Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Alstom's Investor Day. I'm Danny Di Perna, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Alstom. I'm very pleased to be here today to provide you an update on our operations, and supported by my colleagues, provide you an update on our product line businesses.
Today's agenda, I'll begin with an update on our overall operations, process convergence, product convergence, and I'll turn it over to Benjamin Fitoussi, President of our Rolling Stock & Components. Following Benjamin, you'll hear from Matt Byrne, the President of our Services business, and finally, from Jean-François Beaudoin, President of our Digital & Integrated Systems. Let's begin with an update on our operations.
We secured last year three key focus areas, it was really all about post the acquisition of Bombardier, stabilize, then integrate into how to operate as one company, our processes, our products, and then begin the journey of transforming the business into a more efficient and lean Alstom company. For stabilize, as you may recall, I presented a portfolio 12 months ago of roughly 60 critical projects that we put the best of our technical competencies and supply chain and quality professionals to help us improve and reduce the risk of these critical projects. I'm very pleased to tell you that on our methodology of risk index, we've reduced the risk of that basket of critical projects from 3.4 down to below 2.
We are in the green on those projects, and our customers appreciate the effort that Alstom has invested over the past two years to improve our product execution. From a quality perspective, we've also made enormous improvements, roughly 70% improvement in the quality of our execution, and the customers are also building more and more confidence with our ability to execute. If I turn to the second focus area, in terms of integration, we had wanted by March 2023 to have the company operate as one. One system and standard way of working through our processes and one consolidated, converged product and component platform to offer to our customer. The progress for today, we're at 82% deployment in terms of our standard way of one company Alstom processes.
From a product platform convergence, we've achieved 100%, and now we're down at the fundamental building block of components, and we're progressed to 25%, and we'll continue to make that journey throughout the year. The final focus area was more about transforming. From transforming, I'll share with you a little bit more information about how we've consolidated so that everyone across the new one Alstom can use and access the same digital set of tools.
We're at 78% in terms of user consolidation. I have a slide on Alstom's APSYS program. It's our continuous improvement program across all of our functions, manufacturing sites and supply chain operations. We've made significant progress, over 70% in terms of the score on how we continue to improve our operating processes.
The results are we've been rewarded over the last two years, EUR 40 billion of orders, and we have an impressive backlog of EUR 87 billion. I mentioned business process integration and digitalization on the prior slide. The punchline is this, a company of our size, over 80,000 people in every country, every continent around the world, to be able to co-develop new products, to be able to manufacture, to be able to tap in to the network that we have, bringing all the best of best that Alstom has for each and every one of our projects, we need our global teams to be able to develop, engineer, manufacture, and support the business from anywhere across the globe. In order to do that, we need an integrated one global single instance platform for our people to work together.
That's what we've developed, and that's what we continue to deploy and drive across the organization. In terms of, you know, our current status on converged processes, you can see we're roughly around 97%. In terms of digital tool consolidation so that everybody works in the same platforms, we're roughly in the mid-70%. Turning to APSYS. APSYS is Alstom's continuous improvement program.
The diagram on the top is really just to indicate you take the best of best of lean Toyota Production System tools, our black belt Six Sigma trained professionals, pull it all together in a very disciplined, organized process of standard work. It is not just for manufacturing. It is across all aspects, all business process, all supply chain and manufacturing processes with a very strict methodology on how to measure performance.
Down below is just the articulation of the progress that we've made over the last 12 months. The two and the one indicate the two legacy companies coming together as one. Of course, the legacy BT sites were not using an APSYS continuous improvement program. They have had significant improvement, over 200% metric score improvement over the last 12 months, while the legacy Alstom sites continue to charge on towards the goal of three and above with a 73% improvement overall.
As you can see in the photos, our APSYS system is rigorous, it's disciplined, it's all about training people, it's all about people wanting to come to work every day to make Alstom better and better. Let me turn a little bit to enterprise risk management. We've had a lot of practice over the last few years, unfortunately.
You can see the six icons starting a few years ago, right at the same time as the acquisition of Alstom buying Bombardier Transportation with COVID, then the semiconductor challenge, then a shortage of raw material, then inflation hit. A little bit of crisis on energy and a continuous unfortunate geopolitical risk situation that's occurring in the globe. A little more detail on one or two of them. Electronic components. We certainly met the challenge. We set up a crisis management cell for the last couple years to drive and secure our delivery to customers. There is no question that semiconductors worldwide has affected all industries, both the commercial and industrial sectors of the world.
As you can see in the diagram, although it's slowed down post the COVID era from a consumer electronics demand, the demand for automotive, aerospace, and our railway system industry is going to continue to grow. Despite the fact that we reacted quite well, we now have gone from a two-week visibility to a six-month rolling average. We continue to review every hour of every day the demand for all of our projects.
We've partnered with many of the semiconductor partners and OEM manufacturers in the world. We've redesigned, we've found substitutes, over 650 components over and above what we would have normally done for component obsolescence. Now the message is that we're gonna keep doing this over and over again so that we can ensure that we stay ahead of the demand that is coming from a semiconductor market perspective.
The second enterprise risk management that I'd like to dive into is inflation. It wasn't 12 months ago that dotted line was shifted over and we were at the top of those peaks. Forecasts were to come down, who knew? Today, it has come down across all of these many elements on inflation, material, wages, transportation, logistics, and energy.
There's certainly the inflationary effort has come down. As you can see, it's still above the norm that was set at the baseline in 2019. We do need to be very cautious. We have to drive cost reduction, which we are, leveraging the new scale of the One Alstom we're able to leverage across the world in our supply chain.
We need to be diligent in terms of pricing our contracts, how we commercially look for inflationary formulas to protect the business and to offer best value to our customers. If I turn a little bit to quality, I wanted to just highlight two key metrics from the suite of metrics that we have to measure our performance and how we're driving customer confidence and satisfaction.
On the left-hand top side, it's just a measure of our development performance. Our design for quality, which we call DFQ backlog, is coming down. That's good news. Over 40% reduction in the backlog means that our development process, the people that are executing the engineering design and development and verification, validation testing is really improving our speed.
That's great because it allows us to execute our program schedules faster, able to get into the production industrial on time, and deliver to our customer contractual commitments on time. On the other side is our production output across all of our product lines, rolling stock, and digital systems. Our overall number of demerits, defects that we have unfortunately presented to our customer which require rework, has reduced almost 70% over the last 24 months.
Significant improvement. The graphic down below is showing that now with the One company, more customers, so more customer surveys, we are continuing now to steady continuing progress up in terms of our Net Promoter Score, all about driving customer satisfaction and customer confidence. Just a word on our supply chain. We have an enormous global supply chain. It is a competitive advantage for us.
We're spending roughly EUR 14 billion across 22,000 suppliers geographically located across the globe as you see in the diagram. The good news is we're able to leverage the proximity to customers so that in our bids, we can offer localization should it be required, and should it not be required, we still offer localization and best cost capabilities from around the Alstom network and around the developed supply chain that we have. This is gonna help us drive our performance. It helps us accommodate customer-specific localization requirements. Also from a region-to-region proximity, we're much more agile and quick to respond to development needs and production needs when we're in close proximity to the manufacturing sites that produce the trains for our customers. On the far right at the bottom, it also demonstrates the overall effort we've been doing to improve our overall supplier performance.
As the chart demonstrates, over the past 12 months, we have been able to reduce the number of critical suppliers that interrupt our production flow, but there's a lot more work to do to really bring the Alstom supply chain to best-in-class performance. Let me turn a little bit to technology.
The company has continued to invest and will boost greater than EUR 700 million per year for the next few years so that we can now inject technology on green mobility, smart mobility, and a more healthier mobility technical solutions for our customers. As I mentioned last year here in front of all of you, we today have the broadest component building block portfolio, and with these continued investments in technology, we're now able to top up and specifically direct the technologies that meet the needs of our customers.
There's an ever-growing digitalization and green mobility demand for requirements to be resolved with our customers. Let me share that with you. From a customer-centric value proposition, these are the five areas that we're super focused on right now, bringing effective technology and innovation to meet the customer needs. Of course, we want our customers to be profitable.
Profitable, cash flowing customers are good for the industry, they're good for the passengers, and they're certainly good for us as major OEMs. That means we need to offer best value at best cost to lower the CapEx, and we need to focus on the reliability and availability of our systems so that we don't interrupt operation, and we provide seamless railway system transportation solutions at best cost.
From a total cost of ownership perspective, the reliability of all of our components and the aggregate of our train system is value for the customer. In terms of customer needs, comfort, bringing full range of maintenance and services, and overhaul expertise helps to enable reduce the cost of operating Alstom train systems for our customers. Finally, on the last panel, the connected train. You'll hear a little bit more about this from Jean-François Beaudoin during his presentation, but there is no question that the world is going more and more digital.
The ability to have the brain on the train and our digital suite of capability to connect all of the systems and to be able to connect to the ground and to the signaling systems in a safe and cybersecure way is the way of the future, and Alstom is leading the pack on that capability and technology. I leave you with one last message. Alstom is up and running and on track after 24 months. We're pleased with the progress, but there's more work to do. Now, let me please turn it over to my colleague, Benjamin Fitoussi, President of Rolling Stock and Components. Thank you.
Thank you, Danny. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are now going to deep dive into the rolling stock and components product line. Last year, we made a very detailed roadmap presentation to you. I want to show you now the progress and to convince you that we are on track with what we said last year. Let's start with the market.
The market remains very buoyant. It represents in the range of EUR 44 billion per year and is supported by a growth rate of 2.8%. The growth drivers are very strong. Together with Bombardier, we have created a strong number one on the market. We represent approximately 35% market share. We are twice the size of our number two and number three competitors. The market is well consolidated with the four players representing more than 80% of the market.
The acquisition of Bombardier Transportation has been a game changer, both for us and for the industry. Together, we are today the number one in all the geographies across the world. We have a consolidated footprint, which is very significant and which allow us to serve our customers wherever they want in the world. This is very important because our customer are expecting from us local content.
This global footprint allows us as well to consolidate in some best cost-competitive countries, specific setup to support, both in terms of engineering and in terms of manufacturing, the key locations. This is true with our setup, for example, in Mexico, in Morocco, in Eastern Europe or in India. The first priority just after the acquisition, as it was explained by Danny Di Perna, has been to stabilize the legacy portfolio of project.
I can say today that the execution is under control and that the risk level on this project has significantly reduced, as well as the level of backlog of this project. We have brought a lot of expertise to bring back this project on track. All the technical issues have been solved. The project have been reorganized, the planning reviewed. We have also renegotiated with our customers.
Today, we are moving the effort from those legacy projects to the project we have recently secured, what we call the front-load projects. The second priority has been to act as one company, both in terms of processes and in terms of products. As far as the products are concerned, the integration is done. At train level, of course, but also at subsystem and at part level. We have taken two years to consolidate the portfolio and to rationalize it.
Today, we are leveraging 8 platforms across all the product range, we have been able to phase out 9 products. At component level, we have also significantly rationalized the portfolio because for each of our product family, we have reduced the number of components by 40%-50%, for bogie, for traction, and both also for our integrated systems.
The focus today is now to make sure that we implement this unique portfolio in each and every tender so that we can provide our customer with the best offering, as well as standardized and rationalized offer. In terms of operational performance, I showed you this slide last year. We have made also significant progress. For each of the metric on this slide, you see the evolution with the reference point being the position of Alstom just before the acquisition of Bombardier.
The priorities that we have set was to restore the confidence with our customers and to improve the level of quality of what we were delivering to them. I can say today that thanks to the huge effort done by the quality teams, the quality level today is at the level of where we were two years ago, just before the acquisition.
We have been obliged to set back significant quality teams in all the sites and to instill a new quality culture to reach this performance. On the delivery front, we have made also significant progress, as you can see on the slide. We are still not there completely, but I'm fully confident that in the year 2023, 2024, we will be back to the performance we had historically.
We have been impacted, obviously, by some headwinds, our supply chain has suffered, we have been able to navigate. Thanks to the agility our teams have, we have been able to maintain a good level of performance. If we look at our achievement in FY22, FY23, we can be proud of the progress we have made, both in terms of stabilization of our projects and in terms of integration. We have been able to secure EUR 10.3 billion of orders, which represent approximately 57 projects. This backlog is healthy and less risky compared to what we have in our portfolio because a lot of this backlog is also related to options. We have progressed in the rationalization of our product portfolio, as I explained, and we have rationalized it. We have significantly increased the satisfaction of our customer with leaping forward the quality level.
We have continued to invest and to invest in particular in our footprint in Morocco, in Eastern Europe, to better serve our customer and to be more competitive, and we have mitigated the headwinds that we have been facing. A great year. Looking forward, we have to accelerate our transformation to deliver the expected synergies to the market. It means that we have to continue to win orders with our now innovative, standardized, and rationalized products. We have to get the best of our footprint. We have to continue to develop our footprint in India for the engineering scope in order to reach at least 42% of our engineering in India.
We have to continue to invest in our footprint best cost country for manufacturing, and we have to continue to rationalize our footprint in the high-cost country, which we have started both in North America and in Germany. The digitalization of our processes is a must, and we are working hard to roll it out by 2025, 2026. We are deploying PLM on our engineering and industrialization scope. We are deploying AOS, our advanced operating system for manufacturing, deploying our Ariba solution on the procurement side, and we are deploying Kinaxis on our supply chain activities. Last but not least, we have to continue to reinforce our teams at local level because our business is very local. The strength of Alstom has always been its ability to animate network of capabilities.
This is something we have to reinforce. We have also to work on the rotation of the talents across the various sites. The effort in R&D is significant. Now that we have a product portfolio that is rationalized, we can invest in our core products. This starts with our platform, where we have still some range to extend. For example, we are deploying Atlas 400 on our TRAXX multi-system, but we are also extending the range of our Coradia regional trains in order to feed some markets, such as Germany, where we have been very successful in the last years. We are investing in our core technologies across platform. Of course, energy efficiency, passenger experience, and in particular, noise reduction, cybersecurity, which is more and more demanding from our customer front, and obviously, green traction.
As far as green traction is concerned, we have been granted a very significant subsidies by Europe of around EUR 350 million. This is unique, this will allow us to keep the leadership in hydrogen technology for the railway industry. What is interesting with these subsidies, it is not only about developing technology bricks, but also bringing to the market prototypes and pre-series, both in the regional trains and in the locomotive. Now let's deep dive on our financials and look at the ID card of our financials. First, let me remind you the business profile of Rolling Stock. Rolling Stock is basically 50% of the group activities. 50% in terms of backlog, with EUR 43 billion, in terms of orders, with EUR 10 billion, and in terms of sales, with close to EUR 9 billion.
We are on average managing in the range of 200 projects per year, each project having a life duration of 3 years -5 years. The cash profile of our project is usually positive, thanks to a level of down payment and advance payment throughout the life cycle of the project. Last but not least, obviously, Rolling Stock is a key enabler to some other attractive activities in the group, such as the turnkey activity and the service activity. We have a clear plan to improve the profitability and to reach a high single-digit level. We are working, as I explained, on the top line, selectivity, product convergence, product cost reduction, platforming, we are working as well on the operational front throughout the value chain of our operation.
We are strengthening the supply chain despite the headwinds in order to be more agile and to get more productivity from our operations. In a nutshell, about Rolling Stock, six key takeaways. First, we are uniquely positioned to capture the expected market growth thanks to our product coverage, our footprint coverage, and our scale. We have made significant improvement in project stabilization, we are today moving the attention from the backlog of legacy project to the frontlog of newly secured project. We are today operating as one company throughout the group. We have a unique operating model, the synergies are on track. We have a clear plan in the months to come to deliver the targeted operational recovery and to deliver the additional production performance that we are expecting from our operations.
We are well geared to win profitable tenders, thanks to our innovative and standardized portfolio, and we have accelerated the effort of transformation by implementing best-in-class digital processes. Thank you. Now I leave the floor to Matt for the service part.
Thank you, Benjamin. Let's look at the success story that is services. You will see that since our last update in 2021, all market expectations have been exceeded, operationally and financially. High order intake with margin both in respect of absolute numbers as well as percentge have exceeded expectations. The strategy has managed to mitigate the headwinds predicted.
The market conditions continue to be very favorable to the growth of Alstom and expected to continue that way. In summary, services is fast becoming the backbone to the future of Alstom's success, providing the right mix of profitability, risk, and stability that will underpin the success of Alstom for many years to come. Let's look at the business. The services franchise is split into five business streams, each one have over-delivered against market norms and predictions.
The sales for the business has increased by 25% since our last update in 2021, we see that in the increase in the headcount. Now over 16,000 employees. That increase coming exclusively from the start of new projects and new service offerings. Our USP, our extensive capabilities, and proximity to our client continues to drive our competitiveness as well. All in all, services has been well-positioned and continues to be well-positioned.
The growth strategy is underpinned by four growth pillars: the expansion of the maintenance footprint and business, the globalization of parts and overhaul, the extension of train operations outside of North America, and the expansion of our smart and green mobility. The market drivers remain very constant, although we are seeing increased emphasis on cybersecurity, obsolescence, and long-term service contracts from our client base, which is highly beneficial.
We've also seen the exit from COVID drive the agencies around the world to try to stimulate passenger growth, either through improving the journey experience or through efficiencies and productivity, so they can offer a better service. Alstom has been well-positioned in our strategy to be able to accommodate that. We also seen the energy crisis.
That's accelerated the appetite of the agencies to find and implement more energy-efficient solutions. Alstom's range of retrofittable energy offerings has been well received by the market. Let's look at the numbers. What we've seen is acceleration of the order intake from 1.2-1.7 book-to-bill. We've also seen the number of service offerings being put into the market increase by 36% year-on-year, driving that order intake increase.
This new enhanced level of order intake we see as the basis going forward, and that's also reflected in our increase in sales at 12% year-on-year. The market conditions continue to support the growth aspirations of Alstom going forward when it comes to the services market. Also what we've seen is an expansion of the outsourcing, the maintenance around the world. The desire by the agencies to improve their productivity, to modernize their operations, and to drive down cost is driving a new market, which Alstom is well-positioned to capture. Its focus on total cost of ownership is enabling us to be competitive from both a CapEx and OpEx perspective, and we see that with the bundled deals. Most bundled deals now, rolling stock and services, look at the total cost of ownership, the maintenance, the CapEx cost, the energy costs.
Alstom's strategy has been well-positioned to be able to be very competitive in this environment, and our success rate has been phenomenal over the last 24 months, and we see that continuing going forward. Also, we've invested in our teams, our project teams, our maintenance teams, our sales teams, and the other support function in order for them to be able to harvest our backlog better. That's paying dividends in terms of sales and order intake and in respect to customer satisfaction, bringing new solutions to the market. We know the service offerings provide an optimal mix of risk, stability, and profitability. There's an increased emphasis and focus going forward on ensuring we capture more of our installed base. At the moment, it's 25%, but the strategy drives that to 35% in the midterm.
Some of that will come from the capture of new build at inception. Through the bundle deals we mentioned and the exploitation of the total cost of ownership criteria. We need to capture the existing install base also, making sure not only do we drive new solutions into the market and digital solutions to our clients, but making sure that our commercial offerings are both agile and flexible to allow the client's constraints to be met.
That's an important critical aspect. The T triple A concept, Technical Support and Spares Agreement, has been highly beneficial in doing this in recent years. It's allowed the agencies to modernize, to improve their performance, to gain the skills and capabilities of Alstom while still within the boundaries and constraints they face. That's opened up new markets for us, but it's also helped us to harvest existing markets.
Our strategy is working. It's delivering growth and profitability for Alstom. However, it's also delivering significant results to our client base. Their operational performance, their customer satisfaction, their financial performance is increasing and improving as a consequence of the services we offer. That's creating a new partnership into the industry.
A long-term partnership built upon trust on a mutual beneficial approach to how to deliver a better service to the general public. A good example of this is the Elizabeth line in the U.K. Quite pertinent, but since its introduction and its commencement of full service, the Alstom fleet has been the best performing in class. That has led and helped the system as a whole to achieve very high standards of performance, which in turn has led to significant passenger growth way beyond prediction.
3.5 million people per week compared to an original estimate of 2 million people per week. That's partly driven also by the customer satisfaction, the journey experience. TfL's own customer satisfaction survey is ranking the Elizabeth line as number one across all their services. Our focus on total cost of ownership is not only driving our competitiveness, but also driving the financial performance and the ability of our clients to expand. Baden-Württemberg in Germany is a great example.
Not only is the vehicle best in class when it comes to maintenance cost, but the total cost of ownership focus on energy has been highly beneficial to our client. When this fleet is introduced, our client will see significant operating cost savings as a consequence of that focus on energy consumption. I mentioned earlier customer intimacy.
It's a big competitive driver for Alstom given our proximity and our bandwidth. The MARC operations and maintenance contract gives a, again, an great example of this. Our long-term relationship with that client, understanding their needs, their challenges, and their aspirations, positioned us well for when the client went out to gather an enhanced operations and maintenance contract. We're able to understand their needs, and we're able to tailor a solution which allowed us to win that work. Work which will be worth up to EUR 1.2 billion over 15 years. This is a train operations contract and also a maintenance contract, both of Alstom fleets and non-Alstom fleets.
What we're seeing is the benefits which are driving into the market are not only helping the growth of Alstom, but helping the growth of our clients as well, driving, as I said earlier, a new partnership model. The services franchise, we know delivers the right mix and profile of risk, stability, and profitability. This will underpin the success for Alstom going forward.
The long-term contracts which deliver predictability and self-generating growth through to the short-term business, which allows us to translate order intake quickly into cash and into sales. We see the market conditions being very favorable to Alstom at the moment, and we continue to see those going forward. The service offerings we bring to market, our commercial solutions we bring to market are allowing us to open up new and existing markets. Headwinds still exist.
Our strategy has been very successful to this point to manage those. Our rapid growth is increasing the emphasis on resource availability and supply performance, but that is accommodated for in our strategy. In summary, Alstom Services has exceeded all predictions in terms of financial and operational performance to date. We anticipate with the strategy in place that that will continue to grow going forward, and as mentioned at the offset, to allow services to be the backbone of Alstom's success going forward. Thank you. Now I'll hand across to Jean-François to take you through our DIS business.
Thank you, Matt. Good morning, good afternoon. I'm Jean-François Beaudoin. I'm the Global Head of Digital and Integrated Systems. One of Alstom's mission is to accelerate the model shift, which means making train more attractive and more affordable, to make people choose trains over cars or planes. Signaling and systems are enablers to meet that objective in a different way. Signaling systems are the brain of the railway systems.
They enforce safety while maximizing the traffic on existing infrastructure. As a complement, system activities are involved when there is a plan to expand existing railway networks by creating new infrastructure. Today, I'm going to share with you Alstom's ambition on both. Signaling market is worth EUR 15 billion per annum.
It has a growth rate which is slightly higher than the global railway market, notably because it is a recognized solutions to help increasing the capacity on existing lines, both in main line and urban applications. It is notably translated into very significant investment plans that have been announced by public authorities throughout Europe, and notably in Germany and Italy, where it has already started materializing into orders.
As well in France, where government has recently announced important investment plans for improving the railway infrastructure in the country. The other interesting observation is that while ERTMS was originally a European standard, it is becoming adopted by more and more countries and networks across the world. Here you can see a list of countries and projects that Alstom is currently executing to deploy ERTMS as the digital enabler for railway systems.
This trend is continuing to further increase, Alstom has the largest number of references of such solutions outside of Europe. In that market environment, the competitive landscape is evolving and globally is under a consolidation trend. Of course, there is a major consolidation operation which is currently being conducted, which is likely to be completed in the year 2023, but that trend has already started years ago.
When this new operation is actually completed, the competition landscape will be reduced to three very large global players, roughly the same size, and quite a few other much, much smaller players, sometimes five to 10 x smaller than the large ones, very often local or domestic players. In that environment, Alstom ambition is very clear, is to continue outpacing the global market growth and sustain a high single-digit growth.
The reason why we believe we can do this is that we consider ourselves as the most global signaling partner. Number one, because of the nature of our portfolio. We've got the largest signaling offering available on the market and a very significant install base because of our history. We also have a very extensive footprint with customer intimacy and local presence in more than 45 countries.
Our capacity to innovate and our track record in providing to the market the latest innovations, like ETCS has built the latest standard, Hybrid Level 3, train-to-train CBTC concept, our latest generation of onboard vital computer, which is now part of our standard offering. This capacity is fully recognized today. We've got more than 3,000 engineers dedicated to R&D and innovation. We also have a continuous confidence from our customers.
We scored more than our target at eight in this fiscal year customer satisfaction surveys. A large part of our order intake comes from orders that are linked with our existing install base. With this, you can see on the upper right corner of the chart that out of the 10 largest countries in terms of signaling market in the world, nine of them are home to Alstom. A country in which Alstom is either the number one or number two in terms of signaling market shares. The only one missing is actually Germany, which is the largest market in the world, and will continue to be in the next decade. Our goal is very simple. We want to make Germany home. The situation for the onboard market and the wayside market is quite different.
On the onboard, which is a much smaller market than the wayside, we are already the leader. Atlas, the Alstom solution, is the most desired solution to the market if you judge by the market shares. The projects we are currently executing in Stuttgart are considered as being a trendsetter for what's going to be the continuation of the German rollout. The starting point on wayside is very different. Prior to the Bombardier acquisition, Alstom had no presence in that market.
Bombardier had some, with the technology, a digital interlocking, a site in Bönningstedt with qualified German-speaking signaling engineers, as well as an existing relationship with the main customer. Combining those Bombardier asset with the technology bricks that Alstom has bought, notably in the ETCS Level 2, and adding further investment to complete that offering has helped us unlocking the gate of the German wayside market.
This strategy has already provided results. Prior to the acquisition, Alstom revenues in that market were EUR 70 million a year. In the last two years, we booked around EUR 700 million of new orders, and our growth rate in terms of top line is targeted to be in the 30% range in the next three years. Talking about our delivery capabilities, we are a brain-intensive business. We have more than 10,000 engineers. Our footprint strategy is articulated along two key axes. On the one hand, a very concentrated footprint when it comes to the R&D and development activities to be able to develop standard solutions. Here we have 10 main sites distributed in all around the world. That usually specialize in a given part of the portfolio.
On the other side, we have a very distributed delivery footprint for the deployment and customization of those standard solutions to our local customer needs. Here we have a presence more or less in all countries in which we operate. We think we found the right balance between that concentration of development activities and that fragmentation of deployment activities.
Of course, we want to combine that distribution of the footprint with the right balance between high-cost countries and best cost countries, with India remaining at the heart of our global strategy, and with a global ambition to combine India, Thailand, Poland, Brazil, and others to add up to 50% of our overall engineering activities within the next three years. Innovation is one of the three levers for our strategic plan. The first axis is, of course, to continue accelerating the digitalization of our portfolio of solutions.
Delhi-Meerut , which is the first ETCS project that is going to be executed in India, which is going to be in operations in the next few months, will be the most advanced ERTMS solutions in the world. On top of that, it also is the first time our virtualization strategy is fully materialized. That means that both the onboard vital computer and the wayside vital computer that operates the systems are virtualized.
The software layer and the hardware layer are becoming independent, which helps managing obsolescence and scalability of operations along the life cycle of the assets. Cybersecurity is the second main axis. It's the flip side of digitalization. From a situation where 5 years ago, almost no projects had cybersecurity requirement explicitly in their documents, today it's becoming a norm. We have three areas of focus.
Number one, all the latest generations of new products are designed in such a way that their cybersecurity requirement are embedded from the beginning of their design. Second, we have a service offering to implement what we call a hardening strategy that targets the install base for solutions that have been designed and deployed a decade ago or more, where we feel our customers have a need to get some support in making sure that they can control the cybersecurity of those older technologies, typically by implementing intrusion detection solutions, for instance.
The third area of focus is to provide the right level of support to our customers in their cyber-related transformation of their own operations. We use three enablers for implementing that strategy. Number one, we keep leading railway cybersecurity standards that have materialized now in new norms, CENELEC, IEC.
We keep leveraging partnerships like with Cylus, Israeli startup we've invested in, and we keep increasing our in-house railway cybersecurity expertise. Today, we've got more than 300 of such experts working at Alstom. With this, FY22, FY23 was a very solid year in terms of numbers. We recorded a high single-digit growth, EUR 2.4 billion of revenue, a book-to-bill at 1.2. In a business model where, as compared with our rolling stock colleagues, contracts are usually smaller size, shorter cycles.
Some of them are bigger and longer cycles, but for the most of them, they are executing in a couple of years. They usually come with lower down payments, have some inventory intensity, notably because of the need of availability of electronic components, which translates traditionally in positive working capital. Improvement levers for profitability are commercial and operational.
Commercial by further improving our mix, small versus large orders, pushing services offering, making the right selectivity choices along the risk profiles of the tenders, as well as keeping harvesting the long-term customer relationship we have with so many customers. Operationally, of course, a lot relates to engineering performance with the right balance between best cost countries and high-cost countries, but also accessing talents in large talent pools, like in India, and further improving automation.
We also want to keep implementing our R&D convergence roadmap to benefit further for R&D scale effect. We have faced headwinds this year, electronic component crisis, supply chain disruption and material availability, and inflations, which have been broadly mitigated but will have to be kept monitoring. With this, we're very confident that we'll keep delivering a high single-digit growth and that we'll reach a double-digit profit in the next period.
I'd like to conclude with few words on our systems activities, which are usually involved when customers want to create a new railway systems and prefer to come to people like us to procure that railway systems as a whole, rather than buying separately the infrastructure, the rolling stock, the signaling, sometimes the operations, and all the maintenance of that systems.
The business profile is very different. Those are very large projects, few hundred millions to billions, longer cycles, very low R&D and CapEx intensity for the reason that they leverage the ones of signaling and rolling stock activities, and usually enablers for operations and maintenance businesses which are traditionally higher margin. Because of their similarities with construction contracts, they are usually well-financed and come along with negative working capital profiles. The amount of visibility, of market visibility that we see in the next three years is almost twice as much as what we saw in the previous period. Alstom is very well positioned in that business.
We are the clear leader amongst the three global players on that market, and we want to keep being the best-in-class system provider to be selected as the best partner, notably from civil work companies, when we have to work in consortium. To do that, of course, we leverage the technology and competitiveness of the larger Alstom offering, our delivery track record, and our unique vertical integration from system level to all subsystems. We delivered a very large double-digit growth this year. We want to keep going on that double-digit growth on average and a strong high single-digit profitability. Now that you know all about Signaling and Systems, I suggest that we meet in a couple of minutes for the Q&A session.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Alstom Investor Day question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please also ensure your mute function is not activated for our signal to reach your equipment. Our first question today is coming from Andrew Kukhnin , calling from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks very much for taking my questions. I'll go one at a time. Maybe I'll start with growth. I'm just looking through your materials and listening to presentation, it looks like you're targeting growth rates well above the 5% that you have as a midterm target. Across everything but rolling stock, and in rolling stock, you highlight multiple opportunities and growing markets. I just wondered if you could talk about why not a higher growth ambition for the business?
Thank you. Thank you for the questions. I think, I will take it with Laurent. I think we raised this point this morning. We fully recognize that the potential of the market could allow us to have a higher growth achievement. I mean, there is a market potential. We have a market positioning which allow us to get there. At the same time, we want to make it clear that we are privileging, targeting the quality of order backlog first, the quality of our margin and our cash flow generation more than the growth per se.
We kept this growth guidance, recognizing that clearly there is a potential to do more, and we see what will be the actual numbers in the future. We are going to target services, signaling, systems, and try to be cautious and prudent on the rolling stock, while again, addressing the market growth which exists. I think it's... We have given, and of course we have given some indications, so if you make the math, you can find that you can go to higher numbers. Clearly, our main goal is first and foremost to restore the profitability and the cash flow generation while sustaining our market share, but not necessarily gaining a lot of market share. Thank you.
Thank you. On margin, if I may, could you give us some idea of where the rolling stock margins are now?
I think in terms of margin, we've given some guidance on where we should go, which has not changed as compared to last year guidance in terms of where we want to go. Unfortunately, today we are still influenced by the very low margin contracts and which we are still trading. As you know, most of them are in rolling stock. There's only a very limited portion in signaling, and most of them are in rolling stock. Therefore, today it's really a low single digit, a very low single digit margin in the rolling stock. As you know, we are targeting a high single digit, but we are still at a low single digit.
In terms of margin enhancement, clearly, our rolling stock is in our mix, we are going to improve the mix by growing services, for example. But in terms of pure margin enhancement, in terms of activity, rolling stock is the one which has to improve the most its activity margin, I have to say. And therefore, also, link back to what you asked in terms of growth, this is why we are targeting more profitability rather than growth.
Got it. Thank you. If I may, just the last one response to something coming from investors, on Laurent's departure and replacement, maybe could you talk about the process that you're planning for that in terms of handover and, kind of key priorities, and key challenges that maybe you want to highlight for the, for the successor?
Yeah, I think it's, I would say it's a classical process. There is nothing particularly striking in that. First, I mean, on your behalf and on, I would like to thank Laurent for the long contribution. He will still be there for a few months, but it's a good opportunity to do it now. There will be a relatively long handover as Bernard will come end of June and Laurent will leave end of July. We'll have numerous sessions before that. Bernard, as you know, has a large experience in industry as well as in long-term businesses. He's very much acquainted to, for example, long-term project accounting and controlling, which is quite a specific situation.
We'll do that progressively. I had already, of course, a lot of talks already with Bernard. He's well aware about the challenges of the group and where we stand in our journey. I don't expect any surprise coming from here on that side.
Great. Thank you for your time. I'll pass it on.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Daniela Costa from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. I just have one question which goes through the service penetration, where I think you had 25% of installed base penetration now and 35% as your medium-term ambition. Can you talk through, like, who you're displacing to capture that, and sort of what would be the motivation? I guess someone else is maintaining your installed base. What are the barriers to entry that others also decide to pursue exactly the same opportunity? The final thing is with that, can you maintain others' installed base? Is that perhaps like a way to compensate and to raise the whole service levels across the board? Can you just talk a little bit about those competitive dynamics and who's maintaining the installed base today? Thank you.
Maybe I'll let it to Matt to answer to this question.
Yes, certainly. If you look at the ambition to get to 35%, it's driven by two factors. Number one is the introduction of new vehicles into service. Benjamin introducing around 4,000 vehicles per year, and we're capturing a high proportion of those vehicles by definition with the bundle deals we mentioned. The next is probably more to the point of your question, which is the existing fleets. Now, of the 120,000 vehicles not currently under our control-ish, those are predominantly and almost exclusively maintained by our clients and the people who originally sold the vehicles to the operators. What we're looking to do is provide a service offering to the existing clients, which makes it compelling from their financial and operational perspective.
The tools we've created, the supply chains we create allow us to provide a service which is cheaper than the client can provide in-house, and is able to provide higher asset utilization, well not that, it's reliability or availability. When you talk about displacing, what we're doing is complementing our existing clients with a greater level of service, which would obviously allow them to meet their own aspirations when it comes to cost saving or operational improvements. You mentioned the reference to non-Alstom rolling stock. About 10% of what we maintain is non-Alstom rolling stock, and that does tend to increase over time as well. We're targeting both Alstom going forward and non-Alstom rolling stock, if that answers your question.
Thank you. One follow-up just on your customers and making a saving from them. Maybe can you talk a little bit about the landscape there? I thought sort of, at least in Europe, a lot of your customers have, like, very unionized workforces. To what extent can they really forgo the service? Maybe this is the wrong assumption and it's much more flexible in terms of their cost bases in adapting.
It's actually a very good question. In Europe and in North America, very unionized workforce, and this is why we use different commercial models and operating models to allow us to open that up. We make reference to a TSSA, technical support and spares agreement, which effectively allows the client to get the full benefit of having Alstom in the equation.
Our technologies, optimization of maintenance plans, our supply chain, whilst at the same time continue to control their labor. It allows us to open up unionized environments, and we've had some good successes in both North America and in Asia, as well as Europe in recent years, opening up markets which were previously closed to us because of that very nature.
Those commercial models allow clients to modernize, allow them to exchange risk while still, kind of adhering to their socioeconomic constraints which they may face country by country.
Thank you very much. Our next question is coming from Gael de-Bray of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Can I start with one question on the planned R&D spending of more than EUR 700 million that you've talked about. Maybe firstly, a clarification on this. Is this before or after you receive public and other type of financing? How shall I square this willingness to invest more in R&D, when you actually reported a lower spending in FY23, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of sales? I will start with this one.
No, I'll let Laurent take the point on the numbers themselves. It's a very good point, Gael, that you are mentioning on this year, and we had exactly the same dialogue internally, maybe one hour ago, on the R&D spend, so when we were discussing with our internal people.
It's fair to recognize that this year we spent considerable amount of time and focus on the stabilization of our projects, and we have underspent a little bit in R&D as compared to what we would have ideally done. That's why we need to. That's back to my point saying that we have stabilized our projects today.
There is less to be spent in terms of resources on the project themselves, and we will have more time to develop our R&D going forward. On the numbers themselves?
Yes. Gael, good afternoon. In terms of numbers, just to put the facts in terms of R&D gross cost, we are actually spending more in FY23 versus FY22. You are right, the PNL impact is a bit less, but this is related to funding which has been increased during the full year 2023. To your first point, we are talking of a gross effort before subsidies and grants of above EUR 700 million moving forward, as we explain drivers being digital in the wider sense and green traction, which are two of the very important axes of innovation moving forward.
Maybe it's a good opportunity to ask Jeff to say a word on his R&D. You know that half of the R&D is actually related to signaling activities. The signaling activities and intensity in R&D is much higher than the rest of our business. Maybe, Jeff.
Yeah, absolutely. Almost half of what Alstom spends in R&D is to support signaling and digital solutions, as well as cybersecurity enhancements of our global portfolio. It's fair to say that this year we spend pretty much the same amount as the year before, if not slightly more, and very much in line with our plan. We have the ambition to keep spending the same amount and accelerating for the signaling part and accelerating the investment for digital technologies and cybersecurity, which is more and more demanding.
Thank you, Jeff. Thank you.
Actually, I had a second question, and it was indeed directed to the signaling business. In theory, assuming you had the balance sheet to do it, do you think it would make sense strategically to invest in perhaps slightly adjacent areas, including multi-modality solutions, city traffic management, ticketing solutions, crowd flow management, you know, that sort of things that could enlarge the group's capabilities to offer, you know, maybe more integrated and comprehensive mobility solutions for cities?
That's a strategy question that we, I would say we document on a regular basis. We observe very carefully what are the movements on the market on those. I won't give you a final answer to that, would we do it, will we do it, but it's a question which is open very regularly. There are different colors of digital markets, so to speak. One that you're mentioning is related to those adjacent businesses like multimodality management, ticketing, passenger journey, passenger journey planning. The entry barriers in reality, technologically, are not as high as the one in signaling. The competition landscape is pretty crowded.
When you look at the valuation of companies, having a play in that game, they are usually very, very high. We keep looking at that. Maybe we'll have to make some move in there. Today that's not the immediate priority.
Thank you. Thank you, Gael. Next question.
Thank you very much, sir. Next question is from William Mackie of Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you very much. My first couple of questions relate to rolling stock. you know, when we look at your production sites, 50 across 22 countries, and you've highlighted you've started the rationalization in the USA and Germany, with the comment started. My first question is, where does that rationalization journey take you over three years to five years now that you have made great steps in standardizing the portfolio of products and components across your offer?
On this one, and we'll address this with Benjamin, it's we need to combine rationalization on one hand and the need for capacity. Even though, as I said, we are not targeting necessarily a huge growth, you know, still, we have some capacity growth which has to be accommodated. That's, that's something which is important, and we need to deliver many more cars than what we deliver today and in our, in our plan. Rationalization is also a specialization of the different sites. We have defined some vision and some mission side by side. Some of the sites have to be scaled down, some of the sites have to be increased to cope with this new load.
I don't know, Bernard, if you want to say more on that. Yeah.
Yeah. The strategy, the manufacturing strategy in rolling stock rely on the fact that we want to be close to our customers. This is why we are investing in having fitting lines as much as possible closer to the customer operations. I think that if you compare ourselves to the competition, we are really able to address all the customers worldwide while consolidating what is, I would say, easier to ship from a cost standpoint, so the car body shell and the key components. Here we try to massify in Eastern Europe, in Latin America or in India, for example.
In terms of, I would say, balancing capacity versus needs, I would say the main challenge, as I said in my speech earlier, was in Canada and to some extent in India. The rest of the organization is well-balanced. We have engaged the actions. Of course, it's easier to be conducted in North America than in Germany. But in Germany, we have started, and it will take, I would say, one or two years to adjust. In parallel, as Henri said, we are growing our activities because we have more cars to deliver, so progressively we rebalance the capacity versus de-demand.
Thank you.
Thank you. The second question, if I may, relates to service and specifically the increase in the level of long-term agreements that you're accepting within service. We've seen or I've seen in many industries that those long-term agreements carry with them embedded risk on the commitments you offer to the customer if for some reason the technical assumptions or the cost assumptions are different. How do you manage the risks on those long-term agreements, and what sort of sustainable kind of provisioning or warranty levels do you expect against your ongoing long-term contracts?
Okay. Shall I take this one?
Yeah. Yeah.
A couple of points. Firstly, whilst we've seen an increase in the long-term agreements, they've been apparent in the industry now for 20 years, with Virgin back in the early 2000s probably entering into the first. We've seen good profitability from those contracts over the years, primarily because the services business, because the long-term arrangements allow us to optimize our footprint, allow us to optimize our supply chain, optimize the maintenance regime.
We're able to respond to technical challenges by optimizing the cost base, and developing and evolving the cost base accordingly. It's not unusual to see a long-term agreement whose margins have increased by over 20% since it became a mature project. That's what history is telling us.
Obviously, technology is moving on and we recognize that introduces new challenges, cybersecurity being one of those. What we're making sure is that the arrangements we make with our partners and with our supply chain, as a number of back-to-back arrangements where we can ensure that we're mitigating some of the potential risks which we see on the horizon.
In summary, long-term agreements have been around a while already, and they've proven very profitable to Alstom over the years. The risks which do materialize are able to be more than offset by the opportunities in terms of optimization of footprint, the introduction of new technology, retrofit it into the older style of vehicles, and allow us to optimize the maintenance regime.
A good example being the introduction of HealthHub and TrainScanner allowing us to optimize our maintenance regimes. At the same time, we ensure that we've got a long-term arrangement with our, with our supply chain and partners. Now, one thing Evert mentioned is long-term contracts are also self-fulfilling when it comes to growth. Once we're in the equation with the, with the clients long term, we're able to grow the sales, not only just the margin. The ability to offer additional services, the ability to modify the units, to meet the clients' increasing demands for enhanced service, enhanced passenger journey, experience, et cetera, et cetera. Those contracts also bring new sales opportunities.
That's what we're seeing in terms of our backlog, which has, say, been stretched back over 20 years, where we see both the margins improving and the sales.
Thank you, Matt.
Final question relates to signaling. You've indicated, you know, a high single digit level of profitability. When we review your competitors in the industry, they've achieved mid-teens or higher levels of profitability. You target double digit margins. Why not mid-teens and or some higher ambition? How far could the profitability in signaling really go? Thank you.
The observation you're making on competitors meeting mid-teens profit levels relates to some competitors, not all competitors. Some of our well-known competitors reach profit levels which are much lesser than that, and I'm thinking of signaling pure players.
However, if we talk about this competitor that goes into the mid-teens, they have a presence on the German market, in size, in history, in installed base, which is such that we believe that they can benefit from scale effects in such a way that they can deliver very significant profit levels in that market specifically. That's one of the reasons why we want to become a home player in Germany, not only because of the size, but because we believe that there is a role for Alstom to play as well in terms of margin mix improvement.
Thank you very much.
In the midterm, while we are doing that, there is no reason why we should not match the profitability of Siemens, huh, to make it clear. Thank you. Are there other questions?
Yes, sir. We'll take our next question from Jonathan Day of HSBC. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your comment about the amount of work that's required in the supply chain to get to best in class. That's my first question. Perhaps you could also comment on the risk management processes in the systems business in order to manage those, the longer term contracts in the systems businesses. Thank you.
I think I will hand over to Danny on this question on supply chain. Thank you, Danny.
Thank you. Thanks, Jonathan. I did make the comment that, you know, meeting the requirements of a growth and with all the complexity in the supply chain that we've had over the years as I mentioned in the enterprise risk, certainly we've got to improve overall. When I said best in class, you know, our on-time delivery performance from suppliers, some of the quality snags, it's a continuous battle. You know, the comment of best in class is we should not be happy until we can get our suppliers delivering on time 100% what we want. That's not the case today, but, you know, I've been in many industries. It is the endless journey.
My comment about best in class is what we need to fulfill Jeff's business and for Benjamin's rolling stock business, we need all of our suppliers to have better capability, better capacity, be a little bit more agile to schedule changes, and be able to give us the quality that we deserve, that we ask for, that we pay for on time. It's not always the case, but over the last 24 months, we've made some great strides in terms of improving overall supplier performance. Maybe Jonathan, unless Henri, you heard the risk management of systems. Could you clarify?
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Could you just clarify one more time, Jonathan, what risk from a systems perspective were you pointing towards?
I was just thinking about the sort of longer term risk, you know, associated with some of those contracts. I mean, typically, when you look at some, say, for example, big construction contracts, I mean, often people can take those on, they tend to then sort of have problems further down the line. I was just wondering what kind of review processes you have in place to maintain profitability and protect profitability in that systems business?
Clarifying, Jonathan. Jeff, over to you.
I'll take this one. In terms of a process for assessing the risk profile, it's exactly the same process as any other aspects of the business. What we're trying to do is to set up the proper partnership models to make sure that the risk allocation in the execution of those projects is done in such a way that risks are in the responsibility of the stakeholders who can manage the execution. Typically, when we work in a consortium with a civil work partner, it's under arrangements that are such that civil work risk is on the civil work partner and the electromechanical package risk is on our side.
There are also commercial arrangements with customers sometimes, in some environment, like an alliance model, for instance, that makes sure that all stakeholders, including our customers, have the same purpose of executing the project with the risks under the right level of control.
I under control consider that systems projects or the systems approach is sometimes better for us to manage the overall risks because most of the risks are in the interfaces between the value subsystems. When we manage all the subsystems on our own, we manage the interfaces as well. Sometimes issues that can emerge from holding stock can be offset, so to speak, by dealing with the signaling aspect in a different manner, for instance.
That's one of the value proposal we bring to our customers when we promote the idea of them procuring their new railway system as a system package. I hope that answers your question.
Yeah. Thank you. Jeff. Thank you. Maybe we should take the last question. I think there's one last question.
Yes, sir. We do have one question left in the queue. The other person's name is Guillermo Peigneux-Lojo of UBS. Please go ahead, sir.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I guess it's a little bit of a question regarding order potential growth, which obviously, as you highlighted, you still have a lot of potential on the market. Not only continues to be growing, but your participation in the market now is larger. Therefore, you know, one could depict that the commercial success of Alstom will continue in 2024 and beyond. Therefore, your order intake potentially growing. My question is, you know, it seems to be the case that orders continue to grow at a faster pace than revenues.
I was wondering, obviously, if, you know, having a decade of expanding backlogs from 3 years -4 years to around about 5.3 as you are right now, you know, how can Alstom, you know, identify the bottlenecks to release more of the, of the backlog as we go forward and therefore, you know, being able to, you know, diminish that 5-year delivery times into maybe a more, much more comprehensive, delivery times for the industry or whether this is just a bottleneck that will not be, you know, solved, so to say. I basically, is 5% growth as much as the industry can get being you the leader of the industry? Through efficiencies rather than capacity additions, can you deliver more?
No. Okay. Thank you very much. As a global statement first, it's not abnormal that our backlog is growing as we are moving towards service. As Matt has said, we are increasing our share of long-term service agreement, and therefore, the duration of our backlog is expanding with time. Having said that, it's true, and that was back to the question addressed by Benjamin, that we need to improve our capacity in holding stock. I would say we have to improve our efficiency to deliver faster our cars in order to have a better rotation of our assets and better utilization of our assets. I don't see today any bottlenecks. I think we have time to unlock the bottlenecks. We need to increase some of our capacity.
The bottlenecks would be, by the way, both in engineering and manufacturing. We need to grow both engineering and manufacturing. In both cases, there are ways to improve the efficiency in engineering by standardization and in industry by having a more standard and I would say standard lines, if I may say, and automatization as well of our lines. For example, in Barcelona, we have now a line which is fully automated. There are a lot of ways to unlock these capacity constraints. Okay. Thank you, thank you, everybody. I think, thank you for this second Q&A sessions after this morning. Just as a global wrap-up, sir, thank you to my colleagues for being here this afternoon.
Just as a global wrap up, I just want to confirm that as you have seen, we are in strong markets. There is no slowdown in the market whatsoever. On the contrary, we see a lot of signs of investments from everywhere on all continents. We had a very, very important year this year in Alstom to stabilize our portfolio. Even though we had to face some headwinds, I think we have mitigated this headwind extremely efficiently, and we have improved globally our backlog quality and our backlog margin.
We are now up and running, as you have said, and it was a question of Gail, I think we are up and running and able to increase our R&D efforts, able to increase our innovations effort, which is, as Wally said, the ultimate goal of this merger is, one, to have a global reach in terms of geographies and in terms of product, two, of course, to come with best-in-class technology.
Having said that, you will not be surprised we are totally committed to deliver our guidance and our objectives, whether they are for next year, as we have detailed them, 6% adjusted EBIT and significantly positive free cash flow, as well as in the long-term ones from 8%-10% of adjusted EBIT and 80% cash flow conversion. Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a nice day, everybody, and see you soon. Thanks a lot.