I can tell you that is something that will be working because all the managing directors, we are directly involved with a high percentage of our variables. So this is very important for the group in 2024. And we are all aware about that. That is one of the pillars of the success of the growth for the next years. The second one is to increase the cross-sell between the different activities and the different countries.
And the third one, to develop new offerings and end-to-end and as-a-service offerings. This is something that, as you could see in the film, will be developed by Israel, that is here with us, in the new business development support direction in the group. And then we are looking for new targets in the main activities and the main countries where we want to be for external growth than for acquisitions. In terms of capabilities and verticals, we are very strong in the workplace. We have strong capabilities in distribution, financing, and services. We are not very strong in audiovisual, but we have some good capabilities. You know that we launched Gather. You could see in the film at the beginning. We launched Gather in 2023, and we already have a good pipe of deals or European deals.
So taking profit of the experience that we have in the Netherlands, in France, in Spain, we are able now to develop European deals in this vertical, but we will be improving our capabilities. The infra network is more or less the same situation. We have 14% of our revenue on infra network, but we want to develop. Finally, on the non-IT assets financing, we also want to develop ourselves. So now we have capabilities, 65% around the workplace, 35% around audiovisual, infra network, and strategic assets and equipments. But what we want is to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions in all the countries where we are present and with all the capabilities, including the design, including the refurbishment, and with distribution financing and managed services in all the countries for all the verticals.
So our aim is to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions for these verticals in all the main European countries where we are. And we are starting in a very good way because we launched a new offering in September coming from Financing France. It's a very easy solution, and it's called EASI. It's Econocom as a service for impact. This is an end-to-end solution around the workplace that includes design, distribution, financing, services, and refurbishment. And we have a good pipe around this new solution, but we already signed already. And it's not so easy to launch a solution in September and to sign a very nice deal, EUR 5 million, 11,000 devices, many countries around the workplace with the largest European agricultural group InVivo. So it's a nice achievement. It's a new as-a-service solution. It's the center of our strategic plan.
So you know that we have many streams to develop for executing our strategic plan, and we have to be focused. So we are focusing in 2024 in some main streams. On the organization and governance, we have a COMEX, Jean-Louis, Patrick, and myself, once a week. We have a group management committee, 15 people, once a month physically, main country managers and managing directors. This is the operational direction for the business all over the group. And we are trying with this new organization to be able to work in transverse, to work in collaboration, all activities and all the countries. For that also and for alignment on offering and deploy largest sales coverage, business development support is a sponsor in two committees for transverse conversations between the countries and activities and developing the international deals.
We are, as I said, putting a lot of investment in 2024 on sales recruitment with a central team that will be helping all the countries and activities for that. We already decided to put in place a new direction around all the tools and the data intelligence in group with Quentin, that is also here. I mean, I think that these are the main streams where we want to focus: on recruitment, on business development and alignment on offering, and on tools and data intelligence in order to be able to harmonize the offering because we can have the same offering, but if we don't have the same tools, it's very difficult to execute. So to tell you that also, in order to fund the journey Patrick already told about, we are looking for investments.
So I think that we will be able to tell you something in the next weeks, next months about these 3 subsidiaries that are not in the scope of the strategic plan and that are for sale. We come to our main points of outlook. For 2024, we are where we wanted to be. We have a development plan that already is in place. I hope that we will be able to tell you something about that very quickly. I can tell you that it will be a nice reduction of debt for the group and not a reduction for revenue and EBIT for this year. That we already have a pipe of acquisitions, mainly in audiovisual, on the first step, and in distribution also all over Europe, accelerating recruitments, deploying new offerings. Then our only guidance for 2024 will be on the revenue. Why?
Because we have to do some investments. So it will depend also on the results of the year. But we are planning investments in recruitments. We are planning some investments in data intelligence. And we are also planning some investments for acquisitions. So we will not be giving guidance in terms of results, but we can tell you that our aim is to grow between 3%-5% on revenue in 2024. And we expect that mainly in H2, the distribution market will be improving. So we think that it will be more on Q3 and Q4 that we will be able to give you good results on that. So these are our expectations for the year. These are the main streams where we are focusing our efforts. This is the way we are executing the plan with the priorities with 2024 that are very clear.
And now time for Q&A. We are at your disposal for answering all the questions that you may have.
Ready for questions?
Absolutely.
Well, you know that before questions, first, let's make this meeting a bit lively because we are not getting a seat, but it could be. You all know the story about the three envelopes. You know the manager that is being made redundant, and he greets his successor, and he hands him three envelopes. Yo u know the story?
Tell me all the rest.
You're going to be concerned because you've been here two years. You say every year you will open one envelope. So after one year, the manager opens one envelope, and he reads, and he says, "Blame your predecessor." Okay? And the second year goes around. Then he opens an envelope and says, "Blame the market." And after three years, he opens the last envelope.
Blame yourself?
I say, "No, no." He says, "Set up three envelopes." Well, Patrick has been here two years, so now.
Thank you very much. I'm waiting for the envelopes.
Okay. So now I hand up the responsibility to you to manage answering the questions.
Very good.
But for some of the questions, I can handle it. Okay? Yes. Okay, Benjamin.
Thank you for some questions maybe from the room. And then we go into questions maybe from.
Thank you. Thanks. And thank you for the clear presentation. I have some, let's say, boring question on 2024, and you've already partially answered. So indeed, so as Angel said, you have a sales target. You don't have a profitability target. Could you give us some hints about, let's say, the potential impact still of your growth investments? We understand that, okay, you want to plan or lay out the foundation for the coming years of growth and also profitability improvement. Could you give us a bit of a range maybe of how much pain you're ready to endure to invest in your growth? Yeah. Could you give us a bit? Yeah. That's my first question. Thank you.
I won't put a number to it as such. It's not going to be significant in the end in terms of the impact because when Angel mentioned that we target the 3%-5% growth, growth will result in additional contribution in terms of results as well. That contribution should allow us to carry out most of the investments we want to do and we plan to do as part of the start of the strategy plan.
But then again, we want to be and we are free to sort of accelerate. Now, when you prepare a plan based on organic growth and you want to relaunch that organic growth, you have to invest. You have to invest into the organization, into the people, into the recruitments, all the topics that Angel mentioned as well. And keeping up with the trend that we included in the strategy plan, it is important that in 2024 we do that because basically to launch it and to boost it and to make sure that the trend also for the years to come will be there as planned. But no worries. No, there's nothing going to be significant as such. But we just want to give ourselves a bit of flexibility there, which I think is very logical at the start of a strategy plan.
Well, I know most of you would like the profit to increase. But why? The reason is, do we have to increase the profit? Of course, for the shareholders, it's a good thing to increase the profit if you're going to sell short term. But if you're a long-term player, you have to choose between increasing the profit shortly or making investments so you'll make a much higher profit later on. Also, one of the reasons could be that we need it for bank support, but we don't need more bank support. We have more than we need. At this time, we have close to between EUR 3 million and EUR 400 million commitment from banks, secure bank loans. We are using maybe 1/3 of it, maybe less. So we don't really need the money with the banks.
As Angel told you, we probably will get some money from our deficiency shortly or before summer anyway. Apart from me as a long shareholder, I have fixed a minimum of what we should get, which is about the same as this year. We could also decide to invest more rapidly and to get less. We have made the decision to grow at the speed that we have shown you on the plan. I think as a main shareholder and to protect the actual shareholder and the future shareholder, I think it is a good strategy.
Okay. Thank you. The other question is on the leasing, so TMF. To me, the growth, as I see it, but I didn't have the, let's say, the pro forma sales figures in the past. It looks to me like there was a growth acceleration in Q4. I think you said that the growth was actually more continued throughout the year. But in my view, it's not what was reported as far as, let's say, the first nine months. So I have the impression that the growth really accelerated in Q4. And correct me if I'm wrong here. So should we expect so this 10% organic growth, should we expect this type of the same level? Was there something special, basically, in 2023?
No, it's more about.
Peut-on mettre à ça parce qu'on ne voit pas à ça? C'est très désagréable. Nous, on est les vedettes, mais on ne voit pas les piqueurs, donc.
Après, on connaît nos on est un connaît-on-copain, c'est bien ça.
Oui, oui, mais on connaît la voie, mais on n'est pas sûrs.
Maybe I can speak about the TMF activity.
Yeah. No, no. I'll explain on the number because I understand the question on the trend. I'll come back to it.
But the trend, as you were able to see, even if we put in the numbers of 2023, the discontinued activities on TMF, we still are growing strongly in TMF. Okay? So this is the result of investing in Salesforce in the last two years. We already told you some presentations ago that we were investing strongly in TMF in all the countries. I think that in 2023, we had the result of these internal investments with very good results in our TMF activity in countries like Patrick mentioned, in Germany. In Germany, we doubled the production in TMF in 2023. We are expecting a good growth for 2024. In Italy, we come back to be one of the main ones in the market. In Spain.
In the rest of the countries, we are in a very good situation. We already reinforced the teams. I really think that we will keep on going with a good and strong development in growing in TMF. We also have a differentiator compared to the competitors. We have a Fast Asset Strategic Financing. We have a central team at group level who is able to originate with the countries and to structure and to finance and refinance on a hybrid way, some refinancing without recourse, some refinancing with recourse, and some deconsolidation that is bringing a lot of value to these activities. I really think that we are in a good way to strongly becoming the leader on TMF in Europe.
And maybe to come back to your question because if you look at the seasonality, in the first half of 2022, we had a couple of larger TMF financing operations. And those larger deals were in 2023, mainly in the second half of the year. And when we presented the half-year results, we had explained that especially on those larger deals, the timing or the phasing is not always the same year on year. So there has been a difference in terms of seasonality between 2022 and 2023, which you can indeed clearly see. So probably your perception about the strong growth in 2023 is also impacted by the fact that the large operations we had in 2022 were mainly at the start of 2022. We had larger operations in 2023. We're also at the second half of 2023. So you have that seasonality impact.
I think it's important then to look at the overall trend that we presented today on a continued activity basis year on year. And yes, we remain very positive about the outlook of that activity.
Okay. Thank you. And I forgot to introduce myself. So David Vagman from ING. One very last question. We had a very nice jump in profitability in leasing, if I'm correct, in 2023 versus 2022. Now, I'm talking excluding the discontinued activities. If I look at the profitability in leasing in 2022, can you come back on this big jump, and is it sustainable, putting aside the growth investments?
It's mainly that 2023 is the year to look at. In 2022, we had a couple of one-off items that impacted negatively the 2022 results. So if you look in terms of the profitability and the profitability percentage, which is up to 4.8% in 2023, that's basically the number to look at. So going forward, and that's also our reflection and assumptions that we included in the strategy plan, that's sort of the level where we target on and maybe a bit more, which is also behind basically the growth in the operating margin percentage that we included in our strategy plan.
To remind, we came from 4.3%. We want to go up to 5.1%. But it includes already some of those movements. If you look back to 2022, basically, there were some asset negative one-off items in the financing activities, positive impacts in service activities, but they're more or less balanced out from a total consolidated point of view. So if you look at the consolidated results of Econocom, you can really compare like for like. From a profitability percentage point of view per activity, you should really base yourselves on what we have just presented in relation to 2023 with the ambition, of course, to increase that going forward.
Thank you.
Let me give you some help to understand Econocom because when I read comments from the press or from analysts, it always comes back as it's difficult to understand. For 50 years, I've heard why don't you do like the others? As soon as somebody tells me, "This is how it's done elsewhere," once every two times, I say, "I don't want to do the same elsewhere." One of the reasons is 50 years ago, 55 years ago, I was with IBM.
Since then, most of the companies that existed at that time did disappear. So if you do it like the others, you disappear probably sooner. From all the companies that started at that time or did exist, one is left is IBM. The other one is Capgemini. All the others have disappeared or have been created since. So we are different, but they are not involved in hardware, Arthur Andersen or Capgemini or so forth. It's mostly software. So we are not involved in software. So we don't want to be doing the same thing the others are doing. We always question ourselves, "What should we be doing? What is being done elsewhere, which is good and we can adapt, and what is different?
What should we keep to be different, to be on the market, and to serve our customers? Every time you try to compare to the rest, which is normal, and it's a good thing to do, but then we have to choose. This is our management and administrator job to choose between what is different, what should be different, and what should be the same. It's one of the reasons you have difficulties to compare us. But even though we are trying, we understand very well what you need. As you've seen, we come here more and more often to speak to you, to speak English to you, sometimes Spanish to you. But still, every time, you might be surprised that, "Oh no, we're not going to do exactly the same as XYZ."
But the focus that we bring into the company helps going forward. There have been, indeed, over the last couple of years some movements with companies that were sold. I know there have been some companies into discontinued and out of discontinued. That focus that you have now determined as part of the strategy plan, because at that time there was not just such a clear direction that we have today, makes it very clear for the future and will help us also in giving that guidance more clearly to you in the future.
Yes. This is very important because some of the questions we have, not directly, is said, "Why do you stay in the market? Why do you stay listed?" On the price today, we see a lot of companies buying back their shares or being delisted. We have the same questions. First, if the share stays low, we probably go on buying some more shares.
Why? Not to have more than 52% because not only I have 52%, but I have double voting right. So the maximum is the ceiling. So it won't give us anything. But buying some shares today could be a tool for us tomorrow or the next day to buy a significant company paying with shares if the price of the shares go back up or to a normal price or at least to a higher price. That could be one of the reasons. The second one is because it helps a lot the management to be listed because it forces us for the type of exercise we're doing today. But all year around, we have to keep discipline because we are listed. We have to keep discipline about communication. We have to keep discipline about debt. We have to keep discipline about all types of discipline.
It's easier when you have a listed group and you, partners, your bankers, your analysts behind us because we have to keep this discipline. If you're not listed, you need then to have a very strong name behind you or reputation behind you. I don't want to go out of the listing. I think you're helping us a lot.
Thank you.
Lucas Vermeij, Degroof Petercam . One question about the divestments. With the capital markets there, you mentioned EUR 180 million in proceeds. Is that based on the three companies you have now as discontinued, or do you expect to do anything on top of that? And also, do you expect to make a book profit on the ones that you will be divesting in 2024?
The number stays the same. We put EUR 180 million in capital markets day presentation. That's still the target for those three companies. We're not coming today on the upside that could potentially come from an accounting point of view from the sales as we are still in discussion. But we'll get back on that to the market once we are in a more advanced stage on those discussions and to inform you on that later.
Yeah. We still think it's positive.
Yeah. It should be positive. Yeah. You should also not link that to what you mentioned on the outlook. You should not think that because of those divestments, there might be a negative impact because that's not the case because otherwise, there's no need to sell. There's no need to sell a company which in itself is contributing for, in the end, a negative contribution in the results once you sell it because also from a debt point of view, it's good to lower the debt and to optimize the financial interest expenses and everything. But you have to do the deal at the right value at the right moment in time. That's what we do because we are not pressured. We have time on our sides to do that and to do it properly. That's what we're going to do.
My second question is about your interest rate policy because the interest rate environment is becoming more volatile. Your contracts can be quite flexible for your customers. So how do you hedge yourself against the changes, especially increases in the interest rates?
On interest rates, we already were facing that last couple of years. From the point of view of the business, for us, increasing the interest rates on the financing activity is a good thing. From the point of view of the debt of the group, we issued EUR 200 million bonds at three, five, seven years, one year and a half before with an average cost of 2%. So from the point of view of the business, it's good. From the point of view of the financing of the company, when we will be getting some money from the divestments, we will not have so much credit on variable rates. And we expect a decrease in the rates all over the year to come.
Okay. My final question for now is about the 3%-5% revenue growth guidance for 2024. Do you include acquisitions, and do you have anything in the pipeline that could make a significant contribution to that in this year?
Yeah. It's a total growth percentage. If you get back to what we mentioned at the capital markets day for 2024, the question was asked. I mentioned as part of the model that we prepared, we targeted 2.5%-3% organic growth into 2024, basically, as Angel mentioned, with more growth potential in the second half of 2024 from a market point of view. The 3%-5% range is indeed linked to the fact that we expect also to be able to do some acquisitions in 2024 on top of that. So that's why we have presented that range.
We are indeed very actively also Benjamin, who's also in charge of M&A, part working on that, talking to acquisition targets. But as you mentioned in the strategy plan, I want to repeat that it's not doing acquisitions to do acquisitions. It's to do acquisitions to complete our offering in certain geographies, in certain activities, to accelerate the organic growth. So the backbone of the plan remains organic growth. And we use external growth to basically complete the offer and accelerate organic growth.
So that's the way how we look at acquisition opportunities for the group going forward, which is very good because it gives a great dynamic in a way how we discuss between the group and also the entities locally on what are basically the companies and the activities to look into and to buy into as something which I think will indeed translate also in 2024 already in some first moves and some first acquisitions as well.
Thank you.
So maybe one question from people in remote. When looking at the metrics of your offerings, geographies, where do you consider you need to accelerate? In which country do you need organically from an M&A perspective, you should accelerate?
There is a country that is very important for us: Germany, because even if we are having a very good success in organic growth, but it's too important not to acquire companies in Germany. So Germany is really a target. The Netherlands is also a target.
Thank you, Angel.
And it's a pleasure. And from the point of view of the verticals, I would say the visual is a target, clearly. I would say even before Infra Network. So we want to do everything, but we can't do everything in the first year. So I would say Germany, Netherlands, and the audiovisual in different countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, and France.
But focus. Again, focus is the key word. Just to be which geographies, which activities, as what Angel mentioned, then do it step by step.
Thank you. And this specific point, focus, is important, is key. Question about the strategic plan and the challenge that the group is facing. How are you organized internally to make sure that you are not diluting your efforts and focus on the actions?
I think what's important is to keep the strengths when you launch a new strategy plan and not to say we're going to do things completely different because Econocom has proven to be very resilient over the last years and decades even. So do not change what works well. So in terms of organization, we do have our activity structure. We do have our country structure, our country management structure with clear P&L management responsibilities.
I want to keep that responsibility because it's a very strong element of our organization currently with very strong local management that's very engaged to their own geographies, to their own activities, to their own teams to perform and to deliver their results. Basically, what we're adding on top of that to facilitate them to further grow and build the business are departments like the business development and support activity with Israel that Jean-Louis and Angel mentioned already earlier today, basically to facilitate growth, to allow for the companies to accelerate on growth, and to make sure we work more together between geographies, between the different activities, and support basically the entities to work more and better together and allow for that organic growth but not basically changing or breaking the existing sort of management and reporting structure, which worked very well.
Thank you, Patrick.
I can add some comments. If you're asking me, which is not the case, but if you were asking me, what are my main concerns now, February 15, for the next three or five years, what would it be? Well, as I said earlier, Econocom is people and sales. So my main concern is people: to acquire people, to attract people, to keep the good people, to challenge the people. As you see, the COVID crisis made the people relationship with the corporation move and change. Typically, one of the concerns is having people back to the office. There's two ways to do it. One way is to oblige them to come. The other way is to make such a social life inside the office that people want to come. This is the way we have chosen. Our challenge is to switch people.
Some of the people, after such a track, are tired about what they have done. So we need to change jobs between people to make them alive again, to make them challenged. Then we need new kind of people. We have this guy in the first row here that comes from Arthur Andersen. He is the head of BDS. He's been with the group for five years now. And it's a huge change because him with my son Quentin and his team, they're going all around Europe, first to develop business and then to support, but strongly support, you know what I mean, to make sure it works. And an example is we are working a lot. Quentin has been made responsible for all the tools in the company. If you want to, we are in 17 countries, more than 60 companies, and we have to align all those tools.
It's a big challenge, but it's a people challenge. So it's all about people. And we're not concerned maybe we should, but we are not concerned about financial or market trends. We're lucky today to be in a place where the market trends, basic market trends, are good. And we are supported by our financial world and by the banks. Thank you. And we are made all our efforts to deserve it. We are supported by you with communication. Now we need to not remotivate, but upgrade the motivation of the people as we are on this stage or we are in this room, but to make it to 8,000 people and to acquire and to attract some very top management to share this exciting challenge.
And a changing world with the office is also an opportunity.
Coming back to the audiovisual activities that we have, a lot of companies are rethinking the way how their offices should work, how they should be organized also from a technological point of view, which also gives us opportunities from a business point of view. It's one of the reasonings also behind further developing the audiovisual activities as a group. And we see it all the time. When we go to our clients, smaller, bigger clients as well, there's big potential there because everybody is going in that route and in that direction of rethinking the role of the office and how they want to further increase also the employee satisfaction in a way by setting up a structure that works best. And technology can absolutely and will absolutely support in it.
Thank you. Are there any more questions?
Yeah. Maybe one final question.
Yes. Final question before we switch from coffee to something harder.
Relating to the sorry. Non-financing, non-strategic asset financing activity, where do you see your competitive advantage in this industry?
You want to take the one, Angel?
First of all, our competitors, they already are financing also non-IT assets: industrial, logistics, healthcare. So we do, as they do, since a long time, financing without recourse with our partners. But our competitive advantage is clearly our FAST team. So we have a team specialized in structuring these kinds of complex deals. Sometimes these are medium-sized big deals. And this is a competitive advantage because we are facing a budget about EUR 160 million production for this year. We booked EUR 130 million last year. And the good thing is that the technicity that we could be able to develop internally means that this is not meaning EUR 160 million more debt. This is meaning a great part of this production is deconsolidated, and a certain part of this production is syndicated. So this is our very nice competitive advantage.
Thank you, Angel.
Okay. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
Please join us for a drink next door.
Don't hesitate. We're available.