Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to welcome you for the Air Liquide Digital Capital Markets Day. In this uncertain environment, it is particularly important for us to have this dialogue with you. We are really pleased that so many of you decided to join us virtually, and we hope that the event will respond to your expectations. During the presentation, you have the opportunity to ask questions through the chat. It will be followed by a Q&A session, and we will answer these questions as well as direct questions asked by phone by sales side analysts. This way, we should be able to address most of your requests. As our goal is to be effective and impactful, let's start immediately with Benoît, and then François will accompany you all along the presentation.
Thank you, Fabienne. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day. I will participate in this meeting digitally and not face-to-face due to positive COVID testing. Let's move on. Before we start the formal proceedings of this capital market event, I wanted to say a few words about Ukraine and the terrible tragedy of the war presently taking place there. We share the emotion of the millions of Ukrainians living in or close to the conflict. Their fate concerns all of us. Our first priority always remains the safety of all our employees. I'm thinking in particular about our 14 Ukrainian colleagues from E&C and their families, as well as our 719 Russian colleagues, themselves affected by the consequences of this conflict. We have decided to take action and lend our support to those severely affected by this situation.
Through our foundation, we will make an immediate donation of EUR 1 million for humanitarian actions alongside NGOs to support refugees, particularly in terms of accommodation, education, and access to healthcare. I also warmly welcome all exemplary local initiatives already taken by Air Liquide affiliates and employees, and we will consider providing medical equipment and oxygen to the Ukrainian people. Our operations in Russia amount to less than 1% of the group turnover. So far, the group has announced its decision to suspend all its foreign investments in Russia for major development projects and until further notice. For humanitarian reasons, we will see to it that medical oxygen is still delivered to hospitals and that nitrogen for safety is supplied to customers in strict compliance with current laws and regulations.
Although we also contemplated postponing today's event, we decided to maintain it, as we thought it was important to keep midterm perspectives and share with you and our employees, even during these unprecedented times, the strong underlying trends on which we are already building our future. Let me start with our main achievements over the past 5 years. From 2016 to 2019, the nearest period, we reached 3 financial objectives. Sales growth with an annual growth rate of +6.5%, including the scope effect from the Airgas acquisition. Two efficiencies which were instrumental in the improvement of our OIR margin. Thanks to a fully structured program put in place in 2017, we delivered more than EUR 1.1 billion of efficiencies over 3 years, in addition to more than $300 million of synergies from the integration of Airgas.
Debt, we kept committed to A category rating, and we achieved it, leading to a strong balance sheet. Return on capital employed, the double-digit return on capital employed, initially planned for 2021, 2022, was postponed by 2 years because of the COVID impact. We've been able to deploy a new strategic program to integrate a major acquisition while profitably growing the business and maintaining a very strong balance sheet. Beyond finance, we also delivered on strong fundamentals. Safety first, with a decreasing lost time accident frequency rate, which reached around 1 per million hours. Customer satisfaction second, for which we developed a customer centricity program to improve and measure customer satisfaction. Our net promoter score improved by +35 points over the period 2015, 2020. It is a great achievement. Finally, employee engagement. Commitment and motivations of the teams, in particular during crisis times, are critical.
I'm very proud to report that we consistently received high internal response rates and a strong motivation to perform at the highest level. Leadership was demonstrated again over the past five years. The acquisition of Airgas was a game changer for Air Liquide in the U.S., putting us in a number one position in industrial merchant and giving us a national footprint in the country. On clean energy, after years of advocacy, hydrogen has been recognized as a key molecule for the energy transition to support the decarbonization of the industry and the mobility sector. Air Liquide is both active and recognized as a leader in hydrogen energy. As a matter of fact, the local production of hydrogen is also a way to increase national energy independence.
On sustainability, the group has also been ahead of its industry to make commitments, first in 2018 and more recently in 2021, with commitment towards carbon neutrality in 2050. Lastly, the strength and resilience of our business model has again proven itself during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back on the Airgas acquisition, a true strategic move, we can measure profitability with our two main KPIs, OIR margin ratio, and even more importantly, return on capital employed. They both sharply improved after the acquisition in 2015, 2016, as you can see on the slide. Furthermore, under NEOS, we put in place a structured program based on four pillars: improve business, perform, procure, and transform. As a result, pricing, efficiency, and portfolio management were boosted. A deep structural transformation was achieved.
We will definitely build on this strength in the next few years, and I will let François and Jérôme to come back later on this issue. Delivering shareholder value over time and at a high level matters for us. As you can see on the left, we have outperformed our broader domestic index, the CAC 40, over five years, and it will be the same over 10 or 20 years. On the right, our TSR is above +10% whatever the period over five, 10 or 20 years. As you know, our shareholder policy favors loyalty and long-term investments, which aligns well with our focus on regular and sustained profitable growth. That's the assessment of the past. Now let's turn towards the future. As we are witnessing an acceleration of the major trends post-COVID, including the paradigm shift in energy supply worldwide, we see tremendous opportunities ahead of us.
To be more specific, we are talking about climate urgency. The awareness of this urgency from society and governments has led to new regulations and financing plans to support the energy transition and decarbonization. As a matter of fact, the EU has recently announced its REPowerEU plan, aiming at increasing the resilience of the EU-wide energy system. It will translate into an acceleration of investments in renewable energies. The permitting process will also significantly be reduced. All these initiatives have set in motion major players in industry and mobility sectors. Second opportunity, industrial footprint at national or regional level is becoming more relevant in the current context to ease and better manage supply chains. Three digital technologies are now everywhere. They bring more efficiency and productivity, and they help simplify transactions. As a consequence, the semiconductor industry is investing heavily to keep up with new demand.
There is also a demand for appropriate healthcare, which has only been exacerbated during the pandemic. As a result, many countries push even further for better access to therapies such as those offered by Air Liquide. The role of technology is becoming more and more critical, finally, to develop new markets, new solutions, and to collectively meet the ambition of carbon neutrality by 2050. What does it mean for Air Liquide? A lot of opportunities, of course, as our molecules are key for many industries, and we are seen as a solution provider by our customers. Likewise, our healthcare teams play a key role during the pandemic, and we are now identified as a key partner in the medical field. In brief, we are excellently positioned to contribute to reinvent manufacturing with low carbon industrial processes, leading-edge semiconductors, and a large usage of digital.
We also want to play an active role in the evolution of healthcare systems, in particular with the development of value-based healthcare. By providing access to oxygen to patients in remote areas in middle or low-income countries. Regarding hydrogen, a huge market is ahead of us and developing fast. Both our expertise and experience will make the difference. It will be developed later. Finally, the space industry should also offer new opportunities rather quickly in the future, as it will require gases and some advanced technologies we have in our portfolio. Besides the opportunities, the COVID has also set new rules of the game. In the pre-COVID world, our growth came from the addition of new industrial capacities. Post-COVID, it will come predominantly from capturing new markets and supporting both customers and countries in their energy transition roadmaps. Before COVID, the industrial gas market grew also through a consolidation process.
Today, the new huge hydrogen market is attractive for new competitors. In the past, one looked for leaner and leaner organization. Today, innovation becomes key again, requiring new talents. Before COVID, growth was in part a result of the geographical expansion in emerging economies. Today, it is mature economies that are leading transformation. Before, we played in a low inflationary environment. Now, managing costs and effective price strategies are more important than ever. Finally, beyond digital and cyber, I could also mention sovereignty as a priority in the present environment. No doubt the world has changed very fast in the past three years, and we need to adapt to the new rules. Let's see how Air Liquide is positioned. Our positioning is very strong. We are number one in many geographies, Europe, Asia, healthcare in Europe, industrial merchant in North America.
We are also number one in many businesses. To name a few, hydrogen, large industries, medical oxygen, electronics. Air Liquide has also proven its leadership in innovation, deep tech, and sustainability. We continue to set new standards. We serve global and local industries. We support many supply chains, including critical materials and renewable energy, which help strengthen both industrial basins, local ones, and exporting countries. Our teams have built the new foundations for the twenty-first century with a diversified and powerful geographic exposure, a focus on the most promising end markets, and an innovative mindset, which ideally positions us for future sustainable growth. I trust our teams to continue this successful journey through ADVANCE and beyond. On these words, I will hand over to François.
Thank you very much, Benoît. Good afternoon, everyone. It is my pleasure to be with you today and to present our new strategic plan, ADVANCE. The strengths of the group and our successful track record are the foundations of ADVANCE. There are new things that you will find in ADVANCE. One of them is the fact that we will be looking at comprehensive performance, including financials and extra-financial performance to define our contribution and success. ADVANCE is organized around four priorities. The first one is to deliver outstanding financial performance. Of course, continuous improvement of the financial performance matters. It is a must to do all the rest. It is a way to generate the resources to finance our growth and to earn the trust from our shareholders.
Because we want to do more, the second priority is to decarbonize the planet, provide solutions for the energy transition, and develop hydrogen. It is clear that the dramatic events in Ukraine will rebalance the focus on energy supply. More than ever, the energy transition will be on top of the agenda. Some projects may slow down, but we are convinced that CO2 reduction will remain a midterm target and that energy sovereignty will accelerate some opportunities. As we have just seen last week with Europe's willingness to accelerate hydrogen supply. The third priority is to unlock new markets through technologies and innovation, especially in the fields of hydrogen mobility, electronics, healthcare, deep tech, but also, of course, our core business, Industrial Merchant. This is part of our history, our DNA to always invent new applications, new markets.
It will take a new dimension in ADVANCE. When or if the energy transition slows down temporarily in some parts of the world, enabling progress, bringing value to all those new markets will ensure steadiness of our overall model. Finally, our fourth priority is to act for all our direct stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders, but also society at large. Since we believe companies have a role to play, and Air Liquide can make a positive contribution, thanks to the nature of our business. In the current context, we know it is not going to be an easy ride every day, but we are confident that thanks to our model, we will be able to be resilient in bad times, as we have demonstrated again recently, and seize opportunities when and where they arise. Let's start with the base, which is the financial performance.
Our commitment is made on delivering the three performance objectives at the same time. First, growth. As this plan, sorry, is about capturing opportunities as never before. This will translate into an annual sales growth of 5%-6% on average. At the same time, we will bring and keep our ROCE above 10% as soon as 2023, which is one year before our previous commitment. We believe that in our business, profitability of the capital is the key long-term metrics. Finally, we will do all this while showing an inflection in our CO2 emissions and starting to reduce them. We see that doing only any of those two objectives would be almost easy. The challenge is to do the three at the same time, inventing and demonstrating profitable growth without CO2.
In order to achieve this, I would like to insist on two key enablers. The first one is capital efficiency, as this plant will require significant investment. Capital efficiency means discipline in project selection, evaluating carefully the risk-reward balance, return and strategic interest. Capital efficiency means also flawless project execution to deliver the proper return. The second enabler is going to be margin improvement. What we are targeting is a significant step up in the underlying margin improvement of our business. Jérôme will come back to this in just a few minutes, but let me put things in perspective. We are targeting more than 160 basis point margin improvement over the 4-year period of the program. This compares to the previous period where we achieved 160 basis point underlying improvement in 5 years, not 4.
Let's keep in mind that in the context looking forward, it's probably much more challenging with inflation, with the acceleration also of the energy transition, requiring more capital and human resources, and also with an unstable geopolitical context. Clearly, it's a step up. Let's come back now to our first objective, which is an average annual sales growth of 5%-6% over the next four years. It is important to keep in mind that ADVANCE is about growth, and you will see convincing example in this second part of this CMD today. I will make few remarks on the waterfall chart that you see. The first one is that in the current context, we need to be a little bit cautious on the exact contribution of each business line, but directionally.
First, we will talk a lot about the energy transition today, but in proportion, its contribution to the sales will be limited in this time period, as typically plants take two years to be built and three to ramp up. The second comment I want to make is that all business lines are contributing, and this is the strength of our portfolio through business lines and geographies. In this uncertain period, there will be value in being able to rely on the various business segments and seize opportunities where they arise. Under ADVANCE, we will leverage the best of Air Liquide, benefiting from the strong resilience of our business model, as well as capturing new growth driven by innovation in all markets.
Before turning over to Jérôme to show what this plan means in terms of capital and cash allocations, I would like to step back and to reflect on how this sales growth, coupled with margin improvement, will translate into EBITDA generation. With more than 30% additional EBITDA generated over the period, it is a clear acceleration of what we did during the previous period. This is absolutely key, as it will enable us to invest more into new project to grow, but also reward our shareholders, both in terms of cash and value for their investment. Jérôme, would you take over?
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, François. The question now is: How are we going to achieve those objectives? First, thanks to enhanced efficiencies and strengthened execution. Indeed, as shown on the graph on the left, we deliver EUR 1.5 billion of efficiencies over the 4-year period 2017-2020. Under the previous strategic program, NEOS, we started in 2017 with a yearly objective of EUR 300 million of efficiency. That was increased to EUR 400 million in 2019, and since then, we delivered about EUR 400 million every year. Building on this strong momentum, we target to continue delivering about EUR 400 million of efficiencies every year on leverage. It means above EUR 1.6 billion of cumulative efficiencies over the next four-year under the ADVANCE strategic program. What is our plan to deliver these efficiencies?
We look to build on the successes of NEOS with our three pillars approach to margin improvement. Pricing, efficiencies, and portfolio management remain vital focal point moving into our ADVANCE period. With even more relevance with regard to pricing and efficiency to tackle cost basis in the current high inflationary environment. Please take a moment to go through each of these three pillars. First, pricing. As we're demonstrating in 2021, we have now everything in place to efficiently manage pricing. We use data to provide value information and pricing. Our sales force is trained on how to effectively use digital to support pricing strategies in local markets. Now, 100% of our sales team is properly incentivized on margin improvement. Mix improvement is another level to improve margin.
A great example would be our objective to sign more than 250 new on-site contracts by the end of 2025. It is a great way to improve our margin from mix, as well as support sustainability initiatives, by reducing delivery truck kilometers, and therefore emissions. The second is efficiency with three bricks: procurement, operational efficiencies, and continuous improvement. First brick, procurement. We want to go one step further, make available at a global scale the information on procurement needs. We then will be able to consolidate even more volumes and increase our negotiation power. As such, we will deploy one global integrated digital solution in all 75 countries. We intend to manage more than 80% of spend centrally and by category. We want to leverage strategic relationships with top 20 suppliers in terms of cost, but also partnership and added value.
The second brick is operational efficiency. As you know, we have initiated several structural actions over the past few years, but there are still more to do. For example, we will reinforce the deployment and the use of service support centers, finalize by 2023 the deployment of SIO, which is a remote management of operations in large industry and electronics, and pursue action to increase the density of packaged gas business. Continuous improvement is the third efficiency brick. Here, the objective is to train and onboard 70% of group employees, which is our initial targeted population. Today, it is already more than 1,000 projects per year, which drive operational efficiencies at Air Liquide. After pricing and efficiency, let's now focus on our last pillar of the program, which is another great ways to drive margin by managing our portfolio of activities.
What have we accomplished so far? We have been very active in recent years, accomplishing 132 acquisitions and 28 divestitures. Over the 2016-2020 period, the group exited 6 countries, and even 8 when taking into account 2021. Now, we will actively pursue the management of our portfolio of activities. How? 3 drivers that can be summarized as follows. First, leveraging our positions in existing key industrial basins and realizing synergies across business units. Second, increasing geographical density that improves capacity utilization and captures advantage of scale. Third, focusing on the most profitable business. As you see, margin improvement is the first enabler supporting ROCE objective, as mentioned earlier by François. The second one is capital efficiency, which triggers our investment strategy. Today, we are witnessing a rapid increase of investment opportunities in Large Industries and Electronics.
I will talk about that in a minute. We are in a position of being very selective in our investment decision process. We will remain disciplined and focused on the most profitable project with return profiles above 12%. Discipline also applies on the execution of this project, as it will help optimizing the capital employed, and thus the ROCE. As you know, with our business model, investment decision are fueling future growth. We see indeed exciting opportunities to increase investment decisions by +45% in the ADVANCE period over 2022-2025. That will bring investment decision from EUR 2.6 billion under NEOS to EUR 3.8 billion on average every year over ADVANCE. CapEx to sales will also increase from 12% under NEOS to 13%-15% over ADVANCE. Now what are these higher investment opportunities? Where do they come from?
As we mentioned over the last few quarters, we are seeing an increase of opportunities mainly driven by energy transition and electronics. The pie chart provides the split of industrial investment about EUR 5 billion between the main activities. Large industry is close to 40%, electronics for a bit less than 25%, hydrogen mobility for 15%, and the remaining largely industrial merchant, but with a sizable portion in both GM&T and at scale. As you can see, all in, project for energy transition accounts for around half of those decisions. When including small industrial investment and acquisition net of divestiture, total investment decision should reach EUR 16 billion during the ADVANCE period. This is a significant increase compared to EUR 11.5 billion during the years when you exclude, sorry, the decision for Airgas acquisition.
On the right of the slide, I want to draw your attention to two very important criteria in the investment decision process. First, projects must contribute to our ROCE objective. Second, project must align with our strong commitment to emission reduction target. It is the only way to operate for the long term. As I highlighted, investments are a key element of the Air Liquide business model. During the ADVANCE period, we will take strategic position for the energy transition that will sustain growth well beyond 2025. Mike, Pascal, and Francois will come back on this later. Finally, as we have just seen, CapEx is a strategic use of cash for the group, but regular returns to shareholders have always been another priority. Let's come back on the group's cash model.
You see here over the ADVANCE period, we intend to generate between 23%-26% of sales in cash. First, 3%-4% will be used to manage working capital risk. Second, 6%-8% will be allocated to shareholders' remuneration and net debt management. Finally, 13%-15% of sales will be directed to CapEx and thus reinvested into the business. This is what will fuel the Air Liquide machine in terms of sales, efficiencies, contributing to the cash generation of 23%-26% of sales that close the loop. Beyond CapEx, shareholders' reward remain a priority, and we monitor the use of cash flow while keeping a key focus on debt management and securing our A category rating. I believe you have now a better view on our ADVANCE objective and on the main drivers to reach them.
Let's now see what it means business-wise, and for that, I will hand over to you, François.
Thank you very much, Jérôme. We have given you an overview of our new strategic plan ADVANCE and shared our first priority, financial ambition. What we would like to do now is to show and give you some more substance on the three other priorities beyond the financial ambition. You will see how they support our financial ambition and contribute to our comprehensive performance. Several speakers will talk about decarbonizing the planet and the energy transition, unlocking progress through technologies, and finally, acting for all. Let's start by talking about how we take the lead in decarbonizing manufacturing, supporting the energy transition, and developing hydrogen solutions. Mike, the floor is yours.
Thank you, François, and good afternoon, everyone. Recent dramatic events in the Ukraine emphasize the question of availability of energy and its cost. However, over the midterm, industries will remain compelled to evolve, and decarbonization has become a priority. Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis has rapidly accelerated the expectations for how businesses, governments, and society will combat climate change. Companies are expected to prioritize social responsibility and commit to reducing CO2 emissions or to carbon neutrality. People are changing their habits to consume more sustainable products. Regulations are being strengthened to support the energy transition. I would say even more so today as sovereignty and energy independence is becoming a key priority. However, the journey towards decarbonization faces some challenges. First, decarbonization requires a different mix of assets and resources.
For example, a huge quantity of renewable electricity would be necessary for most industrial processes. This could represent a bottleneck, particularly with respect to energy-intensive industries like steel. I would also note, as a consequence of the war in the Ukraine, the EU has recently announced its REPowerEU plan, aiming at increasing the resilience of the EU-wide energy system, which translates into an acceleration of investments in renewable energy. In addition, the sequestration of CO2, whether onshore or offshore, requires access to reliable CO2 sinks. Second, economic constraints like low carbon premiums or international trade considerations could impact the economics of sustainable production. Finally, regional differences in terms of regulations and decarbonization levers like carbon pricing, as well as the intensity of commitment to decarbonization, present challenges to quick action in the face of society's expectation to immediately decrease CO2 emissions. At Air Liquide, we view challenges as opportunities.
We know that global decarbonization must happen, and this represents a huge potential market for the group. Hard to abate sectors, including industries like chemicals, steel, cement, and refining emit around 10 gigaton of CO2 per year. The decarbonization of these industries alone would be valorized up to EUR 1 trillion. That's ten times the current industrial gas market. If we focus on the top 30 customers of Air Liquide, which emit 1 gigaton per year, a large majority have defined a decarbonization roadmap towards zero carbon emissions. Clearly, Air Liquide has the technologies and offers solutions to help customers achieve these goals. How? I'd like to focus on the 3 major avenues for Air Liquide to provide solutions along the entire low carbon value chain, and it will structure our approach in this part of the presentation. First, through low carbon industrial gas supply.
Hydrogen, of course, will play an important role here, but the supply of other low carbon molecules are critical as well. Second, by transforming customers' processes and by working closely with a partnership with our customers, we can develop and deploy innovative technologies that help them reduce their own carbon footprint. Third, by offering carbon capture as a service. Not only are we capturing carbon from our own assets, but we are involved in several coalitions that aim to capture the CO2 of entire industrial basins. Beyond that, we are developing partnerships for the sequestration of CO2. Pascal and François will provide some concrete examples on how Air Liquide can support customers in this decarbonization journey in just a moment. It is important to note that all industries will not decarbonize at the same pace.
Pushed by regulation, the energy and refining sector is progressing quickly, and we will come back to this example later. While chemicals, steel, and now cement are following closely. In terms of geography, it is also clear that timelines for decarbonization differ significantly in different regions. Europe is farther along the decarbonization journey, having taken tangible actions towards the energy transition in all domains, industries, and mobility, and instituting funding mechanisms and incentives earlier than the others. Asia has also made strong progress and is already well advanced in terms of hydrogen mobility. Now momentum is growing in North America and the Middle East as they begin to follow suit.
To further illustrate how Air Liquide will support a more sustainable industry through the supply of low carbon gases, I'd like to highlight some of the examples of major regulatory change which will benefit Air Liquide through the solutions we offer our customers. As previously mentioned, the refining sector has quickly started to move towards decarbonization, pushed by regulation. The European Renewable Energy Directive, strengthened in 2018, and known as RED II, establishes a common framework for the promotion of energy from renewable sources in Europe. A key element of RED II affects fuel producers and states that 14% of the energy consumed in product transport today must be supplied by renewable energy, including a specific target for biofuels production. The target of 14% by 2030 is likely to be revised further upward to 28%.
Other specific regulations, such as the EU Emissions Trading System or the Low Carbon Fuel Standard in California, not only impose a CO2 content threshold, but also control CO2 price, credits, and the entire CO2 quota trading market. All these regulations force refiners to move quickly, and they're doing so in a couple of key ways. First, with the production of biofuels, which is expected to triple by 2030 through hydrogenated vegetable oil-based transportation fuel production, biojet or sustainable aviation fuels or fuels produced from renewable electricity. Second, refiners will incorporate more low carbon or renewable content into their existing fuel mix. Air Liquide plays a key role in accompanying our customers in their transformation, and we are pursuing new growth opportunities by providing low carbon and renewable hydrogen. We are currently working with customers in all geographies.
Many projects are going through the final stage of development and will begin to contribute to our growth ambitions throughout the ADVANCE period and will extend far beyond. I now pass things over to Pascal to illustrate the Air Liquide solutions for refiners.
Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. Indeed, decarbonization is now completely embedded in the strategy of most European refiners. It is, for example, the case of Neste, the world's leading producer of sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel. Let's listen to Peter Vanacker, President and CEO of Neste, telling us how Air Liquide supports Neste in their decarbonization journey.
Hello, my name is Peter Vanacker. I'm the President and CEO of Neste. Over the past 10 years, we have transformed from our roots as a local oil refiner to become a global leader in renewable and circular solutions. We help transport in cities as well as customers in the aviation, polymers, and chemical sectors make their businesses more sustainable. Today, Neste is the largest producer of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel worldwide. Everything we do serves one purpose: to create a healthier planet for our children. To achieve this, we have a strategy called Faster, Bolder, and Together. We say together because when you look at the scale of the task ahead of us, it is clear that no one company can do this work alone.
When it comes to our work with Air Liquide, that cooperation takes the form of the supply of hydrogen to our world-class renewables refineries. We have worked with Air Liquide for many years, seeing our relationship develop from a supplier-customer to a true partnership. As our journey to become a leader in renewable and circular solutions has progressed, Air Liquide has fully supported us through providing greater volumes and, critically, continually improving reliability as those volumes rise. Looking ahead, this reliability and joint commitment to a decarbonized future will serve both companies very well. Action to tackle the climate crisis needs to happen now, and we need to explore all available technologies. There is no silver bullet.
Neste has pursued this approach for years and believes that Air Liquide can be an important partner for us in the future as well, especially as we ramp up efforts to transform hydrogen production from conventional to new technologies. We look forward to more of that same commitment and spirit of partnership in the years to come in what will be a fundamentally decisive decade for diffusing the climate crisis. Thank you.
All markets are moving towards decarbonization, and we are helping the move. All our industrial activities are supporting customers by supplying them low-carbon products. This is the first avenue that Mike mentioned. Let me give you some examples. First, in Large Industries. In South Africa, we acquired 16 air separation units from Sasol in 2021, with a clear joint commitment to decarbonize the plants. Our goal is to reduce the site CO2 emissions by up to 40% over 10 years. As part of this plan, together with Sasol, we are actively working to procure the long-term supply of 900 MW of renewable electricity. This is a first for such a large-scale decarbonization commitment.
In Normandy, in France, we will have the first low-carbon hydrogen network, with the addition to our existing network of a carbon capture unit and of a recently announced 200 MW electrolyzer. François will develop this example in a few minutes. Another example, in the United States, in the metals market, we are supplying carbon-free oxygen to Steel Dynamics. We achieve this with an air separation unit fed by wind power, which is contracted long-term. Now, in addition to large industries, many other activities at Air Liquide also provide low-carbon products. Let me illustrate this with a few more examples. In Industrial Merchant, the ECO ORIGIN offer is proposing bulk air gases produced with 100% renewable energy. In electronics, within our advanced materials offer, our enScribe molecules help decrease the greenhouse gas emissions of the semiconductor industry.
In many countries, Air Liquide is very active in developing a low-carbon hydrogen supply chain for mobility. Matthew will come back to this later. Around the world, we already operate more than 20 biomethane units. This local production of biomethane is part of a toolbox we have to help countries to strengthen their energy independence. The European Commission insisted on this very point in its recent REPowerEU communication. As previously mentioned by Mike, there is a second avenue for Air Liquide to provide solutions along the low carbon chain. It is to contribute directly to the transformation of the customer processes. This is important because to decrease their CO2 footprint, many of our customers have to deeply change some of their processes. With more electricity-based processes using renewable power or with more bio-feedstocks instead of conventional carbon-based feedstocks.
To help with this decarbonization transformations, Air Liquide has many specific solutions to offer. Let's again look at some examples. Starting with refineries. Mike already explained how Air Liquide can support their new decarbonized processes by supplying low carbon hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen that are needed in large quantities in their move to HVO and biofuel productions. In chemicals, the conversion to bio-feedstocks has already started. It requires large volumes of hydrogen. Another opportunity is to tackle the large CO2 emissions that come from crackers. Air Liquide can support the decarbonization of gases from a cracker by combining oxygen supply for gas reforming with carbon capture. In the steel industry, blast furnaces should be progressively replaced by DRI processes or by electric arc furnaces. Here again, Air Liquide can play a key role to support the decarbonization.
We can, by injecting hydrogen directly in the DRI process, drastically reduce the CO2 emissions of such plants. We can optimize combustion processes with oxycombustion, which also allows for a more efficient carbon capture. The cement industry is another good illustration of new growth opportunities for Air Liquide. Indeed, until recently, the cement production process did not need industrial gases. Today, since the cement production process is an intrinsic CO2 emitter, we are working with cement companies offering solutions for the decarbonization of their existing plants. It is carbon capture as a service. In parallel, new cement production units can be designed with oxygen supply injected directly in the cement kilns to improve efficiency and to reduce the cost of the CO2 capture. To summarize, we have many opportunities to participate in significant changes in customer key processes with oxygen or hydrogen, but also with carbon capture.
This is the third avenue that Mike mentioned. As Neste's CEO said in the video, no company can do it on its own. Partnerships are key for the energy transition. Our gases and solutions can help our customers decarbonize their products and processes, but they can also contribute to significant new markets opened by the energy transition. A very good example is the battery manufacturing sector. This market is growing extremely rapidly, linked to the expansion of electric vehicles. It is expected to grow about 20% every year between 2020 and 2030, and very significant investments are being made as we speak in many gigafactories around the world. To give an additional perspective important for us, with the ongoing technology change, the amount of gas used for each car produced is expected to grow by 45%.
Midterm, this would potentially be a large new gas market with more than EUR 1 billion by 2030 for the supply of industrial gases. Further down the road, we could even add new sales of advanced materials molecules from our electronics business line, which may be used to enhance battery performance. Let me illustrate this new growing market with a video from Jürgen Fuchs, Chairman of the Management Board of BASF Battery Material Manufacturing Plant in Schwarzheide in Germany.
By 2030, there will be around 1.5 billion cars on the road worldwide. Electromobility is one of the key solutions to unite the global desire for individual mobility and the need to significantly reduce local emissions. BASF is driving sustainable electromobility with innovative battery materials and state-of-the-art technology. BASF's new battery materials plant in Schwarzheide, Germany, will produce components for around 400,000 full electric vehicles annually. BASF is committed to provide a reliable and sustainable local supply of high-energy density cathode active materials to cell producers and automotive customers, meeting their specific needs in Europe. BASF is the largest chemical supplier to the automotive industry, with unparalleled customer access and market knowledge. The new plant in Schwarzheide is already well under construction and will expand our product portfolio at the site while creating around 150 new jobs after its startup in 2022.
Air Liquide has been our partner in Schwarzheide since 1995. The company is now investing around EUR 40 million in the construction of a state-of-the-art air separation unit right next door to our new plant. In Air Liquide, we have a strong and competent partner who reliably supplies us with industrial gases. Air Liquide supports us in successfully shaping the future of our production site, Schwarzheide. Air Liquide's new plant will provide the highest industry standards in safety, efficiency, and reliability. You see, Air Liquide is an important partner for BASF also in the field of battery materials. With the support of Air Liquide, BASF will establish a reliable, sustainable, and European-based supply chain for battery materials.
I hope you are now convinced that with the energy transition, Air Liquide is uniquely positioned to capture significant growth by bringing products and solutions to customers to support their process transformation and by contributing to new markets. I now leave the floor to François, who is going to give you more color on Carbon Capture as a Service.
Good afternoon, and thank you, Pascal. As Mike and Pascal explained, decreasing CO2 emissions has become a key and urgent priority for the industry. Thanks to its technical solutions, Air Liquide will play a key role by, first, supplying low-carbon products, and second, supporting the transformation of our clients' processes and offering carbon capture as a service. On the map, you can see concrete examples of projects. They reflect the construction of a complete ecosystem being developed in Europe from CO2 capture and transportation to storage in the North Sea. They are located in key Air Liquide industrial basins, where we have a long-term established presence, infrastructure, and strong relationships with industrial actors and authorities. It enables us to gain first-mover advantage in these carbon capture projects, not only to decarbonize our own sites, but also to mutualize needs from other industrial companies in these basins.
We've been awarded European and national fundings with our partners to accelerate carbon capture projects in Antwerp, in Rotterdam, and in France. Similar opportunities are emerging in the United States, in the Middle East, and in Asia. Air Liquide is uniquely positioned with all the necessary innovation, expertise, and experience. Why are we in such a favorable position? Technology leadership. Through innovation and pioneering mindset, we are continuously improving the efficiency of air separation units, reaching ultra-low energy consumption and adapting assets to the intermittency of renewable energy, like the case of the new oxygen plant in the Netherlands with the ALIVE process. Regarding low-carbon hydrogen, Air Liquide E&C proprietary technologies include all thermal processes, SMR, ATR, and POX, for the production of hydrogen with carbon capture readiness.
Specific to carbon capture, we offer a complete portfolio of solutions which mostly depends on the various concentrations of CO2 in the feed gas. We are also able to combine virtually all technology breaks, cryogenics, adsorption, absorption, and permeation, to address each specific industrial needs. Finally, regarding electrolysis, we continue to focus R&D to further develop new technologies and form important partnerships, such as the one announced recently with Siemens Energy on PEM technology. Our talented teams also leverage industrial tools and solutions to further optimize energy usage on a daily basis. Now, let's be concrete and focus on the Normandy area, a great example of what we can do in our basins. Back in 2015, we successfully started the first industrial-scale CryoCap carbon capture unit. Since then, we've captured 100,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Building on this success, first, we are taking over TotalEnergies' hydrogen plant on a traditional over-the-fence model. Reliability, flexibility, improved economics, take-or-pay clauses. Second, we will decarbonize this hydrogen production by installing a CryoCap unit designed to remove around 700,000 tons per year of CO2. These sequestered tons will hence not carry a carbon tax for the benefit of TotalEnergies and Air Liquide, and will allow both groups to reduce their carbon footprint. Third, as announced two weeks ago, we are going to add large electrolyzer units of 200 MW, powered by renewable energy to supply other applications requiring renewable hydrogen. This includes mobility along the Seine River up to Paris. We are hence creating a unique pipeline system offering all the shades of hydrogen, depending on the maturity of the various customer decarbonization plans and their economic value.
Additionally, we signed last year an MoU for carbon capture as a service with other large companies located in the same industrial basin, namely ExxonMobil, Yara, and Borealis. Aggregating more than 3 million tons of CO2 per year will allow economies of scale. As a conclusion to this chapter, the Large Industries ambition during ADVANCE will be based on leveraging the successful business fundamentals and nurturing the existing positions, and also taking early positions in the energy transition, transforming our offer and asset space. We already signed projects which will start to contribute by 2025 and deliver their full potential beyond. We will deliver a 4%-5% annual average growth for our Large Industries business over the ADVANCE period, with a strong commitment to reduce CO2 emissions in absolute value starting around 2025.
On these words, and after such a dense chapter, you certainly deserve a 10-minute break. Welcome back, everyone. Mike, Pascal, and François have presented to you what we intend to do to lead the decarbonization of manufacturing, the energy transition, and the development of hydrogen solution for the industry. Now we will deep dive on how we will leverage innovation and technologies to create new markets. We do not want to be exhaustive here, but we will focus on some key markets where we will bring differentiation. Hydrogen mobility first, healthcare, and more precisely home care, some applications in Industrial Merchant, and finally, space to illustrate deep tech and innovation. Mathieu will start with hydrogen mobility. Mathieu, please.
Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Hydrogen is now widely recognized as an essential pillar for the energy transition with a dazzling acceleration over the past year. The new geopolitical context require us to step up this energy transition even faster. Local hydrogen production is not only a solution to climate change, but also an opportunity for many countries to increase their energy independence. We discussed a few minutes ago our vision for the decarbonization of the industry, but we are also very much focused on heavy-duty transport. 25% of the worldwide CO2 emissions are currently produced by transport, and hydrogen is a key solution for this sector in particular. This will drive strong growth in the hydrogen mobility market. It is expected to reach between 15,000 and 50,000 tons per day by 2030.
This will create a potential market of EUR several tens of billions in less than a decade. 2025 is a tipping point. By then, the bus market will grow rapidly, closely followed by the heavy duty segment. After 2030, we will begin to see more hydrogen application in the maritime and aeronautics industries. New mobility hubs will develop around airports, ports, major cities and corridors, densifying these, the distribution infrastructure. We expect the market to be sizable by 2030, but it will triple in size again over the following decade. As you recall, Air Liquide will invest EUR 8 billion by 2035 in the hydrogen value chain. To ensure we fully leverage the opportunity, a significant portion will be devoted to mobility markets. Positions have to be taken now to seize the acceleration.
By 2035, we expect the growth of Air Liquide revenues driven by hydrogen mobility to be in the same range as the industrial hydrogen one. Why are we uniquely positioned to seize this profitable growth? Well, we will build upon our strength, industrial legacy, technology, and business model. Firstly, Air Liquide will leverage its historical position in industrial basins to create synergies, such as in production assets and logistics between industry and mobility. Access to large scale, competitive, low carbon hydrogen is the key to accelerate the development of mobility and to move fast. Secondly, our business is also based on our technology leadership. As François presented earlier, we have the capacity to produce low carbon hydrogen based on our proprietary carbon capture technologies. Importantly, we are also focusing on scaling up large-scale electrolysis to produce renewable hydrogen.
After Bécancour, the world's largest PEM electrolyzer with a capacity of 20 MW launched last year, Air Liquide announced a few weeks ago its 200 MW capacity Normandy projects to be commissioned by 2025. That's already a tenfold increase in terms of capacity. Our leadership in the liquefaction and transportation of liquid hydrogen will also be essential for the development of certain markets, and we operate today 5 liquefiers worldwide. We have 20 years experience in developing hydrogen stations with already close to 200 stations sold worldwide. Finally, all these trends make Air Liquide a competitive midstream player in this value chain. We have a business model leveraging our fundamentals and historical core activities at the crossroads of large industries, industrial merchant and technologies relying on best-in-class safety and reliability. Momentum is building around hydrogen.
For decades, we've been leading the way to increase the visibility of hydrogen solutions and shape the market. The key technologies are mature and project pipelines are growing. We walk the talk. An incredible increase in public and private investments and partnerships is underway. For example, we have 37 active strategic partnerships worldwide and a robust pipeline of hydrogen investments all over the world. Air Liquide already has hydrogen mobility operations in more than 10 countries, making it the most international player. In this ramp-up phase, road mobility is a particularly active sector. We have partnered with many companies such as Lotte Chemical, Sinopec, and Iveco, and we have a joint venture called HysetCo with Toyota and TotalEnergies. We are also developing technological partnerships like the one announced with Faurecia. In aviation, maritime and rail, it is also time to prepare for a more sustainable future.
Airbus, ADP and VINCI Airports are our partners to help bring commercial fleets of zero-emission hydrogen aircraft to the skies by the mid-2030s. To accelerate our efforts, we have also initiated the largest global fund dedicated to expanding hydrogen infrastructure, aiming to raise over EUR 1.5 billion. The entire hydrogen ecosystem is under development, and we are all in this together. Now, I would like to share a short video about HyAMMED, a project that brings together private and public players to kickstart the transition to clean mobility solutions.
Today, transport alone is responsible for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in France. In the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, a new project has the potential to transform the transport of goods and merchandise. The project is called HyAMMED, which stands for Hydrogen in Aix Marseille for an Ecological and Durable Mobility, and is a response to the hydrogen mobility ecosystems call for projects of the ADEME. Air Liquide is building the first high-pressure 1 ton per day hydrogen refueling station at Fos-sur-Mer for long-haul trucks in Europe. The station distributes low-carbon hydrogen and provides up to 20 refillings per day for logistics trucks for up to 800 km of autonomy. These 44-ton hydrogen trucks will transport goods to mass retailers like Carrefour, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and Monoprix. Hydrogen is at the heart of the project because vehicles using fuel cells have no polluting emissions at the point of use.
The HyAMMED project is bringing positive energy to the entire Aix-Marseille region. This project was made possible thanks to the involvement of a variety of partners.
As announced last year during the Sustainability Day, by 2035, we aim to invest EUR 8 billion in order to grow our hydrogen sales to industry and mobility threefold compared to 2021. By 2030, we will have 3 GW of electrolysis capacity to fuel the energy transition. Things may move even faster. A recent example is the European Commission's announcement of its REPowerEU plan to take actions for more affordable, secure and sustainable energy. Some countries and industry want to ramp up their investment in renewable energy sources. The world calls for an acceleration of the energy transition. Air Liquide is at the cutting edge of this transformation, and we will go as fast as the ecosystem allows. Air Liquide is going through a unique moment in its history, and hydrogen is central to its future.
Thank you, and let me hand it over to Émilie.
Thank you, Mathieu. Good day, everyone. Let's focus now on electronics. First, what are the market trends? Digital is accelerating with IoT, 5G, artificial intelligence, from autonomous cars to smart medical devices, automated and self-learning industrial plants. This translates into a growing appetite for electronic chips, more chips and always more performing chips. As a consequence, the semiconductor industry is investing unprecedented amounts, more than $100 billion a year. Industry leaders each having a $100+ billion investment plans for the next 5 to 10 years. In addition, in a context of pandemic and geopolitical tensions, semiconductor leading manufacturers want to secure their supply chain and request their suppliers to localize production. What does it mean for us? All of the above open significant opportunities for Air Liquide.
More and larger fabs requiring Air Liquide to invest very significant amounts in ultra-pure gas plants in Asia, but also in the U.S. and Europe. More performance challenges for the next chip generations that Air Liquide can tackle with its advanced materials. If justified, Air Liquide can invest in production facilities next to large consumers. Air Liquide is uniquely positioned to capture these opportunities with a complete portfolio with five product lines. First, carrier gases. Air Liquide is the leader for the supply of ultra-pure nitrogen and other carrier gases. We develop new energy efficient and short lead time generators, as well as low carbon solutions like ultra-pure hydrogen produced by electrolysis. One large electrolyzer already built in Taiwan and several under construction. We keep investing to expand in basins and to leverage data science and artificial intelligence to make our operations always more reliable and efficient. Advanced materials.
Developing the next generation of chips requires investing new materials with unique properties. Our advanced materials division is fully embedded in the semiconductor ecosystem, and Air Liquide is the industry innovation leader. Thanks to its industrial expertise, Air Liquide can bring new molecules to market in a record time, safely and complying with the highest quality standards of the semi industry. As mentioned earlier by Pascal, within advanced materials, the enScribe molecules have a positive impact on the environment. Air Liquide is thus expanding its innovation and manufacturing footprint. Moreover, as you know, Air Liquide also provides specialty gases, total gas and chemical management services and equipment and installations. Let me now give you one example in advanced materials that has become an industry standard. What is at stake? The semi industry keeps inventing new generations of more powerful chips, pushing the boundaries of science and technology.
To support our customers on their quest for smaller and smaller chip dimensions, we develop high-tech molecules that enable the latest technologies. What are our customers looking for? In the case presented here, customers were looking for materials that allowed self-limited atom by atom growth, whatever the surface topology. Years ago, Air Liquide invented such a molecule, ZyALD, which enables the deposition of a zirconium oxide layer with exactly the same thickness everywhere, a strong contribution to the increased memory efficiency, both in terms of speed and energy consumption. ZyALD has been instrumental in advancing multiple generations of DRAM technology and is widely used globally. ZyALD is just one of the multiple examples of our advanced materials offer, perfectly positioned to benefit from the semiconductor megatrends.
Let's now discover further how our teams engage with customers, industry leaders, and the ecosystem and design molecules which remove roadblocks on the path towards next generations of chips.
At Air Liquide Advanced Materials, we have four areas of focus. It starts first and foremost with the reason we're in business, which is our customers. We work hard every day to innovate, to develop new solutions with them, to meet their operational requirements, and to provide global support for them. Secondly, it's with our shareholders, who put their hard-earned money invested in our business in order that we can provide a reasonable return for the risk that they take in that investment. Third is our communities. We want to be a great neighbor and contribute back to those communities in which our factories are located. Lastly, it's our employees. We want to be able to provide a rewarding workplace for our employees that challenges them, but also rewards them in an equitable manner.
One of the great things about Air Liquide is we have a very long history of innovation. The company was founded by an inventor. The semiconductor industry is known for having a focus on quality, and especially on things like high purity, and our chemicals are very high purity substances. If you look at the chips under a very powerful microscope, what you'll see, if you get down to the nanometer scale, is there are little tiny wires, and they're wrapped in insulating material. You have to make those wires out of something, and that something is what we sell. To innovate, you have to work as a team, and that team often includes your customer. Our customers are global semiconductor chip manufacturers. They expect worldwide support. We operate facilities in several countries, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, France, and the United States.
As mentioned by François, in electronics, we targeted +8%-9% sales growth on average per year. Indeed, Air Liquide's unique position in the semiconductor industry will generate very strong growth through 2025 while contributing to the group margin improvement. Leveraging its innovation capacity and its pool of talents, Air Liquide will continue to create exceptional value for its customers and consolidate its position of industry leader. Thank you, and I will now hand it over to Diana.
Thank you very much, Émilie, and good day to everyone. It is now my pleasure to share with you our ambition to profitably grow our healthcare business with our proven strategy. I will focus today on our home healthcare activity for chronic patients, which will be the key growth driver in the coming years. It is indeed the market with the biggest potential and the activity with the highest need for transformation of the healthcare systems worldwide. Now, what are the key drivers? First, rising chronic diseases. They represent 70% of deaths worldwide and more than half of the global cost burden in the years to come. Second, changing expectations and behaviors from empowered patients. Third, a mounting pressure to focus budget on value initiatives to ensure resilience and the sustainability of the system.
In the meantime, we observe an evolution towards more patient-centric places of care, complementary to hospitals which progressively refocus on acute care. Notably, chronic patients are eager to be treated at home, while on the other hand, some severe chronic conditions require specialized locations, more cost efficient than hospitals. Lastly, the market is transformed by digital and technology, which change the way patients are treated and are taken care of. Overall, we believe we are well-positioned to support the long-term transformation of healthcare systems focusing on value. I will now go through our unique assets that will drive our success in the coming years. Indeed, our home healthcare activity is in a unique position. We are present at hospitals, taking in charge patients and onboard them on the treatment of their chronic disease at home.
Our more than 4,300 technicians and nurses visit patients every day and help them follow their treatment. Our strategy might be encapsulated in one simple equation. Value is generated by improving outcomes that matter to patients relative to the total cost to achieve these outcomes. It is at the heart of the value-based healthcare approach that enables health systems to achieve the best outcomes for patients at the lowest cost. To reinforce the fundamentals of our success and prepare value transformation in the long run, we will benefit from our unique proximity with chronic patients to understand what really matters to them, combining human touch and digital solutions.
Of course, from our presence at chronic patients' side, along the cycle of care, including the patient's home, supporting relocation of care from hospitals to new locations, and connecting all stakeholders involved in the patient's pathway enabled by digital. Last but not least, the trust developed over time, both with customers at the hospitals, with patients at home, and with their physicians, thanks to our team's solid medical expertise. Before moving forward with our financial ambition, I would like to share with you some concrete examples of the value transformation we have already started. First, how we take our patient services to the next level by personalizing their care plan.
Vitalaire, the home healthcare activity in Spain, takes care of more than 370,000 chronic respiratory patients at home. About 70% are patients who suffer sleep apnea syndrome. The current situation in Spain is that every year we have significant impacts on our results linked to volume of sleep apnea patients that has been increasing around 10%-12% in the last 5 years, and budgets related to those therapies have been suffering big constraints. Every single day, we discuss CPAP number of hours per night with our customers. This is called compliance to treatment. However, this is not enough, and we want to go further to introduce the global concept of adherence to improve the quality of life of our patients, to create the conditions for operations excellence and digital transformation, and to contribute to the healthcare system sustainability.
PIMA is a program based on scientific evidence, CPAP standard protocols, and a unique OSA adherence interview. This program places the patients at the center of the therapy and empowers them during the therapy. The four pillars of PIMA are the stratification of patients, the evaluation interview for OSA patients, a specific educational training program, and flexible care plans adapted to each patient's profile. Our experience has shown that with PIMA, we improve treatment compliance by more than two hours per night compared to the standard rules. Patients declare that their quality of life has been positively improved. This new program also allows us to generate internal savings. With a long-term vision, PIMA will help us to open a new dialogue with healthcare payers to be paid by results.
Additionally, Vitalaire will evolve from a traditional home healthcare company visiting patients at home to an adherence expert company that will contribute to the healthcare system sustainability and to the best quality of life for our patients. PIMA will change our company. Our customers are vulnerable people, and helping them the way they really need is our dream. Vitalaire, together for a better life.
Now let me show you how digital, IT, and data technologies will boost our operational excellence and achieve an even better customer experience.
Let's see how this helps us support Mike, an Air Liquide healthcare patient who started sleep apnea therapy. Lately, Mike has been having a few problems with his mask and called our customer service teams. A customer service agent has easy access to all relevant information regarding Mike, such as his prescriber, the type of mask he's been using, the next scheduled appointment with Air Liquide Healthcare. An appointment between the field technician and Mike is scheduled based on efficient scheduling policies and considering the patient's preferences. The technician is given all routes, traffic, and safety instructions on his mobile device. At Mike's place, she coaches Mike to better adapt to treatment. On his mobile device, the technician has access to all relevant information and telemonitor data. She can also generate reports that can be sent to Mike's physician. Meanwhile, our sales representative is visiting Mike's prescriber.
Thanks to this mobile app, he can share with the prescriber the latest updates on the previous interactions between Mike, the customer service, and the field technicians. It is also the opportunity to demonstrate the value and quality of our service to enhance the prescriber's confidence to refer new patients to us. How do these three actors interact so easily to provide a better experience for the patient? Digital comes into play to enrich our interactions with patients and customers. We launched the first worldwide program which transforms our sales, customer service, clinics, and field service operations, thanks to a common digital platform accessible to our teams.
To conclude, based on our unique positioning and robust fundamentals, we will seize the opportunities offered by the market's drivers, and we will continue delivering solid growth and being a strong contributor to the group's resilience and performance. More precisely, we plan to grow by 4%-5% sales on average per year, and even up to 6% if we exclude the exceptional COVID sales in 2021, the reference year of the ADVANCE plan. The biggest contribution is coming from a strong organic growth of our home healthcare activities. We will focus on value-based healthcare transformation to ensure sustainable and profitable growth. We will consolidate our geographic position as well with selective acquisitions. Last, we will again boost our operational excellence, leveraging digital, IT, and data to generate efficiencies and balance price pressure.
I hope that you are as excited as we are by the ambition of our Air Liquide healthcare business, and I would like to thank you all for your attention. Now, I hand over to Marcelo.
Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. I will focus on Industrial Merchant for a few moments. Now is an exciting time in the Industrial Merchant market as we are seeing powerful change driven by innovation and technology. At Air Liquide, innovation and technology have long been drivers for growth, and this remains so as we see potential to unlock new end markets and usages as we move into our ADVANCE period. IM has a clear role to play in those markets that are building a more sustainable future. For example, as Pascal mentioned earlier, we see a 45% increase in the gas intensity of electric vehicles versus combustion engines and the expansion of battery production.
We also see tremendous potential in additive manufacturing or 3D printing, as argon is used to provide inert atmospheres during the additive manufacturing process. Emission testing gas standards, oxygen and carbon dioxide for increasing water treatment, new food freshness and storage, as well as combustion and energy management, all pose significant opportunities. All these drivers represent around EUR 10 billion in new market potential. Thanks to Air Liquide's focus on innovation and proximity to our customers, we are keenly positioned to capture this growth. Societal trends, most notably sustainability, are shaping our future and changing the way we work and live. By being in the market and leveraging on who we are, Air Liquide is ready to seize any opportunity.
Air Liquide has improved performance and customers' experience by leveraging digital with our size and scale. Looking to the future, there remains significant opportunities to grow while meaningfully improving operational performance.
IM is the perfect playground for digital. With 2 million customers, 20 million cylinders, and close to 10,000 vehicles, we generate tens of millions of transactions per year. The data footprint for our operations is vast, as is the opportunity to leverage that data to deliver value. The digital transformation of data into information allows us to understand customer needs to advance operational excellence and drive growth in our business. By harnessing the power of digital through more informed data-driven decision-making, we anticipate churn, optimize our pricing, and deliver an outstanding customer experience. In fact, we have been able to offer new data-enabled solutions and services to help our customers optimize their own operations and business. IM is also delivering on some major programs. Let me share with you three examples. First, Integrated Bulk Operations, or IBO, builds on a fully digital supply chain.
With predictive analytics, we are able to forecast customer demand based on consumption patterns and optimize product sourcing based on production costs and plant location. With this program, we are optimizing our transportation costs, carbon footprint, and customer experience with real-time customer information of the delivery. Second, Killisby delivers a user-friendly click and weld connector with a gas reserve indicator and connected services. It facilitates the continuity of gas supply for its users, thus improving safety and productivity. Third, our omnichannels customer engagement approach through physical branches, dedicated sales teams, best-in-class e-business platforms, and our inside sales force. This approach helps to boost productivity and unlock efficiencies and overall end-to-end business optimization. I'm confident that with all of these digital transformation programs, Air Liquide will continue to deliver growth and improve operational performance with our business. Our overall ambition is to make every interaction valuable.
Let's focus now on the solid fundamentals of IM and how this supports the group's strong performance. First, our geographic end market and customers' diversities add resilience to the business, as recently demonstrated during major global disruption like COVID-19. Second, we continuously build density to this local business. As a local business with global reach, IM is close to our customers, no matter where they are. Importantly, through continued portfolio management and strategic focus, we have a balanced portfolio offering the best mode of supply with an increasing share of high margin on-site production. Our customer focus approach drives our innovation and product offerings. By leveraging digital channels to ensure we have actionable data, we're able to materialize efficiencies and offer the group a long runway of opportunities ahead.
Finally, we have also demonstrated the excellence of our pricing programs, leveraging our tools, processes, incentives program, and overall our strong commitment to margin management. All these fundamentals translate into a long-term market vision that capitalizes on our leadership in key geographies to capture new growth opportunities. Importantly, Air Liquide's IM business line with relatively less capital intensity generates a strong free cash flow supporting investments in other parts of the group's business. To summarize the near term, we have forecasted solid sales growth through the ADVANCE period of between 4% and 5% for IM. This will come from a combination of volume, a sustained approach to price, and continued bolt-on M&A net of divestitures. Industrial Merchant has also been the largest contributor to overall group margin improvement since the Airgas acquisition in 2016.
We will continue to optimize end-to-end supply chain management and continuously improve operational excellence. Driven by active data, digital utilization, and aggressively adding density in key geographies such as the United States and China, IM is constantly transforming for a more efficient, effective, and profitable way to grow our business. Before I finish, I want to convey both my excitement for our future opportunities and the confidence I have in our teams. We have a highly qualified, dedicated, and motivated team of professionals, coupled with innovative tools to deliver our ambitious objectives and make every interaction with our customers a valuable one. Thank you. Now back to Paris.
Thank you, Marcelo. Let's move to Global Markets & Technologies WBU, which develops and manufactures disruptive technologies to open up new markets in the energy transition and deep tech. Let's focus on space as an illustration of GM&T deep tech business. If we first have a look at the key market trends, what do we see? The space market has been undergoing a profound transformation for the last 10 years, mainly pushed by the exponential need for connectivity, IoT, 5G, geo-localization, a renewed interest in human space exploration towards Moon and the Mars, and finally, the increase of environmental concerns requiring Earth observation and encouraging launcher and satellite propellants decarbonization. In addition, the role of private players is increasing, with companies such as SpaceX and numerous startups entering the new space. Space is a long story for Air Liquide.
We supply both gas and equipment to this market for launchers, satellites, and space exploration. We've become a major partner in the space industry. Our strategy is to play an active role in the new space, targeting the Earth observation growing needs, as well as space exploration challenges. The accessible market for Air Liquide amounts to around EUR 1.7 billion. We can leverage our strength, our recognized cryogenic expertise and technological developments, and our strong connections to the new space ecosystem. Air Liquide is indeed partnering with space agencies, new startups, and key industrial partners. You have a few names of partners here on the slide. Air Liquide's involvement in the space adventure is here to stay, keeping our pioneering spirit and leveraging our innovation capabilities.
To conclude this part, technologies to unlock new markets are made possible by our leadership position in innovation to support our business and operations. We spend around EUR 300 million on innovation per year. More than half is dedicated to energy transition and to digital data and artificial intelligence. In the energy transition field, Air Liquide is developing a complete offer of decarbonization technologies, enabling differentiation. For instance, we're developing hydrogen technologies for the production, liquefaction, and transportation of liquid and gaseous hydrogen, but also carbon capture technologies. In digital and data, we've driven a phenomenal acceleration in recent years while ensuring more protection, resilience, and competitiveness of our IT systems. Any new offer has some digital component, and we continuously leverage data, IoT, and AI potential in our business lines for healthcare and IM supply chains, as well as large industries.
In our traditional businesses, we focus on new applications of our gases, industrial safety, and operational excellence. Our innovation leadership is based on four strengths. First, our five innovation campuses across the world, enabling us to be close to our customers in our key markets. Second, a well-structured exploration process to avoid blind spots and prepare the next technological waves. Third, a solid intellectual property management, which gives us a competitive edge. Air Liquide is the first applicant of new patents in its industry. Last, technological partnerships to accelerate developments and gain scale, such as the one we've announced for electrolyzers with Siemens in Europe, and in total, 400 partnerships with customers, academics, startups, and suppliers.
To conclude, our commitment to unlock new markets is strongly relying on our ability to innovate for our customers and patients and master the key technologies which will make the difference in the next decade, leveraging our number one position in innovation. Thank you.
Thank you, very much, Émilie. Now, let's turn to the last chapter of this presentation, our fourth priority, supporting our comprehensive performance, which is acting for all. Fabienne, let's start.
Thank you, François. For Air Liquide, performing is also acting for all, and this is not new. That's why in March 2021, during our sustainability day, we extended our climate objective to ESG objectives with a strong engagement towards our stakeholders, our patients, but also our employees and shareholders, while keeping a strong focus on customer centricity. Let's talk decarbonization first. As you know, we are aiming at carbon neutrality 2050 with clear milestones, including, as part of ADVANCE, the beginning of emissions reduction in absolute value. I believe you have understood from my colleague's presentation that decarbonization is opening a wide area of new opportunities for the group, but it is also a commitment and a responsibility that we want to make and take for us and for all.
We will transform our operations and invest heavily, as it is key to Air Liquide's future, but also to our customer base, our employees, and shareholders. Embarking them in our journey, understanding their expectation, and responding to their concerns is at the heart of our strategy. I will hand over to Armelle for our focus on customers and employees, and then I will come back to illustrate our commitment to shareholders. Armelle?
Thank you, Fabienne, and good afternoon, everyone. During the last five years of NEOS, we deep dived our customers' experience to listen, then understand, and ultimately act on what matters to them. We started by active listening, collecting 100,000 customers' feedback about their experiences with Air Liquide using state-of-the-art customers' tools. We got in their shoes through hundreds of customer journey mapping sessions with them to understand better firsthand what experiences matter. We drove home a customer-centric mindset with all employees by bringing customers into Air Liquide. We are now transitioning our efforts and engraving customer into our core DNA, just like we did with safety. We will continue to use customer insights coming from all types of interactions to focus our efforts.
To deliver the industry's most valuable and effortless company to work with, we will leverage our innovation, digital, and AI capabilities and resources. Lastly, we will empower by enabling those closest to our customers, delivering our promises of reliable supply and quality in particular. Customer loyalty is the ultimate objectives. It improves profitability from additional value co-creation opportunities and by lowering the cost of customer acquisition. For our employees, it is virtuous by keeping motivation high and enhancing the sense of purpose. Let's now listen to an Airgas customer on his experience with Air Liquide.
Cleaver-Brooks is a world-leading manufacturer of boiler room solutions with over 90 years of industry experience. Our company today is the sole provider of integrated boiler, burner, and control solutions. We develop innovative boiler room technology and systems that lead the market in safety, reliability, efficiency, and sustainability. Cleaver-Brooks has a long-standing relationship with Airgas. Originating in our Thomasville, Georgia location, Airgas has been a key supplier in the Cleaver-Brooks supply chain, supplying welding related commodities for over 25 years. In 2019, we began to leverage our long-standing relationship with Airgas to supply our manufacturing locations across North America, including their Canadian locations, who now work closely with Air Liquide on a daily basis. My favorite thing about working with Airgas is the people. Their responsiveness and candor help us keep focused and allow us to perform our day-to-day work.
Airgas keeps us competitive by providing us a range of industry experts to increase our efficiency and ensure we stay on the leading edge of technology. A great example of how Airgas brings value to our company's work is by using their digital welding efficiency analysis dashboard. Using the data provided by this tool, we can identify potential areas for projects to improve efficiencies and reduce cost. Another example is our use of the Airgas high capacity EXELTOP cylinder, which allows us to save money by reducing the number of cylinder changeovers, as well as eliminating the need for a regulator and a flow meter. We see Airgas involved in various community outreach programs, many of these communities Cleaver-Brooks operates in. By investing in the future, Airgas helps sustain our industry.
Satisfied customers mirror engaged employees. Two levers are key to succeed, the engagement of everyone and the ability to support our business ambition with technical expertise. First, we want to act on what matters to our employees, creating a safe, inclusive, and engaging workplace. It is also a must for retention and attractivity in a tight labor market. Last year, we shared with you four commitments contributing to these goals. First, safety. It is a prerequisite to any action at Air Liquide with one ambition, zero accident.
Second, diversity as a source of performance. It means creating the conditions for equal opportunity for all and promoting a culture of inclusion. In 2021, we have improved by 1% up to 31%, well on track to reach our objectives in gender diversity by 2025. Third, we also announced a new commitment to having 100% of our employees under a common basis of care coverage by 2025, and this beyond local legislation. It includes life insurance, health coverage, and 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. We have finished a thorough due diligence of our local practices and action plans are implemented to reach our objectives.
Last but not least, engaging people in the company, but also for society, and it really takes on its full meaning today with the extraordinary mobilization of our employees in Poland and Romania in particular, but not only, to support Ukrainian refugees. Engagement is a must, but to deliver ADVANCE business ambition and to rise to the challenge to decarbonize the planet and unlock progress via technologies, we need very strong technical expertise. Good news is we can count on a very structured program called Technical Community Leaders and on 4,000 highly qualified experts. Launched in 2003, it is a very dynamic program driven by our business strategy. Before I hand over to Fabienne, let's discover more about this program in this video.
What is Air Liquide TCL program about? Technical Community Leaders contribute to Air Liquide growth through innovation. Technical Community Leaders prepare the future for our customers and patients. The TCL program is structured around the identification, recognition, and the development of our technical talents, including six levels of expertise from local to international scope of contribution. Each level is a progression in terms of extent of expertise, scope of influence, and contributions to achieving results. How do technical experts contribute to Air Liquide's performance? Technical experts contribute in seven main domains. Safety, quality, and reliability, know-how building, innovation, knowledge transfer, product management, business development, and communication promotion. Their expertises are related to nine technical areas, sustaining Air Liquide technical leadership. For international fellows, what is the most important to grow as a technical expert in Air Liquide?
Well, I would say being entrepreneurial.
Learn, share, engage with others internally and externally.
I believe you need to be a lifelong learner.
Tenacity.
Be ready to accept new challenges.
Not only you need to know what to do, how to do, but you need also to know why.
You must dare.
Everything you do should be useful, concretely useful for our customers and all our operationals.
You know that another of the specifics of Air Liquide is the importance of the individual shareholders base, representing 1/3 of our equity. We aim at deploying a best-in-class governance, understandable by both individuals and institutional shareholders on the balanced equity strategy. Our dividend policy is very stable, with a constant payout ratio around 50% on the dividend in absolute value that has never decreased over more than 30 years. In fact, our dividend growth has been on average 8.3% per year over the last 30 years. Shareholders' return is favoring loyalty and long-term investment through free share attributions and loyalty bonuses, aligning with our focus on the long-term profitable growth. Beyond shareholders, we want to act for the society as a whole, and the illustrations of this strong will are numerous.
I will mention first the Air Liquide Foundation acting for research and also for local community support, including professional training for underprivileged. To be noted, the foundation resources have been increased during COVID to support research programs to fight the pandemic. More recently, once again, the foundation has engaged immediately in response to the terrible tragedy in Ukraine through a first donation of EUR 1 million for specific actions alongside NGOs and by complementing also local initiatives to help the displaced Ukrainian populations. We are also considering how we can provide Ukraine medical oxygen and equipment.
My second illustration relates to our Access Oxygen program, providing access to more than 1 million people in rural populations in low and medium income countries in Africa in particular, and to our cooperation with international development organizations. I will stop there as I know that you are eager to listen to the conclusion and after that to be able to ask your questions. I just would like you to remember that Air Liquide performance means nothing without a complete commitment to our stakeholders and to our planet, and that with ADVANCE it is even more obvious than before.
Thank you very much, Fabienne. We have reached the end of this presentation. We hope that you have a better view of what ADVANCE is about. Let me reinforce some key points. First, ADVANCE is clearly about delivering financial performance, which is a prerequisite. Our ambition is to go beyond and to deliver a comprehensive performance, financial and extra-financial, which is the way to first ensure long-term sustainable growth and reinforce our leadership position in the industry. I think by now you have in mind that under ADVANCE, a new paradigm is that we will deliver profitable growth while reducing CO₂ emission. Of course, to achieve this, capital efficiency and margin improvement will be key. To summarize, what are our management priorities today?
The first one is deliver and invest, as this plan is about accelerating the improvement of financial performance and preparing the future as we will invest 45% more than in the previous period. The second priority is to allocate resources, both in terms of capital and talents. It will require discipline and selectivity. Finally, to onboard all our stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders to get their support and their engagement. In the current context, I am absolutely convinced that you can rely on the strength of the group more than ever. Be resilient and leverage our base business, manage cost and pricing when needed, and also capture opportunities to invent the future. Acceleration of the energy transition, growth in the digital and electronics, transformation of healthcare system are major stakes that will remain, and where I hope you have seen by now Air Liquide is very well-positioned.
ADVANCE is about creating value for our stakeholders, performing for what matters, to deliver today and prepare for the future. Thank you very much for your attention. Benoît, I think you have some final words. Please.
As François has just summarized the key messages we wanted to present today, I wish to pass my conviction that we have everything we need to deliver on the group strategic vision. I'm very proud of the unwavering commitment and outstanding capabilities of our teams around the world. They have demonstrated what they are capable of, in particular during the past two years. Growth and resilience are part of our DNA. Our values and our teams will make the difference. With that, we can open the line for questions.
Thank you very much. We are now starting the Q&A session. I think we will start to make sure that everybody is getting connected by some questions which are coming from the chat. Mike, please could you read some of the questions which are coming in?
Certainly, François. One of the first questions that we have is about fossil fuel prices, and the specific question is how will rising fossil fuel prices impact decarbonization as well as the energy transition?
Mike, maybe this is a question that's for you if you want to start with the U.S. perspective.
I think whether it's the U.S. or globally, at any point in time where we've seen an increase, a very significant increase in hydrocarbon pricing, there has been a view of the importance of renewables. As things have evolved over time and given the current framework, we are obviously now very well-positioned to see renewables grow on a global basis, whether that's with all of the efforts currently announced and we're involved in in Europe, certainly with a lot of the new policies and regulations that are being formulated in the U.S. and already some companies beginning to invest, and even in Asia as well. I think that actually that can act as an accelerator and a reminder of the need to diversify the energy system in general and also to really diversify and now decarbonize the transportation fuel sector.
Thank you very much, Mike. I think you're lucky enough to read the next question.
Fair enough. I would be happy to do that.
Mm.
On Scope 3 emissions, even if you say to accompany large industrial customers in their path to decarbonization, that is part of the solution. The question is, will this actually not help? How can the individuals understand why you do not want to commit more on Scope 3? That is to say, they just don't understand why we don't want to move forward on Scope 3 today.
All right. That's a very good question, and we had a lot of discussion with Fabienne about the Scope 3 and what we should take into account. Fabienne, do you want to comment on the Scope 3?
Yes. Sure, François. You know that we made a commitment on what is our control, meaning scope one and scope two. Another very strong component of our strategy is to provide our customers with innovative solution that will help them, enable them to reduce their own CO2 footprint. More and more of our customers are also committing to carbon neutrality 2050, and we believe we will all converge to this objective, our suppliers, ourselves and our customers. Now, why don't we make a commitment? I believe it's too early for us to do that. The main reason is that we don't even have a method to calculate the scope three. If you look at the way we calculate it, we include sold products, but not the usage of sold products.
If you look at the way Linde calculated, they don't even include sold products. We have very different methods. What we've done, we have engaged under the umbrella of SBTi into a working group, to be able, together with our customers from the chemical industry, to establish a method. That needs to be the first step. Then we'll see where we stand, and progressively we'll see if we can make this commitment. Being very transparent and honest, as usual, for the moment, we give a commitment on what is under our control and what we believe we can achieve.
Thank you very much, Fabienne. I think we can take some questions from the operator. Can we have the first question, please?
Thank you. The first question comes from Mubasher Chaudhry from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. Just as part of the 160 basis points operating margin, you talked about the three levers. Could you help us with the magnitude of each of these levers? I think you talked about kind of the key components driving it, but just kind of the split between the three levers for the 160 basis points, that would be helpful. The second question is related to that. Can you talk about the pace of delivery? Is this something that's likely to be a linear delivery or more back-end loaded as some of these initiatives gather pace? Then finally, on the EUR 1.6 billion efficiency savings, could you talk about the costs required to achieve those savings? Thank you.
Thank you very much. I would suggest that, Jérôme, you take the first question on the margin improvement and the pace on delivery.
Mm-hmm.
Probably Mathieu will make some comment on the efficiency program.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Mubasher. Basically, you know, as you mentioned, we commit to deliver 160 basis points over the next four years. In terms of what is the contents on that, you know, we have also committed on the fact that we are also targeting EUR 1.6 billion of efficiencies over the next four years, you know. This is something that is also a very strict component of this. You know, there is in that, at that regard, you know, three parts. There is a procurement part that will deliver. There is also the fact that we will have industrial efficiencies, and also the fact that also we'll commit as well on continuous improvement. Mathieu will come back on that later.
We'll also have a pricing activity. You know, you recall that the fact that we have been extremely proactive during the last year in 2021 by delivering, you know, a significant uplift in pricing. We'll continue to do that, especially in, you know, in this kind of inflationary environment. The last pillar is portfolio management. We will, you know, look and continue to look our portfolio of activities to either invest in some additional activity that we consider relevant to the margin or also divest as well for the one that will not contribute to the margin improvement. On the second point, related to the commitment, yes, we are committed on the 160 basis points, but we do not want to commit on a yearly margin improvement.
We want to commit on the 160 basis points over the next 4 years, which is our plan today.
Thank you very much, Jérôme. Do you want to dig a little bit into the efficiency, Mathieu, please?
Sure. I guess, as Benoît mentioned earlier in the presentation, we have a structural plan in place, and actually we put it in place already a few months back. Most of the costs are already embedded into what you see, when it comes to either CapEx or OpEx. Most of these programs are supported by some changes in our processes, in our digitalization, in our systems. Again, they are already part of it. That's why we see that we want to harvest what we have seeded. It also explains part of the acceleration on the contribution as we have invested upfront, basically, to make this program, to put them in place and to staff appropriately.
On the other end, some aspect of these programs comes at no cost, and the best example is continuous improvement, where we want to chase the waste throughout our processes and organization. We have some teams in place with some SIM champions, as we call them, in the teams, and basically day after day, they are looking at operations, support functions, in order to make sure that we are as efficient as possible.
Thank you very much, Mathieu. We have the next question from the audience, please.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Stott from UBS. Please go ahead.
Oh, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for the presentations. I have one question, and it was quite a broad one. When you as a company saw the REPowerEU package last week, what one or two elements of that most interested you? Where do you think there's a game-changing moment in that policy? I suppose where I'm going with this is that a big part of the move away from Russia is LNG, and I was never really aware that Air Liquide had a big role in LNG, but I'm very happy to be corrected on that. And then finally, could there be a big step up in biomethane as well? Sorry, it's a very broad question, but I'm really interested in your more detailed thoughts on last week. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Andrew. I will answer this question. I hesitate a little bit to say that we saw opportunity given, I mean, the dramatic events that are driving, I mean, the REPowerEU initiative, of course. This being said, clearly, I mean, there is a willingness from Europe to move forward and to increase the independence in terms of energy, relying less on imported fossil fuel to Europe. When we look a little bit into the details of what is being proposed, we see in fact a lot of opportunities. The first one is the energy efficiency, which is a major way to reduce basically our consumption of imported energy. As you know very well, we offer a lot of solutions for our customer to save energy.
When you inject oxygen in a glass furnace, for example, you save 15%-20% natural gas consumption. Overall, energy efficiency will create a lot of opportunities for us. Beyond that, we saw clearly that there was a willingness to increase the role of hydrogen overall and renewable. We see that as being opportunities. Renewable, because we clearly see the today situation in Europe as a bottleneck to be able to develop hydrogen from renewable. We do expect that there will be more push on this. On hydrogen, the commission today is stating that the objective should not be 5 million tons per year of use of hydrogen, but an additional 15, which mean within this additional 15, 5 will come from additional hydrogen capacity.
What we are doing in Normandy is exactly the kind of things which is expected from Europe, switching also, I mean, the fossil fuel to the electricity supply. Then the other 10 million out of the 15 additional will come from import, which could be also another opportunity. Hydrogen, renewable will be opportunities. Just to finish, clearly, there was also a push for biomethane, and you know that Air Liquide has been building a very strong position in several countries in Europe. We see there again, opportunities, and it's very interesting because it's a way to achieve independence, but also to reduce the carbon footprint of the natural gas, the biomethane which is being used. All in all, we see clearly this as an acceleration of the trends that we had already identified and where we are well-positioned.
I hope this answered your question. Maybe we take the next question.
Yep. Thank you, François Jackow.
Thank you, Andrew.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Jones from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you very much for taking my questions. The first one just on quantifying some of these energy transition opportunities that you talked about. Could you help us understand perhaps a few examples of how much more industrial gas intensive some of these are? For example, how much more do you sell into a biofuels producer compared to a traditional refinery? Or how much more do you sell to a DRI-based steel plant rather than a sort of blast furnace plant that's not using any hydrogen at all? The second question, going back to some of Benoît's comments at the start about shifting from a cost-focused merchant organization towards a little more innovation-driven. Could you give us some color on how that changes how you operate the business? Does that mean hiring more people?
Does that mean increasing the overall innovation budget, more partnerships with external organizations? Anything just to help us understand that a bit, that'll be great. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Alexander, for your question. I think Mathieu will answer the second one, but maybe we start with Mike. If you can speak a little bit about the application in the customer processes.
Sure. I think in the energy transition, there's multiple verticals to this. Clearly, as we look at the production of renewables, for refiners in the transportation sector, as part of what we discussed earlier, there's a real drive to use different sources of renewables, and refine those in some existing refining processes and to expand those processes to handle that. The reality is, if you look at the quantity of hydrogen necessary and used in desulfurization today versus the amount of hydrogen that would be used to upgrade those renewable hydrocarbons to fuel-grade materials, it is significantly higher. We're talking orders of magnitude from a hydrogen standpoint. In reality, we see an increase in the amount of hydrogen per barrel, so to speak, or per liter of transportation fuels produced.
That's a significant upside. In addition to that, the hydrogen, whether it's used in DRI, which is clearly the transition for the future, or looking at the use of renewables from an Airgas standpoint, thinking about sources of renewable oxygen to also produce the steel, this will increase as well the requirements from a steelmaking standpoint as we shift from a blast furnace to a focus on DRI. That'll not only ramp hydrogen, but it likely ramps oxygen as well from a renewable standpoint specific to that.
Thank you very much, Mike. Mathieu?
When it comes to IM, I think what's fantastic with IM is that we don't have to change the way we operate today. We see a wave of opportunity in front of us, driven by energy transition or new societal trends that we have to capture. The core of our activity is not changing. We are local, we have the teams, we have the molecules, and our job is to push them through the market. Indeed, we see new trends, and we mentioned a few during the calls around water treatment, around combustion, around car batteries. All of these are using our typical small molecule, the one that we are moving on every day. Our job is to discover the next innovation.
A good example are the car batteries that we highlighted earlier. We need a lot of oxygen for the cathode production. The oxygen is the same typical one, up to us to be very competitive, to offer the best solution for these type of customers, and to make sure that in the field we can support these activities. To do so, we have to work around application equipment and expertise, which is what we do on an ongoing basis, and make sure that we manage our portfolio of innovation well. That's what we do through an annual process where we really make sure that we capture the trends in the marketplace and that we lay that back together to our innovation portfolio. Nothing new, but again, a lot of opportunities that we have to capture.
Thank you very much, Mathieu. Before we take a question from the chat, maybe we have another question, live.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Georgina Fraser from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. Good afternoon. I've got two questions. The first is on portfolio management. During the NEOS efficiency program, portfolio management was more heavily weighted towards acquisition versus divestments. I was wondering if you could give us some color during the ADVANCE strategy. Will the split look similar, or will divestment be more helpful to delivering your targets? My second question is related to over the fence. I might be wrong here, but it feels like over the fence activities are gaining importance in Air Liquide strategy. Firstly, would you agree with that statement? Could you please elaborate on the key drivers behind the rising over the fence activity and how it contributes to basin density?
I'm sorry, Georgina, but the connection was not very good on your second question, so can you clarify your point because we had difficulties to hear you?
Yes, sure. The second question was on over the fence. Would you agree that it's gaining importance in Air Liquide strategy? That's something that it feels like to me, listening to the presentations today. If you could elaborate, what are the drivers behind rising over the fence activity, and increasing basin density?
Okay. Maybe on the first question, Benoît, with whom we have discussed a lot acquisition and organic growth, may want to make a comment. Benoît, do you want to comment?
Yes. If you can hear me? Can you hear me?
Very well.
Okay, excellent. Thank you. I'm jumping in. I was attending very carefully all the presentations. There's no real change in the portfolio strategy, to be honest. You can see from the analysis that it was small acquisitions, bolt on. The divestitures on their side were more on the countries or the businesses where we did not really see a strong future. I think this strategy will go on. You never plan for a very big acquisition, as a matter of fact. If you think at a point in time that you have to study one, you do it. I would say just in a nutshell that the divestiture and acquisition strategy in the portfolio will remain as they are.
Now, you also have to think in terms of what are we talking about in terms of businesses. Because the businesses will be healthcare, will be electronics, will be technologies where we will have an added value. It will depend on where we see more opportunities. Hydrogen might be part of them, but essentially the strategy will remain what it used to be, and you should not expect a big change in the impact of the portfolio management in the years to come.
Thank you very much, Benoît. Maybe I will try to answer the question about the over the fence and the fact that we see indeed, I mean, more willingness from our customer to move towards, I mean, the model of the over the fence. I think the reasons are pretty clear. I mean, first, the fundamental of the over the fence model where we provide, I mean, increased reliability, safety, overall cost of ownership, saving capitals for the customer. This is true, this has been true for several years. Clearly, I think the fact that we demonstrate this value with customer is also an additional factor.
The fact also that we have a very strong position in key basins is adding to this value because we can leverage the infrastructure, generate economies of scale, and provide additional benefit that a customer investing by itself cannot generate. I think there is something new which is coming clearly, which is the fact that on top of all those traditional value, now we are delivering clearly value about the carbon reduction of the production of oxygen or hydrogen.
The fact that we master the technologies, we have the know-how, we have the experience, the credibility, but we have also as a company a commitment, and probably we are leading the industry in terms of commitment, is really giving comfort to our customers to work with us and to invent new business schemes, leveraging the fundamentals of the large industry business model, but going into the decarbonization. I think when you combine all that, we see clearly a trend and an acceleration in the over-the-fence overall. This is true, just to finish, on large industry, but also in electronics, of course. I think we have now a question from the chat, and Mike, can you share that with us?
Certainly. The next question from the chat is if growth is not accelerating all that much, why is CapEx rising 45%?
Jérôme, can you answer this question?
Thank you, François. Of course, I would be very happy to do so. Just to recall maybe what we have been doing, what we're expecting to do in the next four years compared to NEOS. We are accelerating. Growth in NEOS at that time was when you exclude, you know, the big acquisition of Airgas at a, you know, average growth around 4.5%. Plus 4.5% in average into the period. We are expecting 5%-6% over the next four years, so it's already an acceleration.
Now, on the question on why or how much of that is impacting the growth in terms, you know, of the plus 45% of CapEx, you have to bear in mind that, you know, when you sign a big contract, you know, there is about one or two years of this contract, you know, to be erected to result in a air separation or big unit to be set up. Then there is the ramp-up phase. Some part of that will definitely contribute to the growth acceleration at the expectation of 2025, but also beyond of that.
That's why, you know, which is the beauty of this program, is that not only we will also be able to deliver this acceleration of growth in 2025, but also be able to accelerate in the future as well.
Thank you very much, Jérôme. I think we have another question from the chat. Mike, please.
Certainly. The next question is, can you talk about opportunity of carbon capture as a service opportunity versus opportunity of green hydrogen?
All right. Mathieu, do you want to answer this, please?
Of course. First of all, we see a lot of opportunity in carbon capture. The first buckets will be customer that eventually, no matter what they do in their process and how efficient they are going to produce CO2 as part of their production processes. Cement or lime are really good example. Those are brand new growth opportunities for Air Liquide. As we mentioned earlier, they did not need industrial gas years ago, and now we start talking to them and we have already some successes. You may have noticed that we have some very good projects in the area of Dunkirk with some support from the European Commission. The other part is the transition phase.
As we all know, we have existing assets on the ground, and if we want to move fast, time for renewable energy, time for green electrolyzers or other type of renewable or low carbon solution to speed up, carbon capture is definitely a good solution for the years to come. Air Liquide is very well positioned. We have the technologies to do that. We went through that during the presentation, especially with our CryoCap™ proprietary technology. We are trying to develop a solution of carbon management as a service, being an aggregator in few basins, putting together some CO2 volumes in order to capture them, transport them, and eventually store them. We can see CCS as a growth opportunity in the years to come. Again, time for the green solutions to ramp up.
Thank you very much, Mathieu. We'll go back to the live questions. If we can take the next question.
Thank you. The next question comes from Chetan Udeshi from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking questions. I have a few actually, and I'll read them out one by one. First one was going back to the previous question on CapEx and growth. I want to drill on that point a bit more because if I look at the NEOS program, you guys guided to about 5% growth, excluding the contribution from Airgas. The CapEx during that period was like, I think, previously it was mentioned in the presentation of, you know, EUR 11 billion-EUR 12 billion. You know, for incremental 1% growth target today we are talking about CapEx, which is, you know, much higher. I'm just trying to understand, is there some structural change in terms of CapEx intensity today versus five years back?
In terms of, you know, just this investment, you know, the program for investment, the program for CapEx, how much of this has been driven by top-down assumptions versus bottom-up assumption on the available projects, you know, customer discussions, which is driving that, you know, CapEx forecast? The other question would be in terms of how should we think about the impact of this on free cash flow. Can you shed some light on, you know, how should we think about cash flow from operations as a percentage of sales or as a percentage of EBITDA? Would you think, you know, we should be modeling for the next four, five years, given the CapEx is gonna be high? One last question.
You know, clearly the outlook that you guys have projected is very upbeat, promising, but in this environment where the energy prices are very high, do you think there is a risk at some point that could also be you know, few customers find it difficult to survive and like, you know, in terms of energy cost inflation, not for you, but also for some of your customers, how do you see that dynamic playing out in the next six to nine months? Should we expect any particular headwinds for Air Liquide specifically? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Chetan. Thank you for your interest. You've got quite a bit of questions. I will take the first two. Jérôme will talk about cash, and I'm sure that Benoît would like to make some comment on the outlook that we discussed extensively. First on the CapEx on the growth, again, if you are looking at the absolute value, first you have to take into account that the group is getting bigger. To achieve the percent of additional growth in 2025, you need basically more CapEx than what we used at the beginning of NEOS, of course. Also I think the fundamental point is the fact that the plan is going to deliver most of its growth after 2025.
Really that's a very important part of this ADVANCE plan, is that we are preparing for the future, and we are preparing for the next phase of this growth. The second thing is on the assumption. I can tell you that we have done a lot of work, I mean, through the teams, and it's a mix of top-down and bottom-up. At the end of the day, one of the things that we had to do was to be selective with the number of projects which were coming from the field. I think this is one of the feature of this period. We see a lot of opportunities where we can contribute, which by the way is giving us the possibility to be selective. We have very strong assumption, and we have a list of projects.
Not all of them will happen. We have sufficient backup to have a very strong portfolio to support this plan. Now talking about free cash flow, Jérôme?
Yeah. Thank you very much, François. Thank you, Chetan. Again, very, very interesting question. In terms of cash flow, you know, I will reiterate what I've said at the beginning of the call. We expect, you know, we have increased our cash flow. You noticed that in the last year significantly. You know, with also the improvement of the margin in the coming years, plus on top of the sales, you know, we expect to improve our cash flow to be in the range of 23%-26% over the period. That's free operating cash flow. Out of this, you know, our story is a growth story. We want to allocate this first to our CapEx. CapEx will be in the range of 13%-15% of this cash flow. This.
The next point will be the return to shareholder. Because we want first to make sure that our growth story is okay, and then also making sure that our shareholders are also rewarded. We expect 6%-8% frame of return to shareholders, which give us, you know, a very well balance between development, profitability, and return to shareholders. You know, something that also we decided also to disclose is the fact that we expect and we target an improvement in our EBITDA in value, you know, in 2025, which is +30% in value compared to 2021. With all of that, I think you can model it and see that this is very consistent and very straightforward.
Thank you very much, Jérôme. Benoît, could you give us some comments on the outlook and the impact of energy and inflation, please?
Yes, sure. If I may just, Chetan, a quick math, because you seem to be really focused on the growth. If you add 1% growth on a EUR 23 billion turnover, it's EUR 230 million additional sales. With a capital intensity of three, gives you about EUR 700 million more CapEx. Four years, about EUR 3 billion. If you add EUR 3 billion to the EUR 11 billion of the NEOS period, you reach EUR 14 billion. This is compared to 16. The difference with 16 is probably the ten percent more CapEx we had between NEOS that ended in 2019 and this plan, which starts in 2021.
François insisted on that, the fact that most of our investments at the end of the period will not produce during the period. That's the answer in math. Now that being said, your question about the outlook. Energy will play a very significant role, I agree. A role for our customers in the future, but the cost of energy will have to be digested by the world, and I'm pretty sure that the market will actually sort out the different types of energies that it will consume. A steel customer today is consuming both natural gas and electricity. A chemical customer is consuming natural gas, but in the future there will be more recycling and the use of existing products. Refining will go from fossil-based to more HVOs or bio raw materials.
I think the whole energy system will change, and that's where I think, number one, prices will be increased, and number two, there will be a reshuffling in the way you use energy. There will be opportunities for us, because together with energy, hydrogen will play a role, and CO2 will have to take into consideration. For me, the future is a mix of which energy, how much hydrogen can you inject, and how much CO2 can you get rid of, properly. That's the equation where Air Liquide is going to play a very important role.
Thank you, Benoît, and thank you, Chetan. Let's move to the next question, please.
Thank you. The next question comes from Laurent Favre from BNP. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and thank you for taking two questions. The first one is for Jérôme. In the slide on capital allocation, you mentioned the 6%-8% as shareholders plus net debt. Just now, you mentioned just shareholders. I just wanted to get a feeling for what kind of leverage you're targeting, bearing in mind you've been getting the leverage down quite a lot in the last five years. The second question is for François. You just mentioned that you had to be selective on projects, and I was wondering what has been steering your selection process in terms of size, in terms of geographies. Are you also revisiting the way you invest globally based on, for instance, regionalization trends? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Laurent. No choice, Jerome has to answer.
Thank you very much, Laurent. I appreciate your question. Again, on cash allocation, you know, I said earlier that we have an equation which is again quite simple in the sense that we want to, you know, to focus on the CapEx and on the growth, but without forgetting, you know, our shareholders. Also it's a flexible math in the sense that if we are not able to find or there will be less projects than we are expecting, which we do not believe today. Today, we are very much, you know, working on a portfolio of opportunities which give a very bright future in terms of CapEx.
We would then be happy to return to the shareholder. We do not believe today that we are in this situation right now. Of course, if things would evolve in that regard, we would, I would say, adapt on the situation. On the target, gearing and metrics, I would say that we do not have any target. You know, if we see that during the period of time, we've been a 30%, 40% gearing target value, then we would ask ourself about how to reallocate. Again, it's not where we stand today. Today, we are very much focused on our growth strategy and CapEx allocation.
Laurent, in terms of selection of projects and how do we select them, I think some of the things you know them very well. The fact that we want really to select the project which are the one which makes sense and which are profitable on the long term. We want to leverage our differentiation, which could be technology, which could be key positions, strategic position in some of the key basins, for example, of course. Number one criteria is, of course, the profitability of the project, and there is no reason in the energy transition to make any compromise on the profitability of those projects. We are able to select a profitable project, for sure.
Of course, the selection of the country, the basin, as I mentioned, the industry, but the customer is always very important with the criteria that we have been using for the past years to assess the risk-reward balance. New things and something which is going to be more and more visible is the fact that the customer and our solution has to be aligned with the carbon reduction trajectory that we want to have.
That's really now becoming a key criterion, meaning that if we cannot find a solution to decrease the CO2, either by sourcing energy, which is a low carbon energy, or by providing a solution which is in itself a low carbon solution, then we will not invest. To summarize, I would say traditional criteria for the project plus the carbon reduction potential for us and for the customer, of course. We have our next question, I believe.
Thank you. The next question comes from Martin Roediger from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon. I have two, please. Benoît, you talked about the new rules of the game, the growth in the pre-COVID time and the post-COVID time. What does that mean for the market growth rates in industrial gases in general? Because I would like to understand to which extent, in this next period until 2025, you also want to outgrow your respective market with your 5%-6% comparable sales growth target. The second question is on the energy transition projects. You got for your 200 megawatt electrolyzer project in Normandy, a subsidy from the French state of EUR 190 million. Can you tell me how this is treated in your income statement as well as in your cash flow statement?
In this context, I guess you also get, in other energy transition projects, also subsidies. You mentioned Antwerp, Rotterdam and so on. Can you also mention here this, the amount and how you treat them in income statement and cash flow statement? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Martin. I guess, Benoît, you'd like to answer the first one, please.
Yes, sure. Thank you, Martin, for your question. The new rules of the game, as you just mentioned, are clear, and it's changing. I think this plan has been built on the fact that we have a base business, and this base business is very solid. We believe in it, and it's part of our growth. Now, in the absence of any new opportunities, in particular in energy transition, electronics or healthcare, I think we would be able to serve the same type of growth, underlying growth, that we had during NEOS from 2016 to 2019. The fact that we see all those new rules coming is bringing us at least one point of growth in sales, and that's very, very true. It is not just relying on hydrogen for energy.
I think you have understood that CO2 and capture and sequestration as a service will probably come first. Because the reality is that a lot of customers today need to decarbonize first before they deeply change their processes and use more hydrogen or oxygen or both in their processes. I think the fact is that the market is going on with the same type of growth as we had before, but as we see these new processes and new rules coming in, it will translate into sort of additional growth. Now finally, if we compare Air Liquide with the other competitors, I think we were amongst the first, if not the first, to really jump into this new world of energy transition.
Probably we'll be capable of capturing the growth earlier on, and this is why we factor into the plan this 1% additional growth, because we think that we are very well-placed. Now, I have a last comment. Everything we talk about is more in the 2025/2030 period. What was presented today was 2021/2025. We will only see the beginning of the acceleration, and we think that we will be able to accelerate our growth in the second period as we see the energy transition impact being more visible in the market. I hope it covers your question.
Thank you very much, Benoît. I guess, Jérôme is going to answer the subsidy question.
Yeah.
Please.
Yeah. I will not go through directly on the Normandy because, you know, I don't want to disclose specifically on this project. Overall, you know, maybe two things that we need to have in mind. First, the return that we are expecting from the transition energy transition project are basically the same that we want to most of our project. Of course, there is a component which is the subsidy, which help to get this return that we want, and we want to keep at because you know return on capital employed is one of our key objective.
Now, having said that, funding most of the time is a CapEx subsidy, meaning that it's a reduction of the overall CapEx at the beginning, and it's managed through that, you know, and is beginning to go through lower depreciation. Very much, you know, we have to see that at a CapEx level. You deduct the subsidy and then you have the value of the net CapEx that is depreciating, you know, in our CapEx first and then into our return. Basically, that's the way it works.
Thank you very much. I think we have another question live, please.
The next question comes from Jean-Baptiste Rolland from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on what you bake in for the future couple of years in terms of the contributions from startups, existing customer, and pricing. Should we expect a significant acceleration in your startup? I noticed a disconnect between your investment backlog being at the top end of the range, whereas the CapEx have been lagging a little bit. Maybe one thing that would be interesting, perhaps for the second part, that you mentioned between 2025 and 2030, to what point could Air Liquide support an acceleration in the startups?
It turns out that in the early part of the 2010s, you are actually able to support EUR 800 million-EUR 1 billion of startup per year. I'm wondering if this is the same kind of profile that we can expect in the second half of the 2020s. Shorter question, the second one: When you say that EVs are 40% more gas intensive than their internal combustion engine counterparts, do you include or do you exclude the higher electronics content that is within an EV? Third question, in relation to your green investment, most of the investment that you have sanctioned at this stage are related to medium scale brownfield. Would you consider in Europe or in the U.S. sanctioning a large-scale greenfield? Thank you.
Thank you very much. I will try to be, and we will try to be, fast as we are reaching the end of this session. Maybe on the first question on startup and ramp-up contribution, you should expect at the beginning of the plan something which is in line with what you have seen in the past few years. Indeed, it's going to ramp up towards the end of the period and accelerate. It will depend to some extent also on the mix of the project that we are going to see and of course, on the price of energy. Some of those projects are going to be based on natural gas in different parts of the world. Some of those projects are going to be based on electricity and especially renewable electricity price.
There, there's quite a bit of uncertainty. But clearly there is an acceleration there. The second point, do you want to add something, Matthieu?
No, it's more or less. Thank you, François. Because there was also a question on the pricing, you know, what is becoming pricing during the period. Our objective, you know, in pricing is to cover inflation at the minimum. When we talk about pricing, we talk about merchant, you know, because that's basically where, you know, we have to get very proactive because, you know, on the large industry, we are fully indexed, so we do not have an issue in terms of energy, for example, energy indexation. On pricing to cover inflation in the plan, we have about an assumption which is 2%-3%, both in terms of inflation and pricing. Just for you to know as well in the model.
Thank you very much. Matthieu, you take the question on the battery and probably Benoît will come back on the large investment.
On the battery, if you take an internal combustion engine, indeed, with the electrification, we see less gas, so less moving parts, less manufacturing in the process. It's probably 25% less gas. As you mentioned, Jean-Baptiste, we need to add up. Where we add up the electronic piece, the secondary, electronic piece, and especially the active material production piece, as well as some smaller elements, then we reach out to another plus 60%-70%. Yes, we add the electronic part of the electronics, but the big piece for us are mostly the cathode that takes a lot of oxygen.
As I mentioned, we have some smaller parts in the equation like mining, recycling, that will take some gas and all of that contributes a lot to every single electric vehicle that is going to be produced.
Thank you very much. Benoît?
Your question, Jean-Baptiste, related to risk. Is there sort of room for us in those very large projects? The answer might be yes if we think that the supply of whatever, oxygen, hydrogen or the capturing of CO2 makes sense in terms of who the customer is and what the product, the end product is for in the market. There were many discussions about methanol, about ammonia, and there will be probably others. At this stage, we were not convinced to actually heavily invest in those projects, but it might change. It depends on how the energy chains are going to be structured in the future.
If there is a significant customer of Air Liquide in Middle East that decides to produce massively a product like green ammonia, and if we are convinced that this chain, ammonia chain, makes sense in terms of risk, then we might just build a significant plant in Middle East to supply this customer. That's not really a change in the strategy compared with what we did in the past. It's all about do you believe in the market and do you believe in the risk you take supplying this customer?
I think there will be a lot of evolutions in the market, so we need to see how the energy market is going before we engage in such projects.
Thank you very much, Benoît.
Thank you very much. I think we are reaching the end, and we have the last question live, please.
Thank you. The final question is from Peter Clark from Société Générale . Please go ahead.
Thank you. Backing up as ever, but anyway, there's two questions. The first one is back on the growth and the investment. I've heard everything you've said on that, but you've also made it quite clear you expect the backlog support to be sort of 1%-2% as you go through the term. You're pushing price, so I don't know, maybe 1%. It does imply you're not expecting much from underlying market growth. I just want to confirm that's true. The second question is related to that, and it's related, I think, to what Georgina was asking and the traditional large industry model, the traditional onsite model. I remember 10 years ago, Benoît, at the ALMA update, you were talking about the fact that the China steel story was over.
The game of adding capacity in Asia was pretty much over, simply adding capacity. I'm getting the feel here that you do see a slowdown in the traditional large industry, air gas type model, as we look forward and other opportunities accelerate from that. I just wanna check I'm not going way off beam there. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Peter. Jérôme, do you want to answer the first one?
Yes, it will be very quick on the first one. Thank you, Peter, again. You know, on the underlying business, you know, what we did in the assumptions, and we know we can always discuss assumptions, but this one was the one that we took, is that we went to go from in this industrial production around 2% compounded average growth rates. So that's where, you know, which is supporting the underlying business. You know, we have always shown in the past that we have been able to deliver at least this on top of what we have been able to deliver in terms of pricing. That's where we were in terms of assumptions, and that's what you have to get back in your modeling.
Maybe I will answer the one about the less traditional opportunities. I'm not sure what are the traditional opportunities anymore because today we see that in many parts of the world, the growth opportunity are driven by additional capacity and/or change in the process to reduce the carbon footprint. We see really a shift. It's not equal in all the region of the world. Clearly, we see that this is driven currently by Europe, but we see also some of the customer moving in that direction in different parts of the world. That's a change for sure.
That does not mean that there is no more business for the air separation units, because the beauty of the model is that oxygen is the fantastic molecule to reduce the CO2 emission, for example, in the oxycombustion. We mentioned, I mean, the example of the cement industry, where there was no industrial gases being used, and today you see large quantity, 1,000, 2,000 tons per day for a site, being used in some of the cement plant. Also, clearly in electronics, we see that the growth is continuing. Is that a traditional growth? Yes, to some extent, but very clearly we are seeing more opportunities with larger scale. All in all, we see that the business is transforming, but still with a very strong portfolio of opportunities.
I think I will stop here and we will stop because it's time now. We would like really to thank you very much again for joining us today. Benoît, myself, all the management team here value very much your time and our interactions. We hope this was an insightful session for all of you. With ADVANCE, Air Liquide is clearly opening a new chapter, building on its strong business model and capturing sustainable growth in many markets. With ADVANCE, we act today and prepare the future. As always, the IR team is at your disposal should you have any further questions. The management team and myself will also be meeting many of you in the next weeks and months. In the meantime, please take care. Thank you very much.