Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Alstom Investor Day. After our results announcement this morning, where we have outlined our 2021, 2022 performance, which I remind all of you was totally in line with our expectations, totally in line with our trajectory, we have decided for this afternoon to particularly focus on rolling stock activities. This is why we do this specific session to which I welcome all of you. I will start with a few introductory comments, reminding you some of the main messages of this morning and also detailing some of our other activities which are important as well. Then I will leave the floor to Danny Di Perna, our Chief Operating Officer, which will outline a few of the specific aspects of the rolling stock activities, together with his colleagues, Benjamin Fitoussi, in particular, responsible for rolling stock operations.
Together with Danny and Benjamin, and Laurent as well, will be then at your disposal to answer to all the questions you may have at the end of the session. Let's come back a little bit on this year and a few of the main highlights of this morning's presentation. I think the first one, and the most important one, is about customer satisfaction. During this transitory period, during an integration of such two large companies, it's extremely important that we keep a strong customer focus, and therefore, we are extremely happy and proud to see our customers actually congratulating ourselves on this integration. The promoter score is positive, above eight, and as importantly, when we make surveys, 90% of the customers are welcoming the way we have integrated the two companies together. The two companies now are working as one.
All our processes have now been converged, are now fully deployed. Of course, it will take two to three years to fully deploy all our digital tools. As you know, Alstom was embarking Industry 4.0 type of exercise, and we need now to deploy that on a new scope. As far as the processes are concerned, they are all, now fully deployed across the company. Our products are now not converged, but we have plans. We have a strong product planning in front of us in order to fully benefit for the extended portfolio that now we have. At the same time, we need to cover the entirety of the market, and at the same time, we need to benefit and leverage from our synergies, standardization, modularization of our platform. As far as synergies are concerned, we are actually ahead of schedule.
We have already delivered more than EUR 100 million of synergies, which allows us actually to uplift our targets. As you know, we have the target of EUR 400 million synergies, and we are going to uplift that more than EUR 450-EUR 500 million of synergies. Overall, 2021-2022 has been a fantastic first year. There have been an immense work have been done. All our plans have been achieved operationally and financially, and therefore, we are in a very good position to confirm our mid and long-term targets. It's people first during this kind of integration, so we are extremely proud and happy to see the two teams having converged together, two teams being only one team now after only a few months.
When we make surveys on, for example, whether our values are known by the entire new team, more than 80% of our people know our values. 80% of our people are proud to work for Alstom. Just one indicator, more than 1 million connections have been done on our Alstom University, meaning that there is a strong willingness from all our teams worldwide to get on board, to get fully knowledgeable about their full new project, product portfolio. This is of course of utmost importance in a time where we need to recruit a lot of new talents, where we need to attract, when you need to retain talents. Last year, we have been in a position to recruit more than 9,000 new colleagues across the globe.
We have a similar type of challenge for 2022, 2023 in a world which, as you know, is extremely tense on that perspective. We believe that we have extremely strong assets to attract people. Our type of activities as a purpose, our type activities in green sustainability, smart activities, are strong attractive for the different talents across the globe. Now, as I said, let's come back a little bit on our other activities. We are going to focus on rolling stock, but rolling stock, at the end of the day, is half of our activities. I just want to remind you our other activities, starting with service, probably around 25% of our activities. Strong and successful full year for 2021, 2022. More than EUR 4 billion of order intake.
You see a few of these examples, whether it's in Santiago, whether it's in Dallas, in for Metrolinx in Canada or for Transdev in France. A number of new orders. The book to bill above 1.1 is actually a long-term target for us. As you know, we want to grow service faster than the other activities, and we are in a good way to do so. Service activities are not only, I would say, more profitable, more cash generative, more sustainable, but they are also allowing us to be very close from our customers. Usually, the best score in Net Promoter Score in customer surveys are achieved with customers with whom we have long-term service agreements. The availability is increasing dramatically when we are actually taking on board their fleet, and they know that.
That's why more and more customers, more and more operators are actually subcontracting their maintenance activities to us. Second, extremely important activities for us, signaling. A market which is now fully consolidated with three main players. We are one among the three main players in a market which is growing extremely fast, where we have a full range of our portfolio of activities. Both in mainline and in urban. As you know, we had a fantastic achievement in the delivery in urban of our new Fluence platform. Or as far as mainline is concerned, we have made some very good entry into main markets, particularly in Germany, which is an extremely dynamic market, where the combination of both Alstom and Bombardier technologies have allowed us to be extremely strong on this market.
On signaling, we made a lot of efforts, we made a lot of progress in our product planning, in the product convergence. It's typically an activity where the synergies are high on R&D because we are talking about digital platforms, which we can leverage on a much larger scale than in the past. Now, we have defined what will be our next generation of platforms, and we are working hard to achieve that. Last but not least, turnkey activities. This has been traditionally a differentiator in Alstom portfolio. We are very strong. We are actually a leader on these activities. We were a leader on metro. We are now reentering in the tram turnkey activities, but we have also extended our portfolio with people mover for export, for example, or monorail.
We have now the largest portfolio, and we have a very strong position, which is, for example, illustrated by our 100% hit rate this year. We have won all the tenders which we have submitted, which really mean a lot in terms of our positioning on the market going forward. This is a market which is rebounding. Traditionally, both Middle East and Latin America were strong markets. They were a little bit slow in the recent period. Now Middle East is rebounding, of course, on the back of the oil price increase, and Latin America has also rebounded. Frankly, an activity which will be a strong differentiator and a strong value creator for Alstom in the coming future.
These were a few of our reminders on some of our other activities, which as you know, are profitable, growing activities on good markets where Alstom benefits from extremely strong positions. Now we want to focus on our rolling stock activities, rolling stock and components activities. I will hand over to Danny Di Perna, our Chief Operating Officer, which will give you a few highlights. Benjamin, again, will come to particularly focus on the operational activities of rolling stock. Danny and Benjamin will be here to answer to your questions, and I will join them with Laurent at the end of the session. Thank you again, and talk to you later.
Well, thank you, Henri, and good afternoon to all of you, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to present the rolling stock and components portfolio for Alstom. Accompanied by Benjamin Fitoussi, we will go through a bit of a deep dive on the rolling stock and components business portfolio for Alstom. If we turn and look at the market first, the market is roughly a EUR 45 billion market and is growing at roughly 1.5%-1.6% CAGR year over year. In that market, we are in a very strong position compared to our competitors at 38% market share.
Along the bottom of the slide, we wanted to just highlight some of the most recent wins from our Coradia Stream to our Coradia Nordic to an Australian victory with our Flexity tram, all the way to our high-speed HS2 partnership with Hitachi in the U.K.. If you look at our portfolio, the combination of the two businesses leads us to a very impressive portfolio. We have product platforms that cover the gamut of all capacity and speed combinations that our customers around the world require. As you can see on the global map, we cover all the four edges of the world, and we have the ability to both standardize based on our product platform and breadth of our platform, and we can also customize to the specific needs of the markets based on our customers' requirements.
As you can see at the bottom, we cover today, Alstom, more than 30% of the entire industry installed fleet. It's an impressive portfolio for us to begin the next portion of our journey. The fundamental building blocks are components, and these are the elements of technology and performance that enable us to have the best cost-competitive product platform that we can offer to the market. If I start on the first tranche of effort, it's really about creating a spectrum of green solutions for our customers. Number one, we are the pioneer leader in hydrogen-powered trains, including green traction and battery-powered trains. Down below, we're investing in technology on interiors for specific coatings that'll give us the antibacterial protection that the new world post-pandemic requires. Down the middle, we have a very broad component portfolio, the broadest in the industry.
We have all the building blocks and technology elements that we can bring together now, especially with the combination of the two businesses. There is really no reason why we can't be the best cost competitive, highest performing railway offerer to the world. We now are selecting certain areas of vertical integration to help bolster our position in components. As you can see on the images, we're investing in brake capability. Of course, our most recent acquisition of Helion is giving us that extra capability and technology to go deep into the world of hydrogen-powered train systems. The next portion is to look at our breadth. We have a very global but local presence and capability. We have millions of hours of manufacturing, millions of hours of engineering in 50+ production sites across the world for rolling stock and components.
This gives us the breadth of capability for proximity to our customers, to be able to tune the requirements tailored for each and every one of the specific locations and requirements and railway network specifications. We have everything that the world would need from a railway perspective. Then going a little bit deeper, we're investing significantly and continue to invest as a new Alstom in technology for greener, smarter, and more inclusive mobility solutions. What you see on the slide is a recent announcement of a partnership for logistics and infrastructure with ENGIE to help bolster our capability in hydrogen offerings. The image that you see on the far left is the BEMU, our Battery Electric Multi-Unit train system that is first in operation for a BEMU in passenger service.
Down the middle is the TGV and Avelia Horizon, which is getting ready for later this year testing, and the unique technology investments has enabled us to have 20% more capacity while reducing consumption of energy by 20%. Finally, unfortunately, during the pandemic, creations of investment in technology were more anchored towards protecting, people, and we invented the PEPA-F filter antiviral HVAC filter that we could incorporate in our train systems to kill the virus, to kill bacteria, and to try to protect the rolling stock passengers. If I turn a little bit to our ambition, grow profitably. In order to do that, there's a series of strategic orientations and key initiatives that we are focused on.
Number one, in terms of market share, from the 38% that we see that we have already, 3 to 4 percentage points more, that's the growth that we think we can easily garner in the market. Coupled with that, we're focused on high single-digit adjusted EBIT. That's our goal. For that, we have both the focus on platforms, standardizing our components, standardizing our offerings, so that we can drive scale, we can drive cost reduction. On top of that, looking at our worldwide operations and our global footprint so that we have now a better balance of high-value cost sites and best cost centers so that we can bring the best of both high-tech capability and best cost sources to bear.
If I look a little bit at the staircase of how we get to the high single digits, we've broken it into three key focus areas, stabilize, integrate, and transform. Under stabilize, I will cover a little bit more in detail, but it's really about executing on the backlog, at the gross margin, and on time to the current adjusted plan that we have to meet our customer commitments. With regards to integrate, the product convergence and the integration of processes that can go across all of our new colleagues and Alstom sites is gonna enable us to extract synergies and cost reduction, not to mention a bigger breadth of supply chain spend that we can leverage for further cost reduction.
Finally, as we transform, both from a footprint utilization so that we can better utilize the footprint that Alstom has today, and the digitization of our processes in our manufacturing sites, in our component and rolling stock assembly sites. This growth to high single-digit , of course, also has mitigating actions for the global headwinds that the industry and the world is facing right now. I will cover these more in a bit more detail, but just to mention, obviously, what industry is seeing today is material and labor inflation. We are focused on electronic components. There's a worldwide shortage of semiconductor electronic components that we are very diligently focusing on. Finally, managing supply chain and logistics, extension of time, and risk is all part of the global headwind action plans that we have launched most recently.
As we turn to the next section and a bit of a deeper dive on each of these three key focus areas, I'm gonna cover stabilize, and then I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, Benjamin, for integrate and transform. Now let me dive deep into stabilize, one of our key focus areas. This section is really all about answering some of the questions that you have on how Alstom is applying our playbook to turning around difficult projects. Let me first start with the backlog that we currently have. EUR 41 billion comprising roughly 130 projects that are greater than EUR 50 million. On this slide, we've broken down the projects by our platform segments. Just for articulation, in light rail, we have 26 projects, roughly EUR 3 billion of backlog.
By far, regional and commuter, which total roughly EUR 22 billion, more than half of the total backlog, with almost 50 projects combined. We started by looking in detail at the backlog and looking at the 130 projects so that we could take a look as to what is required to turn around these challenging projects. On this slide, I'd like to share with you a bit of the detail, 2021, 2022 key backlog data. There's the EUR 41 billion of backlog distributed by product segment, roughly trailing EUR 8.6 billion last year, and the color code shows the segmentation of those sales by product segment. On the right-hand side, the 130 projects. Unfortunately, EUR 2.3 billion of those trailing sales were at zero margin. It's roughly 20 projects.
20 projects, very challenging, need task force, need technical fixes, need operational solutions to help get them to complete. The other 110 projects are profitable. Let's do a little bit deeper assessment on the project portfolio that we have. We've done a comprehensive portfolio risk assessment. On the left-hand side, you can see the 130 projects that we thoroughly assessed in H1 last year. There's the 130. Of course, in the top right, operational financial exposure combined, high critical projects, 20 projects. I'll go into more detail in a moment. In the middle, it was deemed and assessed they're medium criticality. They still need attention, they need technical resources, they need operational focus. Between the central group and the regional execution teams, we've combined forces to focus on those 60 projects.
The remaining of the 130 is roughly 70 projects which we continue to execute in the regions at our production sites, and they were deemed much lower risk and much more stable. If you take a look at the main root causes, the expertise of combining the two business together, and of course, with Alstom's playbook applied to this portfolio, it was really quick to find out what are some of the main root causes of driving into these challenging projects. Number one, compliance to requirements. Not robust enough, allows for retrofit, and not closing out on all customer requirements causes extra cost and causes delays. Second, planning schedules that are not totally aligned in terms of our gate process and releasing designs ahead of maturity level that is required to go into a smooth serial production.
Third, most importantly is applying the right quantity and technical competency of resources early on in the phase of the project because it's early on in phases of the projects where you either get it right or you set yourself up for some challenges. What we did is together we assessed these 60 projects where we needed to forward deploy task forces. Experts combined with the regional experts that are already across the world, roughly 250 applied to these 60 projects, incrementally with all of our technology and operation and supply chain procurement experts, roughly 50, 60, combined together to focus on how to stabilize these projects.
Inject experts for development, review top to bottom all of the customer requirements, align the project schedules with what the customer now needs and what we can actually execute and deliver, and then a much more robust, rigorous, disciplined process from the Alstom playbook on gates to ensure that as we move from one gate to another, the work is completed. Moving then to look at a little bit more of the systematic process, there were 15 criteria for each and every one of these 60 projects. Of course, I'm just highlighting the diagram to show the exhaustive amount of effort that was taken. 15 for every single project assessed, almost 600 project reviews, and over 60 maturity assessments on this population of projects. When we started about a year ago, mid last year, we had the red thermometer. 3.4 was the criticality index score.
Below in the bottom is kind of the index methodology, but higher the score, more challenging the project, more operational financial exposure, more disappointments to our customers and of course, to our company. Where we are 12, 13, 14 months later, an enormous effort has been done to rectify some of these long-standing challenging projects, inject technical resources, and fix the problems at root cause. Today, I'm pleased to share that we're somewhere around 2.5 based on the criticality index. We've made progress, roughly 26% reduction in criticality. That's good, but we're not done. We're gonna continue this methodology.
We're gonna continue to invest these resources until the job is done, and we complete these projects and clear them from the backlog so that we can enjoy the benefit of this process applied early on to projects that come into our portfolio and add to the margin and growth that rolling stock requires. We envision that in another 12 months by March 2023, we'll be in the green, which will be anywhere between one to two. All projects have their challenges, ebbs and flows, and anywhere in the 1.5 to two would be a good project performance for us to be able to drive forward and meet our customer commitments and our shareholders' requirements.
One last point, taking all of what has been learned, the Alstom playbook from the past that has been very tried, proven, and successful, and applying it and adjusting and modifying it to some of the legacy BT projects and focusing on enhancing the tools, we've learned together a lot on how to improve project execution. I don't wanna go through all the details on the chart today, but what I want to show is that there are tools that have been developed through this learning that are now best practices that we're applying from day one. Day one, day -1 at the tendering phase, at the NTP, notice to proceed phase, and throughout the early phase of the project.
The first 12 weeks, we wanna have all critical project reviews with the maturity assessment, with the 15 criteria that you saw on the prior chart applied to all projects. If we do that, then at least we're looking at the risks before they become issues. Now, to see some of the benefits of this Alstom injection of task forces, let's take a look at a video where it's been applied across a few of our sites and a few of our critical backlog projects. Wow, that was exciting. Honestly, a heartfelt congratulations to the Alstom team. The Alstom team in the U.K., beautiful recovery. The Alstom team in Switzerland, in Villeneuve, and the Alstom team in France, well done. Bravo, félicitations.
Now let's turn to global headwinds, and let me tell you what we're doing in terms of a multidisciplinary action plan to mitigate the cost pressures that we see that are coming from the industry and the market. On the left-hand side, the data set clearly shows there's been a rise in inflationary measures with regards to labor, energy, material, and logistics cost. On the right-hand side, I wanna just articulate to everybody what we're doing to mitigate the cost pressures that we see and protect our margins in rolling stock and components. Number one, our team is working with the commercial team every day to ensure that the roll-up of cost pressures that we see across our entire supply chain are rolled into so that we can accurately forecast for project by project by project what the cost pressures are.
We take cost reduction activities to mitigate those cost pressures, but we ensure that the commercial team is fully aware of all the details of cost that are going into our bids and tenders. From a commercial contract perspective, of course, the commercial team is working with our customers on price adjusting formulas so that we have some protection with regards to market increases on CPI. For us in rolling stock, we are reinforcing the selectivity for fixed and firm price contracts. We wanna be cautious, and we're going in eyes wide open on fixed and firm and ensuring that we see the forecast of our cost increases in the supply chain, and we bake those into our bids.
Working with the suppliers, our ultimate goal is to have back-to-back conditions so that we can protect from any cost inflationary measures that come through in the project cost from our customer flow down through to us, and we need the supply chain to step up with us shoulder to shoulder and help us mitigate the cost pressures during this inflationary cycle. Next action that we've taken is to go long on material. By giving a better forecast and committing to the longer term horizon of material, our suppliers are better able to plan their cost position, their capacity, and we know they can count on our volume coming in the future. Finally, we're taking action to apply stringent cost measures across the portfolio to mitigate all these headwinds.
Now let's look at one other mitigating global headwind action plan, and it's predominantly about electronic components and logistics. In 2021 and 2022, we were successful in mitigating risk that came through from the electronic components material shortages across the globe. We're taking that same playbook that worked very well for us, and we're applying it, and we're double downing on the action plan. We're in control of our demand. We know where the hotspots are, and we've been doing an in-depth analysis of the semiconductor OEM material supply, the brokers, the distributors. We've engaged engineering so that we could look for alternative interchangeable components. We've turned on alternate sources all to ensure that we can secure supply as we did last year, copy that playbook, and apply it. We've added more resources, and we're focusing on our production delivery cycle.
In the event that we have some disturbances, we are able to resequence production so that we can hit our customer delivery schedules. All this to say that we're taking these global headwinds, we're putting resources on it, and we're focused on mitigating these headwinds. Now let me hand over the next portion of the rolling stock and component presentation to Benjamin Fitoussi.
Thank you, Danny. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm very happy now to follow the presentation, and we will move to the second focus area, which is about integration. As you can see on this slide, as part of the integration, the ambition is to work as one company between the two legacy company and to bring back the performance of Alstom to the performance it had before the acquisition of Bombardier and to deliver the committed synergies. For this, we have four set of actions. First one is to align our processes. The second one is to align our product. The third one is to work in every site to reach the required level of performance. The fourth one is to continue our effort in terms of cash focus. I will now present each of the four set of actions.
Let's start with the integration of our processes. We are proceeding in two steps. The first step is what we have achieved in 2021, 2022, which was to be able to operate the company as if we were one single company. We have aligned our KPIs. We have aligned our organization up to the lowest level of the organization, and we have aligned more than 80% of our processes. All of this is now included in what we call the Alstom Performance System, APSYS, which steer for every site on a monthly basis, the maturity of development of our processes. That's the first step, and it has been achieved. The second step is to align our IT tools. Of course, all of this is related to the single ERP that we call GSI. In March 2022, all the Alstom legacy sites are under GSI.
We have already started to engage the BT sites as well into this transformation. We have started with Créteil in France, and we are going to roll out on the 35 sites of Bombardier by 2025. This will bring 12,000 additional users under GSI. With GSI come all the other tools that we need to operate fully as a one company, which is about Ariba, the Alstom operating systems, and the new PLM foray for the engineering. Here are on this slide, a set of KPIs that we monitor every month on all our sites. What I want to show with this slide is the fact that we have a reference point, which is the performance of Alstom just before the acquisition of Bombardier. When we have integrated Bombardier, for most of the KPIs, the operational performance has been downgraded. We knew that.
The good news is that, as you can see on this slide, the performance throughout the year 2021, 2022 has improved on all the KPIs. The goal is very simple. By March 2023, the ambition is to be back at the performance we had in January 2021 on all the KPIs. We are on the right journey. After 2023, we will continue to improve to reach the next level of performance. Now, I will move to the second part, which is about aligning our product portfolio. With integration of the two companies, we are benefiting from a wide range of product at train level, at system level, at component level, and at part level. We have done the inventory of all our product plans, and we have worked intensively on the convergence.
I can say that in March 2022, all the convergence plan have been defined and are being implemented. What is the target? The target is first, to make sure we maximize the market coverage. The second target is to take the best of the two products that we have in our portfolio to optimize the recurring and the non-recurring cost. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see the convergence at train level. In many cases, we had the opportunities to select between the Alstom legacy product and the BT legacy product. For example, on the regional platform, we have decided to focus our product plan on the Coradia Stream platform.
On the urban, as a counter example, the two companies were bringing also their own set of product, and here we have decided to combine the two product and to make the best out of it, which is the one we are now selling, for example, on the Indian market. We have done that at train level, but we have done that as well at component and subsystem level. For example, by combining the two companies in terms of bogie, we ended up with 74 type of products. With the effort of rationalization, we are now at 35 active product. I could do the same for the traction, for example, where the combination brought 66 active product, and we are now at 20 reference solution and 43 active products.
The goal is very simple on average, is to reduce the complexity in terms of products by 50% per component and per subsystem. We are deploying that on our tenders and in some cases on projects that have been recently secured. If I take, for example, the MI20, which is a recent project we have won in France. As you know, it is based on a BT legacy platform, but we have been able to integrate some of the Alstom legacy component to offer our customers the best solution for them. We are working as well, and this is the third set of action on the operational performance with a specific focus on the project management practices.
Danny has talked about it, but I'd like to come back on what we are trying to achieve. With Alstom, we have defined a standard project management practices which is ambitious and which is moving from a métier-based project management to a subsystem-based project management. We are now embarking also the Bombardier project into this model, which is the core model of Alstom. Today, we have, as we speak, 12 projects running with this new model based on subsystem. The ambition is very simple, to add 18 additional project this year and to be in 2025 with the full portfolio of project under this new project management model.
With this new project management model, we embark on a new design for quality model, which is a gated model that we are deploying on all our projects in a similar manner for all the projects since January 1st, 2022. Procurement is obviously a key lever when we talk about an integration of the two companies. This was prepared before the acquisition of Bombardier by Alstom. The teams were ready to engage day one of the acquisition. We have launched a program that we call Leading Together, which aims at bundling the two panels, taking the best out of it in terms of commercial conditions and in terms of supplier performance. Last year, we have conducted 600 negotiations in three waves. We have been able, thanks to that, to generate synergies, cost reductions, recurring and some one-off.
We have been able as well to clean the portfolio of claims that we had inherited in our portfolio, and the result is very great, as you will see, later on. This is just the start of this integration at procurement level. The second phase has started now, which is more ambitious, which is about aligning the way we specify between the two companies. As we have seen during this first year, we have different make or buy strategy. We have different way of specifying our products, and we are convinced that we can combine it for the best of Alstom, and this will drive additional synergies. Quality is at the heart of what we are doing. Very empowered, very strong. With the difficulties that Bombardier was facing, the function in Bombardier has been stricken. We are now revitalizing, rejuvenating the quality function also on Alstom Bombardier site.
We are putting more energy, more resources, and this function is now fully empowered to bring the quality level of our new Alstom at the right level. I want to illustrate with concrete example. You have seen the video, for example, in U.K. We are putting quality walls before customer acceptance to make sure we deliver our customer with the right products at the right quality. The number of demerits has gone down significantly. We are also putting a culture of right first time, what we call in Alstom, the zero defect program. We are measuring on a day-to-day basis the number of defects we are discovering on the cars that we are manufacturing. This has also significantly improved this year. We are also embarking the quality function in our development and putting the right quality focus in all our engineering centers.
All of this is animated by the Quality Academy. As you can see on the slide, we have done hundreds of trainings. We are also deploying the Lean Six Sigma programs. Here as well, we have embarked our Bombardier colleagues, and we have done more than 1,000 qualifications this year. Cost is very important. Cost out is very important, but cash also matters very much. As you know, Alstom had engaged a cash focus program some years ago, which has paid off a lot. We are now embarking also Bombardier in this cash focus program.
With a very clear set of action, more selectivity in tenders in terms of cash profile, professionalization of our plannings at supply chain level, reviewing the terms and conditions with our suppliers to improve the contractual terms, and we are deploying that throughout the company. I remind you the goal, we want to be back to a level of inventory in the range of 20 weeks by 2025, and we want to be able to convert 80% of our adjusted net income in free cash flow. What does it bring now? You know the target that we have promised to deliver to the market is to deliver by 2024-2025, EUR 400 million of synergy. Henri has explained it this morning and reminded it this afternoon.
We have been able to deliver, thanks to all what you have seen now, more than EUR 100 million of synergy in 2021, 2022. We are today confident that we can upscale this ambition of EUR 400 million and to bring a level of synergy at the company level in the range of EUR 475 million-EUR 500 million with all the levers you can see on this slide. In particular, we are very confident that we will deliver a lot of synergies from our converged product plans, from our footprint optimization, as well as from our procurement synergies. Stabilize, integrate, and let's now talk about transform. Here again, we have four sets of actions. The first one is about standardizing our product portfolio.
The second one is about taking advantage of the scale we have in terms of footprint, manufacturing, and engineering. The third set of action is about continuing our effort of digitalizing our operations. The fourth set of action is about our people, our skills, and capabilities. Here you can see on this slide that we had a good track record in terms of selling last year, and all the bids we have won are based on products that are standardized, that are reliable, and that are well-proven. It's not new platforms. For example, we have secured many contracts with our regional platform, our Coradia Stream platform, and we will sell more than 700 cars in the next five years. For the Metro, we are leveraging our Metropolis.
Here again, we have a very strong track record in terms of customer base and in terms of projects. On the suburban, we are leveraging our X'Trapolis. Here again, we have won our Irish trains, we have won the Tren Maya, and we have won the Melbourne suburban trains. These are well-proven, which means that we know the products, we know the technical performance of those products, and there is no discovery. We are putting a lot of energy on maximizing the reuse on every tenders that we are selling. For this, for all the platform we have defined, we have defined what we call reference solution. Each time a tender is coming, we are making sure we are maximizing the reuse at component level and at what we call buy modules to our suppliers.
For all those 68 components and those 48 buy modules, we have defined standard catalogs that we are leveraging. All of this is monitored through a reuse KPI that we are checking at tender phase and during the development phase. I've illustrated with this slide, on this slide, what we are able to do on the interiorism. As you can see, we are able to reuse some generic concept for different projects such as baggage lock, such as side panels, for example, but as well, some content architectural design. What does it bring to us? First, it bring an optimization of our research and development cost, but it also bring us less risk in our portfolio and the ability to deliver our train in a shorter timeframe. On the engineering front, we are continuing the transformation journey that we had initiated, some years ago.
First, in all our engineering centers, we have now a common engineering organization. We have deployed the same processes and same way of working in all our engineering centers, and we have defined specialized centers per type of product. The beauty of the scale we have today is the ability to specialize sites on specific products in specific geographies. Today, all our new trains will be developed in 10 train development sites and in nine component development centers. Those sites are used to developing always the same type of products. Those sites are leveraging as much as possible our best cost competitive countries in terms of engineering. We are, as you know, leveraging mostly our Indian footprint, and Bombardier has brought a lot also of engineering resources in India.
We are also leveraging our engineering footprint in Poland, in Katowice, and in Mexico, in Sahagún. We are ahead of our plan in terms of development of best competitive country engineering. We had a target last year of 30%. We deliver 32%, and the ambition remains to be above 40%, as part of the Alstom in Motion transformation journey. India is not only about providing work packages to the centers in Europe or in the U.S., but is also able to drive complete projects. For example, today they are managing 12 projects. For example, the Tren Maya is under the responsibility of our Indian colleagues, but as well our Bucharest Metro. This is proven to be successful in terms of competitiveness, but also in terms of reactivity.
In terms of manufacturing, Danny has explained it, our manufacturing are a strong asset in our company. We are basically able to provide our customers with proximity manufacturing everywhere in the world, and there is no other player than us that is able to do that. Thanks to our scale, we are also able to prepare hubs where we can massify to manufacture some components or some parts of the trains. For example, we can massify car body shell in specific sites. We can massify traction system in other specific site, while being able to provide for Mexico a train assembled in Mexico, or for the U.S., a train assembled in Hornell, U.S.. Like for engineering, we are also leveraging our best competitive countries footprint, in terms of manufacturing. Bombardier has brought us a lot of skills and capabilities in terms of, best competitive countries manufacturing.
We have doubled our size in Eastern Europe, we have doubled our size in India, and we have now a good setup in Mexico, mainly to address the North American market. The ambition remains the one we have defined one year ago. We are today at 43% of manufacturing in BCC, and the target remains to be at 60% in March 2025. For this, we are continuing to invest in our sites. For example, we are currently investing in Fez to produce transformers. We are investing in Czechia, in Česká Lípa, to manufacture our car body shell for light rail vehicles. We are also investing in Poland to manufacture bogies and aluminum car body shell.
Our manufacturing footprint is an asset, but we have to acknowledge that in some specific geography, we were facing too much capacity compared to the needs. That is true in Canada, where we have taken some specific action, but it's particularly true in Germany and Switzerland. We continue to invest in those countries and we are investing, for example, in our engineering skills, but we had to downscale our manufacturing footprint, which was too big to address the German market. A plan has been initiated. This plan brings a reduction of workforce, but also a compacting of the sites, so around 900-1,300 people less in Germany, in the range of 150 people less in Switzerland.
This effort that we are engaging with our union partners will bring us EUR 100 million of cost avoidance per year as of 2024, 2025, while consuming EUR 150 million of non-recurring costs during the period. Our transformation is also about driving our transformation in terms of digitization of our operation in engineering and in manufacturing. We are investing in automation in our manufacturing plants, in terms of welding, in terms of testing, in terms of 3D printing, augmented reality. We are also investing in our engineering with the deployment of the PLM 4.0, which will help us to maximize the reuse while shorten the industrialization phase. The goal is very simple.
We want to be able to manufacture a car with 10% less manufacturing hours and to design a car with 6% less engineering hours by 2025 as compared to 2021. Of course, we have, in parallel, to invest in people. Henri has explained all the action being done on the culture, on the organization. What I would like to highlight is the effort we are conducting in terms of strengthening our expertise. Alstom had a very strong world-class engineering and manufacturing program that we have been extending to Bombardier. Thanks to Bombardier, we have now a very balanced expertise across the world. We have strengthened, obviously, our level of expertise in North America, but also in Germany.
As you can see on the slide, we are now combining all those assets, a very strong network of expert manufacturing, engineering, all across the globe. Those people are working in networks. We have 34 core networks, and their aim is very simple, improve the professionalization of their métier, reduce the time to market, and bring support during tenders and projects. This ends up our presentation in terms of stabilization, integration, transformation. I'd like to conclude with this slide, and I hope we have convinced you that we are in control of our destiny. We know what we have to do. We are implementing it. By March 2023, the operational performance of the company will be back to what it was before the acquisition of Bombardier.
We have made significant progress this year in terms of project stabilization, and Danny has explained it. We are operating as one company. We are steering the company as one with the same set of KPIs. In terms of integration, we are integrating our processes and delivering the synergy. We have been able to propose to upscale the synergy to close to EUR 500 million. With the reach we have, with the footprint we have, we are able to provide our customers with a unique set of products and of market reach. Now we will move to the Q and A session.
Thank you. Thank you, Benjamin. Indeed, we are going to the Q and A session. Before that, let me just wrap up a little bit the main messages, both of the afternoon as well as of this morning.
Um-
The first message is, of course, about our financial results, 2021 and 2022. They are fully in line with our trajectory, fully in line with our targets, fully in line with our guidance that we have given to you earlier in the year, and which are fully consistent with our AIM 2025 plan. We see a very buoyant market, a very good market. We discussed about the EUR 180 billion of pipeline for the next three years, and we are extremely well-positioned to seize this market, as can be seen in the last year number of more than EUR 19 billion for the intake, which is still continuing. You have probably seen, yes, on Monday, the announcement of a very large order in Germany for Baden-Württemberg as well.
The trend is continuing in the positive momentum. As you know, this was one of the key topic of last year. We have stabilized the portfolio of the former Bombardier Transportation projects. I think both Danny and Benjamin have explained to you what were the actions which have been taken in order to stabilize this portfolio. The stabilization has occurred fully in line with our global trajectory, so fully in line with our estimates. We are integrating the two companies. The good momentum of this integration of the two companies has allowed us to increase our expectations in terms of synergies to close to EUR 500 million instead of EUR 400 million. This is a, I would say, a reflection of the very nice route that we are doing together.
We fully reckon that we have challenges in 2022, 2023, new challenges, which were not necessarily foreseen in the past, such as inflation or supply chain challenges, electronic components, and so forth. We have proven last year that we are able to mitigate these challenges successfully, and we continued. We try and continue, and we will mitigate them going forward. That's why we are keeping our guidances, and that's why we are keeping our trajectory, financial trajectory for the year 2022, 2023, as well as for the midterm outlook in 2024, 2025. Let me just clarify, because I understand there's been some debates among the financial community in the afternoon on one or two topics. Let me clarify what has been said this morning.
The first item were the fact, again, that our guidance is fully in line with our trajectory, fully in line, therefore, with the investment grade profile, which was in line with our trajectory, and therefore, there is no need of debt issue to maintain this investment grade profile. There is no debt issue on the agenda. I can repeat it clearer if needed. There is no debt issue on the agenda. That's one topic that I wanted to clarify. The second topic I wanted to clarify is that our free cash flow of the second half has been fully operational. There have been no such thing as last minute changes in supplier payment terms or any kind of manipulation that you want to look for in our day-to-day operation.
This is a cash flow which has been generated entirely thanks to our operations and the delivery of our projects across the globe. Yes, there is. You may have some questions on some balance sheet elements. Our balance sheet, I recognize, is relatively complex. This is project accounting, which is relatively complex. As far as I'm concerned, I can tell you and reiterate that there is absolutely 0.0 type of manipulation, and the quality of our free cash flow is actually excellent. I will also leave the floor to Laurent for one second, so that he gives a few highlights on this accounting issue for this other payables which has created so much emotion.
Thank you, Henri. Just to wrap up on our working capital performance at large, which has been, to a large extent, normalized in 2021, 2022 on the back of our project stabilization and ramp up. Back to your point on the question we had on the other payables, just to clarify for everyone. What is inside? It is accruals on completed contract as per IFRS, which represents cost to come after customers train acceptance. This is not a trade payable. Second, this other payable has increased over by EUR 340 million in the second half, which is definitely linked to the number of contract we have been reaching customer acceptance stage, which is positive and function of the project stabilization that Benjamin and Danny just explained earlier on.
Third point on this, for reference, Alstom standalone and before the acquisition, other payable amount was around EUR 700 million. You see with EUR 1.5 billion by March 2022, we are very much consistent. All of this, on this basis, we absolutely do confirm a free cash flow positive during the year 2022, 2023 for sure.
Thank you. Thank you, Laurent. After these few explanations, I think, George, we can move to the Q and A session. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please make sure your mute function is not active on your phone to allow your switch equipment. I will open up your lines. I'll give you your name, and then please introduce yourself again and state your company name. Okay, here we go. The first question today is coming from Alasdair Leslie calling in from. Please name your company. Thank you.
Hi. Good afternoon. It's Alisdair from Soc Gen. Thank you. Maybe just to start off with, can you give us maybe a bit of an updated broad insight into the chain of command or oversight, I suppose, on problematic contracts, particularly around the cash flow that works on, I guess, a weekly or monthly basis, how it's monitored, you know, from the ground up to Benjamin, sort of Danny, Laurent and Henri. Maybe start there. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, sir. I will give the floor to Danny.
Sure.
to answer to this question.
Yeah.
On the chain of command.
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Alisdair, for the question. I think in terms of rigor and discipline, I'd like to comment to your question. There is a very rigorous process for project reviews, monthly project reviews. There are quarterly project reviews. I would say there's probably daily project reviews in each and every one of our sites that are responsible within the regions for the projects. There is a very good standard work that looks at project execution, that looks at the planning. There's a continuous, as you saw in my maturity assessment, that was done at a broad level. If you do it project by project, each of the projects are managing with a risk cube to look at the risk assessment and look ahead for issues. Of course, from a...
Now you've asked about specifically cash. Of course, cash is tied into, you know, customer advances, it's tied into milestones, it's tied into engineering deliverables, whether it be documents or evidence for homologation. Then, of course, once you're into, you're into series production, then as we progress through the factory and we deliver to what we call a PC11 and deliver the train, there are cash milestones at that point. I would say that Alstom has a very rigorous program project management approach, standard charts, standard risk cubes, and standard cash estimates. Of course, the finance team supporting the project team. There are finance controllers, there are planners that are inside the projects, but also at the overall, 'cause you said how it goes up to Benjamin, Danny, and Laurent.
There's a very disciplined approach to reviewing cash on a daily and weekly basis in terms of cash forecast. Any you know issues that would come up have to be mitigated. There's a whole effort to help and support the project execution.
Thank you, Danny.
All right.
We move on to the next question.
Yes, sir. The next question is gonna be coming from Daniela Costa.
Hi. Good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Yes, Daniela.
Oh, perfect. I think you couldn't hear me in the morning. Not sure what went on. I have a follow-up from the morning, which also ties with some of the slides now in the afternoon. It's regarding margin and how to think about sort of the sensitivities to things you've mentioned in the morning that the guidance was assuming sort of no further disruption, supply chain, and so on. If we look at slide 26, where you do have, like, those lines on the cost items, you're assuming sort of they ease out in 2023. Can you give us some guidance on how to think about this margin increase guidance if we assume these things don't come down, like, in the slide?
Sort of like some, maybe some range and boundaries on how to think about the sensitivity. Should we assume that your comment for the guidance for the next fiscal year on margin being up is regardless of the shape of those curves? That's question one. A second question is regarding the comments right at the very end on slide 49, where you talk about rolling stock back to normalized pre-Bombardier deal levels by March 2023. Is that a margin comment? I believe in the CMD in 2019, was it 2019 or 2020, or sort of one of the CMDs before the deal that you said rolling stock should be mid-single-digit to high single-digit margins.
Is that what the bringing back to normalized levels in March 2023 means? Thank you.
Thank you, Daniela. Two points, and we have yes illustrated it a little bit this morning. We have a guidance of margin expansion for this current year, which are based upon a few moving blocks, as we said this morning. Some of them is relatively stable, as a level of sales coming from the zero gross margin backlog. Some of them are improving, such as, of course, the synergies, such as the global cost efficiency, I would say, improvement within the company. Some of them are relatively negative, which is the inflation.
We have taken, and I said it this morning, that we have a 0.5 more or less, 50 basis points inflation-related elements in this projection. This is based upon, I would say, a consensual type of projection for the inflation. There is some volatility on that. It can move up to 100 basis points max, but we maintain our guidance nevertheless regardless of this volatility. This is about the margin expansion. On the 2023 KPIs as stated by Benjamin. No, it's not about the margin. I'm with you on the margin. We should go to the high single-digit margin for rolling stock. This is more in line with our trajectory for March 2025.
What we are referring to for March 2023 is the operational indicators. All the quality indicators, the throughput indicators, the efficiency indicators. We want to regain the same kind of quality and delivery indicators. I'm talking about physical indicators in March 2023 of the same kind of quality that we had in previous Alstom. Of course, all the impact of zero gross margin projects and so forth will take time. Even if you are delivering them now with the right quality, as we do, for example, in Switzerland, where we have achieved record high quality and fully recognized by the customer. Even if you have achieved this record high quality and therefore your quality indicators are back to the right level.
Nevertheless, it remains a zero gross margin contract, which remains to be traded. So the financial element is different from the quality element in that perspective.
Sorry, actually, on one clarification on both, because you mentioned 100 basis points max move when you were talking about the margin upside guidance. What was that? Was that like, should we think about it, about it in 100 basis points? There's a zero to 100 basis points range or so. What is the 100 basis points?
No, no, what I said is that we have taken in our scenario a 50 basis points basis point impact of the inflation, of the negative impact of the inflation. When I say that there is a volatility in this inflation, this is based upon I would say the standard type of projection for inflation. Depending on the volatility and on worst-case scenarios, which today could be considered by some economist, it can go between 50 and up to 100. That's the inflation impact. Again, it's not the margin expansion. We said that we reiterate our guidance regardless of this volatility.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We now go to James Moore calling in from Redburn. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got one on rolling stock margin and one on the rolling stock footprint. If I could start with the margin, if the target's to do high single digit in FY 2025 on the adjusted EBIT margin, could you say what the starting point is in FY 2022, the year just finished? I'm assuming 0% to -1%, but obviously there's some assumptions there on signaling and service and turnkey. Whatever the number is, can you say really what the average gross margin is on the 130 projects not at a 0% gross margin? And where do gross margins need to go to get to that high single digit? That's the margin question.
On the footprint, just simply, you have two metro, two commuter, two loco, two regional, two high speed from Alstom and Bombardier. Why not close more factories? Why is 50 sites the right number?
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it's two different questions. On the margin side, we have not guided on this year margin for rolling stock, but the view is, I would say, a good number for this year for rolling stock margin. In terms of gross margin, you know, I will not divide the project into like zero gross margin project and then standard gross margin project. There is a variety of gross margins of projects. We've got zero, and then you got increasing one. It's a complete portfolio that you need to move to standard gross margin. Basically, we have a S&A, so structural cost plus R&D of 9% more or less.
I mean, to get to high single digit, you need to add the 9% more or less structural cost. It brings you to, I don't know, the 16%-17% gross margin, and this is where you need to have the gross margin to get to the standard adjusted EBIT margin. Again, coming from a 0% adjusted EBIT, so for something in the vicinity of 10% gross. But again, it's an average of all the margins in the portfolio. In terms of sites, it's a very good question. We are not specializing the sites on a geographical basis on the product ranges.
We believe that our footprint has an angle of capacity, global capacity, an angle of best cost country, and an angle of proximity. That is what shapes our global worldwide footprint. The number of our sites is today more related to the geographical footprint rather than to the product ranges. Then after that, we can adapt in one geography. When you say one geography could be one country, but in some instances, like in Australia, there is a requirement of localization per state, not even for Australia, but inside Australia per state. If your point is that is the 50 sites optimal number, the answer is from an initial standpoint, probably no. From a commercial standpoint and market standpoint, it's needed.
I mean, you cannot do without it. To be fair, I know no competitor which is successful in the long run on a particular market without having a site on this market. There is a direct link for any significant market between having a site locally and being successful in the market. A rolling stock site, frankly, can do metros, can do regional trains. You know, I was last week in Mexico visiting Sahagún, which is now probably one of our largest site. Sahagún is manufacturing a tram, is manufacturing metros, as well as regional trains now for Tren Maya, and they do that in the same site. I mean, this is not the main, I would say, feature of the site. The geographical localization is important. I don't know if that.
Benjamin Fitoussi, you want to add something?
Yeah, we consider this footprint as an asset, as you said, Henri, because we need customer proximity, and we are the only player with this, the reach we have. We can basically fulfill all the customer need in terms of localization. But we massify whenever it makes sense, so not the fitting part, but the car body shell, some components. Here there is a play of technology, so we can massify a car body shell for aluminum in some sites like we are doing in Katowice, whereas Česká Lípa will be more on steel. This is the beauty of this acquisition. For trams, we want to keep a couple of sites because of this proximity required, but we still do a bit of streamlining.
In the past in Alstom, we had, for example, Barcelona and in Spain, and we had also France in France and we will massify more in Vienna and in France. We are doing a bit of fine-tuning while trying to keep the customer proximity whenever relevant. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, James.
Thank you, sir. We'll now go to Gaël de Bray calling in from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Good afternoon again. I have two questions, please. The first one is on the working capital of negative EUR 1.6 billion at the end of March, excluding provisions. That's equivalent to about -1 0% of revenue. It looks somewhat abnormally high compared to Alstom historical standards that were probably closer to - 7% as a percentage of revenue. Could you guide me perhaps through the normalization that might be expected in the next few years on the working cap? The second question is on the vertical integration strategy. It seems that you have now for some categories, and in particular brakes. How far, how deep do you intend to invest into this and in-source brake capabilities? Thank you.
Thank you, Gaël. Maybe I will leave it to Danny for the brake capabilities.
Yeah.
Which is a part of the global verticalization strategy. Which of course has to be the different type of elements. But go ahead, Danny.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I think, you know, the reason it was on the chart is that we're starting to think now with the integration. As Benjamin said, we've done a lot of work in the one year to converge on component technology, on the variety of building blocks that we have at the component level. Now to your point, the next portion is to look at, you know, a comparative advantage of component technology, component cost, and more, most importantly, knowledge and engineering technical expertise, so that we can forecast the needs of the market and how we can continue to have the highest performing fleet. You're really making a point of make versus buy. Vertical integration doesn't mean we need to make everything, we have to buy all the factories.
It does mean that for certain key critical components, brakes happens to be an example, the knowledge that we get with hydrogen and fuel cells is another example. There's several technologies where our engineering team really does wanna go deeper in the technology so that we can help drive the performance of trains later on, both in green mobility and of course just sheer performance of our product, and it needs that inherent knowledge. On the other side, a make versus buy assessment helps us understand the costs better. It helps us address aftermarket and services revenue streams in the future. It's, you know, we don't choose certain components for nothing. Brackets, we can make them anywhere in the world. Brakes is a whole different story.
It's a multifunctional view of both technology, knowledge, better train performance, services and aftermarket assurance for annuities in the long stream. That's what I would say, Henri.
Thank you. Thank you, Danny. Maybe, Laurent, you take the one on the working capital.
Absolutely. Thanks, Gaël. Indeed, you are right, Gaël, 7%-ish is a good proxy of what was the kind of track record of Alstom in terms of working capital before provision over sales. As I said this morning, we are looking forward to a continuous limited normalization in terms of the working cap before provision, driven by the ramp-up that we continue, and the ramp-up will not be completed or has not been completed end of March 2022. As well, both the order intake and the down payment on which we are working on and the effort on cash focus that Benjamin was presenting earlier this afternoon. These are the moving blocks.
Overall, you are right, a continuous limited normalization over the next few years in terms of working cap over the next few years.
Thank you. Thank you, Laurent. Thank you, Gaël.
And, uh-
Yeah. Yes, Gaël?
Yeah. Sorry, just by limited, what do you mean exactly? Are we talking about EUR 100 million per annum or actually potentially more?
Yeah, it will be limited in terms of amount. Yeah, I think that this is probably the kind of order of magnitude, plus or minus, depends on the years as well, but we are talking about limiting numbers in terms of amount of variation on a year-on-year basis.
You took 1% per year if you go from 10 to seven.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. Thank you, thank you, Gaël. Next question.
Great. Thank you very much.
Yep, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir. We'll go to Akash Gupta calling in from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for your time. I have two, please. The first one is if you can help us understand the technicalities behind back-to-back orders which you place with your suppliers. In those conditions, are your suppliers buying components straight away when you place the order? Therefore, I guess you may be in better position from inflation point of view, or do they keep their position unhedged and therefore these suppliers may be at risk of going bankrupt given where commodity prices are? If you can help us how this back-to-back contract works and whether you go to supplier site to validate, have they bought anything? That would be first question. Then the second one is on financing expenses.
If I look at 2022 financial year, you had EUR 95 million financing expenses, just the expense, not the net, the gross amount. I'm wondering if you can say where it can go next year as I seen your synergy slide that you guide for financing, those bond financing synergies doubling next year. Should we expect a significantly lower gross financing expense next year than what it was in FY 2022? Thank you.
Thank you, Akash. Maybe the first one, Benjamin, you can take on sourcing.
On the sourcing side. Obviously your question depends on the type of commodity we buy and it has to be without entering into too many details. There are many commodities where because it's a product we know, it's a platform we know, and we have discussed about the fact that we have sold this year a lot of projects on platforms that are familiar to us. We have very often framework contracts with our key suppliers for which obviously at the tender phase we can firm up most of the assumptions. Sometimes the price will evolve delending on the various, on the key specification, but all the contractual terms are set up, including the escalation when there is an escalation.
I would say for a big share of the commodity, in particular the most complex one, we are firming up either during tender phase or during the very preliminary phase of the projects. When I say very preliminary, I mean the first six months. Today, what we said is that approximately 70% of what we buy is based on those contract, either with a firm price or with an escalation that is known from the beginning of the contract. Then you have 20%-30% where we cannot firm up so quickly and we buy for one year or two years. Obviously typically the example would be when we buy a steel part or an aluminum part, we can firm up the price of the raw material.
For aluminum, maybe two years, sometimes 2.5 years. For steel, it's a bit more complex. 1.5 years. Then after two or 2.5 years, we have to renew the contractual negotiation. 70% very comfortable after six months, 30% still some negotiation during the life of the contract.
Thank you, Benjamin. On a totally different subject, Laurent.
Yes, Akash. Just to dive on the financial result, indeed, and we were at EUR -68 in March 2021, EUR -25, as you reminded, Akash, in March 2022. Into this, we have two elements. The gross interest from our bonds, which is stable and by definition as senior bonds, and as well the forward points linked to our hedge. This has been quite a good year in terms of forward points for this year. I expect some normalization for next year, so something which will be probably closer to what we had in March 2021 than what we had in March 2022, to just give you a sense of the evolution.
Thank you. Thank you, Laurent. Moving on to the next question.
Yes, sir. Our next question is coming from Martin Wilkie calling in from Citi. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. It's Martin from Citi. A couple of questions. The first one was just on onboard software on the rolling stock. I'm not quite sure how much of this is within the rolling stock division and how much within signaling, but obviously there's been some high-profile contracts with Crossrail, where it looks like you've upgraded the onboard software. You've given some clarification about the sort of moving towards standard platforms on the hardware side. Just if you could give an update as to where you are with the onboard software on the trains and whether we're now on a sort of standard platform there as well. That was the first question. The second question I had was around the phasing of any outstanding cash drags from contracts, because obviously the...
If we look at the sort of provisions on rolling stock or the business more generally on Bombardier, the cash drag sort of lags the revenue recognition. Just to understand what cash is still effective for these contracts beyond the time that you've completed the final milestone. Is it some sort of customer reparation or just to understand any other liability that you still have that could be a cash drag on these contracts once that final milestone has been delivered to the customer? Thank you.
Thank you. On the two relevant questions. On the onboard software, we have two types of convergence. First part, as you said, part of it is in signaling, part of it is rolling stock. When we sell onboard software, onboard equipment within our own rolling stock, when we sell rolling stock, then it's part of our rolling stock activities. When we sell them for other type of equipment or directly for the operators, then it's of course direct sales from signaling. There are two types of convergence again. One is on the global solution for what we call ETCS, so the European standard. Bombardier came with a solution which was called EBI Cab. Alstom was a solution called Atlas.
We have decided to move to Atlas, meaning that we are going to continue to sustain and maintain all the legacy fleets which were equipped with EBI Cab, but progressively, and that we are negotiating with some of the customers. By the way, even if they had a project considering EBI Cab, maybe to move to Atlas because this is for us the future solution. That's now moving. It's gonna take some time, of course, because still for the, I would say the project which we are close to the end, we are still keeping the EBI Cab, and progressively we are moving to Atlas.
There is another convergence within the Atlas solution, within our onboard system, which is a convergence on the hardware itself, what we call CCP2 or whatever, between urban and mainline. Now all the onboard solutions, whether it's for urban systems or for mainline systems, they are equipped with the same type of hardware. Here the convergence has been done, id est now all the solutions, all the new programs that we are selling, either for our own rolling stock or for other rolling stocks, are equipped with this new which we again call CCP2 in our jargon, but with our newly developed hardware. On this one, it's done. It's a purely Alstom.
It does not concern the hardware for urban, for the ex-Bombardier fleet, but for all the rest, what are ex-Alstom and therefore also now for the ETCS, because as I said, we are only selling Atlas for the ETCS part. This will be equipped with our own hardware. We have different types of convergence. Thank you.
There was a point as well on the phasing of.
Of the-
Yeah.
Of the cash
Yeah.
That for you, Laurent.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
To your point, Martin, it depends very much on our product and our project as well. There is a very different perspective between some fast turnaround in terms of cash and some which can be longer. It can last a couple of years. What I can tell you is that in the main, I expect a stability between the kind of the new provision coming from new contract, which will be completed, and the natural evolution and spend of these activities, which again, in some cases, can last for five, six, seven years. That something which can be quite longer in terms of execution.
Thank you. Thank you, Laurent. Thank you.
In terms of.
Hello?
We'll now go to.
Uh, we-
Okay, I think we lost Mr. Wilkie, but we'll now go to Mr. Vladimir Sergievskiy, calling from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Just a couple of questions on projects, actually. You showed the data on 20 projects, high criticality, and another 40 with medium criticality or so. Would you be able to share the split of those into projects originally won by Alstom and those projects that were actually acquired from Bombardier, please?
Yeah. Danny?
Look, there's 130 total. You're very right. You were watching the slide quite well. There was 40 in the middle, and there was 20 that we deemed to be rough, high criticality. I would say to you that the large portion of the high critical 20 are legacy Bombardier, which, you know, we showed them even in the video, the Aventra, some of the tracks locals, the SBB. You know, some of the legacy challenging projects make up the predominant amount, I would say probably 80-85% of the high critical. The good news is, with the playbook that we have at Alstom, we've been able to make significant progress. Two charts after that one, I showed 26% reduction in our criticality index.
We're not there yet, but very good progress after one year. I don't have, obviously in front of me, all of the rest of the 40, but I would say as you go further down, the 130 becomes populated with a handful of legacy Alstom projects as well. I would say certainly the majority of the challenging projects are legacy Bombardier.
Thank you.
Sounds good. Thank you very much. A very quick one in addition to that. Will you be able to provide an update on Transnet project in South Africa for supply of locomotives, the one you actually inherited from Bombardier? What's the current status on execution on this one? Perhaps if there is any update on investigations that are going on with regards to this one.
Yeah. Thank you for the question. We're not going to go into the details of the contracts, of course. This is a contract which is being executed. As for a number of contracts, we have started to turn it around, and therefore, I think the number of locomotives being actually delivered this year is at record high. We are ramping up this delivery. It's relatively a complex situation, as you know, with the investigation coming from the South African authorities, our own investigation. This will take time, but we are discussing with the customers on this project. This is a project on which we are still discussing with the authorities and the customers.
It will take some time, but I'm confident that this year we will manage to get out of that.
Thank you very much. The next question is coming from Jonathan Day, calling in from HSBC. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thank you.
Thank you. Good afternoon. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your sort of competitive advantages in terms of the systems wins. You said you'd won 100% of the projects that you tendered for on systems. So just wondering how you managed to achieve that. Also, could you elaborate a bit on the sort of cost control for those contracts as well, and how you incorporate sort of raw materials and some of the headwinds that you've alluded to into those wins? Thank you.
No, thank you. I think this has been traditionally a high differentiator on the Alstom side as well as on the Bombardier side, but on particular projects, people mover and monorail, where Alstom was more on metro and to some extent on tram as well. I think we have developed with time the unique capability to assemble our different elements, our different activities, whether we talk about rolling stock, signaling, infrastructure, both in terms of power, sometimes in terms of track laying. We have a unique capability of working together to optimize the interfaces and the system engineering. We are not competing a lot against our traditional competitors. I mean, Siemens has done very little turnkey jobs. CAF, not at all. Stadler, not at all. They are not, by the way, having all the elements.
CAF has no, not really some signaling. Stadler, no, and other as well. We are competing against other, some civil work companies which try to do the global engineering of the system or some pure contractor. We believe that we have a unique combination by mastering both the equipment and the system engineering, and this explain what is where. This year, we have 100%. We don't have a full 100% always in-house, of course, because we are conscious of competitiveness issues, margin, and so forth. It does not always lead to win. But we have a good portfolio there. We have no.
On this project, we have not recorded project very recently after the inflation issue. This is not an activity where we are facing particular inflation issues because of the phasing of our projects and the project which we had recorded are already sourced, and the project which we will record will be sourced taking into account or will be priced taking into account inflation.
Right. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. We'll now go to William Mackie calling in from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, all. Thanks for the time. Three question areas, please. First of all, just to scope out the backlog again. Of the 20 projects you've highlighted as critical, you've given a profile of the level of traded revenues linked to those over the next three to four years, but can you just sort of scope again the scale of the backlog, in terms of what level of backlog the 20 projects represent? Then when we look at the granular detail that you schematically presented on the projects, around gross margin and criticality, can you just give a feel, going back to James' question, about the range of gross margins in anything which is subcritical?
Most importantly perhaps relating to the backlog, when you look at the gating, when you look for a target gross margin that you're signing off at the board level or below, what is that target margin as a rule of thumb? That's the first question, questions. The second area is pretty. You know, coming back to net working capital, which is so important today, it's the topic of the day. Can you be more specific about the volatility of working capital intraperiod? What I mean is that we've seen a number of topics around commercial paper programs. We've seen a number of topics about large inflows and outflows of receivables or payables between quarter ends or between half year ends.
Can you at least give us a sense of the typical cadence of the flows in and out of the business between the period ends? When we look at net working capital at the half year, it might change substantially from your full year target, but just to give a sense of that. The final question area relates to accounting, which we can dig into in detail, but, you know, great that you can standardize so much and reduce site-specific costs and benefit from scale, but you're leaving technology behind. What is the risk that you have to take write-downs against obsolescence of technology which you acquired with Bombardier as it becomes no longer commercially viable? Thank you.
Thank you. Maybe Danny, on the first question, knowing that in terms of margin guidance, as we said, we want to reach high single-digit . I gave some indication of the gross margin, which are corresponding to this level. Of course, our tender and our solution should come to this average margin. When we tender a project, we take that into account. Depends on the type of projects, type of markets, type of product. Of course, if it's a new one or if it's a standard one and so forth. It's not one-size-fits-all, but this gives you an order of magnitude at what we are looking at. Maybe Danny you want to, you know.
Yeah, I'll just add a little bit more to that. You make a good point. What I said today, I believe earlier, is that the 20 high critical projects. Again, let me step back. 130 total projects were fully assessed over and over again from a maturity perspective from H1 of last year all the way through. As I shared with everybody, there was progress. Significant progress has been made. Not done yet. Significant progress being made. Of that 130, there's a footnote at the bottom of the slide there, more than EUR 50 million is how we calculate a portion of the backlog.
There are many other projects that are in our project backlog for rolling stock, but they, you know, if they're not greater than EUR 50 million, we didn't add them. I'd say roughly 15% of the number of projects is really what we're talking about. That's the famous 20. I think we showed you on a yearly basis what the traded sales were and it was roughly EUR 2.3 billion of traded sales. That was at 0% margin. To your point, then there's a whole, as Henri mentioned earlier, there's a whole range of margins that are, as you go from the high critical to medium to low, there's a whole range. Some of them are quite profitable, very profitable, and some are in the middle range.
Sorry, Danny. The question was quite simple. You have a EUR 41 billion backlog. How much are the 20 projects? There's two outstanding to complete commercial negotiations of. What do they represent? I hear that the company is not going to take further provisions against them, but we just wanted to scale it for the record.
I don't have the exact number of the 41.
Well, you are talking about the two projects which are
We're still in the negotiation.
Negotiation.
Those two projects are new.
Yeah. Frankly, I think to be fair, I mean, there is no comparison, let's say, between the backlog and the two ones. One of the two is actually completed. One of the two I represent in the backlog, probably a couple, maybe less than EUR 100 million, probably EUR 50 million or something like that. It's a very small amount to be traded, but that does not give you the size of the debate, so to say. Because again, we are negotiating some penalties and things like that. In terms of contract completion, it's over. The other one, I don't even know the half. It's probably EUR 200 million.
Yeah
In the backlog. Not so large in the backlog. I don't want to give you the impression that because there is nothing in the backlog that there is no debate to have. What is for me more important is the volatility of what is on the table. As I said, it's now much mitigated as compared to the EUR 2 billion that we had at the beginning. We are maybe talking a couple of hundred and something at the maximum, so 10% of that maximum. But this is for me more relevant, I think that what it represents in the backlog.
Maybe I'll follow up on the-
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You want to follow up? Yes.
Maybe I follow up on the working capital volatilities and which was your second point, if it makes sense. Indeed, we had this volatility within Alstom. It is very much part of our business. It's not a volatility which is a control. No, this is the sequence of getting into the supply chain, building the trains, and delivering the train and get the customers and the progress payment. This is not uncontrolled volatilities. I will expect again this year to have this I would say lumpiness in our net working capital within the quarters, within the half year. Again, something which is managed.
I feel that probably it will be to a less extent that what we had in 2021, 2022, which was exceptional by any means as we discussed. As I said this morning, there will be some usual seasonality between H1 and H2, but a very limited one. Again, nothing to compare with the one we had in 2021, 2022.
Yeah. Again, I think you are referring to debates on commercial paper and so forth. To be fair, I think we need to step back a little bit. I mean, there is some ways to finance. As you can see, our year-end results, as, by the way, the H1, which was better than our guidance for the cash flow. The year-end was also better than our guidance. I don't think the fact that from time to time we're using commercial paper to finance the volatility instead of drawing on our syndicated line and so forth makes any difference in our working capital management and working capital perspective. There is some volatility and it's not.
I mean, as compared to other type of industry, it's clearly not insignificant volatility. But the way we finance this volatility, frankly, should not leave any of you to try to draw conclusions on where we stand on working capital. As you have seen this year, well, I mean, at the end of the year, we are probably much better than most of the consensus which I've read in the papers. Still, there were some debate on commercial paper and so forth. I think we need to step back on these issues a little bit.
I think there was a question as well on obsolescence management.
Yes. On this one, I mean, to be very fast, the answer is no. There will be no write-off on the technology. We are combining the two technologies together. We are using bricks from different type of technology. There is no such thing as a capitalized technology that we would write off in the future.
Thank you very much for the detailed follow-up. There's one last question around the accounting then. You're working with projects, multi-year periods, IFRS 15, there are many assumptions. We've seen from a number of other project related businesses that during this period of exceptional inflation, they have had periodic reviews to go back and look at the cost to completion and then take revisions against the outstanding cost to completion. You know, there's an element of smoothing you're able to achieve with project accounting. And in this inflationary period, it's sometimes hard to see how the inflation is affecting your reported EBIT. So can you give us any sense of how often you review the expected cost to completion against the current inflationary backdrop?
On this one, there are two elements. The first one is that we have a regular process of monthly project reviews where we see the progression of our projects, the delivery, the quality, the customer relationship and so forth, and we review some elements of the costing. We have each six months a complete review of all the portfolio. We have a complete 100% review of the portfolio, which of course will take any new development of any type of costing, including, of course, inflation. We had, nevertheless, because of this particular period, we looked more precisely on the number of projects which we felt were more sensitive to this question. We launched a specific process to review the inflation analysis.
To be fair, all that we can give you as guidance in terms of the number of contracts exposed, not exposed, sourcing being done, not done, and so forth, has been things which were not so well detailed in the past, and which we have done in the last period, in the last six months, basically, or a little bit more, to better control the situation. We have put a specific process on top of our classical process in order to better assess the situation. We need, as you know, and probably you've been hit by the same type of evolution that assumptions on inflation are changing quite rapidly, up, up.
Very recently, it has stabilized a little bit, but God knows what will happen. We are following as well, and we are taking advantage of all the information that we can get in the different countries on the latest reports on inflation. Normal process plus an extra process for not the entirety of the portfolio, but the projects we feel are most exposed to that situation.
Thank you very much. Excellent.
Thank you, sir. We'll now go to Guy Péna calling in from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question again. I was wondering, with the visibility that you provided on the tender outlook with EUR 150 billion, the slides that you put this morning and this afternoon regarding working capital, also provisioning levels, I wonder whether you could be a little bit more specific about your cash flow guidance for next year. I guess, you know, most of the variables are there. Some of them are normalizing to a great extent. I guess positive cash flow from operations is something that was expected, but maybe the magnitude of it is probably what's basically missing here. Could you give us more granularity as to how to think about cash flows next year? Is it double digit? Is it triple digit?
It is too early to be said, or how can we look at this from a better guidance perspective, if I may? Thank you.
No, thank you. Yes. I mean, we have decided not to give any precise number because of the volatility, and this is a classic issue. I can say I'm comfortable with the consensus. I can say as well, I mean, this is much below any double-digit volatility. If I believe it would be a double-digit one, it would be a break-even situation and not positive. That hopefully helps you to put some color.
Thank you. Maybe the second one is on orders coming into the backlog. Could you comment a little bit as to how are they now accreting to margin of the backlog or diluted to the margin in the backlog? What are the trends expected from that EUR 180 billion tender lineup that you do have in front? I mean, obviously inflation, as you suggested, is moving up very abruptly, and obviously there's supply chain issues here and there, but are your customers happy to accept these price increases on the tendering activity? I basically do expect current orders. Obviously the question is whether current orders are actually accretive to the backlog margin. Secondly, do you expect that trend to continue?
Yeah.
as we go into the next 36 months, I guess?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, first of all, I can confirm what I said this morning. The order intake of 2021, 2022 have been totally in line with our long-term target, and therefore are totally accretive to the backlog. That's clear. Much above what we targeted and much above our current backlog. That we believe will continue to be the case. To your point, our customers are fully aware about the inflation, and there is a very large feeling and sentiment and acceptance of that. We don't see at that moment any projects being canceled because of that. I know that customers are expecting prices to increase and so forth.
We have to recognize that we are in a long-term business, so for the very, very large project, there are not so many project which have been recorded after this inflation period. We'll see when it stabilize in the coming months, what is the ultimate reaction of some of the customer when the inflation is fully there, I would say. I have no doubt that the current year, so 2022-2023, will also be a year of very high quality order intake with very accretive order margin, order intake margins. That's. I mean, we are helped in that respect by two things.
First, that our customers, they are sort of under huge pressure from their authorities, constituencies to really implement their projects. That's one. Two, inflation is widely known, so it's not like internal factor or something like that. Inflation is everywhere on all newspapers, so they all know that. Even more so, I would say that a number of countries have taken some decrees, laws, regulations to allow public entities to take into account inflation when it was not the case in the past. There is a very wide recognition of the inflation consequences on our business, and the last thing they want is to slow down the pace of investment. Okay. I think we have just maybe another
On the order accretion
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Okay. Sorry. Maybe I want a small follow-up. The accretion comment on the order intake is just, obviously both with the legacy backlog but also without the legacy backlog. I basically, if you take out the zero margin, zero growth profit margin orders out of the backlog, would you still make it accretive?
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe we should stop there unless there is a last question, and after that we'll have to to wrap up and conclude.
Thank you, sir. The last question today will be asked by Mr. Akash Gupta calling in from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes. Hi. My follow-up is on margins. Last financial year, you did 5% margin, and I was wondering if you can say what was the underlying margin if you exclude these EUR 2.4 billion-EUR 2.6 billion zero gross margin revenues, and how does that compare to 8%-10% that you target for in the medium term? Thank you.
Well, I don't. I've not done the math, but to some extent you can do it yourself if you take out the 0% gross margin, which is weighing quite a lot on the margin because of course 0% gross margin, it means -nine, -10 in adjusted EBIT, so it has a huge weight. We basically in our plan, by the last year of the plan by 2024-2025, we expect to have a marginal level of ordering of sales booked at 0% gross margin. The entirety of this effect will be absorbed or will disappear in the next years. That will have a mechanical impact on the.
mechanical accretive impact on the margin. Okay. Thank you. I think thank you, everybody. I think it was a nice session, and I think it's good and, we'll probably repeat it next year in terms of morning and afternoon and, hopefully we'll make sure that we don't have the same kind of drama during the day. Thanks everybody. Thanks all of you. Talk to you very soon and, see you next time. Bye-bye.