Good morning, everybody. I hope you are many more to watch me as opposed to those in the room, but for those of you who came this morning, thank you so much for being here. One thing that I want to share with you since it doesn't happen that many times, and since she was on the video, Maud Bailly, the—and she might be—I know, well, she might be actually watching. She should not, but she might. Maud Bailly, our Chief Digital Officer, that you know well, just gave birth to a baby yesterday called Clara. She's very healthy. She's very cute. So if you—if the two of you watching, watching me, Clara and Maud, big kiss. Don't come back too soon. Stay, stay with your two daughters. We start with year-end results.
I have a quick introduction, and then we'll go to the meat on the bone, Monsieur Jean-Jacques Morin, and then I'll come back with some closing remarks. The first slide, which you know well, and it's probably the last time we're going to be showing it, and you've seen it evolving over the last seven years, it's only telling you that the transformation is over, in terms of what we started, the last six years. You see very quickly that, I guess, we are today at 96% asset- light. There is maybe another 2%, 3%, 4% to go. Of course, we're going to be tackling it, but just forget about it. Accor is today a pure asset-light company, which means we have sold all the real estate, whether it was leased, whether it was owned, that Accor had accumulated over the last 50 years.
Second item on which we worked quite a bit, very consciously, is really trying to increase—and we did succeed—the luxury upscale segment, which was 12% in 2012, and then today it's 41%. Believe me, with—and I'll show it to you in a minute—with the pipeline having been signed over the last two to three years, as of today, Accor will be 50% geared to luxury and upscale. Again, we'll go on a Q&A why that is critical and important. On the global exposure, you remember very well 'cause that was not too long ago. That was six years ago. Accor was, at the time, 80% European concentrated model, and it was 75% Ibis, Novotel, Mercure, which was Eco/Midscale. Today, you have a very different picture, in terms of geography. Europe Accorunts to 42% as opposed to 80% five years ago.
Doesn't mean we're letting go and we're no longer concentrating on Europe. We are indeed continuing and probably enhancing and boosting development in Europe, but we've been going so fast organically and through acquisitions. Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa, South America, Canada, U.S. is today the bulk of our business. So well-diversified servicer and much better segmentation in terms of profitability. On the markers for the years, I've been insisting over the last few years on one word that one of you might remember called agility. Agility is trying to make sure that while you are transforming a company, trying to make it stronger, better, are you able to do it in a timely fashion? Or are you always late and you're reacting to unfortunate events, geopolitical events in which you wish you could have done something and you have to assess you could not because of market conditions?
That's absolutely not the case for Accor. We sold the 5% of AccorInvest late last year, and that was a very good trade. You remember the 13% internal rate of return on the money we invested a year and a half before. Huazhu, we sold half of our stake with our partner in China. One has to believe that selling it today would have been virtually impossible. That was done late November with a very good return on capital being deployed, with more than three and a half times the money invested only two years before.
We've sold, and we're probably going to be closing by the end of the first quarter, Orbis, which is all the Eastern Europe portfolio. The number here is EUR 730 million. The proceeds back will be in excess of EUR 1 billion. We did have to invest to go from 55% to 85% of Orbis shares. But that's again, even on the shares we have accumulated to go from 50% up to 86%. On those shares being purchased in only one year, it was another 22% return. So it was a good move to having realized that investment a year ago. We've entered the sale of the lease portfolio and deconsolidated EUR 400 million+ of debt. So it's not anecdotal. All those four events have been done in the best ever market conditions, and it is behind us as of today.
I'm insisting on this one for one reason, which is the acceleration through luxury and upscale. What I want you to be aware of and not confused, because a lot of people actually are not confused, but they don't see it as they should. We keep, and we need to, we need the industry have to change it if we could. We keep reporting to each of you development either in a number of the rooms, 45,000 rooms, 50,000 rooms, or we do it on net supply growth, 5%, 4.5%, 7% of the total net worth. So if you keep the standard, it is absolutely correct that upscale and luxury in the pipeline is 35% of what has been secured. However, in our business, as it is for our peers, what matters is not the number of rooms.
What matters is the contribution on a fee per room and what is the contribution to your turnover and to your EBITDA. You see that, I guess, on the closing speed of what has been signed in 2019 was EUR 1,200 per room, and for 2020 is EUR 1,600. So those 35% contribute much more on a fee per room, which relates to what I told you a second ago. 50% of the fees of Accor will be coming from upscale and luxury, even though it's less in number of rooms. Insisting here on two brands, I'll come back in a minute. Those two brands, Tribe and Greet, are new. They did not exist at the end of 2018. One has been purchased, was Tribe in Australia, and Greet will launch it. Very eco-friendly, planet-friendly, reusing, recycling a lot of material.
That one you've seen, if you were in this room exactly five years ago, that was the brand portfolio of Accor, 10 brands, and very solid legacy 10 brands, which made the adventure very rewarding since 1967 until today. Here, what is a port, what the portfolio is today. The one thing I want to insist upon is that segment here, lifestyle, which we have, I think, 11 or 12 brands. That is the greatest growth segment today in our industry in terms of attractiveness for the owners and attractiveness for the clients. Something that they believe is more unique, greater personalization, greater emotions, and certainly different from a lot of legacy brands. Doesn't mean, by the way, that we should be moving out of legacy brands. That's absolutely not the point.
The point is Accor has been ahead of the game, certainly ahead of anybody else's, on investing heavily in 12 very differentiated brands and even differentiated per geography. And then you see the regional brands here. Just one moment to pause. I keep saying it, and people probably need to have better clarity. 12 brands represent 90% of the money we invest in, which is the 12 global brands: the Ibis, Mercure, Fairmont, Sofitel. Those brands you see here, as good as they are, some of the brands you see here, Tribe, Greet, Mama Shelter, or AlAlexander, we spent very little money, but we want them to continue to exist, to continue to be powerful locally within South Africa, within Turkey, within Chile, Peru. So there's no confusion on the momentum on where Accor, where Accor should be allocating most of our resources. That one is new.
We showed you last year the spread in between capital cities and the enormous diversification of Accor in terms of destination. Remember, Paris was at 2.8%, Mecca was at 1%. So most of our cities have been in between 0.8% and 1.5% of total group exposure. We're showing it now differently. Some of you have it if you want to go deep into the reports. But that's 10 countries of Accor Accorunts for 60% of basically our EBITDA fee stream revenue, which is the management and franchise fees. That number would be 80% if you go from 10 to 20 countries. But what I want to be insisting upon is those legacy countries in which Accor has been in existence for the last 45 years, you see them. But what you see, which is interesting, here is luxury and upscale. Luxury and upscale in France, very small, 10%.
Remember, I told you 50% for the group cruising speed. Germany, 25%. Australia, 35%. U.K., 23%. China is a notable exception because we went deep in China with Sofitel, with Fairmont, much deeper than we have been with ibis, better traction on the upscale and luxury. Brazil, a bit like France, 12% being in upscale and luxury. Here are the other countries missing on this slide where we've been growing through acquisitions or deeper focus on luxury and upscale. U.S.A., since the acquisitions of Fairmont, Raffles, U.S.A., Canada, you have 96%, it's actually only U.S.A., 96% of our exposure is upscale luxury. United Arab Emirates, 76% upscale luxury. Saudi Arabia, 60%. Canada, 94%. So that 42% here, which you have, is really due to a lot of new acquisitions and the business model and the strategy we had planned for three or four years ago.
We have today 5,000 hotels in the network. You know this. We have signed today another 1,200 hotels, 208,000 rooms going forward. Remember, 35% of those being upscale luxury, but it is 50% of fee contribution. You see that in North Central America, 36,000 rooms with 38 existing. I'm actually not happy with only 5,000 being in development. As a percentage of what we have, we need to show muscles and to go deeper there. We're certainly doing it faster today through Delano, Mondrian, SLS brands of SBE. South America, we are so big over there, but we do have 62,000 rooms and 14,000. It's good enough. We've been deploying quite a bit in Brazil. We're now deploying in Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and others. Europe, we are, as you know, extremely big, extremely strong, and by threefold the leader with 344,000 rooms.
We need to get better on the 46,000. This is not enough compared to our size and muscles. We actually are redeveloping dedicated resources to help grow in Eastern Europe and in Western Europe, Middle East, Africa, sees the supply and the pipeline. 45,000 compared to 64. We're going fast in a very interesting market, but very difficult market because everything is different between countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and certainly countries in the Middle East. Of course, Asia Pacific, which is alone 45% of Accor pipeline. That is 100,000 compared to 232,000. Nothing new here. It's just to, again, insist on where are we developing ourselves, which countries, for what kind of results. On the last slide before I give the microphone to our friend Jean-Jacques, there's three things here that I want you to remember and to anchor with.
The first is we need to shout it better. Our business model is incredibly solid, robust, and can weather a lot of tempest. We have certainly a global leadership in hotel management in the world. As you may know, Accor is the largest hotel operator on the planet. Some could be bigger than us, but they're much more franchisor than operator. Is it good or bad? We can discuss this, but let's at least recognize what our strengths are. We are certainly number one every place except in America and in China. I keep repeating, we'll never be number one in China and we'll never be number one in America. That's okay. We have a brand powerhouse, which is unmatched, with 41 brands in different segments. I told you between local, regional, and others.
The platform we signed, a very significant partnership with Sabre, announced a month ago on finally combining together on one unifying technology platform, what is today our CRS, Customer Reservation System, with our PMS, Property Management System on the cloud. It's going to take 18 months, but that's an enormous initiative. It's going to be very well received. It is well received by our owners. We have 100 countries' footprint with a lot of people on the ground, much more so than anybody else's. We are responsible for 300,000 people working under Accor brand and happily responsible for them. We have expertise on both management and franchise. One stop for owners. Owners don't have to go any place else. Within Accor shop, they can find the country they want. They can find the model they want. They can find the brand they want, and they can find the talent they need.
We've been daring in getting into augmented hospitality. The John Paul, Very Chic One fine stay DH. I'm sure we'll talk a bit about it. Happy we went there ahead of the game, and it is now paying on what we've been investing upon. And then we have this, Accor Live Limitless loyalty program that we've been relaunching, going fast. Again, we'll talk about it in a minute. Monsieur Jean-Jacques. It's your turn. [Foreign langauge].
Beautiful slides. Wow. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Very happy to be with you. I'm going to talk about the financial performance of 2019. To start on that, I'd like to get some kind of an overview to you of what were the key achievements. One thing about 2019 is that the world wasn't easy. You know, we went through Brexit. There was the trade war. There were, in the end of the year, what happened in Chile, and I'm forgetting many other events, not maybe because we've got some English people with us, talking of Brexit. So we went through all of that. Despite all of that, we're in line with anything we told you. I think that's the key element that I would like that you retain from the 2019, basically achievement, which is we've weathered the tempest.
Now, talking about the two key drivers of business momentum in our business model, which is RevPAR and organic growth, we end up with a positive RevPAR, 1.7% system RevPAR growth. Obviously detail all of that, but it shows the resilience in the world, which again was not easy. We were at 5.1% of net organic system growth, very much in line with the 5% that we provided to you as the long-term guidance. Our business momentum translates into numbers, into financial performance. Revenue crossed the EUR 4 billion mark for EUR 4.049 billion, which is a 16% increase on reported basis and 3.8% on a like-for-like basis. The EBITDA ends up at EUR 825 million, which is very much in line with our guidance.
The cash conversion, how the EBITDA translates into cash, ended up at 77%. You may recall we provided a guidance of 70%. On the basis of that financial performance, how does that translate for a shareholder? We announced back in December a EUR 1 billion shareholder return. We'll give some details about the modalities of it today.
On top of that, the board of directors decided to submit for approval at the General Assembly a cash dividend, which is going to be of EUR 1.05. It's going to be either in cash or shares. We'll detail that a bit later on in this presentation. So that's the overview. Let's try to break down a bit the business momentum. The first one is development. It's a slide that says record, record, record. Anyway, you would expect record, but we do record. We are there. We crossed the 5,000 hotel mark. We are at a bit more than 5,000 hotels in the network, which translates into 740,000 rooms. We open one hotel a day. We open one hotel a day. We sign one hotel every 16 hours.
That translates into a pipeline of more than 200,000 rooms today, 208,000 to be precise. That's the first driver of the performance in the asset- light world. Moving into the second one, which is RevPAR. I quoted the 1.7% RevPAR growth into financial year 2019. You've got here the key component of it: Europe, Asia Pacific, rest of the world. Europe ended up at 2.6% for the year. France posted for the full year also 2.6% as a RevPAR. You may recall H1 was very strong at 4.7%. H2 was a bit more modest at 0.6%, but one needs to remember that last year H2 was at more than 8%.
Everything being equal, the performance was there and was boosted, in fact, in the first part of the year by the air show and the Women's Soccer Cup. Paris was up 1.6% and the province were stronger, to 3.3%, which also translates some of what we saw as strikes in the end of 2019 in Paris. Germany for itself was at 1.4% RevPAR. Very good Q4. U.K. posted a number which is slightly positive at 0.2% RevPAR. Again, with a different situation between London, which continues on positive trend, 2% RevPAR, whereas the province is a - 1.7%. This is driven by a weaker corporate demand linked notably to Brexit. If we move to Asia Pacific, which is the other big guy in our group.
The RevPAR was down 0.9%, but then again, we find the effect of what happened in Greater China with the trade war. We have a RevPAR for the year at minus 6.1%. On top of the trade war, which we had been experiencing since the beginning of the year, there was in the latter part of the year, the Hong Kong turmoil. All of that basically affected the business that we do in China, but also the business that we do in Asia. To give a number, the RevPAR in Hong Kong for Q4 was minus 50%. These translate notably in places like Australia. Australia was plagued by this China trade war thing. On top of that, they suffered bushfire. It really didn't help having a good environment in Australia.
The rest of the world, the rest of the world, there is a very rosy part of the world, which is called South America, not because of Brazil and because of the rebound of Brazil. So there we experienced 12.3% RevPAR growth and notably with good pricing in São Paulo. And then as far as Middle East and North America are concerned, both of them were slightly positive RevPAR, which ended up being better than what you see in those markets. If we look at how those two business momentum drivers translate into revenue, we've crossed the EUR 4 billion mark. The 16% of reported change is due to the tune of 11% to perimeter because we integrated Mantra and Mövenpick . If we look by segment at what happened, hotel service is up 4.6%.
I'll detail more what was happening in management and franchise fees just after. As for hotel asset, we have a revenue which is up 2.9%. The reported is much bigger at 43%, but this is again perimeter effect. New businesses end up at 4%, but as I will explain later on with a diverse, very diverse picture between One fine stay, John Paul and the rest of the business. The holding and interco is just reflecting Mantra and Mövenpick integration. Now going into more granularity in this revenue, I'm starting with hotel service and in hotel service starting with management and franchise, which is the crux of where we make money. We crossed the EUR 1 billion mark and we are up 3.8%. It is on the back of the RevPAR, but also, of the development of the year.
You may recall the development of the year was queued towards Q4. 40% of what we opened we did in Q4, and so that's how the numbers get derived. Going region by region briefly, Europe is 4% growth. There is a 2.6% RevPAR. The rest is development. Asia Pacific is a positive 2.3% growth. Remember the RevPAR was negative. This is held by the strong development that we experienced even last year in Asia Pacific. Middle East is a 5% growth. Again, the RevPAR was not very strong in that part of the world, but the organic development was better. We had some termination fees in Saudi Arabia that helped complement. The last one is North America and South America onto which you have performance, which are respectively 1.5% and 13%.
The 13% is where you see the very strong recovery of Latin America and in Latin America of Brazil. Moving into the RevPAR, sorry, having finished on revenue, I move now to EBITDA. EBITDA, the view by segment. The EBITDA grew 14.8% on a facial basis, 5.9% on a comparable basis. You see here that hotel service is up 5.8%. One thing I'd like to highlight here is that marketing expenses ended up in the year, being 15% lower than initially planned due to some phasing effect. You may have seen that all was officially launched last December. I had kind of told you that we would be seeing some favorable here. The number in the end is 15%.
What you will see is you will see a shift of this 15% to 20% in 2020 as we will accelerate, in fact, the effort around all. Regarding hotel asset, the number is not good. It's a 7.3% decrease in EBITDA. This is essentially explained by Mantra, the leases, and the very difficult situation that we face in Australia, with a RevPAR down 7% on the Mantra scope. I'll detail that in a specific slide after. New businesses, we had a commitment to you that we would be at EBITDA positive in Q4. We did meet the EBITDA break even in Q4. Again, I'll detail what's happening in new businesses a bit later on.
Finally, on the holding and interco, one thing I'd like to highlight is that there was a shift of benefit plan which were Accorunted in the holding and have been pushed to the place where the employees are employed, i.e., hotel services largely. This is the reason for why you see a favorable between 2018 and 2019 on the holding. We basically put the cost where they should always have been, i.e., where the employees work. Moving, in fact, now to more detail on the EBITDA of hotel services. I'll show you the performance, sorry, you have face to you the performance by region. It's a good 8.3% increase on the EBITDA. It's obviously driven by the revenue that we just went through. It's also driven by some of the cost efficiency plan that were launched.
You may recall the EUR 100 million restructuring plan that was launched at the end of 2018 and which is giving fruits, notably in Europe. Last but not least, we had a strong focus on receivables and were able to collect close to EUR 15 million in 2019. That helped fuel all the numbers of the table that you've got in front of you. I would say sound management there of the EBITDA. Moving now to a point of focus on Mantra. The one thing that I'd like to start with is that Asia Pacific is the fastest region for us. It has been the fastest region because this is where 50% of the development has been occurring over the last years.
We so you see here, by the way, that it is 33% of the revenue of the group when you add up hotel services and hotel asset. The only thing that you don't take when you do that ratio is reimburse cost because it doesn't make sense to do that with reimburse cost. But out of the EUR 4 billion, there is EUR 3 billion of revenue, which is hotel service and hotel asset. If you do the pro-rata average region, you see that Asia Pacific is 33%. To put things in perspective, this number last year was more to the tune of 26% and was even a much lower number in previous years. Part of the element is the development I went through. Part of the element too is the decision that we took to strengthen our positioning in Australia.
Australia has been a very good country for Accor for many years. It's a place into which the GDP has been growing for over 28 years. There are not a lot of places in the world where you can say the GDP has been growing year after year steadily for 28 years. I don't know any of them. The thing that we've been facing and that I went through earlier on Asia and Australia has been driving the fact that the GDP this year in 2019 for Australia is in fact the lowest since 2009. So it's still positive, but it is the lowest since 2009. So that's why you've got negative RevPAR.
That's why, in fact, when you do an acquisition, just like Mantra, which for strategic reason is the right acquisition to do, it put us the number one by far in the country with more than 20% market share, because of the acquisition nature and the leases that you've got in this acquisition, you had an effect to the bottom line when RevPAR goes down, which is significantly. That explained the performance of Asia. That explained why the EBITDA for Asia was the negative 7.3% that I showed before. All these explanations to tell you that, since we are below the initial business plan by EUR 40 million, we took an impairment to put it back to the right value of EUR 150 million in the Accorunt of 2019.
Again, all of that will turn around because, as I said, this region is a very sound region with very sound history. So it's a question of timing. I would like to give you maybe a different view on merger and acquisition because I don't want you to think that I do acquisition to do write off. I wouldn't like that. Joke aside, here is a table that shows you what we've done on the core acquisition that we did over the last four, five years in terms of amount, FRHI, Mantra, Mövenpick .
What you see on that table versus the synergy that we disclosed, we disclosed to you the EUR 65 million, we disclosed to you the EUR 11 million for Mantra, we are in advance of the plan that we told ourselves, i.e., we're going to do more synergy than what we said we would do. Now, why is that? It's because, in fact, those synergies are essentially cost synergies. They are always based on things that we know how to execute, like relocation of headquarters, IT infrastructure, procurement rebate, all these kinds of things. That's why we are able to so cleanly execute on synergy. In the case of Mantra, we are above and ahead in terms of synergy. It is just that the market is not there. I move now to the other segments that we report on, which is new business.
eur You see that we had been reporting losses in 2016, 2017, 2018, and we are back in 2019 very close to zero. The turnaround that we had promised is paying off. This turnaround has been essentially focused on Onefines tay and John Paul . If you were to split the business, put Onefines tay and John Paul aside, on the rest of the business, the growth is double digit and the profitability is double digit. So the next step that we've got now for new businesses is that we're going to do two things. We're going to either integrate some of the businesses where they belong, and this is the case today already of Gekko, and we'll do it also with Very Chic.
We're going to look at how to further grow those businesses through a partnership and a strategic review, which is the case of D- Edge, which is the case of Onefines tay, and which is the case of John Paul. So we are really reshuffling here to get the most value from the investment that we've done. So that's so much for the review of the businesses. I move now to the bottom part of the financials, the dark side of the financial, the one below EBITDA. And so the bridge from EBITDA to net profit here, the first thing that you see is a strong increase in depreciation, amortization, and provision moving from EUR 200 to EUR 328 million. This is essentially linked to the acquisition of Mantra and Mövenpick, and the IFRS 16 implementation.
IFRS 16 requires that you depreciate the assets that you put them on the balance sheet and then that you recognize the depreciation associated with the right of use on the asset. This is to the tune of EUR 150 million in the EUR 300 that you've got in 2019. The second element that you see, which is worth commenting here is the share of net profit of Associate and Joint Venture. We discussed that a bit when we published H1. The elements of explanation are the same. I mean, the first one is on that line, you've got Huazoo, which is a significant investment that we did in 2016. China being what it is, the result of Huazoo this year are not the result of Huazoo last year. This is explaining part of the drop.
The other one is we have that significant investment in AccorInvest, the 30% that we've kept of AccorInvest, which is showing in the Accorunt on that line. AccorInvest being now an independent company, it has a financing structure which is the one of an independent company. It doesn't benefit anymore from the family good financing condition. There was a very significant increase of their interest charge. That's part also of the bridge. The last but not the least is SBE. On SBE, in fact, the negative profitability of SBE is driven by the fact that we are working on the refinancing, or they are working on their refinancing of the company, because they've got some debt, which is mortgage debt.
This financing is going to be closed very shortly, but was not yet closed at the end of December. Hence, you've got a very large interest expense in their Accorunt, which is explaining a negative profit in our Accorunt. So that's in simple words, I hope the associate drop can be understood. I'm moving now to the third line, which is shifting EUR 600 million, not just a little amount from - EUR 400 million to + EUR 100 million. What you see here is the effect of what we pushed for in terms of asset-light strategy, i.e., divesting of the sale of Huazoo and making sure that we clean the balance sheet as much as we can. This has generated close to EUR 300 million and one of profit. This is offset.
That's where on that line where you find, in fact, the EUR 150 million impairment from Mantra. Last year you had some restructuring, if you recall. The fourth line that I would like to comment, because it's again a big shift, it's moving from EUR 2.3 billion to EUR 0. This is essentially the profit from discontinued operation, where you had last year the one-off gain from the sale of AccorInvest. So the Accorunting gain, which obviously you don't have this year. That's why, in fact, the net profit shifts from EUR 2.2 billion on discontinued to close to zero. So that's on the lines before the EBITDA. Moving into more balance sheet type of item, cash type of item, this is how you move from EBITDA to cash.
From the EUR 824 million, EUR 825 million, sorry, EBITDA to the EUR 434 million recurring free cash flow, you will see there a new line which is called reimbursement of lease liabilities, the same way that you had the depreciation and amortization showing up on the P&L. You've got here the equivalent for the balance sheet. That's the new IFRS 16 implementation rule. That's why you have the lease cash payment. The second line that I'd like to highlight here is that in terms of recurring investment, we are at EUR 160 million. This is very well in line with the CMD Capital Market Day guidance. We said that we would be at max at EUR 200 million. Last but not least, some of you asked questions about the working capital, which was a very negative number at the end of H1.
We had told you that we would be back to zero and that it was essentially timing effect. You see here that we did what we say. The bottom line of it is we're at 77% cash flow conversion. The ratio of conversion of cash in EBITDA into cash, which again is very much in line with what we want it to be. I move to net debt and the bridge on net debt. I'll sound like a broken record, but the largest explanation is IFRS 16. IFRS 16 adds to the net debt EUR 1 billion. The EUR 978 million that you've got as the first column, as we are reclassifying Mövenpick in asset held for sale, because as you know, on Mövenpick , the transaction is signed and will be closed by the end of Q1.
We don't, we in the Accorunt consider it as asset held for sale. So subtract it from the EUR 978. The other elements are pretty straightforward. On M&A, the + EUR 188, so positive cash generation on M&A is coming from the sale of Huazoo and the sale of AccorInvest. So it's cash in for the company. The hybrid delta is just the result of us reissuing what we need in term of hybrid in 2019 and buying back only part of the hybrid to the tune of 86% of what we had outstanding. There will be a negative difference this year, and there will be a positive difference this year, and then there will be a negative difference next year. But it's essentially the timing of the operation of refinancing. So nothing here of significance.
Talking about debt, you know, we did spend a lot of time further strengthening the balance sheet in 2019. We basically refinanced EUR 1.6 billion of debt, EUR 600 million of senior bond and EUR 1 billion of hybrid. You can see from the left table that we worked on the maturity, which is now at 3.7 years. The cost of debt before hybrid, so the bond debt, was also slightly reduced to 1.8%. Just as a perspective, we were at 4.3% back in 2013, so significant improvement over time. Talking about the hybrid, what you don't see here is that the cost of the hybrid, which used to be 4.125% as a coupon, is now at 3.6%. So we really worked, Pierre, who's in fact standing there, really worked hard on making sure that our balance sheet is here for the future.
Briefly on the dividend, you recall that our dividend, as we had told you during 2018 in the capital market day, is based on 50% of the recurring free cash flow. What we do as an adjustment to that computation is include Orbis and also rework the MIP so that it is not a detriment to the shareholders. The mechanical computation of that would give a dividend of EUR 0.98 per share. The decision of the board of directors was considering that in 2019 we were finalizing transition and that the dividend for the last two years has been to the tune of EUR 1.05. We would propose EUR 1.05 per share at the next general assembly meeting. So that's what I introduced on my first slide.
The one point also that you have here is that the payment options will be either 100% cash or 100% shares with a 5% discount if you go for shares. I'm going to move now to something a bit more fancy, which is Accor Live Limitless, Accor Live Limitless update. What you have on the first block is all what we did since December. We basically launched the new premium status. They're called Diamond and Limitless. We put in place some enriched benefits just like on more brands, more F&B benefits, higher generosity. Then we have been working very hard on partnership. You surely recall the emphasis we put one year ago on the partnership and how much could be derived in terms of value for our customer, for our client, for our owner by pushing those partnerships.
We announced last Tuesday, this week, that we signed with Visa as being the provider for the Accorunts. I would like to show you a short video from Mr. Al Kelly, who is the Visa Chairman and CEO. Hi, I'm Al Kelly, the Chairman .
Hi. I'm Al Kelly the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Visa. In May of 2019, I had the privilege of visiting with Sebastian at Accor's offices in Paris. I came away incredibly impressed with the vision of Accor Live Limitless and the fact that we were going to try to bring that to life with a series of co-brand products around the world. I left that office very excited. I look at Accor and I look at Visa, and they have two wonderful brands. In fact, in the case of Accor, a real family of brands.
As I look ahead and I look at a world where technology is exploding and consumers are becoming incredibly digital savvy, the bar on what it's going to take to win with new products and loyalty programs is high. I think that the combination of Visa and Accor is very much up to delivering something really special and wonderful for consumers around the world. On behalf of all my colleagues at Visa, I can't tell you how excited we are to be working with Accor, taking their hospitality expertise and putting it with our loyalty and payment expertise and building winning solutions for Accor's customers around the world over the next couple of years. We look forward to it. Thank you.
This is a huge step forward for us because we are really entering in a world into which we were not. There is significant potential. This potential we quantified for you one year ago. This is the table on the right part where we told you that by 2022 we would generate more than EUR 100 million of revenue coming from those partnerships. Again, we just launched it. 2019 was a doubling of the amount, but the base was low. It's EUR 6 million. What you will see year after year is a doubling of the amount to make it simple. This deal with Visa is the first step of it. We are now in the process of shortlisting banks, shortlisting countries, and you will see more announcements coming up on this in 2020.
The other element that makes that EUR 100 million, which you have some example of it in the point three of the left bucket, this is what we will do with airlines. So we launched miles and points with Air France in 2019, but there are some more announcements to come with other airline companies in 2020. The last element is you may have seen that we have a partnership with Grab, which is basically the Uber of Southeast Asia. Again, this is what we call the mobility part of the partnership revenue. So all of that is to come. But now we have paved the way with those three elements in the current fiscal year to go and get to this EUR 100 million.
The last bucket, which is the one in the middle, is what will derive from all the stickiness that you create with the customer, modest increase in 2019 of 30% to 31%. But again, remember that all was really much worked on during the year and only really coming in effectivity in December. So that's why you will see more in the coming years. Our target is to be above 40%. That's on the Accor Live Limitless update. I move now on the other element of what was into the old program, which is sponsorship. To make it simple, what is called media value in those businesses is the equivalent amount of euro that you can achieve by what you launch in term of sponsoring.
It's the amount that you would have spent yourself if you were to go and get the same level of media attention. This is a computation which obviously is not done by Accorunting. I don't know too well how to do that, but Nielsen is obviously much better than me on all of that. You can see that it is a very significant amount because in six months we've already launched the equivalent of EUR 200 million of media value, i.e., if we wanted to get the same level of attraction, attention, in the world, whether it is online, i.e., on the web, whether it is on social, online is also sort of TV, whether it is on social media, or whether it is offline, i.e., paper, we would have to spend more than EUR 200 million.
It's a very significant number. With countries, which are quite surprising because you see that in Brazil, we already have more awareness of all than we have awareness of the club Accor Hotel that has been in place for 20, 30 years. The awareness is 16% to be compared to 19%. This is much better than anything we had foreseen. We are very happy with that result, me especially, because I'm a fan of the guy closing. What I did there is I took back what we told you in the same meeting one year ago. That's the left part of the table.
What we told you is that we would work on openings, we would work on M&A integration, we would work on EBITDA, we would work on cash conversion, and we would work on the perfection of the asset- light model. We did all of that, went through that. The plan for 2020 is essentially to go and do that further. It's essentially to be even better at all those dimensions. It's essentially doing what we said we were going to do, year after year, period after period, and just be consistent there. We will work on openings and get two new records. We will continue to work on the integration of what we have in the company. We will pursue our route to the EUR 1.2 billion target in 2022.
We will continue to ensure that the EBITDA, which is generated, does translate into cash. We will pursue whatever needs to be pursued on the asset- light model. We are essentially there. We still have the Mantra leases, but on the rest, we are done. That's how I wanted to conclude a lot of consistency in what we tried to say and what we tried to do. Thank you.
You left me six minutes.
Yeah, but you were late.
I was probably late.
You were late, so I'm just in time. Just in time.
It's a carryover.
It's a carryover.
I'll go rather quickly on the closing remarks, which is what JJ alluded to. It's not here by accident either. What I wanted to show you is that out of those seven events, and we probably could have put 12, 10, does not matter actually. Out of those seven events, certainly three same time last year, we knew a bit about when we've done the budget and when we looked at projection forward 2019. We knew about the U.S.-China trade war. We knew about Brexit, that it would be turmoil. We probably, and we knew about Middle East, Africa, geopolitics, uncertainty, and the embargo in between different countries. We had no clue of Hong Kong, no clue of the bushfires, no clue on the Yellow Vest, and no clue on turmoil in South America. Each of those items had an impact on Accor revenues, Accor EBITDA, Accor cash flow. Each of them had a direct RevPAR impact.
Each of them we've been able to find elsewhere, either in the cost or in other geography, means to meet the 2019 numbers that Jean-Jacques talked to you about. So the only message to you is Accor has the ability, because we are so diversified, to weather some difficulty in countries and, thank God, have opportunities in others. It shifts all the time. A country might do solidly for five years, then it's going to be going into difficult times, and it's another country who actually picks up. Coronavirus, COVID-19. You can look at those numbers. The one thing I want to say before I talk about numbers and about this slide. We have, and many of you probably don't, have any precise view on it. We have in China responsibility for 25,000 men and women working for Accor.
What we have done over the last six weeks, and this is the only thing we have done, is every day we've been physically through the executives in China next to them, connected with them, me calling, other people calling, with only one thing in mind: Are they safe? How do they feel? How could we be there for them on protection measures? How could we make sure they can be reunited between the kids, the parents, and their siblings? Is there anything they need from us in terms of procurement, in terms of meals? So that the only thing we have done is looking after them. The second thing is made Accor 100% available to Chinese authority, whether it was provinces or whether it was in Beijing, which means offering to them, and it happened, availability of 20% of the hotels we have closed in China.
Those hotels may be today occupied by administration of China, medics, and a lot of actually experts who need to be physically someplace to be able to work and find the solutions, preparing meals for a lot of people working in different hospitals. That's what Accor has done. We've done it because we've been there for 47 years. We know absolutely everybody within each province. We and with the owners of our hotel, we have all the network and capacity not to be in charge, but to be available. That's what we've been doing. Could we have done better? I don't know. I want you to believe, I guess, this is my only preoccupation. When it comes to numbers, which is on the slide, there's two numbers here.
Number one, Greater China, which includes Hong Kong, Macau, is today 3% of Accor total revenues. Numbers of rooms is more than 10%. Oddly enough, it's exactly the reverse as North America. North America is less than 5% of total rooms, but it's more than 10% of total revenues. Greater China, 3% of our exposure to Accor. The China traveling population going to Europe and going to France is between 1% and 2%. It's 2% for France, and it's 1% to the U.K.. It's very minimal in the U.S. There is no impact so far on any activity of Accor outside of Asia Pacific. You know that the traveling population of China, which is today the largest traveling population, roughly 140 million, which is 10% of the billion four, 90% of them when they travel, they stay in Asia Pacific.
In that number here, what we can tell you, because we're of course looking at the impact, and 80%, by the way, of our people in China, we have asked them to stay at home. They're not physically working in the hotels. We have closed a lot of hotels for distributions because it's not the time for them to be at the service of clients. There's a lot of things being today, slowing down. Impact so far in between the start of that very difficult times and this morning is EUR 5 million of lack of revenues for Greater China. Could it be much more? Of course. It's only going to be depending on what would be, and how long that, those difficult times will last. On Asia Pacific, which is 33% revenues, of course, there is some spillover in between what's happening in Greater China and what's happening elsewhere.
I can only tell you, I don't have a number for one reason. It's because it depends enormously on countries. It has very different impact in Korea or Japan or Australia or Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. Some benefit, some don't benefit. There's a lot of actually cancellation. There's a lot of rebooking, changing destination. We'll have a much better grasp on impact on Asia Pacific for Accor, probably within the next 20- 30 days. But what we do and what I've been doing every single day is phone call, talk to them, and see what we can do. My bet, which is what you have here, is just look at the past and look at what's being said again from the China authority. They said that this morning. And everybody says it. We also confirm it.
The China authorities are doing a hell of a job on handling today something which was totally unforeseen on really putting everybody at work with a methodology, very disciplined, very orthodox, and clearly claiming that they're going to be reinjecting as much money as needed for the Chinese economy to be reboosted and to basically weather that storm. We haven't had any cancellation on signing. It's still progressing. We haven't had any one hotel construction halting. There's lesser people on different sites. We're probably forecasting some delays in some opening, which could go from quarter four 2020 to quarter one 2021. But this is where we are today.
The one thing on this slide is when you look at a lot of events that occurred over the last 30 years in different geographies, Iraq War, SARS, China already, financial crisis, subprime America, Europe, and elsewhere, look at how minimal impact those macro geopolitical events had on the travel and tourism industry. This is a trend. It's in the 20 million of travelers in 1950 to the 1.4 billion of travelers in 2013. By the way, that 1.4 billion or so, if you look at the World Tourism Council and agencies three years ago, we're already two years ahead of what everybody planned for five years ago. It is growing fast between 4% and 5% per annum. So I don't know how long COVID-19 is going to last.
The one thing I know is many of us will be of help to China on making sure that we find the solutions and making sure that we basically claim and gain back what could have been lost in the last few weeks or in the next few weeks. What you see on the right side here is interesting numbers, again, shown to you, in some occasions. The only thing that I want you to look at is those two largest markets. It's the first time Asia Pacific is the largest hospitality market, hospitality market on the planet. It's been in Europe for quite a while. First time last year, they had 8.4 million rooms in excess of the 8.3 million for Europe. You know about America. America has two things to notice. Number one, it is a 74% branded market in the hands of six operators.
It is the most mature market with 16 rooms per 1,000 inhabitants. If you look at other markets like Asia Pacific, which is why it's growing so fast, it's one eighth, only two rooms per 1,000 inhabitants compared to 16 in North America and 12 in Europe. Same thing for Middle East and Africa. Only two rooms per 1,000 inhabitants. There's clearly a lot of hotel infrastructure missing and not existing in sub-Saharan Africa. So Accor is not only in the growth markets, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Latin America, in which we're growing so fast, but we also are in the most fragmented markets in terms of brand penetration. This is why we still have a lot of room to grow in Europe. As big as Europe is, it's only a 32% controlled brand of which Accor is by far the largest.
The assets of Accor are super easy to define. The first, 300,000 people on the ground working on Accor Brand on which we have responsibility for. Again, part of those 300,000, you have the 25,000 people in China and 120,000 people in Asia Pacific. Brand powerhouse, the 40 brands of Accor is becoming stronger and stronger and better and better defined and unique. Accor Live Limitless, and Steven Taylor is very frustrated. Come to Berlin. IHIF, he's the Head of Marketing here. There's so many slides, so many films, so many advertising, so many experiences being done with Accor Live Limitless. We don't have time to show it to you, and we'll show it in Berlin. Network, 100 countries, and Accor number one leadership in half of those 100 countries at a minimum.
The balance sheet, you heard Jean-Jacques, it's never been as solid as today in terms of deleveraging, in terms of cash availability, in terms of margin, and in terms of diversification. There are four things when you move forward, well defined. The first thing, CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. What do you do for your people? What do you do for the planet? What do you do for handicap? What do you do for local communities? What do you do for your carbon print? Is there anything you could act upon and make sure that, I guess, the world's going to be better tomorrow? It's not because we feel it that way. It's because the world needs it and because our clients are looking at it and because our owners want to be embarked.
Because you in the room, you also want to see proofs of what large companies could do on being sensible to it and making commitments. Before I go to the next three, we've made an announcement on January 20th this year, January 22nd this year, on getting rid of plastic and getting rid of single-use plastic in room by the end of 2020 and all the rest by the end of 2022. In the room, it's all those shampoos, conditioners, plastic cup. The good news is we'll put something bigger so you don't have to put your eyeglass on to see the difference between the shampoo and the conditioner. At least we're going to help you and me, before you get your wet, basically your hand being wet and you can't basically get the silver on top of it out.
Go back to the first quick video on what we've shown on plastic and commitment made two weeks ago. Plastic is everywhere in our daily lives with disastrous impact both on Earth and in the ocean. Accor has been committed to a responsible attitude for 25 years and will now go further to reduce its impact on the environment. Every year, we use and we display 200 million single-use plastic items in our restaurants, in the meeting rooms, in the spa wellness facilities. Each of us, you and me, we actually swallow, eat every week one credit card worth of plastic. We just have to stop this. We're focused right now on, by the end of 2022, we want to eliminate all guest-related single-use plastic product in our hotels. For each one, we've determined a plan as to whether to remove them altogether and/or to find substitute product.
This commitment will be implemented in more than 5,000 hotels in 110 countries.
We're going to be sharing that commitment with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Getting Rid of Plastic. It's going to be done also in parallel with United Nations. I want to make sure that whatever Accor group becomes mine and 300,000 people of our co-responsibilities. Our clients want it, but our employees want it even more. It's time for me to be in front of it and basically make sure that everybody will be Accoruntable and proud of those things happening. Accor will eliminate all guest-related single-use plastic items in all hotels by the end of 2022.
In 2019, we completed the elimination of all plastic straws, stirrers, and cotton buds. By the end of 2020, we will eliminate all individual plastic toiletry amenities and plastic cups. By the end of 2022, we will eliminate all remaining single-use plastic items in guest rooms, restaurants, meeting, and leisure areas.
Not easy to do, by the way, but it's live, it's committed, and we will succeed as we have succeeded on many different topics. Development, it is the name of the game. The only way you can go through difficult times, difficult RevPAR environment, is to continue peddling. You have to sign the maximum number of hotels. Those are the buffer that you have to play with against any down cycle in our industry. I think many of us could say that, and I need to thank the team on what was open in the last quarter of 2019, 18,000 rooms alone in only one quarter. I think we have the best team by far in development all over the globe.
That includes design, technical services, include all the developers and legal team. Accor, that's a hell of a job in signing so many hotels in so many jurisdictions. Each of those jurisdictions, different legislation, different social rules, different currency, different construction rules, far more difficult than having 70% of the network in one single country, America. Accor Live Limitless, we've talked about it, JJ did. I want to end with the last slide, which is probably the most relevant for many of you watching me on a webcast and some of you in the room. Every word counts on that single table. So I'll go very slowly. Increase shareholder return, deploying simple cash-generating self-deleveraging asset- light model. I'm not going to repeat it again. You can read it. It is on a paper, and it's not going to go away, which means the following.
You have seen in 2018, and I'm putting aside the ordinary dividend, which is a normal way of conduct on distributing 50% of excess free cash flow every year to investors. But on top of what is ordinary, in 2018, we've done a EUR 350 million share buyback, which Accorunted for 5.3% total shareholder return as compared to market cap to investors. In 2019, we've increased it from EUR 350 to EUR 500 million, which related to 7.3% of total market cap. In 2020, we further increased it to EUR 600 million, EUR 300 million announced last November. And I'm announcing to you this morning after board approval yesterday that on top of the EUR 300 million already launched in the third or fourth of January this year, we are going to have another EUR 300 million launched in the next few weeks for a few months when we finished the first EUR 300 million.
That will be roughly 7.8% of today's market cap. And then next year, already being discussed, approved at the board that EUR 400 million will be also used in share buyback in 2021. But we do say, and it's not by accident, something extra on that slide to be pursued beyond 2021. So what I'm telling you on behalf of the board of directors of Accor is a lot of excess cash flow being provided by this company through a self-deleveraging simple cash-flowing asset- light model. Money should go back to shareholders in the form of share buyback. I've been saying, and I know it's not usual, but I've been shouting a bit inefficiently that we don't believe that Accor is appropriately valued. So the best way to basically confirm it and assess it is to prudently use companies' cash and means in buying back shares of our company. Voilà.
That's where we are. Now we go as quickly as you could, for shareholders, investors, and any of you who could have questions. Let's go first. Why am I not surprised? We need to have a microphone for our friend, for Richard. Richard. If you could, since we have people on the webcast, be kind enough just to say, I know who you are, Richard, but I guess for the audience of the webcast, just start with your name and what you do, please.
Richard Clarke from Bernstein. Three questions, as per standard. So you've made some comments on coronavirus there, helpful. Anything we can say about the Australia fires? Obviously, there, that was a bigger impact in January. Anything we can read into the EUR 150 million impairment as to what you're thinking in terms of Australia performance into 2020, on the back of that?
Second question is you've put the EUR 1.2 billion EBITDA guidance on a slide again today. When that was first announced, obviously things were different. It was pre-IFRS 16, and there's been some perimeter changes. So just wondering, is that EUR 1.2 billion comparable to the EUR 825 million of EBITDA you've announced today? And then number three, you've said you've completed the shift to asset- light. You've still got 163 hotels in that asset-heavy business. Maybe just remind us what's in that business and what can be done to reduce that remaining 163 hotel portfolio.
Richard, I love you deeply. Mr. JJ, you're going to have the three questions.
So as far as Australia is concerned, the big difference between what we had in the business plan and what we see today is something to the tune of 7% to 8% differenc s in RevPAR, right? Part of that is it's more than what you see as being the variance of RevPAR in Australia, but part of that is linked to the geography of where Mantra is. Mantra is very much on the Golden Coast, where you've got people that go there for leisure. All what has been happening during the year in terms of trade war, and you are mentioning the bushfire, has been very much impacting the visitor flow. That's why you've got an even more increased effect coming from visitor portion of the business in the Mantra business plan. Yes, the bushfire does have a specific effect. The second question that you had was on the 1.2. Yes, it is comparable, but this is the magic of number. It's because on one side, you've got changes in Accorunting standards.
You know the IFRS 16, which is to the tune of EUR 150 million rough cut. Then you've got the Orbis, the Orbis transaction, and Mövenpick , which are going the opposite way. All in all, you lose EUR 100 million on Orbis, you lose EUR 60 million on Mövenpick , which are numbers that we provided before. So the magic of changes of perimeter, you have the same basis. Therefore, we're confirming again and again that we will reach EUR 1.2 billion by 2022.
Your last question was?
Just on the remaining 163 hotels in the asset-heavy portion. Yes. What are those? Yes. What's left in there? Yes. What can be done to maybe reduce that over time?
The largest part of what you've got in the hotel asset at the end of the year is Mantra, right, in terms of value. And then what you've got left in terms of number of hotels is what we have in Brazil. Because in Brazil, the way business is done is through so-called variable lease on EBITDA. And you've got a significant portion of the business which is done this way. And that's the way people do finance over time hotels in Brazil. It's a lot of hotels. It's not necessarily a lot of profit because the profit that you have is in hotel service and not in hotel asset when you are on a reverse list, as you know. And then you've got very limited number of hard asset in that column.
You still have one hotel in Egypt, which is called the Gezira, which we ended up keeping for structural reasons. It was not possible to put it in Orbis. You've got the Sofitel in Mauritius. So very limited number of physical hard assets. What you've got left is hotel assets and other. You've got the other part of the business, which is loyalty card that you've got, which is only working in Australia. You've got some timeshare business in Australia. But again, these are small businesses, and this is not really hotels per se. So that's what you have.
You will look to reduce that down over time, all of those different companies?
No, I think the short thing is that the business that we do in Australia on timeshare and that we do in Australia on that loyalty card are good businesses. We make good money, and this is not big amounts. The way business is done in Brazil is not going to change, that we know of. So, you know, either we don't do business or we do business the way they do business and finance hotel. So this is going to stay. The one thing that we've got to work on is Mantra. But as we told you back in December, and you see that now with the numbers we just went through, it is not the right time to sell an asset when the numbers are what they are because you basically are not very convincing on that basis.
It's much better off to wait. When the business will return and it will return, then it will be the right time to go and do what we did for Mövenpick , for Mantra. By the way, you know, the other way of looking at it, if you want to look at the glass half full versus half empty, is that it goes down very rapidly. It goes up super rapidly. Mantra will turn around because the business in Australia, again, as I, as that's why I was quoting this GDP data, the business in Australia because of what Australia as a country is, i.e., a lot of commodities present in that island, in that continent is such that, you know, they're going to grow in the long term. It's just not the case now.
So another way is we're going to get back the EUR 4 million we missed last year on the lease s.
Thank you.
Sure. [Foreign language].
Thank you very much. It's Julian Easthope from RBC. I've got three questions. Maybe I should ask them individually at a time so that you can answer.
Sure. Yes.
So we can remember. So the first one, in terms of your fee base, can you give a sort of broad split between your base fees and your incentive fees? Because it's quite a volatile time. I just wondered whether or not you had too much in the way of profit guarantees, particularly in China, where obviously there's such big volatility in terms of RevPAR that could possibly catch us out in some mar kets. Thank you.
Yeah. Rough cut, the number is 30%. It's hovering around 30%- 35% depending on the year. That's the part of the incentive fee as a percent of the total fees, right? So that's the first answer. The second one is that there is not what you described in our contract in Asia. So we don't have, like some of our competitors, those big threshold and guarantees as you may see in other competitors in this industry. So it's not significant.
Okay. Thank you. The second question, if you take a look at your new room growth of 5.5.1%. Room growth, plus your RevPAR of 1.7%. That comes to sort of 6.8%. Yet your fees are like for like, we're only up 3.8%. I just wondered if it, especially bear in mind the rooms have a higher proportion of luxury rooms. I just wondered if you could sort of bridge the gap as to where the difference.
Again, I get that question every time. So I answer every time the same thing, which is that it's a rough rule that works over time, doesn't necessarily work on a specific geography in a specific time period. It is even less working when you have negative RevPAR, right? Part of the issue that you have in the equation is that it's much more normative in the computation when you are at a 3% kind of RevPAR. When you start to have negative RevPAR, then all of that is disturbed. But to be a little bit more specific on this, on the current year, what you have is that you have a lot of the openings of the fiscal year that were done in Q4. I quoted the number of 40% of the openings being done in Q4.
Because of that, you don't have that portion of what grows, in fact, your revenue on top of the RevPAR, which is to the full amount of what you should get. So there was a timing due to the way the hotel opened in the current year.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Sure.
And just two little bits. In terms of, I think you mentioned that, I call Live Limitless was going to be a EUR 55 million loss this year. That was your original plan. Just wondered if you could confirm that. And also on SBE, there was a EUR 46 million loss. I know you mentioned the financing cost. Where do I get all the questions?
It's sad I'm not.
Because strategy is super tricky.
Okay. Okay. Okay. So the numbers that we provided to you last year on the MIP are the same, exactly the same, except that there is a shift from 2019- 2020 to the tune of the EUR 15 million. From that, you had like - EUR 55 million and - EUR 45 million and then close to EUR 0. You subtract from the EUR 55, the EUR 15 million, and you add back to the EUR 45 million, the EUR 15 million.
That's the number you should take in your model.
Okay, thank you. Just on the SBC losses, when the refinancing goes through, what's the ongoing likely level?
Okay. In the SB Accorunt, okay, the cost of interest is to the tune of EUR 80 million because they basically have a debt which is the same way as AccorInvest is not financing itself on terms which are the equivalent of what Accor can get on markets, which our rates are very competitive because of who we are. Once you start to go into the private world, the interest rates are not at all the same. And so once you refinance that, you expect that charge to very, very significantly decrease. Very, very significantly decrease.
Thank you very much.
Sure. [Foreign language].
Good morning. Sabrina Blanc, Société Générale. I have three questions, please. Unfortunately, I think it's for Jean-Jacques again. Sorry. Okay. The first one is regarding China and coronavirus. Just to understand, you said EUR 5 million negative impact on sales. Is it year to date? It's month per month, just to have an idea. But my more important question is regarding the impact.
Have you seen already some impact outside ASPAC, notably in Spain, for example, where some big events like the MOBA in Barcelona have been canceled? The second key question is regarding the guidance in terms of RevPAR. I know we are at the beginning of the year, but what is your feeling concerning the RevPAR if we compare to the 3% long-term growth? And the latest question is regarding new businesses. Could you come back on the review on Jean-Paul and Juan Fanste? If we can have more color, please.
Well, some of them I can delegate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can. I think I can delegate some. Thank you for your questions.
I'll delegate the third on RevPAR, we don't provide any guidance, right? I think on this one, it's pretty easy. On new businesses, I'll delegate to my boss. I like these two answers. On the EUR 5 million, the way the EUR 5 million has been computed is that we just try to take a snapshot of what we see today. The problem with the data around the coronavirus, it has been evolving quite significantly. Nobody could foresee that epidemic. What we see today is such that if we do a spot computation of what we see today on the months of February, that's how you derive the EUR 5 million of fees, right? The real question that you've got around the epidemic is how long is it going to last and how fast can you rebound from such a crisis?
If you look at history, it happened that the crises were able to be contracted in a reasonable number of months. I don't know if you can talk of reasonable on such a deep subject, but reasonable number of months. Then it rebounded pretty fast. That's really what the elements that we don't know today are going to be critical in the evaluation of what it does for a given year. Now, yes, you're right, some events were canceled. When you talk about the one that you just mentioned, it's not a lot of money. That in terms of effect for us, we did the computation. It's not a lot of money.
We don't have any data here, which is substantial enough that we can derive something that we feel comfortable describing to you. It's too early, simply too early. We don't see it.
On the new businesses, he talked about, Jean-Jacques talked about it, and we have Thibaut Viort here, if you want to see him, coffee after the break. It's divided into three businesses in three different buckets. New businesses are the Jean-Paul, D- Edge, Juan Fanste, RedsDiary, Very Chic. The first bucket that we've talked to you about, which has been done, is deciding that what is today strategic, industry-approved, great talents, very important for our core, should be merged into our core business, GECO. GECO is a remarkable company, interfacing, e-billing, digital savvy between travel agencies, between corporate, big corporate Accorunts.
We incorporated in the global sales of our core department, 100% of the expertise of GECO. It's still a separate entity, but it's fully today merged into global sales and into the digital division of Accor. Likely will be the same for RedsDiary, which is a booking engine for a lot of restaurants. And not for Very Chic, which is the sales discounter that we do flash sales, very successfully done out of Barcelona. Then you have a second bucket, which are those companies performing well, but they need muscles. They need fresh capital. They need to grow faster. Great management team and D- Edge is a good example.
D-Edge is a remarkable technology platform, rendering a lot of services on behalf of independent hotels, helping them to assess the best channel for distribution, the best website, the best PMS, the best way of acquiring search words from Google and others. They are a couple hundred developers tech. They are super, super, super good. That company's been growing very fast for the last four years we had it. They need to grow faster. They need to expand in new geographies, very likely. We're going to give a ball of fresh air to D- Edge, where you're going to have third party coming in, likely private equity or industrial operating companies providing funds and acquiring either 40%, 35%, 60%.
I want Accor to remain as the big industrial strategic partners, but I don't want to be the one putting back more capital into D- Edge because we're not the best partner for them to grow faster. And you have a third way of conducting yourself is some companies, you don't need to remain in the capital of those companies. They should have their own lives. They should be autonomous, and they probably should be merging with other operators or being taken over by other operators. But it could be a mix in between different scenarios. So for Jean-Paul, by the way, as you talked about it, Jean-Paul, we seriously discuss things with two or three different same thematic actors on a planet on bringing forces together, on combining Jean-Paul with an existing, basically, relationship operator, service provider, and concierge.
You'll see a home for each different business. What we've been discussing is how much we invested. I am fairly comfortable that you're going to see all the money back that we invested in your businesses in very different mix than the one I expected myself five years ago. But it is still a very good initiative and solid thematic. We're not going to stop investing, but we're going to do it differently. But you won't see new businesses as the way it's being reported to you. But Accor still is engaged on many innovation, many research and development, and true actors in showing a hand to a lot of new initiatives in the travel tourism industry.
André Juillard, Deutsche Bank.
I have three questions. The first one is about asset management. We all know that you have some mantra asset to sell, and it will probably take a little bit more time than expected initially. Fine. But you still got 30% of AccorInvest. Could you give us some more color on this 30%? Because correct me if I'm wrong, but the lockup is until May 2023. Could we anticipate shorter lockup or earlier exit if I mention it differently? First question. Second question about marketing and distribution. Could you give us some more color about the Sabre partnership, what do you expect from it, and in which timing do we have to anticipate some additional investments in it? Some more detail, please. The last question about the dividend. It's a very technical question, but why offering the possibility to have a dividend paid by share when in the meantime you are doing a share buyback?
[Foreign language]. On the dividend, it's simply because we have queries from people to be able to get their dividend through shares. It's essentially trying to respond to that. Nothing else to read into it. AccorInvest, we have 30%. We sold the 5% in November. We have a lockup 2023 because it was a five-year lockup since May 2018. We're very happy with that investment. We showed you that on the first 18 months, there was a 13% IR. There is a 5% coupon dividend being paid every year. At a minimum on that billion-plus euros value of the 30%, you get 5% of that every single year.
On top of that, likely 6%, 7%, 8% IR because that company is really proving well in terms of growth, sales, EBITDA efficiencies, and therefore development. So it's only going to be a matter of two things. One, do we get green light from the existing consortium of our equity partners to relieve us from the remaining three years of lockup? We haven't asked as of yet for them to do it. The second thing is the minute we ask them, I am quite confident we'll find some amicable solution. But before you do so, you have to decide use of proceed because that money is very safely invested in a double-digit return where we do have cash on the balance sheet today, which you've seen the number, to the extent of, today we have EUR 1.7 billion. EUR 2.3 billion. EUR 2.3 billion yielding 10 basis points.
The last thing we need is more cash on the balance sheet when we have safely invested cash in AccorInvest. One could disagree with me, huh? There's maybe we should be doing a EUR 2 billion share buyback program, as opposed to the one announced. But that's going to be a different question to be addressed later. On the Sabre, Sabre is very audacious initiatives. We've done an RFP request for proposal with a lot of credible industrial partners on doing building only one thing, which was being designed by the digital team, technical team of our core is finally combining two systems who don't talk to each other properly today. The first is called CRS, Customer Reservation System, which in the case of our core, we built it proprietary and it's called TARS.
That system represents 80%+ of all the volume, the EUR 22 billion of volume of our core brand goes through our own CRS called TARS. Then you have the property management system, which you find locally in each hotel, and they could differ from one hotel to the other. Some have FOLS, some have ORS, some have Oracle, and Opera. We've been deciding that, I guess, we should be combining on one single tech platform, CRS and PMS, and put it on the cloud. One's going to be much more efficient. Two, much easier to retrieve and store data. Three, less costly because you don't need any local servers every time you do a PMS. Fourth, you're going to be materializing cost in between initial expert, Sabre in America, and the expertise built by our core over the last 10 years in the same field.
It's never been done before. In order to do it that way, we've announced it. It's going to be, we're going to see the minimal viable product within maximum 18 months. Accor will provide in the form of CapEx the needs over the next four years to fund that program. I don't know whether we said the numbers or whether we never said the number. We did not. We did not. It's not a P&L impact. It's a CapEx impact.
Simon LeChipre , Main First, two questions, please. First of all, on the 2022 EBITDA guidance, EUR 1.2 billion, does that include the EUR 60 million contribution from the MIP you have announced a year ago, or we have to think about EUR 1.26 billion? Secondly, on hotel assets, could you please provide us a sensitivity from a RevPAR to EBITDA, especially for Mantra, please, given what is happening there in Australia? Thank you.
I mean, the RevPAR to EBITDA, I'll just reuse what we used to say in the old days, i.e., that when you are asset heavy, and that used to be in the reference document, the volatility that you have on asset heavy is three times the volatility that you have on asset- light. It's roughly a rule of thumb that works well. But essentially in the case of Mantra, the lease works in such a manner that whatever you lose on top line, you have 80% of it down to the bottom line because it depends after that on your lease level.
And that's why you've got such a fluctuation on the business plan and hence the write-off on the EUR 1.2 billion. Yeah, it's part of the Rondeplan. So EUR 1.2 billion is a number which is much easier to remember than EUR 1.15 billion, EUR 1.25 billion. So you pick up what you want. It's in 2022, so we have 2023, so we have EUR 1.2 billion. Okay. We have Sébastien Valentin on behalf of people on the webcast and on the phone.
Yes. So, as you said this morning, we have some people in the room. We have about 300 people actually following the webcast, and the analysts are asking questions. I will start with Monique Pollard from Citi with three questions. The first is, given the EUR 150 million impairment for Mantra and the Mövenpick Lease Hotels transaction, what should we expect for hotel assets EBITDA for 2020?
You know, what you should expect is there is no reason really at this juncture to have a different number on the basis of Mantra. The problem there is going to be whatever does the coronavirus do to it. But again, it's way too early to have any number around that. The one thing that you should, you should, you can take into Accorunt in the computation, I think there is about EUR 200 million of EBITDA which is linked to hotel asset. There is EUR 60 million of it which will go away with Mövenpick once we close the transaction in March of this year or in Q1 of this year. So that's what you should take.
Second question here. I think you briefly touched on that, Jean-Jacques, but can you give an update on why the 19 DNA charge is so high at EUR 328 million?
Yeah, sure. I mean, it's essentially the acquisition of Mantra and Mövenpick, which are asset heavy. And with the new IFRS 16 rule that came into the current year, you have to basically reclassify the lease, which was Accorunted before in EBITDA, into two charges: one which is depreciation and amortization, and another one which is interest. So the depreciation and amortization, which is associated with this standard, is an additional EUR 150 million to the numbers of depreciation and amortization for the group. And so that's why you move from EUR 200 to EUR 330. EUR 150 is IFRS 16 amortization.
Okay. Third question, last question from Monique. Can you please explain why the share of net profit from associates and JVs is so low in 2019 at EUR 3 million? And then within the EUR 3 million, what was the share from Huazhu, AccorInvest, and SBE JV?
Okay. I was a bit in my explanation, but I'll go into more quantification. You've got the largest part of the gap is coming from SBE, probably to the tune of EUR 40 million. And then you've got the remainder, which is split equally between AccorInvest and Huazhu. Rough guess. So you've got 50% of it, which is one, 25%, 25%. I'm giving you rough numbers on what it is.
All right. The next question comes from Jaafar Mestari at Exane BNP Paribas. How much of the EUR 15 million provision reversal of the full year was already incurred in H1 2019? North America EBITDA was up EUR 11 million in H1, mostly driven by those reversals.
I think you have part of the answer in the question. If I have to guess, I think it's about 50% of the money that we're able to collect, which was in H1. I remember making some comments in the H1 call around that, so 50% is a good proxy for what we recognize in H1 of that one-off effect.
I'll now turn to questions from Vicki Stern from Barclays. First question, marketing investments. Given the shift, can you confirm the right absolute amount to assume for 2021?
I explained that, but I'll say it again. It's 45 plus 15, so that should make 60 if my computation is right. I was computing all questions, and all of that is negative number.
Cost cutting program update on net amount to expect over the coming years.
When we went through the restructuring charge, you may recall we booked about EUR 100 million, a bit less than EUR 100 million, of restructuring charge in the 2018 Accorunt. We had a series of plans that were being executed, one in Europe, one on BCD, and one on the central function. The split of that, and we said that the return on that would be a EUR 65 million cost saving. The EUR 65 million, there is EUR 20 million of it, which is in 2019, EUR 20 million of it that you should expect, or EUR 25 million that you should expect, in 2020, and the remainder should be in the last year. Rough guess.
The next question is on coronavirus. We discussed P&L assumptions. What are our thoughts or your thoughts on potential impact on net system growth for the year? Can we still do 5% net system growth?
I'll take that. Take that one. We're shooting for the same, and we set it, 5% net system growth every year and trying to surpass it. I told you half, I mean, 45% of the supply growth over the last couple of years likely to be remaining the case in the next couple of years is Asia-Pacific. So rough cut, 25 plus or minus thousand rooms are coming from Asia-Pacific moving forward. Let's be very careful. You have 60% of that is Huazhu, and 40% of that is Accor branded and Accor operated. So as of this minute, we don't know because there's no delay. We continue basically engaging with the owners.
As you may know, the Chinese authorities have made debt capacity available at cheaper financing over the last two weeks to existing owner-developers in China to make sure those projects don't stop. So it is still progressing, likely to be postponed in some projects and delayed in opening maybe within four months, six months, one quarter, two quarters missed. I would say that probably half a point could be the maximum impact in terms of net supply growth. So going from 5.1% to 4.6%, but two-thirds of that differential is non-impactful for Accor because the Huazhu hotels don't provide any significant revenues for Accor.
The last question from Vicki is on EBITDA 2020. We don't give guidance at this time of the year for the full year. But could we help analysts by calling out some of the key items we should have in mind or they should have in mind for the bridge from 2019-20 20, such as cost cuts, incremental marketing investments, any other thing which they should be thinking about?
I think that's what we try to highlight into the various comments that we made. That's why we make all the comments around the marketing investment plan. I mean, for sure, we're not going to stay as we are if things were to deteriorate, related to a crisis, COVID, coronavirus, or things. So we're going to start to figure out, you know, what we can do on so-called self-help measure to make sure that, you know, we do what we can on the portion that we do master in what's happening.
I think the key element on which really the visibility is too low today is the coronavirus in terms of transition. For the rest, we discussed the cost savings. We discussed the MIP. There is nothing that comes to my mind of significance that I should be adding to that.
The only thing, and I know it's probably the conclusion to Vicki, anybody else's, and I think we shared it with you. We said multiple things here. We said five minutes ago that we are confirming the EUR 1.2 billion of EBITDA by the end of 2022. Therefore, by confirming that number, we're confirming that we're likely growing in 2020 and in 2021 and in 2022. We also said to you that whenever we have turmoils, difficulty in one country, thank God we have other countries working on six cylinders or other continent. We're confirming this again.
We said that we have a very simple cash flowing asset, I mean, debt deleveraging model. So simple. We have cash. We have good cash transformation. We also added that we have capacity to deploy and to open one new hotel a day in 2020 and likely in 2021 and 2022. The only word that I want you to go away is optimism. Accor is truly optimist on our capacity to weather many storms as we have done the last many years and continuing growing the company's performances and growing likely solid returns to the shareholders and capacity to give jobs to many people on this planet and to offer performances to the owners and to engage further on preserving our dear planet. That's where we are.
Can we stop there?
I've got like three more questions. I will turn to Jamie Rollo from Morgan Stanley. Question on operating cost in management and franchise, which fell EUR 60 million or 19% despite central cost being reallocated the year. Why? And is this sustainable?
Part of it is what I alluded to in terms of reallocating some of the costs that happened to be Accorunted historically in the old column that relates, in fact, to benefits, so people cost, and that was, in fact, not in the column where it should be. We improved it by doing an allocation of those costs into that given column. That's to the tune of EUR 18 million. The other thing that you've got is you've got the marketing incentive plan, so all what the EUR 35 million is also showing up in the column called STO, Services to Owners.
That's EUR 35 million, which is happening here. Last but not least, we are not stopping the investment in terms of digital and systems. I'm still pursuing, in fact, the plans that we've got to improve some of the functionalities, notably, you know, payment in Asia as an example of the things that we do. There is continued investment here. It's not necessarily much more, but there is continued investment, so it's not a reduction either. Cash was EUR 2.8 billion at December end and will rise again post-Orbis disposal.
Even with the buyback, Accor still has significant firepower. What is the plan for that cash?
The plan for the cash is what we've been sharing with you is another EUR 1 billion of share buyback or confirming the EUR 1 billion of share buyback, EUR 300 million already launched, another EUR 300 million in 2020, another confirmed EUR 400 million share buyback. We have more cash to be deployed. I told you that we're going to be pursuing share buyback in the near futures. I'm also telling you we want to preserve rating of this company. When you do have EUR 3.3 billion of cash on the balance sheet after Orbis, you also have EUR 4 billion-ish of debt on your balance sheet that you're facing. You can't use the cash without either reimbursing the debt or if you do use the cash, use it properly and wisely to make sure you preserve your rating because you still have kept the debt on the other side.
It's not a simple answer. My answer is we are very much aware of the solidity and the cash features of this company, and we are solidly prepared to make sure that it will be reinvested, reallocated as properly as it was in the past, which is why I showed you the slide. A lot of the cash being used over the last few years has been properly used in terms of return on your investment, and it was shown in one of your slides, be it Orbis, be it AccorInvest, be it Huazhu, and many be it Fairmont, Raffles, and many other investments. Bear with us, and every month passing, you'll get greater information on cash deployment.
The last question is from Alex Brignall at Redburn. In the hotel penetration data, the room count only includes STR hotels, not smaller properties. What is the risk that business models like Oyo mean that smaller properties are more important, particularly in emerging markets?
It's a good question. It's a difficult answer. Many of you know we have met with Oyo a dozen times since 2014, 2013. So we know very well their business model. They are likely very successful in India. They are very successful in China. We don't know as of yet how successful would they be in America. They're starting in Brazil. They have started in the U.K. I don't know. The one thing I can tell you is on those independent hotels, they have access to a lot of new technology applications. One of them is Oyo. For us, we've never seen we call it instant noodles.
Instant noodles is Accor's capacity to sit down with an independent owner and to bring them on board on Accor's network and him inheriting one of the 40 Accor brands. So it is a very important market, and you're absolutely right, Sébastien. It's a market we pay a lot of attention to because it is another way to develop the Accor network without the necessity of opening another hotel and adding supply to existing market. So time will tell, but I guess we are very close to those fragmented markets. It happens to be out of North America in which Accor is the most present. Sébastien, c'est bon?
Cool. May I, could we adjourn? No one has. Again, I'm very thankful for those of you who took a plane, a train, a taxi, or Uber, walked, bicycled to come here because at least we were not alone in this room. Thank you so much, and thank you all of you on the phone. Bye-bye.