Good morning. We have not talked for another three years. Actually, I didn't realize it was so long. A lot of things have happened since then, and today we're going to talk to you about what we've done over the past three years, what we expect to do in the next three years. We have a few presenters. I will start then. We'll have a presentation on listed investment by Frédéric Oudéa, who's our executive senior advisor. We'll have a presentation on private investment by Michaël Bitard, indirect private investment by Joe Topley. That is what's called now GBL Capital. Then we will have capital allocation ESG by Frédéric again. In the middle of that, almost forgot you, there will be a presentation on Affidea, which is one of our private assets by its CEO who is kind enough came to this presentation.
So that's the agenda. It's quite ambitious agenda and of course we expect to have time to finalize with some Q and A session. The duration of with will depend on the velocity of this. So we better get going. So just maybe coming back to that I've said coming back to your first page, sorry I said we haven't talked for three years. A lot of things have happened since our last presentation, 2021 first one is that I remember we're in a room like this and half the people were wearing masks at the time. We're still in the, I would say the tail of the COVID that then we followed by hikes and downs from the market, interest rates, roller coasters, geopolitics. There's a lot that have happened as we all know.
And then of course the last event is yesterday, election of Donald Trump for a second term. It's hard to know what's going to come, but there's at least two things I believe we should be sure about for Europe. The first one is that the support for Ukraine will probably not be what it was and we'll see what that leads to. And the second one is that there will likely be tariffs between Europe and the U.S. So both of which I don't think are necessarily good news. But anyway we will see. We should let the dust settle. But I would say this is one of the short term events that we should be seeing coming our way anyway. So what we want to do is basically benefit from who we are, from our DNA, from our permanent capital, from our family DNA.
You know that we're controlled by two families. It's very important in our thinking and our acting. We want of course to differentiate our sourcing ability. And we will illustrate that by examples. But we think there is basically room for people like us that have that DNA family, that DNA permanent capital. And that differentiates us from a lot of the peers, a lot of the private equity houses. We have some playbook as well that we will talk about permanent capital. You all know what it means. We don't need to raise and return capital. Agility because we do minority or majority. We do private or listed companies. We have a real partnership focus. A number of the deals we have executed have been executed thanks to that partnership focus with families, with founders. And we try to be moderated in our leverage at the holding level.
Our current loan-to-value is at 7%, and also in the portfolio, we try to limit leverage in everything we do. So this is just a snapshot, although it's a busy page, on what has happened since we last talked in 2021. The important numbers are that there's been a lot of investments in the first two years. You'll see the names. Most of our private names were acquired during that period. Affidea, Canyon, Voodoo. We've been less active. You will see in the last two years because I believe we've been disciplined. We thought that the bid-ask spread was just too high. And we passed on many opportunities that were otherwise attractive, but the price we believed was not attractive. In the same period, we have sold some assets. We'll come back to that. We have continued our share buyback.
You know, it's an important part of what we've done over the past years. So we spent EUR 2 billion over the past years buying our own stock because we thought it was cheap, because we thought it was the best utilization of our money. Our discount was and still very high. And along the way we have increased the weight of our private assets. It was 17%. It's not more than double that. And that's the direction of travel that you will see in the future. And lastly, it says we're ready to accelerate as markets reopens. We have looked at quite a few things over the past years. Again even this year, never found what we wanted. Either not a good asset or not a good price. Now it's looking like the market is reopening and we expect to see more investments.
We are actually active right now in one or two processes. But there are opportunities coming back and we think we will be there to seize the opportunities. This is just a snapshot of what we told you in 2021. I think it's always good to look back and see what has worked, what has not worked. We talked about the listed assets. We believe that there we have had a mixed performance. I think it's fair to say that it comes mostly from our top three names. You know our top three assets are Adidas, SGS, and Pernod. And those three assets have had difficulties over the past years. Thank God. Not all at the same time, but in different moments. At some point Adidas had some issues from China, from Kanye West.
I'm not going to re-explain the whole story, but we had to take action, and we're instrumental in the change in management. SGS had its own set of issues, and we also were very active in bringing in the new management team. Both companies have rebounded very nicely since then, and hopefully will continue to perform. This year Pernod Ricard, which had otherwise very well performed over the past two years, is now going through difficulties that are mostly, I would say, industry-wide difficulties, and we'll talk about that as well. Private investments. By the way, there are other names that also have not performed, and I think we'll talk about those later. On the private investments, I think we're basically on track. We have done the deals we wanted to do, and they're all performing very well.
Guy will present on Affidea, which is the largest investment we've made, which is performing very well. Indirect private investments. That is GBL Capital. In 2021 it was called Sienna Capital. We changed the name just because we had another Sienna vehicle. It was a bit confusing. So GBL Capital now indirect private investment mid teens on track and asset management not exactly gone the way we would have liked. So we basically took our foot off the gas pedal. We just want to clean it before we redeploy. We're finalizing the restructuring this year. Sienna Investment Managers will be profitable this year. I mean 2025 and we'll see from there what we do. But first it was fix, make profitable and then develop. We haven't yet entered the develop phase but that's what's coming next. This is an overview of our portfolio.
It's EUR 17 billion worth of assets. The color code is where we're the largest shareholder and where we're not. There's quite a lot of blue. But you know, you know this portfolio, most of you, it's composed of, you know, high quality companies usually with solid balance sheets and with growth potential. So very happy with that. Interesting that we're actually number one shareholder in 85% of our assets. That's important because, you know, you would argue it's good to be majority. Yes. But if you're the largest shareholder at the table, you still have a voice whether you're majority owner or not. So we're the largest shareholder at the table in 85% of the portfolio. And we also majority owner of 25% of the portfolio. These three assets private there we're larger shareholder. We're majority owner.
Imerys, we are also majority owners and of course GBL Capital, but that doesn't count. I think just to keep in mind, because sometimes I read that, you know, we're a passive investor. No, even if we're not the largest shareholder, we're not passive. Certainly if we are the largest shareholder at the table, we're quite active. As I said, in nearly 25% of those assets, we're actually majority shareholders. This is just basically a strategic objective that we have set ourselves for the next years. We want to grow NAV per share, of course. I mean everything starts from that. How do we do that? We're going to continue to support listed investments. Objectives that they will represent approximately 50%. This is indicative, of course, but that's sort of direction of travel.
The two private investments, direct and indirect together will represent about 50% versus 26% today. There will be of course, asset management. We will see. I think we want to be quite opportunistic about that. As I said, fix and then develop. We're still in fixing mode. The good news is this asset management that's called Sienna Investment Managers, it's not basically valued. I mean, you don't give it value when you do sum-of-the-parts, it's worth zero. That's fine. It's actually worth a little more than zero. It's basically the cost of some of the acquisitions we've made. But anyway, I think there's upside that there is potential in it, but we want to be very prudent in the way we present it. Increased NAV per share, increased distribution, we've talked about that. We will distribute this year.
We'll propose to the AGM the distribution of EUR 5 per share. That will be the base for future dividends, which we intend to increase every year, and we want to continue share buybacks while maintaining conservative leverage. So that's really what we intend to do: start developing more on the private assets, be opportunistic on the listed ones. If the market corrects 20%-30% in the next year or next three years, we will be there ready and seize opportunities. There's always a list of names, list of companies that we like, list of sectors that we like, that we continue to monitor. And if some of these companies become available at the right price, we want to be ready to invest. So it's not all about private; it's priority to private assets where we think we can create more value, be more agile.
And I think in this environment being agile is the name of the game. So we want that agility, we want the smaller base where we can actually double or triple the size of the company. But we also want to remain opportunistic with listed companies. As I said, if market is correct, we will be more active in listed companies. This is just a simple illustration, but I insisted to put that page because sometimes what's obvious is not so obvious. Okay, so what's worth EUR 1 billion in our books? It's actually worth in our market cap at 600 million. Why? Because we have a 40% discount. Why we have 40% discount? Well, there's many ways you can explain that. First of all, all holding companies trade at a discount. If you ask me, I think it's at least twice as twice too much. But fine.
I think it's linked to the performance and I think we should revert that. One way we can revert that is actually if we dispose EUR 1 billion of assets and distribute part of the proceeds. Well, you know, that would basically unlock the discount. You generate EUR 1 billion in cash, distribute EUR 400 million and reinvest. Sorry, 400. You distribute and you reinvest EUR 600 million. By doing that, you just basically cancel the discount. We're not going to do that to cancel the discount, but I'm just saying we will be selling assets and that will be the crystallizing. The crystallization of the proceeds through the disposal is what this will achieve for us. Again, this is not an objective. This is just an illustration of what we think we're going to do with discount.
At the beginning, I was very, when I say the beginning, it was 10 years ago, very obsessed with this discount. I'm not anymore. I'm just saying, you know, there is a discount. Let's utilize it. Let's basically distribute some assets, some proceeds. So this is really what we want to commit for the next three years. As I said, we want to grow the NAV per share. We want to basically deliver double TSR per year, and we want to redeploy some of the proceeds we will make. By the way, this presentation is already online, and Alison, our IR that you all know, said our stock price is up 2.5% based on this. So don't mess up in your presentation. So I'm going to try not to mess up. The disposal is basically EUR 1.7 billion worth of Adidas shares.
I'll come back to that in a minute, but this is just to illustrate the rest has not been done. We need to divest. I mean, we need to. We have given ourselves an objective to divest EUR 3.3 billion worth of assets in the next three years. That will be a combination of private and listed assets. I would say mostly listed, but not exclusively listed. EUR 1 billion of cash earnings. We have taken into account the fact that we will be selling some shares and some of the listed. So we think that number is conservative, but it's what we have basically put forward, and basically GBL Capital, which will return EUR 1 billion in the next three years. Again, I think we have good visibility on that. So we're quite confident. I'll come back to this page on utilization, but rapidly. Basically we want to reinvest.
With the gains we make, EUR 3 billion return to shareholders. It's the other way around. Sorry. Anyway, we redeploy some and basically distribute the rest. GBL Capital will be basically, you know, eat what you kill. They will distribute and they will be therefore given more money to deploy. If I come back to Adidas, we basically sold EUR 1.7 billion worth of shares that represented 2.9x M OIC and a EUR 1.1 billion capital gain. If you add to that what we sold a few years ago, we sold EUR 2.2 billion worth of Adidas shares for EUR 1.4 billion capital gain and basically a 3X. Today we own 3.5%. We've been long term owners and we want to continue to be long term owners. At least where we are now, 3.5% and it represented EUR 1.4 billion.
So again, been there for over 10 years, been supportive, been there for the good days and the bad days and want to continue to be a shareholder here. Sebastian, who's head of communication and investor relations of Adidas, is here not just to make sure I don't say anything stupid, but also to tell you that there is a strong relationship between our firms and we want to continue to do that. And also let me say that our new CEO Bjørn has done an amazing job since he joined. He joined at a very difficult moment. I explained it earlier, you know, Kanye West, America, Asia, China. Very difficult. China was a very big part of our P and L. It's gone down quite a bit.
Despite all that, he's managed to turn around the organization in a very dramatic way and we're very confident that he will continue. We just needed to crystallize some value because in the past I think it's fair to say that we had emerging winners and we were always under the idea we needed to be there forever. I think the new evolution is we will be more active with our portfolio companies with our listed names and be capable of moving if we think there is some profit. By the way, we've still been there for 10 years and hopefully we'll be there for a number of years. Please report Sebastian, that I said that. Thank you. This is a breakdown of the previous page on the utilization of cash. We want to reinvest basically the cost base.
When we sell, you have the cost base and the profit. So the cost base will be reinvested into new assets to make it simple, and the profit we make will be distributed to shareholders in a combination of dividend, as I said, starting from €5 per share, which is already a big improvement to what we have had over the previous years, which you would remember was €2.75 flat. I think we heard the message. I think flat dividends are not good. I think our shareholders like to have increasing dividends. So from that base we will be increasing dividends every year and we will continue the share buyback. How will we fund that? As I said, from cash earnings and from capital gains and the reinvestment priority to private assets and some opportunistic listed investments.
If we find the right moment, the right target, again, the names are known.
It's just finding the right entry point that's the important part here. This is basically an overview. I don't know if you're familiar to this, to the current team and to where we want to take it. We have about 20-25 investment professionals. We have a team of experienced, you know, this is just the managing directors or the partners. All of them have 20+ years of experience. Some more just because they're older, like Frédéric, he's now Senior Executive Advisor. 30+ y ears of experience. Michaël, who will present, has been with us for a long time. He was at BNP Paribas. Luca joined us from Tikehau. He's based in Milan, you know, some of the others.
Important is people don't necessarily know that, but we have five offices and this is going to basically expand because we're opening an office in Italy and an office in Milan, sorry in Germany. The five actually has already the Milan one, but I think with the German one we'll have six offices across Europe. That's basically the model we like to have. Here is basically an overview of where our network comes from. It's extensive. It comes from our board. It comes by the way from the board of the listed companies we sit in, where we have a lot of smart people with smart ideas. Very useful when we look at an opportunity in consumer goods. We can call someone from the board of Pernod Ricard, for example. If it's a more industrial company, we can talk with someone about Imerys.
So we have a lot of talent in the boards. We have of course, the shareholding families that are not on a day to day necessarily very active, but they're very active if you need them to open the door or to facilitate an introduction. So it's a differentiating factor, we think GBL Capital also, and we'll present it in a second, gives us access to a number of very smart investors and in specific cases we can actually call some of the funds or firms we invest into to basically pick their brains and get a better sense of an opportunity. The ESG function of course is important as well. And our corporate finance team also very active. So all that gives us an ecosystem that gives us an edge, gives us a differentiating factor we believe basically gives us a better understanding of the opportunities we look at.
That's it. Okay. I was much faster than I should have been. Sorry, I thought I had a lot of page. So I'll now introduce the next speaker, which is Frédéric. He will basically talk to you about our listed investment and about value creation across the board. Thank you very much.
Good morning to all. Let me just highlight that Ian has already largely commented on the playbook we want to deploy in terms of value creation. With discipline, we provide support to our boards and management teams in the key aspects, different aspects which I think should ensure the success of our portfolio companies. We will present in the minutes to come some more concrete examples. I just would like to highlight first of all the specific focus on growth opportunities when we invest. Both organic growth, but of course the M&A opportunities, the built up opportunities. Second, governance lever is obviously a key element for us. We ensure that we have quality of board, quality of management teams and we do that with our family driven philosophy, looking of course at the long term and being committed shareholder.
The last thing I would like to highlight is of course ESG. We try to ensure that ESG is embedded in the strategy of our different, in the right and adequate way and of course we try to help our companies to anticipate the evolution of the regulatory framework. We have here tried to illustrate on this slide the different dimensions on which we have contributed in the last 18 months in the different companies. I will comment in a minute more in detail the SGS example, but let me first of course again highlight the spectacular rebound of Adidas. Ian commented on this in the last 18 months things have really changed a lot.
We consider that Adidas has defined a right strategic roadmap, investing in new attractive products, putting emphasis also on operational excellence to improve the margin and has sorted out of course the Kanye West issue. The company is well equipped in our view to deliver strong performance in the coming quarters on the back of a solid growth. Regarding Pernod Ricard, Ian commented already about the sector and the difficulties of the sector, but still Pernod Ricard is acting. And then when you look of course on the right of the slide you can see that we have even more levers on which we can act for private companies which are generally speaking less mature than the listed ones. Michaël will elaborate on this more in detail.
Let me say now a few words on SGS which I think is a good example on how we can act as a committed and active shareholder. A few words first of all on the company. SGS is the world leader in testing, inspection and certification service sector. It's a market which benefits from an attractive growth above GDP because it benefits from certain structural trends, positive trends, in particular the increasing regulatory requirements, for example the reinforcement of the sustainability ones. It's also still a fragmented market and the leaders in this sector have opportunities to consolidate to make value-creating acquisitions. SGS is number one in this sector, acting in 115 countries, having an annual sale of CHF 6.6 billion and a strong profitability. It has historically been particularly strong in the natural resource sector, the industrial and consumer goods ones.
It has successfully diversified in the health and nutrition and the certification and has recently developed first-in-class expertise in sustainability and digitalization. We at GBL have been instrumental in the changes which took place at the beginning of this year. A new CEO, Géraldine Picaud, who we knew well from her previous CFO role in one of our legacy investments, was appointed. She reshuffled the management team to streamline it and to ensure more simplified decision process and increase accountability. She has also defined a new strategic roadmap that she will detail in the Capital Market Day to come which is scheduled this month on the 19th and 20th of November with a focus in particular on the development in the U.S. and a more active M& A stance. She has also launched an ambitious operational efficiency plan as a result.
On the back of very good first nine months result this year, 7.8% organic growth, steady EBITDA. The share price has improved increased by 27% since the beginning of the year as of the 1st of November, and we consider that the company has still very nice opportunities in the coming years in terms of long-term value creation, and we fully support its management. Let me again remind you a little bit more where we stand with our listed portfolio, and let's have a global look at it. I think it's very important to first keep in mind that four lines represent 90% of the net asset value of the listed portfolio. It is SGS, EUR 3.6 billion value of our stock, Pernod, EUR 2 billion, Adidas, EUR 1.4 billion post our sales, and Imerys, EUR 1.3 billion.
The rest of the portfolio, Umicore, EUR 450 million roughly, Concentrix, EUR 400 million, and Ontex, EUR 150 million, represent altogether a little bit less than EUR 1 billion. That is 10% of the overall listed portfolio. We have already commented on our top four stocks. Everything is not perfect, but we are confident in the opportunities in these four companies. I don't come back to what I've already commented. Let me just highlight that Imerys is also currently trading at a slightly lower multiple than historical average. But we see long-term opportunities in particular in graphite and carbon as well as in the extraction of lithium on the back of the development of the e-mobility. And we have also a successful joint venture on the quartz raw material. The two stocks which have suffered the most in the last 18 months are actually Concentrix and Umicore.
Regarding first of all, Umicore. Umicore is facing the slowdown of the sales of electric vehicles in Europe as well as the competition of the Chinese companies on the overall automobile sector and battery value chain. The current strategy is to optimize the existing capacities regarding the battery material and to maintain of course the strong contribution of the other activities. Catalysis, recycling, specialty metals, which are doing fine. We are confident in the capacity of the new CEO and the new management team to find the right and realistic solutions, and fundamentally with a zero value attributed to the activity on battery material. We consider there is upside going forward regarding this company. Concerning Concentrix, the company suffered from the hype around AI and the perceived risk on outsourced services dedicated to the customer experience.
We consider on the contrary, that AI can be an opportunity provided Concentrix can integrate this new technology in its offers with the capacity actually to provide its clients with more added value services, probably less intensive in terms of human resources. So as you can see, overall we are confident that the valuation of these two stocks should rebound in the midterm if of course we implement successfully the strategy. I will now leave the floor to Michael to comment on the private assets.
Good morning everyone. I am pleased to present the private assets priorities of GBL as a key pillar of our strategy. Why are we focusing on private the overarching reasons is we want to achieve higher returns. And why do we believe we can achieve higher returns in private assets? There's three reasons to that. First, through agile governance in private companies, we believe we can steer more easily strategies and drives change. Drives change where it's needed, drives change when it's needed. Also in our private ambition we target smaller companies. It's easier to grow a company from a lower base. And at GBL, I think Ian mentioned, we like to believe that we can at least double if not triple the size of companies which is easily achieved versus very big companies. The third reason is, as you know, GBL is a long term investor.
A long term investor means we can take longer decisions for what's right for the business. When we have a big CapEx requirement, an IT transformation, an R&D cycle, we will take the decisions that are right for the business and we will not be influenced by the quarterly cadence that we sometimes see in the public markets. Now we are seeing the early signs of success. It's still early days, but if you look at our controlled private assets, Affidea, Sanoptis and Canyon, since GBL entry we have achieved more than 20% revenue and EBITDA growth. Now if you decompose it at revenue level, we have achieved 12% organic growth, which is quite remarkable in this environment. Let me walk you through the typology of transactions we typically look at. We are very clear.
We look at European companies, high quality businesses in which we can deploy large equity checks. The boundaries is about EUR 300 million- EUR 1 billion, although the sweet spot is EUR 500 million- EUR 800 million. But we have set our boundaries. We seek to acquire majority stakes, but we are open to minorities with significant influence. And there's four core verticals across which we spend our time. First, Healthcare, where we try to identify platforms that combine resilience and growth. Of course Sanoptis and Affidea are good examples. In consumer we look for very solid brands which can either expand internationally or go into adjacent markets. In business services we look for very large, deep and fragmented markets where companies demonstrate a high cash flow conversion profile. And in specialty industrials we look for business that have value add and which can command margins, high margins.
This is an important page. This is, I think Ian referred to it as GBL Differentiated sourcing capabilities. At GBL we were very active since three years. We may have looked at more than 300 companies. On the screen you see 200 because we were very conservative in what we penciled down. But in fact it's more while very active. We are also selective. And the first thing we do is we try to meet management. We always like to say that it's always good use of our time to meet with management teams and that gives us a good benchmark. Having met with so many teams to immediately know what great looks like. And that allows us to be selective. And we have therefore a drop rate or a selection rate that is in excess of 90%.
But then at the moment that we decide to double down and run with the situation, we tend to be successful. And we are successful because we are different and we leverage our key strengths. Our key strengths were already mentioned today. Permanent capital, differentiated and far-reaching network, agility and ability to tackle complexity, bringing this to life with our private assets. What we prefer the most is a narrow and bilateral format. I think many investors will tell you that they only look at bilateral situations. The reality is we often find ourselves in such situations because we are a great alternative being different than private equities. That's why we often there. We also have very early sourcing focus and very strong relationship either with vendors, with management teams, with founders.
That was the case at Affidea, Sanoptis, and Webhelp where we were in very narrow formats. Now we can also be successful in wider auctions. If you remember, Canyon was a situation where most big US private equities were chasing these assets. I remember us going to Koblenz in the middle of COVID and immediately you could tell that the fit between Ian and Roman, the founder, was from day one a success. It was a family to family relationship which no other private equity could replicate. And furthermore we could offer a longer term perspective and very moderate leverage which allowed us to prevail in the end. Now this is about sourcing. But I think once we own an asset we also want to be clear about value creation.
I would like to use Affidea as a case study and show you first a short video about what Affidea does to then go on as to the value creation.
At Affidea we believe everyone deserves better access to high quality care. As the largest pan-European provider of community-based polyclinics, advanced diagnostics and specialist healthcare services, patient care is at the forefront of everything we do. With an extensive network of clinics across 15 countries, we work with dedicated medical professionals to provide state-of-the-art healthcare services to millions of patients each year. Affidea clinics offer patients a complete integrated care pathway from consultations, laboratory analysis and diagnostic services in an out-of-hospital setting close to home. These services are increasingly complemented by out-of-hospital treatment services. Our specialist doctors have access to modern diagnostic imaging and lab services enabling best-in-class quality care and turnaround times.
Our services are available in stand-alone community-based clinics but also in co-located hospital facilities providing convenient access to both public and private patients. Across Affidea's growing network we're also developing Centers of Excellence. These facilities have deep expertise in a single specialty and offer end-to-end services particularly in neurological diseases, orthopedics and cancer. We take pride in our comprehensive cancer care pathways dedicated to improving outcomes by enhancing early detection and diagnosis and improving access to radiotherapy services. With strong leadership and clinical governance, these Centers of Excellence serve as an essential reference for the wider Affidea group, promoting and developing innovative service propositions. Affidea is committed to clinical excellence and to advancing healthcare through significant investments in new diagnostic technologies, including AI solutions that enhance diagnostic effectiveness and efficiency.
In a world where doctors are an increasingly scarce resource, our modern polyclinics and Centers of Excellence combined with our dedication to exceptional care provide a highly attractive place to work, and because our services are more accessible, the overall cost of care is reduced which also benefits payers. As public healthcare systems face increasing pressure and patients seek faster, more modern and affordable access to high quality care, Affidea stands out because we always put our patients first. We streamline pathways providing an outstanding care experience and remove the stress of visiting a medical center so patients feel comfortable and supported at every step. We are dedicated to providing exceptional care right at the heart of the community. At Affidea we care.
So let's go back in time for a minute, two years and a half when we identified Affidea as a platform, as a company with real platform value. Why platform value? Because we saw organic growth potential on the back of underlying trends. Aging population, preventive care. We saw business development opportunities going to new countries, bolt-on M&A, strategic M&A, greenfields. We also saw operational improvement potential with margin uplift or implementation of AI tools. Very quickly we realized that to do this and to unleash the full potential we needed to find a high quality management team. And we were very happy to take on board Guy Blomfield and Charles Niehaus to take on this challenge. But not only did we strengthen the team, we also strengthened the board.
We invited Frans van Houten, the former CEO of Philips, to join the board as well. Both Guy and Frans are here today. Thank you for that. Before I invite Guy on stage to share with us how this value creation came along, I would like to remind you that under this collective ownership we have more than doubled EBITDA of this business in 2.5 years and it is still today marked in our books at 1.4x w hich we consider as conservative not only in light of performance but also of some of the P/E rating we have seen in the space.
Looking at RadNet in the US as an example and also when you look at exit or monetization optionality over time with trade buyer in the space, large PE or infra funds that have already signaled interest or even minority process which we internally refer as a private IPO concept with this Guy, may I invite you to share with you the value creation over the past two and a half years.
Delighted to talk to you about Affidea and the leadership that we get with GBL. In many ways the video steals some thunder so I'm going to try and navigate through. We are the largest provider of out of hospital care and it's a phrase that needs to be clarified and I'll capture some points of it as I go through this morning, largest in a number of ways by scope, 15 countries across Europe. Those countries represent over 50% of healthcare spend in Europe and as Michaël has referred to this business model that I will articulate is applicable to other markets as well. By way of example, if we added Germany, that would be 70% of healthcare spend across Europe. 380 centers. The business closed 2022. In terms of GBL's ownership that was very much in the low 300 s.
We're adding circa two centers a month to the portfolio. 14 million patient interventions annually. Actually there's 14 million interventions around 9 million discrete patients. Those are the patients who attend. Not all of them attend every year. You quickly get back into this 15+ million patient pool. Unarguably we have relevance to more patients I would argue than any other provider. If I take our Portugal business. The population of Portugal is 10 million and here we are providing at this scale. T he 2023 sales, circa EUR 850 million. We'll come to the growth profile in a moment. In inception back to July, the numbers would be closer, much closer to the low EUR 700 million, EUR 710 million, that type of level, you can see the growth coming through this point here.
In terms of private payer mix, please don't view public by definition as being the 47 as a negative. We are vendor neutral. It's an important point in healthcare provision. I've worked in healthcare now for well over 20 years and there's a few learning points. One of the key ones is if you can have a business model that is relevant to public commissioners as well as private payers, you can get optimal efficiency, optimal relevance and you can switch patients from public to private when the public can't necessarily give them the access or the ability to pay. Affidea is absolutely vendor neutral. We have three categories, public, self-pay and increasingly private medical insurance. Private medical insurance is growing at a rapid rate in many countries and as a result we get a higher premium, the same cost to serve equivalent service margin accretion.
If we take Madrid, where our head office is located, our shared service office, PMI penetration is now at 35%. Over the last decade that has doubled and we're seeing post-COVID an increase accordingly. So what are the distributions in terms of the business model across those countries? The majority is what we term as polyclinics. Polyclinics are essentially community based outpatient clinics. They have access to diagnostics and access to lab, but under one roof you would access your specialist. So on the assumption that some of you ski and on the assumption that some of you statistically might have hurt your knee or a meniscus or whatever, if you did, you would access the orthopod directly in our clinic. She would refer you to your MRI scan.
Should you require any bloods or lab, you would get access and under one roof you would have the predictability of knowing A, you would be seen quickly, B, you will get your results for your diagnostics and think it through. If it's meniscus, potentially Affidea could provide your day surgery for that arthroscopy. Now if that's the case, we have a business model where increasingly we can provide more of the care safely and appropriately in these community settings. It provides for an evergreen orientation many of our patients will come through. In terms of cancer pathways, we start off the genesis of Affidea with high-end diagnostics, nuclear medicine, PET CT, MRI scanners. Again, in order to better understand your status in terms of oncology, you have to have access to those diagnostics.
As it stands today, over 50% of oncology care can safely and appropriately be provided in community settings, and we have accelerated the provision of better access to cancer care by doing that. Most people's frame of reference for health care is about 10 km. They don't want to travel to big hospitals necessarily where they can access under one roof the care. I'm dwelling on this slide and I will speed up, but of those patients, if they know they can access their orthopedic needs, they can access their oncology needs, they can access for their pediatrics, for their children under one roof. You are meeting the family need, and we're starting to measure the number of patients that we retain and we're starting to get some fascinating data in terms of very high retention rates as we transition the business to a polyclinic model.
This strategy, I've worked in this space and we referenced Charles Niehaus for a number of years and we worked in a peer company called Alliance Medical. We took that over in 2011 and successfully sold that in 2016. That was a three times money transaction. It was successful, but at the time Affidea was a peer of ours. Affidea was an equivalent across many of the markets we operated. We have held to this model of adding this capability set under one roof beyond diagnostics, by introducing the specialists into the clinics, the clinics that you saw, and we did that rapidly when we did an audit of the clinics that could facilitate that service. The result is compelling. We have had organic growth, as Michael referred to very strong double digit in 2023, high inflation.
Many of the markets you're familiar with have double-digit inflation and in some very high double-digit. But we contained inflation and we contained our margin. My point being is we have in our bailiwick the ability to price accordingly and contain as a result the EBIT margin. In 2023 was maintained and I'm signaling to you that margin, the operating margin of the business is now accreting. Clearly, given the level of growth in EBITDA being above sales. I will come to some numbers in a moment. So how has this been achieved? And I want to bring this full circle back to the presentation earlier, which is these are the pillars by which GBL operates and they're actually very useful because you can just slot in within a matter of weeks.
We did a complete strategic review of the business for its applicability for the outpatient service model. We took those 300 or so clinics and we stratified the market's openness to this service and accelerated it, and as a key theme for everybody, this out of hospital care model is being demanded by patients, public commissioners, private medical insurers that I referred to earlier. There's a theme which I will come to in a moment, that access, care, quality, and cost. If you can crack those in health care, you're in a good place. Access in the community is much easier than going to a hospital where the outpatient department is competing with inpatients, so the strategy pivoted as a result of this. You've got a much more determined model in terms of what assets you want to acquire that would complement the strategy.
And again I'll come to that. I n the 20 years operational excellence across multi sites. All of the experience has been in multi sites, whether dentistry, hospitals, diagnostics or whatever. And putting in place some discipline quickly bears results. And I talk to driving efficiency. A s a result w e have a blue book by way of example for the productivity of an MRI scanner. And I would hazard we're twice as productive as public systems. We would be significantly more productive than most private hospitals. As a result, our average unit cost to serve is lower. And away we go. Digital, I'd expect you to have an interest on essentially, and I am tight on time here. Have I got two more minutes? As I rush through this Digital I'm going to come to. But digital is a key driver and digital enablement is a must have the capital allocation.
We've maintained leverage very strongly and I would be stealing again the governance that is captured by colleagues earlier. But I'm delighted in the way that we are working and clearly the ESG parameter is a very strong theme coming through and we are early adopters in terms of the European regulations. You have seen the types of pictures. But this is a fit for purpose. As you saw in the video. Patients are choosing and they have the choice in the majority of our markets whom their providers should be. It's the modern fit for purpose. The challenge I referred to. I stole my thunder. This access, quality and cost efficiency. But we can demonstrate on each of those parameters how strong we are. As a result, we get commissioned and many of the public sector commissioners are switching care to out of hospital providers such as Affidea.
Where are we investing and what type of returns are we delivering? The clinic extensions is obvious because if you start with a diagnostic imaging clinic, you want to add the polyclinic capability. The returns metrics on those are not adding the expensive equipment because you've already got it. You are adding the consultant capability, the rehab capability, etc. As it stands today, the target is five times but the delivery is much closer to four greenfields. Where we spot a gap, we will put down new assets and we are delivering on this year three of delivering below five times the investment level. As it stands, we're well below that number bolt-on M&A. We inherited a legacy of buying very expensively and we've put in threshold targets from day one.
The result of this is significant because where we add strategic assets, we get the complement and utilization of polyclinics in the community of which we serve. Patients have got more access. The returns metrics are higher and then clearly platform assets of which we have done a number have been very successful in the last two years and we're starting to scale up these investments. All of these have the characteristic in the business case of underpinning future organic growth. I'm signalling as we go into 2025 that the levels I showed earlier we will continue very strong double digit organic growth. Clearly with this investment program, well north of the 20s, I'm going to start to close now. The patient choice and digital enablement go hand in hand.
Affidea's scale allows us to share this investment in digital capability across 380 clinics and north of 10 million patients in a way that other providers at a local level struggle objectively. We are best in class in terms of our digital enablement. The overlay of AI is essential in this space and many of the AI startups have been in diagnostics. We bring a confidence to our patients and commissioners in selecting the right partners to be part of. Affidea means that we can provide the digitization in a way that perhaps others are selecting in a more random way. The governance that we have and the ability to get the proof points with the data sets we have on millions of patients is a further proof point. We've all seen this patient journey.
If we're in healthcare, every business of this nature would proudly put up this is what we do. My closing remarks are as we now know how patients access Affidea. 2/3 of them access through their phone or through a tablet. They digitally interact and expect to be able to access off the back of that. They want predictability and choice in terms of booking, they want to be able to have predictability in terms of the specialists that they see and they want to have certainty of the time frame and we have a charter in terms of delivering on that. It is incredibly difficult for a public sector model to do that. If we can provide the service that is better and provide better access at the same price and we're more efficient because we're sharing the cost, we're in a lovely sweet spot.
And I come back to this doubling of EBITDA. The marginal economics of having one more patient using your MRI scanner is a phenomenal marginal economics. It's about 70% at the margin. So our ability to cope with further inflation through volume, through attractiveness, I would argue is a given. We have a booth over lunch. I would be delighted for you to come and see and my colleagues have been very innovative. They've got VR glasses and it will allow you to walk through some of these centers and experience this said platform and I'd be delighted for you to do it. I'm going to stop there because I've overrun, but thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Guy. We are really pleased to have you as a partner and as you can hear from his words, that we are sitting on quite some untapped value, the way we have valued Affidea in our books. But not only are we very pleased with the development of Affidea, we are also seeing for the upside you in our other controlled assets, starting with Sanoptis, a leading ophthalmologic platform which has a very distinct model where they partner with doctors as minority shareholders. This company has already made quite some progress by outpacing the market growth by demonstrating its M and A machine in still very fragmented markets. It has focused, fostered number one position in Germany and Switzerland and managed to enter into Austria, Greece, Italy and Spain.
And also has proven to be at the forefront of technology by leading the funding raise on an AI ophthalmologic platform. Since we started the journey, we have almost doubled the size of the company and here again conservatively valued in our books at 1.3x . Moving on to Canyon investment that we conducted in 2021, we've gone a long way. We have strengthened the organization under a new leadership team. We have increased our market share in our core franchises, road bikes and gravel bikes. We have continued the international expansion, first in the U.S. but more recently in China. And we have established a solid digital presence having become the number one brand in social media quite significantly ahead of giants like Specialized and Trek.
Since our entry we have doubled revenues, but in a quite challenging and volatile market, we outperformed peer, but nevertheless we have been caught in unexpected volatility. We divide the market in two periods. The 2020, 2021 and 2022 was sort of a COVID-led booming demand mixed with scarcity of supply. You may remember that you were not able to buy a bike at the time. They were simply unavailable. In 2023 and 2024 the market turned and we saw normalization of demand. Still healthy demand, but coupled with oversupply, excess supply has led to discounts. Discounts are leading to weaker profitability and that has delayed our value creation plan. We're spending a lot of time with the team and we continue to believe in the long-term perspective of the brand and the underlying industry. W e have today
Volker Wendel in the room and Nico, founder and CEO of Sanoptis, CEO of Canyon. I do invite you and encourage you to, after this session or a lunch, try to spend some time with them and get a better feel for the state of affairs in those two companies. Now to close my section, I would like to share with you a short video on Canyon with regards to recent partnerships with Mathieu van der Poel. For those who don't know the former world champion road cycling and LeBron James, I'm sure this one you will know as well as recent medals we've won on Tour de France and Paris Olympics, and to share with you how proud we are to be invested in Canyon.
Mathieu van der Poel has some road, he has clearance, he has daylight.
This looked impersonal.
That was absolutely magnificent.
Since you signed with Canyon?
S ix years ago? Yes.
Can you remember how many races you've won?
163.
Yeah, quite a lot.
Good morning everyone. Can I just give a big thank you to Alison to start with, to making my job incredibly difficult to follow the Canyon video. That. Thank you for that. My name is Joe Topley. I'm pleased to present to you GBL Capital, which is our indirect private equity business. I have a couple of slides. The key numbers are on the first one, which I'll come to in a moment. As Ian mentioned at the beginning, GBL Capital used to be known as Sienna Capital, and we made a conscious decision to rebrand the business in March of 2023 to make it very clear to the market, not just you as investors and analysts, but also to the market participants in general, that this was a balance sheet business and not a third party fund management business, so a couple of words about myself.
I joined in September 2023 from Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan where I was a fund investor. I have over 20 years of investing in third party funds and I think that's important for a couple of reasons. One is that pattern recognition is all important. When you look at external managers, you really need to know what good looks like. And I was delighted to join the GBL team to lead GBL Capital just over a year ago. So the key numbers are here behind me. I'm going to start with one number which is EUR 2.8 billion. This is the value of the GBL Capital assets today, which represents about 17% of the total GBL balance sheet. And the idea or the aim is very much to say between 15% and 20% over time. And we manage the business accordingly.
The core purpose of GBL Capital, there are two reasons that we exist. The first is as a diversifier. The point is that we have a lot of consumer assets at group level. Adidas, Pernod Ricard, Canyon. You've seen them just now. We have an ability to diversify away from consumer and into other areas which we don't pursue on a direct basis. I'll give you one example, which is enterprise software. We have Voodoo in our portfolio, but really we have very little exposure to the enterprise software market and we as GBL Capital can do that. The second reason is geographic diversification. As you know, on the direct side, we invest in European headquartered businesses. At GBL Capital we can get exposure to North American businesses as well. We're not doing anything in Asia. But so diversification is the first key purpose.
The second one is cash generation, and when I joined GBL I was very, very clear that the key purpose really above all of GBL Capital is to produce consistent cash generation. We will end this year generating over EUR 400 million of cash which can be reinvested into new assets but also upstreamed into dividends, so those are the two key purposes. When I started to discuss with Ian the idea of joining the firm, we went through together a process of developing a new strategy. It's not a major shift, but it is an enhancement of the existing strategy, so we will continue to invest in funds and co invest, and what we agreed at the time, which was then endorsed by the board at the very beginning of this year, was a EUR 750 million investment plan.
Over the next three years, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2/3 will be invested in funds and 1/3 will be invested directly into companies as co-investments. Alongside those third-party fund managers, we will be focusing on Western Europe and North America exclusively, nothing in Asia. My view is that the Asian market is hard to judge. The geopolitics are complex. The languages are complex, and I feel much more comfortable with the risk profile that we can achieve in Europe and North America. We will be investing in two core strategies, buyout and structured equity. The core thesis here is downside protection and consistency. We're aiming to generate 15% net returns for GBL Capital. Just a couple of words on how we expect to do that.
The underlying fund managers that we are investing in who aim to generate something in the region of 20% net returns for their investors. We're giving ourselves a little bit of a margin for error, but when I describe our target returns, I always describe it as 15% and the plus is very important because I do want us to have an asymmetric outcome of returns where 15% may go to 16, may go to 17, but it shouldn't go down to 13. That's where we're really focused. The reason and the way we can do that is by really focusing on the best managers in the market. We have a pipeline where we have met over 160 fund managers over the last year. The reason we build that pipeline and build that funnel so broadly is so we can pick the very best.
The way we invest in funds is we will be putting tickets of EUR 40 million or $50 million into funds and then we'll be co-investing with those managers in the region of EUR 15-30 million per ticket. We expect to have somewhere between 12 and 14 underlying fund investments within that EUR 750 million envelope. Probably the same amount of co-investments. We won't be doing consumer funds, we won't be doing co-investments in consumer-focused businesses. We will be focusing on health care, industrials, business services and enterprise software. The last thing I would say is that we really want to make sure that we focus on the best managers. If I just give you some example of what we've done so far this year. We've invested in four fund managers.
Epiris, which is a UK value based buyout manager with a very strong track record. Warburg Pincus Capital Solutions, which is a structured equity fund run by Warburg Pincus, which is a very well known U.S. or global manager. HarbourVest, which is secondaries, gives us a very attractive risk adjusted return profile. And finally Bregal Unternehmerkapital, which gives us exposure to the DACH region in buyouts across a variety of sectors. So that's what we've done. You can see on our co investments we have a number of strong managers that we've also partnered with. So with that I'll pass you on to Frédéric Oudéa, who will talk about our asset management business.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Joe. So, yes, let's say a few words on our asset management business. And first of all, let me just remind you what Sienna is. It's a EUR 37 billion asset management business with the core part, EUR 28 billion being listed assets and fixed income with a specific expertise in retirement and saving products. This business is developing on the back of the relationship, an exclusive partnership we have with Malakoff Humanis, which is a French mutual institution. It provides Sienna Investment Management with a certain number of business benefits. First, access to the retail client base of Malakoff Humanis, which is of course something attractive. Access also to seed money. And we can compete for mandates to manage the reserves of the supplementary retirement scheme in France, which is managed by trade unions.
This is what we have been able to achieve in the last 18 months with relatively big amounts of money, of net new money flow, of course, with relatively low fees. This partnership provides actually to Sienna Investment Management a kind of solid foundation with probably much less risk of outflows than what you can have with a traditional third party relationship, and it helps to build further upon that core pillar. The rest of the business is a EUR 3 billion private credit business with some interesting niche strategies and expertise, such as, for example, renewable project financing or collateralized loan to SMEs in France, and the last part is a EUR 6 billion real estate asset and property management. The net asset value of the business is low, as Ian explained, EUR 125 million in our books.
The yearly revenues a little bit more than EUR 110 million, reflecting again relatively low fees on listed products, and of course the fee redistribution agreement that we have with Malakoff Humanis when we accept their retail network. We have really been transforming the business with three different phases. The first phase between 2021, 2022 was actually to invest, acquire the businesses, in particular, taking a controlling stake in what was the former dedicated asset management business of Malakoff Humanis, which has retained a minority stake in that business, and then of course acquired the two other businesses. The second phase, from 2023, and which will be completed at the end of 2025, had been dedicated to the integration of the activities and the streamlining of the cost in order to improve the financial performances of the activities with the perspective to reach at the end of this period.
The breakeven. The next phase from 2026 onwards will be to grow organically with three main strategic directions and objectives. First, further enhance the relationship with Malakoff Humanis and extract the maximum value from this partnership. Second, taking advantage of the, if I may say, retailisation of private products on the French market with a law encouraging the financing of real assets. And third, develop relationship with third party LPs. We believe that the business leveraging on more scale should be able to deliver progressively profitability and contribute more positively to the cash earnings than in the last few years. Overall, we think we can extract value from this asset in a consolidated market. While we do not envisage, contrary to some of our peers, to make large acquisitions and to allocate a lot of fresh capital to these activities.
Let me now just say a few words on our financial policy and capital allocation. First of all, financial policy, we are very disciplined and we want to maintain a leverage on a very high quality balance sheet. Just four dimensions that I would like to highlight. First, our strong liquidity profile. At the end of September 2024 we have EUR 4.3 billion of cash available to seize investment opportunities. Second, conservative loan-to-value ratio 7.3% at the end of September, our policy being to keep this loan-to-value, but below 10% through the cycle. Of course, with the flexibility to increase it temporarily to finance deals. In a nutshell, we are not really comfortable with leveraging our balance sheet. Third, low structure cost, something like 30 basis points of net asset value.
On the back of that, an attractive A1 credit rating, with a stable outlook with Moody's. Regarding our capital allocation, Ian has already largely commented. I think we feel comfortable with this financial roadmap. EUR 7 billion of resources, EUR 5 billion of disposal and again 35% of that has been already secured thanks to the Adidas sale. EUR 1 billion of cumulated cash earnings. We feel also very comfortable with that. And as Joe has just mentioned, the contribution for GBL Capital also of something like EUR 1 billion and then the usage is a balanced usage. We think it's realistic on all its components. As we already said, EUR 3 billion of investment in private assets. This is the primary focus.
EUR 3 billion of distribution to our shareholders and EUR 1 billion something like this, which will be of course reserved for GBL Capital, as already explained, which will be to a certain extent self funded in terms of our dividend policy on top of this policy to allocate most of our cash earnings to our shareholders. The big change is that we want to distribute part of the crystallization of the capital gains that we are going to achieve in the coming years. I just would like to come back to Adidas. Ian has already commented. The road has been a bit bumpy, but we were patient and thanks to that we created a lot of value on this investment overall during the period. EUR 2.2 billion sales, 3 MOIC on average and a TSR of 18%.
Again we remain with this 3.5% stake and with full confidence, as I've already mentioned, also in the trajectory of this company. Last word on the dividend. Again the change, as you can see, is that on the base of this new €5 per share, we want to ensure a steady growth beyond 2025. I just would like to highlight a technical change. We will announce our yearly dividend with our yearly results as of course previously we were just financing the dividend with cash earnings. We had visibility in mid year. We want to wait to have full visibility both on cash earnings and of course the crystallization of the capital gains. And we will match the announcement of the dividend on a yearly basis with our yearly results. Beginning of the year. Regarding share buyback, we will pursue an opportunistic share buyback program.
I just would like to remind you we have an envelope of EUR 500 million which was validated at the beginning of this year. This program is completed at 47% and we pursue the share buyback program with a lot of, of course, discipline. This slide tries to illustrate the trajectory we have in mind for GBL in the coming three years. Our objective is to increase the net asset value of our portfolio with our value creation playbook as illustrated by all the people on the stage, and it's true for both our listed and our private assets. We intend to further rebalance the structure composition of our portfolio. 50% listed, 50% private asset. With this split, 2/3 directly owned companies and with GBL Capital representing the other third. Our conviction is if we execute successfully our strategy.
Thanks also, of course, to the share buyback, we should deliver a steady increase of net asset value per share and, with our distribution of dividend, of course deliver to our shareholders a double digit TSR, which would be, of course, in our view, attractive. Last word on ESG before I leave the floor to Ian to conclude on ESG. ESG is really part of our DNA and we have here on this slide already the two pillars. First, as a leading investor, our ESG vision is really to anchor our practices and the practices of all the companies in our portfolio on our patrimonial values underpinning our long term commitment to a sustainable world and our corporate culture. Our strategy is twofold.
First, in terms of GBL as an investor, we pay a lot of attention when we look at investment opportunities to ESG, identifying the risk, trying to see whether we can mitigate that risk and of course taking that dimension into our decision process regarding our companies. We are again trying to help our companies themselves to be really responsible and, as I've said, to enshrine the ESG dimensions mentioned in their strategy in the right way with the adequately calibrated approach. We are, as you know, also committed to SBTi objective. I think today GBL is really recognized for its ESG leadership and for the impact, the positive impact we have on our overall assets and we will continue to add value to our investment via the ESG lever where and when it makes sense. Ian, it's up to you now to conclude.
Thank you. I just would like to basically wrap it up and try to describe what was basically presented to you. I hope by now you're convinced that there is opportunity in GBL. Basically in every line of what we do there is I think room for investors like us. Whether we compete with private equity or whether we compete in asset management. We are a differentiating vehicle because of our DNA that we've tried to explain. The permanent capital is obviously one of the differentiation factors. The family DNA very important to us in everything we do, in how we act. That gives us also agility and it gives us ability to make a difference.
When you present yourself as a long-term investor, not focused on leverage only but really on relationship with like-minded people, that made a difference in a lot of what we've done on private assets where people feel like, you know, they're talking to families as well. And that unique family DNA again is part of our history and is part of what makes us a different investor. We have differentiating sources, capabilities. I think we can win deals without being the highest bidders. Should be careful by saying that it just happened to be true. A few deals we've won, we're not the biggest bidder and as you saw in the slide earlier, we've done six final bids and out of those we closed four transactions. So I think that hit rate is quite solid.
It doesn't mean that we're smarter than other investors, just means that we have something different to propose. And if the sellers, the family, the founders, the CEOs don't like it, they tell us early days and we know we shouldn't be spending time there and we move on. So as a result of that differentiated approach, it allows us to be very focused not to waste too much time on opportunities that we don't think we're going to take to the final line. And as I said, six final bids, four deals closed, we think is a hit rate that is a differentiating. And then we have a playbook for value creation that frankly originates on our history of how we focus on what really matters.
When you sit in the board as a minority investor, although you're largest guy at the table, you are a minority investor and you have to focus on what matters, which is really what are strategic directions and decisions. Whether it's M and A or opening a new franchise, opening a new country, that's strategic, that matters. The choice of the key people. That matters. There is the good example and the bad example. The bad one is when there's difficulties like we had in the recent past. Some of our companies, you need to be capable of saying, okay, it's time for a change, we move forward, we find someone else, we redefine the strategy, we move on. And we are capable of doing that. And we've done that in many occasions. It goes on to capital structure. You know, we're not very keen on too much leverage.
So we want to have a say on dividends, of course, because that's part of our model, what we call cash earnings. But it's also, you know, acquisition, how much leverage the company is capable of bearing, how much leverage we are comfortable with. And that's also where we want to be instrumental and of course ESG, because nowadays ESG has become at the core of everything we do and think. It's part of finance and we should be at the forefront of that. So for big cap, it's capital structure, its strategy and M&A, it's key people and it's ESG. That's what we got from our DNA from being minority investor into large corporation listed. And that's exactly what we do into private assets. So it's a bit different, I guess from more private assets, the investors.
But that's what I think makes us an appealing partner for private assets, and that's what we think we have. As I said earlier, we like to say there is room, so there is room for people like us to put all that together and to be differentiated. This is the last slide that basically says, look, we also think there is significant upside in basically everything we do. We have a high quality and diversified portfolio that's growing. As I said, we have faced some difficulties in the past, but nevertheless, I would say our assets are the right assets in the right place. The listed ones have further upside.
We've tried to take you through some of the names but you know all of our names, some of which are very cheap right now, some others you know fairly valued but overall I think our listed portfolio still has a lot of legs, direct. You know we've only talked about Affidea briefly, presented the others. We also think there is emerging winners in that portfolio and you know we will see in the recent future if there is news. We have quite a few things we're looking at as well. So we will add some private names to this portfolio and indirect, I think Joe presented and I think hopefully he's convinced you that our model is the right model. We're refocusing more into private equity in the past.
We're more diversified and there's a lot of attractive opportunities coming our way into new investment and into co investments that you know we're going to continue to develop. Doesn't say here but I also would like to add the Sienna Investment Managers that was presented by Frédéric also not valued in our in our sum of the parts and you know it's little by little but eventually we will create value through that. I'm convinced we will reinvest into new investment. We said private but not only I also said that if there are opportunities in the listed environment we will be there because we are logical investor into that and we think there is promising outlook in this market that is going to reopen after basically 18 months that were quite calm.
We have quite a few things on our list right now and as I said we want to continue to deliver good returns to our shareholders. It will be through a high dividend but we think we can afford it. We think it's also what investors expect and we want to continue buyback because as long as we think our stock is cheap we're trading at 41% discount today. We think it's. I was going to say ridiculous but we think it's cheap and as long as that continues we will continue to buy back. So on top of that I think this is a good value creation proposal. But today as I just said we're trading at a 40% discount so it could be a good entry point based on this and the discount. That's my personal view and last words.
I wanted to say, maybe before giving the floor the chance of asking questions, my long-term vision. I'm not announcing anything. This is not board approved. This is just what I'm telling you we can do here. I think my long-term vision is that there is a chance that over time GBL could become a very attractive listed vehicle with private assets, a portfolio of PE assets. So one of the things we want to do, simplify what we do. Okay. And focus on what we think we can do better and where we can create more value. So that's really to conclude what I wanted to tell you. That doesn't mean that tomorrow we're going to sell our listed assets. Don't get me wrong, this is not what I said.
I said long term vision is we can have a very diversified portfolio of private assets and we'll still have some listed assets, but you know, we have to put some numbers. So direction of travel is what we said, 50% private by 2027. But I would say this is the first step towards more private investments. This is really what I have as a long term vision. And that's it. So we'll now happily take questions. There's people with mics if you need and then I will basically decide who's the right person to answer the question because I may not be capable of answering your question. So I think there's a question there. Thank you.
Hi, Saima Hussain from AlphaValue. Congratulations on your strategic roadmap, which is very ambitious, and thank you for having us today. I have several questions to start with regarding your listed assets. You have gradually sold off several of your listed investments. Considering your goal of reducing your listed assets to 50%, Imerys, which has been in your portfolio since 1987, be possibly excluded despite its long-term appeal. Next, about cash earnings. GBL Capital and Sienna currently don't offset the decline in cash earnings from the sale of your listed assets? When do you expect Sienna and GBL Capital to make up for this drop in dividends? And are you considering raising dividends from your direct unlisted holdings? Could you also share your view on private equity environment? Do you think that the conditions are becoming increasingly favorable for new acquisition?
Among the sectors you've mentioned, which one is your top priority given your recent entry into healthcare? And finally, what are your thoughts on consolidation in the alternative investment sphere? We, for instance, Wendel acquisition of IK Partners and Monroe Capital, which bring new entrants. What impact do you think this might have on your business and on Sienna? And are you also considering expanding Sienna through M&A or only through organic growth? Thank you very much.
Thank you. So I hope all questions will not be as long; otherwise we won't have time to take many. But thank you. Thank you. So, joke aside, I will answer three of your questions and I will pass the floor on the other two, one to you, Xavier, and the other one on direct listed holdings. So on Imerys. Look, so we don't comment, of course, on our intentions. I personally think Imerys is very cheap. I think Imerys has had issues in the past for a number of reasons, one of which being, as you know, its publication that has weighed on the stock. Hopefully we'll get resolved. It looks like we have good news, but I'm very prudent because every other quarter over the past five years we heard where we had good news and we still are where we are.
So my only answer is I'm not going to comment on what we're going to do. But I think it's very cheap right now. It's basically trading at 5x net debt to, I'm sorry, EV to EBITDA, which I think is extremely cheap. It's a good business, it's very diversified, it serves a number of end markets. So certainly an asset we'd like to continue to own. The second question I want to answer is the one on the PE environment. Look, I think we are basically maybe at a turning point. We had, I would say 18 months where the spread between bid and ask was simply too broad, maybe two or three turns. I think we've observed that that's narrowing down. So I think we will enter a zone of transactions probably very soon.
As I said, there's at least two opportunities we're currently looking at which we think we can be. You know, it's early days, but we are in a zone where we think there could be transactions in the next year or two and the segment remains extremely robust, lots of money raised. Although for the first time in years we see that some firms will not raise again. And that's new. You know, for the past years there had been crisis, but somehow people were able to, you know, maybe reduce the size, raise later fund or continuation funds. I think now we're in a zone where there will be a flight towards, you know, quality and I think that will lead to some firms disappearing. But there is still tons of money out there waiting to be deployed.
So I think the next two years, three years, because we have three-year plan here, will be very robust and we'll see a lot of opportunities. Last question I will take is the one on asset management. Look, I've seen what some of our peers are doing. I don't think it's part of our core strategy to do that. We want, as I said, to fix what we have. By the way, we've also said that if we find the right opportunities to complement Sienna Investment Managers, we would consider doing some M and A. But it will be, I would say on smaller numbers. We don't think right now about buying a GP or we don't think right now about expending all our resources into that segment. We are in it. We want to fix it. We want to grow it. We want to expand it.
But that will not be dragging our resources. Our resources will mostly be into direct investment priority to private, but also listed as I explained. So this is not our strategy to grow in asset management. To answer your question very directly. So there were two other questions, one about Sienna. Xavier, you said you would take that one. Yeah, get the mic.
Hello everybody.
I can speak loud, but it's
for the streaming.
Sorry.
Okay. Indeed. Well, many thanks for the questions. I'll take two minutes for the cash earnings.
First i t's fair to say that you saw while reading our Q3 reporting that indeed the cash earnings decreased compared with last year by something like 15% being sorry, EUR 56 million. But you. That was perfectly, I would say forecasted because you know that last year cash earnings were impacted by the exceptional dividend coming from Imerys from EUR 109 million was impacted by EUR 46 million of dividends coming from the SIM line that we disposed of and also influenced by EUR 10 million coming from GEA, also a line that we disposed of and basically we started the year with a deficit of EUR 150 million and as you can see due in particular to the contribution of GBL Capital increased by EUR 80 million year to date that basically now the deficit is move from EUR 150 million- EUR 250 million.
Then I would say quite normal speaking about short term next year.
Basically the disposals of the Adidas shares that we made, you might remember that the contribution to the cash earnings of Adidas is not huge because we are speaking about less than EUR 10 million. Okay then basically the disposal that we announced should not influence the cash earnings next year about the coming distribution of GBL capital in future. We are indeed expecting positive outflows from them. Speaking about more medium term, obviously what will impact the cash earnings will be the mix of the disposals that we'll be doing. Because obviously if you sell high contributing listed assets might influence the cash earnings versus when you sell private assets that are not contributing to the cash earnings nowadays. It might have another impact. Okay, in a nutshell, that's what I wanted to say.
Sorry, I should have introduced Xavier as our CFO. Okay, there was another question. Sorry, there's something I didn't write. You forgot to answer.
I just also asked if you would consider raising dividend from your unlisted holdings?
You mean our direct investments?
I ndirect holding?
Look, it's always a possibility, but that's not how we think of it. I mean, we think about creating value through those participations and, you know, most of them will be leveraged, are leveraged, so won't have the capability to distribute dividends. If they had the capability, we would recommend to them to keep the money to develop through M&A or what have you. So it's not part of the plan. It could happen, but it's not part of the plan.
Sorry.
Thank you. Good morning. Kris Kippers, Degroof Petercam. A lot of questions being raised already. First question, looking at your dividend, how are you in the future going to balance the fact that your portfolio is going to switch from listed to unlisted, which implies less liquidity. And then, of course, at the same time, starting from €5, growing from there, how do you keep LTV in sync when, for example, major divestments are not happening and you want to keep your LTV in sync? So that's my first question. And then of course, linked to that. Do you think shareholders would be pleased with a higher dividend or do you still hope, of course, NAV growth, because in the end, that will be the driver of value creation.
So I'll take the last question and Xavier, the CFO, will give you an answer for the first one.
Look, we're not deciding on yield or growth. What we want to do is both. Okay? We think that we can continue to serve a growing dividend and grow NAV per share. That's the objective. It's not one or the other. We think we can deliver both as a result of everything that we explained. So it's not that we're giving up the assets, distribute them, because we don't know what to do with the money. We want to invest the money, we want to grow the NAV per share, and at the same time, we believe we can afford to pay this dividend. So it's kind of going to be not one or the other is going to be the two of them. And Xavier will reply to you on the first question.
I now understand that I need to use the mic. Speaking about what will be the source of dividends first, there is nothing new in what we announced because we said that in the past our dividends policy was to distribute our cash earnings and if deemed appropriate, also capital gains. There is nothing new. The only new thing is that we did it this year and basically, you know, speaking about if we can sustain five and in the future growing on the basis of five dividends per share, just to give you some figures, you might have seen that with the disposals of Adidas, we've got something like EUR 1.1 billion capital gains. And it's already just a good source of money to fuel the dividends. In addition to that, we're forecasting EUR 1 billion of cash earnings as mentioned.
I would say for the foreseeable future, it's okay. Second, even, you know, we might expect also to have some exits coming from private assets, once again generating capital gains that can be also a source for dividends. I would say that at this stage I don't have any, I would say special concerns in this respect.
And also, you've heard that Joe has committed to huge dividends. Right, Joe. So he's got EUR 400 million this year, he said. So.
No pressure. Yea h
No pressure, no pressure.
Thanks. And then follow-up question. Is an optional dividend an option for you?
With respect to you. I think he's the dividend master.
No, no, but well, listen, we want to keep it simple and basically for us, as you can see with the solidity of the balance sheet that we do have. No, we don't need to have a scrip dividend or an optional dividend, full stop.
I would have said the same. So it's good. Thank you.
Good morning, Alexandre Gérard CIC. Two questions on my side, please. So you have in mind to reduce the discount going forward? Don't you fear that allocating more funds to private assets and less liquid assets might ultimately transfer into a higher discount to NAV? And also from the credit side, the impact of your rating might be impacted. So can you comment on that? My second question is related to your sector allocation going forward in private assets. Are you done in health care or might you consider increasing your investments in that area? Thank you.
Thank you. So on the first point, sometimes I read about this. Our goal is not to reduce the discount, okay? If we can reduce it by our actions, by growing the NAV per share, by making good investment, it's fantastic. But we don't wake up in the morning saying, shit, how do we reduce the discount? You know, we've been looking at it for 10 years and the reality is that it's not been very efficient. If you look at our peers, they all have discounts as well. So it's something that's very strange and difficult to explain. I don't think that investing into more private assets will increase or decrease the discount. I think what could and would increase the discount over a long period is to grow enough per share. Maybe there's other things but at least that's how I think of it.
If we continuously deliver from now on growth enough per share eventually, and it will take time because everything relates to discount takes a lot of time, you know, we will see a reduction. It went rapidly up from 25% long-term average to 40%. I think it's, you know, probably self-inflicted. So now we will make sure it goes down. But again it's not an obsession. Our strategy is not designed around a discount. You know, the discount something we can utilize as we showed you. If we sell an asset, crystallize the value and distribute the capital gains whilst you crystallize and the discount equivalent, you basically utilize a good discount to return money to your shareholders. So I don't think there's a direct link with private assets and we don't live and think about discount all the time. It's there.
We think about how to best utilize it. Is the answer on the sector? Look, we happen to have built I think a strong expertise, maybe a strong word but at least strong experience in the healthcare assets. It doesn't mean that we will do only that. But you know it's possible we will do more investments into healthcare. I think we have a good franchise there. And by the way the result is after these two deals the bankers, you know send to us everything that relates to health care. So we want to avoid that. We don't want to do only health care. But yes, we could do some more deals in healthcare. Not only we don't want to become a listed healthcare fund but it's possible we will do more. Yes, Hans wants to ask a question.
Thank you, Ian. Hans D'Haese ING. A follow-up on previous questions, actually the starting base of dividend growth. What should it look like? Is this inflation plus something, something more? Very simple question. Then secondly about discount, reducing it. Well, I'm seeing actually in the market other very successful holding companies, portfolio companies that are struggling with the same issue with very good performance with a very good TSR. So I don't think this is something that's playing. I would say that there is kind of a doubt in the market how private equity assets are valued and more transparency in underlying financials, multiples, the performance, the evolution of the debt for instance that was something that was lacking in the presentation. You saw sales growth, EBITDA growth. I don't know how that has evolved for some of the private assets. That definitely would help.
Okay, so first of all, I'm not going to tell you what we're going to do with dividend. We're just saying it's going to grow. So I don't know if it will be inflation or more. I hope it would be more, but I'm not committing to anything. And when it comes to discount, I agree with you, it's very surprising. There are some holding companies that over the past years have a stronger track record than us and they're still trading at a higher discount. So again, we don't act in relation to the discount. Okay. We think of ways of best utilizing it, which is what we illustrated by selling and distributing. But it's possible that we'll talk again three years from now and that we have had a great journey. And that discount still at 40, it's what it is.
It's part of the holding company. The best thing you could do is take the company private. Then you actually do that. But that's not part of the plan we envisioned. So some of what you said is correct. Better returns are not necessarily a function of a return. I'm sorry? Of a discount, what's certain is it will take time. I think our position as we speak is not the best it's been, but I think the 40% discount is way too high in my mind, which is why we continue to buy back shares, which is why we continue to deploy capital. When it comes to discount of our portfolio companies, we'll send it to you. Of our private assets, they are leveraged as typical LBOs, but they're not overly leveraged. The overall, the average, you want to get a mic.
So with regards to your question on leverage, I think we are on a case-by-case basis and we always look at what makes sense, but we keep a conservative approach so we'll always be at lower levels than what private equity would do. So our two platform deals are by definition more leveraged because the asset requires to be leveraged. I think on Affidea you can look it up because it's quasi-public, it's leveraged around five times. Okay, but that's the same as the opening leverage, although we have doubled the company in size. And this company furthermore is generating organic growth, is generating cash. And so we believe it's a very healthy level.
We don't communicate on Sanoptis, but you could think of a similar zip code and for example, on Canyon, it made no sense to highly leverage this company and luckily we didn't because remember I talked to you about excess inventories, building up excess supply building up inventories. We had very low leverage going in. It has come up a bit, it's still below three times. Luckily we did not overleverage that asset as some private equity have done in the cycling industry. It's a case-by-case, but always healthy.
Okay, and would you consider disclosing the multiples you're valuing yourselves on such companies?
The valuation of our private assets?
Yes, yeah,
It is, it is public.
What you don't have is the underlying multiple is public. Right, because the valuations are.
Yes, of course. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you, Hans.
Hello, this is Sharad from KBC Securities. I just have one question since all the good ones were already asked. It's about the Concentrix investment case. The stock is down approximately 55% year to date. A little bit more since your entry. I was just curious to know how the company would differentiate itself and kind of hold its ground given the proli feration of AI specifically.
Great. So we happen to have one board member in the room, so I think we're going to give him the floor to give you the answer.
So thank you for your question. I would start with the strategic rationale of this deal. So you remember that we enter into this transaction by investing in Webhelp, which was one of the European leaders at the time we bought, was a very strong company and performed very well since our investment, doubling EBITDA. But we came to the conclusion that the best chance to effectively remain competitive in the future was to be on a global scale. The combination with Concentrix was one way of doing that. So when you look at the market today, you have two global players, you have Concentrix on one end and Teleperformance on the other, which gives you scale to address global needs of clients and gives you the scale to invest in technology. Which addresses your question.
When you look at the performance of the business since we made the combination, the business has performed very well, so EBITDA is up since obviously the merger, the growth has slowed down, which has impacted somewhat the valuation. But really the key driver of valuation today, as Frédéric said, is the perception of people around AI, and what we see is, as Frédéric said, is an opportunity for us. I think there's a misconception of complexity around AI product and the need for businesses to have services to actually build their own AI products and solution. I encourage you to see what Concentrix is doing today, we continue to invest in services. We are launching new products. I encourage you to see that, and we hope, as Frédéric said, that as we perform and we follow our strategic journey, the valuation would follow as well.
Thank you. It's definitely very cheap today. I mean, it's trading around five times, it's growing. The plan, I think it's public, I'm sure it's public, is to deliver 600 million free cash flow for the year. I mean, it's good, and by the way, as far as I'm concerned, the dust hasn't settled. We know AI is going to play an active role. It could be an enabler that allows our technicians to be more efficient, more rapid in the answer they give to their clients, and remember that. I mean, the market knows that, but our top clients are all clients from the Valley. I mean, top five clients are all the big names you can imagine. So these guys still see what we do as very useful tool. Now, will all that have disappeared in five years? Probably not.
It will be different, probably be smaller, but more profitable. That would be my view. My view. But there is definitely room for a business like that. I just think it needs to reinvent itself and that's where we are. We're in the middle of the journey and I think it's just, imagine, it's quite complicated to be an investment committee on the Monday morning from a hedge fund and you walk in and you say, I have a great idea. We're going to invest in call centers and people are going to look at you and say, what the hell is wrong with this guy? So it's just not the right place to be right now.
But it doesn't mean that the business is not providing great service, good cash flow, even growth in this environment, with everything we just said, they're growing this year and they're generating strong cash flow. So it was the right move to become more global, to become U.S. By the way, Concentrix is based in the U.S. and to become more diversified, which is why we did it. But yeah, I just think it's hard to point out right now where we will be in few years. I think there is room for firms like that. I think AI has not really settled down. I mean, dust hasn't settled. We can't really say what's going to happen. It's a big evolution, almost a revolution, but I think we needed to give it a little time. But it's cheap. Any more? Yes. Another question here.
Thank you. One last question on my side, so you mentioned earlier that the value of Sienna IM in your NAV was low, close to EUR 100 million, if I'm not wrong. What could be the value creation linked to the normalization of the profitability of that asset? That is, what EBIT do you have in mind for that asset on a standalone basis going forward?
I can't comment on that, but what I can tell you is let's pick a number. You know, today it's negative 2025. It will be breakeven to positive. Let's say that without bolt-on, we could still do bolt-on. We don't want to grow and put all our resources into growing this business, as I answered before. But you know, there is the possibility that we find some specific niches that we think are attractive. But let's put that aside. What I think is certain is that we will be profitable in 2025 and then we'll see what the value is. But we don't have a clear number in mind. I understand it will help the model, but we just don't know. Okay, there's no more questions. Thank you all again for participating.