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CMD 2019
Jun 24, 2019
So good morning, everybody. Welcome to Alstom Capital Market Day. I think the last one was around 3 years ago. So it's a pleasure to have you all in Paris today. So we have a full day of meeting together.
So we have to start with a disclaimer. But after that, so the agenda of the day. So we start I will start by a general overview of where we stand today and our market perspective as well as our strategy. Then Laurent will present to you the finance part. Thierry Best, with us today in charge of the operations, we present to you the efficiency.
And Ling, who is in charge of the full Asia Pacific region, will present to you a small snapshot on our activities in India. Then we'll have a questions and answer session at the end of the morning, then the lunch break classically. And then this afternoon, we'll reconvene Jean Francois Bodoin will make a snapshot on signaling activities, which you will see will be key to our future plan. Bernd, with us, will do a snapshot on services as well, a key part of our future plan. And Marc Granger, who is in charge of strategy, will give you a few highlights on our innovation.
And then we have another Q and A session, and we'll make some closing remarks. So you have a few colleagues from the Committee of Assam who are in the room in addition to the one I've just presented. I can see Gianluca who is in charge of Europe there and Jerome who is in charge of North America. As you know, we are organized by region. And Jean Baptiste is there.
Where is Jean Baptiste? Jean Baptiste is in terms of France. Of course, you are not allowed to ask them any question. They are just here for them. So here they are.
You have all the pictures of the different presenters of today, the speakers of today. So let's get started. Of course, I'm sure that you all came today to hear about our future. And most of the day will be dedicated to our future and how we are going to achieve our new plan. Having said that, I think it was worth spending 1 or 2 minutes on where we stand today and the results of our previous strategy.
So I have a few slides on this topic. So as you may remember, and this was in March 2016, when we launched actually, when we launched externally our 2020 strategy because inside that storm, at the time, we were all part of the global group, so it was not publicly disclosed. But inside Assam, this 2020 strategy has been actually launched in 2014, 2015. So the idea behind 2020 strategy was very simple. We had 5 pillars, but the idea behind was the fact that our markets were globalizing and we needed to become global ourselves.
What does it mean? It means that not only we had to be present commercially on all continents, but we wanted also to invest physically on these continents. So to have manufacturing capabilities, engineering capabilities, project management capabilities on all the continents, all the regions. And this was the main theme of our plan. And of course, this had to be accompanied by a number of innovations.
The first one was to extend our range of solutions because to go on all these new markets, we had to develop our turnkey solutions, turnkey capabilities. We had also to renew our rolling stock platforms, which were not necessarily competitive enough in order to address all the markets worldwide. We had to innovate as well in terms of more fundamental research and development in order to combine all the needs for the digitalization of our markets, for the sustainability of our markets. So as you know, we have launched a number of innovation. And of course, this was to be done while serving our customers, while delivering our backlog at the time.
So we did that. And actually, it worked. It worked pretty well, to be fair. And we achieved our main goals of this 2020 strategy. 1st, as I said, the main the first pillar of this strategy was a geographical pillar.
And as you can see on the slide, we were indeed, at the end of the plan, number 1 or number 2 on all the main regions. And we are today the most global player. Europe took time to take off. We had a slowdown in France, and now we are recovering quite fast. But overall, we have grown by more than 5% per year, which is to be compared with market growth of 2.3.
So very regular growth, which was again the first pillar of our plan, which has totally brought its roots. But as I said, this was the goal which was achieved. The means behind this goal is definitely to enlarge our capabilities, enlarge physically our capabilities. And I think it's fair to say that we are today, as I said, the most global company, the most multiregional company in the transport world with the largest number of employees outside what we can call domestic markets or domestic countries. And you see here with a huge growth of activities outside Europe, Europe representing now more or less a little bit better than 50% of our employees, but we are significantly present in the Americas, in Asia Pacific and in the Middle East.
As I said, we have created hubs in order to execute our contracts, in order to manufacture our trends. And you can see here some example of these hubs In the U. S, where we are invested quite easily, notably for the various big train, in Brazil, where we have a new factory in Taobate, coming from a smaller factory in Sao Paulo. We have a new factory in South Africa. We have a new factory in India.
And I could have also other factory in Kazakhstan. And these factories and I'm sometimes asked, but is it only due to localization? And will localization continue? The answer is yes, localization will continue. But the main difference between what we have done in the past and what we are going to do in the future is that these factories are really hubs to serve their regions, while tomorrow, if we are to localize somewhere, we'll do it only for the contract which is concerned because we don't need new hubs.
I mean once you have covered the world, you don't need new hubs once you have enough hubs. But sometimes, you are asked to localize, and that we will do, but really with dedicated means, focused means in order to address a specific project. In addition to the hubs, we have created 2, what we call, best shoring, so 2 important resource pool for the competitive and the volume of our business. 1 is India, of course, and I'm not going to go into the details because Lynn will make you a complete presentation on India. And the second one is Poland, which is playing within the European region an increasingly important role.
As you know, this kind of expansion, because we are in a world which requires partnership, which requires to team up with local authorities. So this kind of expansion has to be also accompanied by new partnerships or by partnerships. We have put on the slide a few of the most important ones. Transmars Holdings in Russia, the largest rail manufacturer in Russia. Cascoo, signaling in China.
Ghibela in South Africa or Indian Railways in India for the locomotives. Extremely important to be flexible enough to adapt to your footprint, to adapt your organization, your structure to the local needs. So again, we cannot imagine that this growth outside Europe has come without any investment. This has come with fundamental investment, a lot of investment, both in terms of capabilities and in terms of physical capacities. In terms of solutions, a huge effort has been done to renew completely our platforms, to rebalance our portfolio in order to increase the turnkey capabilities, in order to increase the service capabilities and in order, of course, to increase the signaling capabilities as well, even though, as you will see, I think we are going to boost much more both service and signaling in the future.
In terms of investment and R and D investment, we had to renew our platforms. This was and this is still, I have to say, a very, very significant effort. When you launch a new platform like a Tramway platform, like a Metro platform, it requires 2 I would say both huge investment at the beginning and then, of course, an investment again during the first projects because the first projects are always more complex to deliver when you have new platforms. And we have managed during this period not only to renew our platform, but also to deliver our projects to the satisfaction of our customer. As you will see, investment will
continue in the future.
But of course, these platforms have a duration which are quite long, 10, So as said, this has I mean, it's both a consequence and, I would say, necessity. This has been deployed with a continuous improvement of operational excellence. In terms of on time delivery, which is the most important indicator, which has improved in the last year, percent or plus 15 points to be clear. In terms of cost of spend quantity, which has also decreased, And we have seen year after year the margin, which is included in our order intake, increasing year after year, year after year. And this came together with an improvement of the way we were executing our contracts within our backlog, as being illustrated by the chart.
So each year, we have improved the mix of the margin within the backlog. So you see you have not only the new contracts, which have better margin, but within the backlog, the margin is improving. This expansion has also been done with tight control of S and A, of the structural cost. And therefore, we have managed to take advantage of the growth in order to leverage this growth to improve our profitability going forward. This I would say that this is both as I said, this is both a consequence of our actions.
But very clearly, this is as well an enabling factor of these actions. If we don't execute properly our projects, if we are not entirely focused on our projects, then we are not in a position to implement our strategy. This goes together. We cannot transform the company if we are not properly executing our projects. That's extremely important, and that's also key for the future.
So in a snapshot, 2020 was largely a success. We have today the largest backlog in the industry. And this largest backlog has been fueled by the geographical expansion has been also fueled by the expansion of service long term maintenance contract. We have grown the fastest in the industry in the meantime. We have increased significantly our profitability, and we have recovered in terms of free cash flow.
Although, as some of you may say, we can do better in that perspective. So now where do we stand and what are the future? A few elements on the market. You all know that. My message is that's very simple message.
Drivers are not changing, but the market is better every day. So it's I was with the Railway Manufacturer Association of Europe a few days ago, And some people said that the market has never been as good as it is today. And it's simply because we have huge tailwinds. Of course, the drivers will not change. We still have economic growth, which is here.
Still the funding, the governmental funding, it may lack in 1 or 2 regions, as I said, in Middle East, in Latin America. We may have some issue of financing. But in the main, the priority remains rail transportation and the ability of fund is there. Urbanization is, of course, a key trend, as you know, but it's accelerating Quite symbolically, I think Shanghai Metro has reached €10,000,000 per day of passenger, which is a huge number. But it shows that if all cities in the world have to achieve this kind of number, The growth is really in front of us.
But the number one indicator, which is now, I would say, overwhelming is a sustainable development. We are if you compare 2020 with when we launched 2020 and the situation now, we had an acceleration of environmental concerns in the world, which is incredible. This is day after day. We become used to it. This, of course, for in Europe for the European election, you've seen that, but we become used to it very recently.
Who could imagine that you had such a public debate on airplanes? In the last months, you had a lot of debates on whether we should forbid domestic flights in Europe. This could not be imagined only a few years ago. So this is pushing, pushing all investment in favor of electrical mobility. And of course, the most electrical mobility today is definitely rail.
You see that on the chart. So very regular growth of ridership, urban plus 5% per year. I mean there are very few industries, very few sectors which can benefit from such regular and you said it's not cyclical, regular growth of the underlying demand. Actually, it's not a market which is driven by the demand. The demand is untapped and the demand is infinite.
If you put a new line, if you put a new metro, it's immediately full. 2 weeks ago, and this is quite symbolic, and maybe we'll come back, Ling will explain that later on, but we have delivered the Sine Metro. And Sine Metro is extremely symbolic for a number of reasons because it's the first metro which has been delivered by Alstom entirely from India, manufacturing from India, signaling from India, system from India, everything from India. But it's not because of that, that I'm quoting Cine Metro. I'm saying that because in 2 weeks, you had 1,000,000 passenger in the Cine Metro, in 2 weeks.
And this illustrates the fact that it's not a question of whether there is some demand or not demand. It's a question that people are waiting everywhere in the world that new lines are coming. This, by the way, puts a huge pressure on us, which is good, which is the fact that now all public authorities are scrutinizing extremely closely all what we are doing, of course, because they need to answer to this basic demand. Urban but as well mainline. And this is also one thing which had changed over the last years.
There was 5 years ago, I mean, for particularly in France but in other countries as well, you had a kind of trend debate on whether it was too costly, whether what was the future of trend. And this is not at all the case anymore. If you look at very high speed all across Europe, ridership is increasing a lot. Not only we know that in France, but it's true in Italy, it's true in Germany and so forth. So it's a really important trend.
So of course, these are the fundamental drivers. So it translates, by definition, into a growing market. The market is estimated to grow around 3% per year in all regions with 2 small caveat, as I said, Latin America and Middle East Africa, which is which are growing a little bit more slowly. Even though we are still a lot of projects, but I expect some of these projects to be delayed. But Asia Pacific still growing a lot.
Europe, Europe, very important. And I think we should invest a lot in Europe. There are a lot of huge market in Europe and North America discovering urban transportation. In terms of solutions, you can see here that all the activities are growing. As I said, I'm challenging the estimated growth of Turnkey because I know that some of the large projects in Middle East Africa will be delayed at the end of the day.
So in our plan, we don't count on the rebound of this system project in Middle East in such a short period. Another trend which is accelerating, even though it has taken a lot of time, which is the diversity of our customer because of the deregulation, because of the liberalization. So from traditional customers, as you can see, the SNCF, RZD, TCBD in Turkey are on track in the U. S, we are now a much larger variety of customers, some of them being, by the way, affiliate of the first one, but acting more as private customers in the world. And therefore, these customers are becoming more and more partners.
They are becoming partners and they want to be with us not only at the inception of the projects, but during the lifetime of the rolling stock during the lifetime of their systems. They are interested by the total cost of ownership. They are demanding services. And they are more if you take fixed trend as it's been announced to come to France, these guys, they don't even want to own the rolling stock as they do in buses. So which will push for new types of business models such as paper use, mobility as a service and things like that.
One thing which is very characteristic of that is our partnership, for example, with NTV in Italy where we are very close with 1 each other. You have to see that actually operators are less and less our customers. The operators this movement where transport is becoming increasingly important for any public authorities has led a lot of public authorities in the world to take more power on this transportation agenda. And you see that everywhere in the world. And for those of you in Paris, for example, in the France Mobility is gaining a lot of importance.
And at the same and this is true in Riyadh, this is true in Singapore, this is true everywhere in the world. And the operators are becoming more partners rather than customers for us. So we team up with them in order to serve ultimately the final customer, which of course are the passengers, but these passengers are represented by the public authorities rather than by the operators. And this opens up, of course, a large variety of new services that we can bring to the market. Technology.
So environment to illustrate my point on the DSL band, mean, it's I was discussing that with Europe recently. Everybody has been surprised by the speed of this environmental concern, in particular against the diesel. You know that a lot of bus manufacturers have invested 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 to develop new diesel engines in order to match and to be compliant with what they call Eurocap 6, which is a new norms of emission. This has they will never sell 1 bus like that because today, all cities will buy electrical buses. And this was absolutely not foreseen.
So you see that the societal and the people and the society is moving much faster than the norms actually. And it's actually the general environment, the people which are pushing as we have seen all train manufacture all operators to set some deadlines to take out all diesel trains from their network. Nobody has asked them to do so. There was no law, no regulation, but it's just the general public, which is asking that. And this is accelerating the move.
So of course, we have 2 emerging technologies to replace the diesel trends, the hydrogen. And as you know, Alstom has developed the 1st manufacturer to develop a train. And the batteries, the 2 of their own, I would say, zones of fractions, batteries for short either very dense or very short legs and the hydrogen for longer legs. This mobility change comes with a huge impact of the digital technology. Why?
Not only because I would say it's trendy to have digital technology, but because if you want to implement a complete sustainable mobility, you need to coordinate the different modes of transportation. You need to make sure that the metro systems are working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And for that, you need to increase your usage of digital technology in order to connect your trends to make some predictive maintenance, to make sure that you are real time totally aware of what's happening in the trends. You want to work towards autonomous trends in order to be more flexible in the operations. Shared mobility, meaning that you need to move people in the different type of mobility.
You need to improve the flow of people in the city. This is what we call a multimodal flow. And of course, you need to communicate between the infrastructure and the vehicles. So all that comes with a number of different technologies. And that's I think Mark will come more in the detail on this kind of technology that we are going to use in the future.
In a nutshell, to describe what's happening, you had different silos in the past between the electrical share mobility, which was the rail and the polluting individual mobility, which was the car. And now we have something which is coordinating both mobilities, which we call the new mobility. And both, I mean, if you this slide can be shown not only by us, transportation, rail transportation, but I'm sure that the car industry is sharing with you exactly the same trend. And it happens that rail mobility is by far the most advanced type of mobility in that direction. It's safe.
It's sustainable, already electrified. It's already automated, not yet autonomous, completely autonomous in an open network, but already automated, particularly for metros. And it knows how to address a very complex system. So basically, we have where we are. We have achieved our 2020 strategy.
We have a lot of tailwinds in coming from the market. We are extremely well placed as a company, but also as a sector in this new mobility. So now we need to write the new chapter of Alstom history. So first, what we want to be, we want to be we are already global. So that's where we are, and that was the result again of the 2020 strategy.
But we want to be seen as the most innovative player for sustainable and smart mobility. You could say it goes it's obvious, but don't forget that 10 years ago, a little bit more than 10 years ago, we were breaking the world record in terms of speed. And here, there is no reference to speed. We are not saying that we want to be the fastest transportation company. It's what we want to focus on is to move to the mobility transition.
Maybe there will be as there is energy transition, there is a mobility transition, we want to be the leading player of this mobility transition, both in terms of sustainability and smart mobility. So we have defined the branding, what we call mobility by nature for Alstom. I don't know if you have the small movies coming or not. We have a small
movie, actually a small movie.
Just to make a So this is the new branding of Fasten. And of course, as you can see, the idea is really to say basically 2 things. The first one is that we are a pure mobility player. So we want to be in the mobility. This is our DNA.
This is and so by nature in that sense, We are and this is a new asset, but now we're coming from a few years. But we are not technology for being technology. The idea is to provide, again, sustainable mobility and this maybe this play on words with this by nature. And this is what will represent Alstom in the future. We have launched a new plan.
We need always to encapsulate all our actions in a plan in order for them to be implemented. And we have 3 pillars of these new plans on growth, innovation and efficiency. The difference with 2020 is, again, growth will not be based upon kind of geographical expansion, which was the heart of 2020. Now we are a global company. The idea is to partner more and more with our customers, with the operators in order to extend the value that we are bringing to them.
And this can be illustrated by service, and this will be illustrated by service. This can be illustrated by digital functions, and Jeff will present the signaling part. This also can be illustrated by the enrichment of our platforms. In Rolling Stock, instead of changing our platform, we're going to enrich this platform in order to serve better our customers. Innovation, as I said, I'll come back to that, dedicated on green and digital, extremely important.
And efficiency, we need to deliver efficiently our backlog. We have, as I said, the record backlog in the industry. We need to deliver it. Now that we have a vast network of footprint, we need to manage it efficiently. And we have to recognize that there is a huge potential there because we have been extremely fast in growing.
And when you are growing fast, by definition, you have sites which are lacking maturity. The dialogue is not perfect. A lot of things to be improved. And this will be improved, thanks to the huge utilization of digital technologies. We have also changed a little bit our values for agile, inclusive and responsible because we believe that this is the heart of Aston where we need inclusive is kind of a classical work today, but we want to be inclusive inside because our products have to be inclusive as well.
When we want to be in a sustainable business, we believe that it's not only pure environment, it's also to provide to all our passengers the possibility to use our products. So a few I will go fast because then this will be again detailed to you later on in the day. On services, we want to become the undisputed leader. We are already the leader in size. We want to grow in terms of innovation of new services that we can bring.
In terms of partnership, as I said, long term partnership, predictive maintenance. Again, this will be explained to you. In signaling, I think that we have invested a lot, but we still this is an area where we still need to renew some of our platforms, in particular, on Mainline in order to gain some leadership there and rolling stock. As I said, the idea is not to redevelop completely on your new platform, but it's to enrich them in order to better serve the customers that we are already serving or to address new markets. So overall, we want to be number 1 or number 2 in our market theoretically as we are today, but also by product line, by activities everywhere in the world.
So services, again, a market which is untapped today, largely untapped, 1, because lots of operators are doing their services themselves and the liberalization will change that And 2, because as operators are asked by the public authorities to be even more efficient, again, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and so forth. There are lots of things that we need to bring to the market in order to allow this new efficiency. The particularly in Europe, the installed base is quite old, and we need to refurbish to retraction. And this is also the green service because a lot of old trends, DSL trends will have to be renovated in order to comply with the new environmental concern. Today, we have a very good position, more than 60,000 vehicles, only onefive of that as a service contract.
So a lot of, I guess, a lot of potential. We are starting to see a lot of good stories of subcontracting. And as you can see on the slide, we have grown quite significantly over the last year in sales, but there is also a time lag between orders and sales. So we are growing even faster in orders, and the growth in sales will cover the next 10, 15 years when you take a contract in Riyadh. It's a 20 years contract, so it's really a very, very long backlog that we have.
Signaling. I think here as well, lots of potential in Signaling. You have to distinguish maybe, like, 2 markets. There is the ERTMS market, the European Mainline market, which is a very large market, as you can see, which is gaining momentum. Really, the ETCS, which is the RCMS deployment, is gaining a lot of momentum, project by project, but also country by country.
And our firm happens to be very good in complex project management. So this is playing a key role in the future, but we need to invest in order to be more efficient, and Jeff will come back to that. In urban, we are by far the most global player. We have the largest installed base. We are number 1 in China and number 1 in India, which is which are obviously the 2 main markets for urban.
We need to invest. We have invested a lot in terms of new platform here. And we have, I think, with Fluance, which is our new urban platform, we have the best in class the world class platform for the future. NAM Freight, we are in freight and mining. This is a more smaller market, but which is quite promising, not only in North America but in the rest of the world.
Rolling stock. As I said, we are number 1 in as a global player today in rolling stock. We have today, 50% of our orders are coming from the new platforms. So we are still not at the end of that, but we have reached significant tipping points, if I can say. We have already €1,800,000,000 for our new regional trains contract, €300,000,000 for the trams, €1,200,000,000 for the metros and €4,000,000,000 for our new VASP.
So the new platforms are really now there. They need to mature. And a lot of optimization that we can do with these new platforms, and this will drive not only our growth but of our profitability going forward. We have to embrace and to embark with the maintenance. So we do design for maintainability.
We need to improve the energy consumption of all these new platforms and, of course, to integrate all digital technology as we do with, for example, with Nomad, which is a small acquisition that we did to connect our trends with the brand. So innovation, AskTomy is quite known for its innovation capabilities. I'm not going back to the 10 years ago with world record world speed record, but also long ago with the first power electronics in driving, in drive controls and so forth. But very recently, we have invested in a new bus or a vehicle which is halfway between the bus and the tram, a new the hydrogen train, which again has been the landmark launch of last year in terms of new rolling stock. We have pioneered the predictive maintenance with HEALTHHUB.
We have pioneered the energy optimization of systems with ESOP to be able to capture all the energy, the braking energy notably. And we have pioneered the driverless metro more than 20 years ago now. So in the future, we have 2 clear priorities. As I said, green mobility and smart mobility. Green mobility is green traction to optimize our traction capabilities because this is where the battle of the consumption is, but also to use new types of energy such as hydrogen, batteries.
Electromobility, as we know that roads are becoming more and more electrical, and that's our investment in buses, but that's also investment in electrification of roads. And I would say the green processes inside the company in order to optimize or to minimize our energy consumption, to minimize our waste different sites. So extremely important. We believe that as time goes, our customers will not be only interested by the environmental performance of our products, but they will also be interested by the environmental performance of our sites, of our engineering on the way and how much CO2, I would say, are emitted, for example, through the production of their products. 2nd topic, smart mobility to optimize the flow within our systems.
So I would say beyond the classical signaling systems, you need also to optimize the flow of the people because it's not signaling. The first goal of signaling is, of course, safety, but you have a second goal, which is efficiency. And we need to add this efficiency at the level of the metro system, for example, but also at the level of the city. You need to connect the train and see the data driven rail mobility. And of course, autonomous train is the next frontier.
We have automated metro, but we have not yet automated trams or automated trends on the open network. This is the next frontier. Efficiency, Thierry will say much more on that. We have reached our margin goal of 7% through sourcing cost reductions, through manufacturing in what we call best cost countries, so particularly in India, particularly in Poland, but also in Latin America, in South Africa, control of our project execution and our cost, and we had a change in mix. The next phase will be a little bit different.
Again, the change in mix will have not as an impact as in the previous plan. Service will grow, and this will obviously improve the mix because service has a better margin mix. However, we have improved quite a lot rolling stock. So now the difference between rolling stock and the rest of the activities is not so wide, and therefore, the mix impact plays a smaller role. So the new levers will be clearly the optimization.
It will be more a lever of efficiency and optimization, of stabilization rather than expansion. And this optimization and destabilization will be allowed through the digital transformation of the company. But of course, we need to continuously execute our project properly because if we don't do that, then not only we are not going to deliver the appropriate margin, but also we are not in a position, as I said, to transform the group. There are some, I would say, what we call natural drivers. So there are some mechanical impact as we are now beyond the first contracts of our new platforms as we are reaching the 2nd contract, the 3rd contract, the 4th contract.
Of course, the new platforms are getting maturity, and they become more competitive. As I said, sustainability is extremely important for us. So we have a few targets which are dedicated to that to enable the decarbonization of the mobility, to care for our people. We continue to decrease our, I would say, our accident rates in order to create a positive impact on society. It's important for us, Alstom, again, as you have seen in our brand, is not only a tech company.
We are here to improve our communities, and we are measuring that and to develop not only in Alstom but in our supply chain all these values. So in a nutshell, here is our main financial targets, as you can see, continue to grow. But as you have understood, not through the same levers. We are growing by improving and increasing the value that we are bringing to our customers, one customer by one customer instead of having a geographical growth. We want to increase our adjusted EBIT margin to around 9%.
So this is a significant increase, which also will rely mostly on the own efficiency gain, own optimization of our footprint as well as some mix impact, but to a lesser extent. And of course, we want to reach a sustainable level of free cash flow generation, be fueled as well by the decrease of our capital expenditure, as will be explained to you, by Laurent and a sustainable shareholder return. It was in the past, it was useless to define a dividend policy as our net income was polluted, if I may say, by the results of the joint ventures with General Electric. Starting this year, we'll have a pure net income. So it's I think it's worth defining a dividend policy.
So without further ado, I would say now I will hand over to thank you very much, and I will hand over to Laurent. And again, there will be a Q and A session at the end of the morning, so you spare all your questions for Laurent. Thanks a lot.
So good morning, everyone. Very pleased to be with you to guide you on our Alstom in Motion financial framework. I shared with you all after almost a year, Henri, with you in Alstom. Quite an exciting year, an interesting year, I have to say, with my colleagues from the Excom here in the room. So maybe I'll start with a quick wrap up on the financial achievement of the last 4 years, Starting definitely by our backlog, which is industry leading backlog, EUR 40,000,000,000 this is definitively for us a major asset.
On the sales side, as Henri said, we have been growing by more than 5% per year, reaching our target of €8,000,000,000 a year in advance versus our 2020 plan. Related to the adjusted EBIT, we have uplifted our profit from 5.3% to 7.1% as well reaching our 7% target a year in advance, which is a remarkable achievement. On the cash side, we've been growing steadily over the last 2, 3 years despite the transformation CapEx for our globalization of our companies and as well our financing cost. So what are the recipe of this margin uplift? Number 1 is operational excellence.
And Thierry will come back on that. On competitiveness, on sourcing, globalization and project execution of our new product generation. On mix, we have been moving from to 60% in terms of signaling, services and systems and benefited as well on the volume impact net of the pricing evolution. So as you see, altogether, very solid growth in terms of profitability and sales and this faster than the initial target. So what is the real foundation of this performance?
So it is very simple. It lies in tenders, execution and project performance. We are executing as we speak a portfolio of 500 main projects. And on a yearly basis, we are executing more than 300 large tenders on a yearly basis on all the regions. On tenders, we have increased steadily our gross margin and order intake in the last 4 years, thanks to our new product generation, but as well selectivity and I have to say quite precise market pricing analysis that we are using on a daily basis.
On project execution, we manage a positive evolution of our margin at completion at portfolio level since 8 semesters. And this is what you show here, our best internal KPI for project stability and performance. Both tenders and projects, I want to insist on that, is our key performance backbone in Alstom. And this is, I can tell you, our daily management focus. Beyond project, we are expanding our reach with joint ventures and partnership.
So with the Chinese market, with Cascaux, very successful companies working operationally hand in hand with our signaling business as well on TMH, which allows us to access the Russian market. TMH is today €4,000,000,000 plus companies and doing 80% of market share after the merge with LocoTech Services Companies. We developed as well to be agile and flexible close to our customers, JVs and partnership related to project in Dibella, South Africa, Madepura in India or in Kazakhstan. And as well, developing on partnership on innovation, Marc will comment on that, with easy mile autonomous vehicle or nomad for passenger connectivities. All of this is translating into a share of net income from joint ventures at €89,000,000 in 2018 2019 with around €30 ish,000 positive one off from TMH and 7.11 share in equity.
So let's move to the working capital evolution in the last years. So we have been able to manage a stable down payment position, as you see, supported by number 1, obviously, our commercial momentum, but as well a stabilizing trend on the tender condition. Altogether, we have been able to have the working capital stable in the range of plus or minus €100,000,000 and remains negative at minus 20 percent of sales, thanks to our business model, which is based on down payment and progress payments. So let's to wrap up on the last 4 years. In terms of net cash, as you know, our Board has been deciding back in May propose a dividend of €5,500,000 per share for 20 eighteentwenty 19.
This will leave us with, I would say, a robust net cash position of €1,100,000,000 to support our business growth and future investments. A technical accounting point for the accounting expert. We are implementing IFRS 16 as of 1st April 2019, and we are expecting an accounting net cash impact of €400,000,000 to €500,000,000 So to wrap up on the last 4 years and on the 2020 plan, 2 key points. Number 1, very solid financial performance achieved ahead of our 2020 target and second, as you see, a very solid balance sheet. So let's move to Alstom in Motion, our new plan.
First, I would like to share with you that this plan, lead as well by Marc and Julie, has been designed and worked out by a team of 200 people in Alstom, which means that this plan is grounded into the companies. And this is critical when it comes to the financial framework of Alstom in Motion. Our first clusters will be defining and designing our growth path related to the sales performance. The second one will be focusing on future growth and competitive edge with disciplined and selective investment. And third one on efficiency cluster, Thierry will come back on that, will drive profit and cash generation.
All what I will be explaining will be based, of course, on the latest IFRS standard 2015 in particular. So up to the sales now. We are targeting an increase of 5% year on year stable of sales sustainably above market conditions. Our first asset is definitively our backlog, which is allowing to secure €16,500,000,000 to €17,500,000,000 of sales in the next 3 years. We'll be as well prioritizing our growth on high value segments like signaling and services, targeting 40% of these activities in 2022, 2023, while we are building and continue to build on our leadership position on rolling stock and systems.
2019 2020 will be softer in terms of sales growth with activities reduction on Large Middle East System project like Dubai 2020, which is obviously to be completed before October 2020 and the Unibail Style exhibition, but Riyadh as well, which were last year at the peak of activities. Overall, we confirm our sales long term growth based on backlog execution and positive market momentum. So zooming on signaling, I will be fast. Jean Francois will guide you on this, this afternoon. Our clear ambition is to gain leadership on this market, accelerated momentum on European market on the Mainline, globally on the urban market, but as well benefiting from our installed base to develop services.
We'll be as well leveraging our Bangalore assets. We have, as we speak, 12.50 engineers in signaling. We are targeting to go to up to 2,000 people. And I was there a few weeks ago. I was really impressed by the skills, competencies and as well as the can do attitude of our team in India.
Margin wise, on signaling, we are targeting to move with Jean Francois from high single digit to low double digit in the midterm. On services, we want to harvest and accelerate our clear leadership. We are benefiting, and this is a key asset, of a huge backlog €13,000,000,000 But beside that, the quality of the backlog is reference customer commitment for 20 plus years for a number of contracts. From there, we'll be expanding on model our own parts, on long term performance services contract and on green modernization. We'll be as well using digital capabilities to optimize our performance contracts.
Just for me to give you a sense on the new very high speed train generation, we'll be able to measure 2,500 parameters, 10 times per second to optimize the operation of the train. These activities, to be honest, tick all the box. This is why as CFO, I like it so much. Low capital intensities, high margin in the mid teens, low risk and even more important customer intimacy. In practical terms, this means that we are supporting our customers in their key operation, which is a critical part for the next standards to come.
So on to Systems. We are definitely at the peak of activities with our key major projects, which will be completed in the next 2 or 3 years. Moving forward, we see opportunities in Middle East and Latin America. But with, I would say, the geopolitical constraints, this probably will take time and overall a decrease. On the rolling stock, we see overall an extremely positive momentum.
First, thanks to our very strong and long backlog, but as well with an excellent market traction in Europe, in North America and in Asia. The Grand Paris project is a flagship example around us here in Paris, but there is example in India, Australia and the U. S. In terms of margin, we are expecting to increase from mid single digit to high single digit in the midterm, benefiting from our best cost countries setup in particular. So let's move to innovation.
Our clear target is to maintain our R and D capacity investment, keeping our R and D over sales stable. This will give us innovation firepower to invest on green mobility, signaling and smart mobility, while we continue the development and finalize our development on the very high speed train. Related to the other platform, rolling stock platform, as Henri said, we will not invest into a new family generation. We'll have the harvest on our current families and as well built on our newest innovation, the Ebus Aptis and the hydrogen train. I think that we can collectively be very proud of this.
As you know, we are the 1st and the only one on the market to offer this technology. Related to margin, we are targeting to boost our profit to benchmark level from 7.5 percent to 9%. So first, the definition subjects to explain the 7.5%. So in line with our peers, we'll be including as of 20 nineteentwenty twenty, the Cascaux share of net income in our adjusted EBIT to reflect, as I explained, the strong operational link between Casco and our Signalling business, and this was an impact of 0.4% pro form a in 2018 2019. So what are the drivers to reach this 9% goal?
Number 1, volume, where we'll be benefiting from the increase and the continuous overhead cost management, while we do not expect changes in the pricing evolution. Mix will be benefiting from the higher Signalling and Services margin and finally, operational performance benefiting from our best cost countries footprint and sourcing targeting around 60% with what I call the 2 competitiveness war machine we have, which is India and Poland. We'll be as well harvesting, of course, on our new standardized platform. All of this will be based again on our key performance backbone: tender performance translating into healthy margin on order intake and project execution, securing our margin on our backlog and on our portfolio. So for margin, we want to moving forward to focus on EPS growth.
So as we said in the past, our EPS, our net income has been impacting by the GE transactions. Our key EPS drivers will be obviously EBIT expansion, but not only will be as well returning to a normative level on the restructuring cost. Financial expense will be reduced, thanks to the bond repayments in March 2020. Our effective tax rate will be between 25% to 30%, benefiting from our deferred tax assets. And we'll be using, in the future share buyback instead of capital increase for our long term incentive payout scheme.
On this basis, we are expecting our EPS to develop steadily over the next 4 years. So let us move to the cash, the $1,000,000 question. This is definitively, as a management team, free cash flow is generation is our top priority. And we've been putting together with TeriBeth, a holistic cash improvement program that we are colluding attacking all drivers. Let me give you 3 examples, 3 illustration of this plan.
Number 1, aligning the management incentive. Free cash flow generation is representing 40% of our yearly financial management target for 10,000 people in the company out of 36,000. And new since this year, free cash flow to net income is used as a key midterm target associated to our long term incentive scheme. 2nd, operation, which is the most critical part. We are targeting to work on a 20% reduction on the testing cycle time.
This is where basically the train is complete and obviously where a large part of our inventories is sitting. But as well in the production line, we are optimizing the high value item to integrate it at the end of the cycle like the brakes. All of this in terms is a target of 15% of our inventory risk coverage reduction on our projects. A practical example I've been witnessing in La Rochelle when I was visiting them a few weeks ago, we are limiting the physical storage along the production line to avoid overstock on our TGV production. By this, it's a very pragmatic way not to have overstock at the various station of the production line and something which is efficient, visual and is giving value.
Finally, on the culture and the mindset, with training, process, management focus, cash is pushed in daily decision from tenders to production to sourcing, supply chain down to project execution. Our cash focused program managers used to say that we make cash a key decision subject in any decision of the companies And we make it a key discussion subject, including in our campaigns. You can witness that if you come in Saint Trois on one of our sites. So turning to CapEx now. CapEx prioritization is done as part of this cash focused program with a strong and stringent operation and finance process.
We are ending our transformation CapEx this year, and we do not target any opening of any new industrial hub. So our priorities are very simple: capacity increase, again, in India and in Poland, benefiting from our low manufacturing oil rates, but as well the competitive supply chain, which are around these sites and as well efficiencies and automation. Wonderful example is Ghibela, our new plant in South Africa, which has opened back in November. We have, to give you a sense, 8 robots which are allowing 22,000 welding points per day, stepping up the efficiencies of these plants. Altogether, we are expecting to move from 2% to 2.5% of sales for industrial CapEx to around 2% in the midterm.
So now up to the working capital dynamics, driven by new projects and execution. Our new project as part of cash focus, we have strict down payments and working capital golden rules to ensure positive financing sustainabilities. We do not see in our tenders activities on a daily basis any declining trends in terms of down payments vis a vis our customers. The second axis is execution of our project portfolio. On this one, inventories is to ramp up on our key rolling stock projects like PASA in South Africa or Amtrak, for example, in the next 2 years impacting our working capital position.
On the midterm, we are targeting a stable working capital position based on steady execution after ramp up and on tenders discipline.
So
altogether in terms of delivering our free cash flow performance. We are targeting to uplift our free cash flow to net income from around 50% in 2018 2019 to above 80% by 2022, 2023. Our key drivers will be, of course, our EBIT ramp up, driven by profitability and sales expansion. Working capital will be stable on the midterm, but as well financial cash out will be reduced by our balance repayments and our tax cash out will be supported by our tax losses carried forward. Our free cash flow, for sure, will be subject to the usual customary short term volatilities related to our business on down payments and progress payments.
So turning to investment. We are implementing a disciplined M and A approach based on bolt on acquisition. We'll be focusing on our key strategic axis, signaling, services, but as well accelerating our digital and innovation strategies. We are targeting obviously to be EPS accretive overall on this investment. Our priorities here will be again very clear: number 1, selectivity number 2, integration and third one, quality of execution.
Moving to our shareholders' return and capital allocation. The bedrock foundation is and will remain obviously our free cash flow generation. Our target is to maintain a solid balance sheet to execute our backlog and support our growth in order to invest into a disciplined M and A policies. In parallel, we target, of course, to maintain our solid investment grade rating. On this basis, we are confident to define a sustainable shareholder return policies with a dividend payout between 25% to 35% as of this year.
So let's wrap up all together. Starting with 2019 2020. So 2019 2020 will be a year of stabilization of growth after an exceptional year 2018 2019 with a step up of sales and profitability, which has been impressive. This year, the business cycle with the finalization of our major system contracts and the evolution of our large rolling stock projects will lead to a sales and margin growth lower than our average objectives and to a working capital generation, which will be impacting the generation of free cash flow. For the period up to 2022, 2023, we are confident to present you our Alstom in Motion financial framework objectives with for the period 2019 2020 up to 4 years with annual sales growth of 5%, adjusted EBIT of around 9% in 2022, 2023 third one, net income to free cash flow above 80% by 20 2, 2023.
And finally, implementation of a disciplined investment and M and A policy to create value. On this basis, Alstom will be introducing a dividend payout of 25% to 35% as of this year. So just to conclude on my side in a very few words. Number 1, we are extremely well positioned in a growing market, which is driven by green mobility. And we are global players in all sense.
Number 2, we are targeting leading margin and cash generation. 3rd point, we retain firepower to invest in disciplined innovation and M and A, supported by our strong balance sheet. Altogether, ladies and gentlemen, our priority is very simple: sound execution on projects, tenders and investments to deliver EPS and free cash flow growth and all of this leading to sustainable shareholder return. Thank you very much. And I pass the floor to Thierry, which will guide you on the efficiency drivers.
Thank you very
much. Thank you, Laurent. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm extremely happy to have this opportunity to drive you through how operationally we are going to support the financial performance that Laurent just described. And indeed, it's very much about how to execute efficiently the €40,000,000,000 backlog that we enjoy today.
As you remember, the Alstom 2020 strategic plan was based, operationally speaking, on 3 pillars: sourcing, footprint globalization and low labor cost country extension. And thanks to that, we've been able to hit the targets that we fixed 3 years ago, namely enjoying a sourcing saving of €250,000,000 per year, pushing 60% of our train manufacturing outside Western Europe and reaching 3,000,000 engineering hours in our Bangalore hub. Building on these foundations, we want to add 3 additional levers of this on this efficiency stream. The first one is digital transformation. The second is footprint stabilization and optimization, as already mentioned by Henri.
And 3rd, best in class project execution. And with these additional three leaders, we target to be able to be able to decrease by 15% our lead time development further increase of our engineering hours in India to reach 30% of all engineering hours being performed in Alstom 60% plus sourcing and more generally operations activities in best cost country and last but not least, a 15% hard inventory coverage reduction. So let's move to the 1st pillar, digital transformation, starting by engineering. Here, we are heading towards 2 very precise directions.
The first
one is to develop and to implement a seamless process and tool from the very early stage of the R and D to project execution. And second is to massify the usage of 3 d technologies in our design reviews. You can see 2 examples on the screen. First example is Dubai Metro, Dubai 2020 Metro. And second example is the recent development of our new generation of regional trains, SmartCore Adia.
Internally, we've factored a massive effort in terms of digital development and digital review for the design of these two trains. And the ambition that we have today is not only to be able to perform this internally, but also to convince our customers to do joint design reviews through this 3 d technology. We have a 3 d room here in Saint Trois in our headquarter. We've developed mobile pack so that we can do that anywhere, including our customer premises. And we are now developing what we call a smart board to be able to connect several locations around the world to perform these design reviews at the same time without having to request the engineers to move in a single location.
Thanks to that, we have already recorded a substantial reduction in our lead time for Metro minus 4 months. And we want to expand this by 2023 to all our solutions, reducing by 15% our lead time development. 2nd function that is embarked in this digital transformation, industrial operation. And here you can see some examples of what we are using today. 1 of the very obvious one is obviously robotization.
And you can see on the bottom right a photo of 1 of the biggest robot used to weld bogie frames that has been developed in Le Creusot, our center of excellence for bogies. A smaller version has been installed more recently in Obonje, a joint venture that we have in South Africa to perform exactly the same kind of task. But it's also the usage of virtual training for critical processes such as welding or painting. 3 d printing, especially useful in the very early stage of prototyping where you can face missing parts or missing tools, hence the necessity to be able to react extremely quickly. Connected workforce, this is extremely interesting because as you know, we have expanded all around the world.
And from time to time, operators can be facing issues. So in order to save time for the experts to take the plane and to come and help, with these connected glasses, the operator can live comment the problem he's facing and the experts to help him solve it. But it's also very much about digital supply chain where we can have impeccable traceability of our parts, all these being encompassed in the manufacturing execution system, which is a totally paperless process from the very early stage of the engineering right to the shop floor for the operator to be able to perform his task. With this, the ambition that we are taking in the Alstom in Motion strategic plan is to be able to reach a 10% additional productivity in terms of manufacturing hours. Metiers, all functions in Alstom are embarked in this transformation.
And I've put some examples here. Commercial population, digital tendering process, manufacturing engineering, I have already mentioned, quality, supply chain, human resources, services that Bernd will comment this afternoon. All these being now encompassed in our new ERP core model called Global Single Instance. On top of that, we factored an integrated data management supporting the automatic extraction of all relevant operational KPIs in order to help each manager to monitor its performance. Today, 70% of the company turnover is covered by global single instance.
And by 2022, we have the ambition to have 100 percent of the company being covered with an ambition at the end of the pillar, digital transformation, we factored all these innovations in the TCV du Futur, TCV 2020 contract that we have signed 1 year ago with SNCF. It's a massive order, 100 trains. With the very latest innovation that has been factored in it, we've been able to take a 25% challenge in terms of number of manufacturing hours compared to the previous generation that has been put in service recently. So 1st pillar for this operational excellence stream, digital transformation. 2nd pillar, optimization and stabilization
of
our footprint. Starting by Rolling Stock Engineering, we are heading into 3 directions. First one is to specialize our engineering site by product, 1 or 2 sites for tramways, 1 or 2 sites for metros, regional locomotive, very high speed. 2nd direction is to develop quite aggressively 2 hubs, 1 hub here in Paris in our headquarter in Saint Trois where we concentrate our master and senior experts in all disciplines. And then the 2nd hub that has already been mentioned and that will be detailed by Ling later is Bangalore in India, where we have access to almost an unlimited pool of talents, very impressive in terms of maturity acquisition.
And 3rd direction is the creation of center of excellence. We already have this center of excellence. For instance, I've mentioned Le Creusot for bogies. I could have mentioned Ornan for motors, Petit Keville for traction transformers, Charles Le Roy and Taabe for traction cases. But we want to go further in that direction.
We recently created in partnership with Safran in Toulouse a center of excellence for electrical. You have to remember that in 1 linear meter of a train, you've got 1 kilometer of electrical cable. So we've launched this center of excellence in Toulouse with a foot in Bangalore, of course, for the engineering and a manufacturing in FEZ in Morocco. But it's also the case for Carbolichl where we are developing in our expertise in highsofon. And in terms of interiorism, as you know, customers are increasingly demanding in terms of perceived quality.
So we've developed a center of excellence in Valenciel. With all this, the ambition that we have is to be able to grow further our footprint in terms of engineering in India, reaching 30% of all Alstom engineering hours being performed there by 2023. 2nd function that is concerned by this stabilization and optimization is sourcing. Sourcing, it's all about concentrating at the very early stage of the development our efforts with a restricted number of suppliers. And we call them the Allianz Panel, limited number, 30 big companies where we massify our efforts, not only in new build, but also in after sales, maintenance and parts in order to be able to perform design to cost.
And then once this is done, have a full catalog of standard products that we can take off the shelf during project execution. Then it's all about supplier based rationalization and a better usage of best cost countries. What do I mean by better usage of best cost countries? Traditionally, what we have done is to ask our historical partner to accompany us in the new geographies. We have asked the usual suspects to come with us in South Africa, in India, in Kazakhstan, in Poland.
But thanks to our industrial presence in these geographies, we've discovered and we've developed links with local partners. And I've picked just one example here in Mexico, where we have partnered with a pure Mexican company in electrical panel, who has given us an additional 20% cost reduction compared to our traditional suppliers. So with this, the ambition that we have in the Alstom in Motion strategic plan is to be able to move from 50% today of sourcing in best cost countries to more than 60%. 3rd function that is in this footprint stabilization and optimization stream, industrial, industrial operation, quite obvious. As already mentioned, we've expanded quite rapidly our footprint in the different geographies.
It's now a must to contribute to the ramp up to the stabilization of all these factories, be it in South Africa with Bunil and Ghibela, in Kazakhstan with Astana, in Katowice in Poland, in India with Coimbatore, Madu Pura and 3 Cities. So quite a fair number of sites that need to grow in maturity and stabilize. And then it will be all about optimizing this footprint. The idea is to specialize a very limited number of hubs into a capital intensive activities, namely welding, machining and painting. And once we have concentrated these capital intensive activities in this restricted number of factories, these factories will serve a network of what we call final assembling unit being located extremely flexible and agile very close to our customers.
And with this, the ambition that we have in the As Tom in Motion is to have 60% of our manufacturing hours being performed in best cost countries. As a flagship to illustrate this 2nd pillar, footprint stabilization and optimization, Sydney Metro, it has already been mentioned, so I will go quickly. Indeed, we've been privileged to sign this contract full turnkey for a full driverless metro in Sydney with signaling, rolling stock and system integration, all this being performed in India with strong support of the Center of Excellence in Western Europe, but also with a strong need to build a strong team in Sydney. Why? For the purpose of commissioning and warranty of the system, of course, but also to perform the 15 years maintenance contract that we have signed.
So really 3 pillars in order to be able to perform this CNA contract with a center of gravity in India, which has allowed us compared to a previous generation of turnkey contract to gain a 20% cost reduction. Digital transformation, footprint stabilization and optimization, 3rd pillar of this operational excellence stream is best in class project execution. As already mentioned by Henri, during the previous strategic plan, we've been able to improve by 15% our on time delivery, thanks to disciplined tender process and seamless project execution. We've added another dimension to that, flexibility and agility, and I've picked up 2 examples. 1 is PRAZA, South African Suburban and Regional Trains, where the engineering was performed in Saint Trois in our headquarter collaboratively with Sao Paulo.
The first 20 trains were produced in Brazil once whilst we were building the factory in Ghibela. And then from trendset number 21, everything has been shifted in South Africa, engineering, sourcing and industrial. And the 7 first pure South African trains have been produced and put into service. 2nd example, Amtrak very high speed train. Here again, engineering performed in Paris and in Saviviano in Italy because it's a tilting very high speed train.
And from the very early stage of the manufacturing, you can see the photo, the very first train is being manufactured in our Hornell, New York State factory. These two examples must now become, let's say, an industrial way of behaving for tender and project execution. The 500 projects that were mentioned by Laurent are to adopt this methodology in order that we have impeccable and seamless project execution. And with this, the ambition that we have factored in our plan is a further 5% improvement in our on time delivery. I've mentioned 3 pillars, but obviously there's a 4th pillar that is absolutely crucial for this operational excellence stream, which is cash focus.
And I've picked up sorry, Laurent, I've copied with pride your presentation the examples that we are factoring in our roadmap. Vendor managed inventory. This has been implemented quite successfully in La Rochelle. The idea is to have a paper use approach with the main components. And thanks to that, we've been able to reduce by 15% the hard inventory in our La Rochelle factory.
Optimization of the production flow, where we are pushing all the most expensive components at the very end of the industrial process. Automatization of the testing process so that we can save 20% of the time because it is the moment where the train is the most expensive in terms of our balance sheet. Then introducing a cash focus angle in all our operational processes, which needs to be fully revisited and last but not least, having all our people in operations with an enhanced training program. With this, we've been able to factor, as I already said, in TEG 2020, a 25% manufacturing hours reduction. But we've also been able to factor a 33% reduction in the lead time of production of these very high speed trains.
And more globally, the ambition that we have in the plan is to be able to reduce by 15% the hard inventory coverage. With all this and as a conclusion, efficiency and agility is really at the heart of profitability and cash generation. Thank you very much. I now hand over to Ling for the India strategy.
Hi, everyone. I'm Lin Fang. I'm in charge of Asia Pacific and Ice Storm. I would like to tell you about our incredible India development story. After several years of hard and efficient work, Alstom has built an important and large footprint in India.
Today, India is a key contributor to our Alstom global strategy with high standard size for rolling stock, engineering and manufacturing. We count today 4,000 people in India located in 4 different places: Bangalore, Coimbatore, 3 City and Manipura. Bangalore, with close to 3,000 people, is Alstom's largest engineering center in the world for both rolling stock and signaling. Today, Bangalore delivers 22% of the worldwide engineering hours. Coimbatore was close to 400 people.
It's one of our global traction manufacturing sites. Cohenbadao represent today 18% of our global hours for traction production. At the 3 City, we build a metro manufacturing facility serving customers worldwide with a monthly capacity of 20 cars. Madi Brua is a local manufacturing site dedicated to Indian market. Not only we were able to build this footprint, but also today, Alstom has a proven track record of projects delivered from India.
For example, for mutual own stock, we have already commissioned successfully 4 projects: 3 projects for India, Chennai, Kochi and Nakno and Cine, as mentioned by Henry and Thierry. For example, for Lucknow Mutual, for which Alstom supplied both rolling stock and signaling, it was the 1st completed mid in India project. The first train was delivered in a record time of 40 months. Another 2 important projects, Moon Trio and Moon Valley 3, that we won 1 year ago are currently under delivery. For signaling, India participate to many, many projects, both urban and mainline, India market and international market.
And very often, Bangalore is the design leading unit for this project. For example, Hong Kong South Central Line, the project it was the 1st driverless project in Hong Kong opened for commercial services 2 years ago. It was also the 1st driverless Alstom solution delivered from India. Over the past 4 years, Alstom went through a fantastic ramp up in India. This journey for growth will continue in future.
3 City and Kuenbatore have become world class manufacturing sites. In the past 4 years, the manufacturing hours has more than doubled, and we intend to reach 2,000,000 hours in 2023. In India, we have built also a large supplier base with high focus on quality. From one side, we reinforced the local presence of international supplier base. For example, we signed 9 alliance partnership with international suppliers.
At the same time, we have been growing the our Indian local supplier base with very strong technical support from Alstom. These actions allowed us to improve significantly the Indian content of our metro project from 30% 4 years ago to 70% today, and we intend to reach 18% in 2023. Bangalao has been developed as innovation hub and the center of excellence for many, many domains. Today, we can count 200 world class experts in Bangalore with 30 patents. As Thierry said, today, we deliver already 3,000,000 hours for engineering from Pangalao.
And tomorrow in 2023, we want to deliver 5,000,000 hours. India is definitely an unmatched differentiator for Alstom. First, India can provide a skilled and abundant workforce. As you know, it's the 2nd most populated country in the world with 1,300,000,000 people. The population is also very young.
63% of the population are under 35 years old. People can speak fluent English there. The focus on education has been greatly improved. For example, each year, over 1,500,000 engineering students graduate from universities in India. This is a huge advantage for our industry.
This workforce in India is also very competitive. In terms of the labor cost, India is 1.5x cheaper compared to China and 4x compared to Europe. Obviously, this competitiveness contribute greatly to Alstom global profitability. India itself is also a promising market for Alstom. In the past 30 years, the GDP growth was very good.
The country is leaving rapid organization. The government demonstrates strong willingness to develop modern infrastructure. More and more cities in India have a plan to develop Metro. All these provide fantastic opportunities to Alstom. In our sector, among all the international players, Alstom is the one who has the largest and most mature footprint in India.
This will contribute greatly to Alstom's long term strategy. Thank you.
So thank you, Thierry. Thank you, Ling. I think we'll open the floor for Q and A. So I will ask invite Thierry and Ling to come together with Laurent. I think we have 30 minutes Q and A and then we will get over.
So we are the last obstacle before the launch just to get a little bit of pressure.
It's Martin Milki from Citi.
A couple of questions. The first
one is on the growth. I mean, you talked about perhaps a little bit of a slowdown or at least not the same ramp up in growth because of the Middle East. Just generally, if you could talk about the tendering activity just to support the growth outlook over the full period? Secondly, just a question on cash flow, targeting getting to 80%. If you could just run through the sort of definitional items that are sort of in the cash conversion just to understand why it shouldn't get higher than that, particularly how you're treating dividends from associates, things like that?
Just the 80% seems perhaps a little bit lower than we might think by 2023.
So thank you. Now on the growth aspect, the tendering activity today is extremely buoyant. A lot of tenders are being discussed in Europe in particular, but not only. But it's true that this year, I would expect the order intake from Europe to be stronger than relatively, I would say, than the rest of the world. As I said, Middle East is a slowdown and very large project from Middle East has been delayed quite a while.
But apart from that, North America is quite buoyant as well, both the U. S. And Canada. So I think that's the undying growth of the market is there, even though this particular year as we speak, would be probably relatively slow in sales due to the end of the project in the Middle East and maybe relatively slow in terms of order, just I would say because of the phasing of the number of orders. But in terms of tendering pipeline, it's still extremely buoyant.
Laurent, the cash?
So on the cash side, the definition is very classical in terms of the free cash flow definition. So it comes with the tax, financing costs, the dividend from the joint ventures. So what are the drivers of our free cash flow to net income from around 50% to above 80% in by 2022, 2023. Number 1 is definitely the EBIT expansion driven by the sales and the profitability ramp up. On the CapEx, as I said, we'll be ramping up ramping down to around 2% of sales.
Working capital, as I explained, is targeted to be stable on the midterm. There is a 4th element that we need to have in mind is that we have a drift between CapEx and depreciation. We have been investing in the past for our transformation. So there is a gap, which is around 15%, 20% in 'eighteen, 'nineteen, which will be resolved after years, but this is taking time because these are investments which are long term investments like factories, plants or gigantools.
Thank you. Yes.
Alastair from SocGen. I was just wondering how quickly you feel that you can kind of start up the kind of M and A engine because obviously you've still got a very overcapitalized balance sheet. And then also, you're kind of looking at lots of different interesting areas, smart mobility, green mobility, services.
Maybe you
could just highlight some of the priorities in terms of kind of inorganic growth and M and A?
Our company is mostly a technological company. This is our assets as well as, of course, our customer intimacy. But if we go towards M and A, this would be to acquire some technology that we don't have. And this can be done through acquisition. This can be done through a partnership or this can be done through your own development.
So I don't have any target per se in terms of M and A. And there is no reason to wait. So we are already discussing and we have, I would say, consistently some discussions with a number of targets, potential targets or potential partners. So it's already there, I would say. Having said that, I will never fix a certain level of M and A that we should inevitably spend, because this is not the 1st driver of our expansion.
1st driver is to acquire. So if we go in signaling, for example, and you will discuss that in signaling, if you want to acquire new technologies, which are needed in order to address a particular market, we will do it. But it will be to be compared with internal development. So you see it's always a possibility to
do both.
It's
Katie from Morgan Stanley. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, on the CASCO JV, I wonder if you could talk us behind the rationale of fully consolidating that from going forward. Is there a change in your expectation for that market? Or what's been the change in methodology there?
And then second, I wonder if you could just clarify for us the situation on down payments because there's been quite a big tick up in orders over the last couple of years. But as you're pointing out, down payments have remained stable. What is the dynamic there? Is it purely because of the TGV order that didn't have a down payment? Or is there an underlying change in trend?
No. On Cascaux, I think the rationale behind is that we are not really changing the situation of Cascaux in China. But it's clear that we are becoming increasingly partners in terms of changing and co developing technology. So the fact to put it on one side or the other side didn't make any sense anymore. In the past, we had our own we were sharing the projects between Cascaux and ourselves.
Today, we are co executing the projects. And in that sense, it was better to include the Astom portion and the Casco portion in the same basket. So we want really to see Casco as an internal part of Astom, not an externally for you, but also internally. In terms of down payment, there is no significant change. It's yet to recognize that some countries or some customers have high down payments, other customers have lower down payments.
So as you have pointed out, TGV has no down payment, but at
the same time, a lot
of progress payments. So it's not because there's no down payment that it's badly financed. Just a question of phasing of these payments. So it's no particular, I would say, structural changes.
How would you see the How would you see the progress of profitability in each of these businesses?
So on the profitability evolution, so relative to the signaling, as I said, we target to move from high single digit to low double digit, stepping on the plan in terms of increasing our presence in mainline European market, but as well as the global European market and as well as the standardization of our platform. Jean Francois will be elaborating on that this afternoon. On the rolling stock, we are targeting to move from mid single digit to high single digit. So here the key drivers is exactly what Thierry has been explaining. The globalization, the utilization of our competitiveness footprint in India, the evolution in terms of the product maturities.
So that is for the rolling stock. In terms of services, we see more stability of high margins, say, mid teens. We are together today very, I would say, healthy margin. It is long term contracts. So here we are more looking at development of our activities system to complete, we are similar to the rolling stock target mid- to high single digit on the midterm.
It's Guillermo Panjir from UBS. Maybe a question on one of your slides regarding the backlog and 50% of the new platforms being on new products and the existing old platforms. Can you, in a way, give us some granularity on the margins on those different platforms? How do you perform in the new platforms versus the old platforms when it comes to operating profits?
No, the answer is no. New platforms are much more competitive than the old ones and clearly they have fueled the growth of our margin. I think that project by project, of course, it can vary quite a lot. And as I said as well, the new project tends to be more complex than the second one, the third one and the first one. So it's not really one platform by one platform, but it's true that TRAM, for example, has been launched 5 years ago.
So the latest projects in TRAM are, I would say, more juicy than the first one. So it's more moving gradually, positively. But then and then these platforms are addressing standard markets. So you have sometimes very specific markets, which can have different type of margin profiles. So let's not draw a global conclusion on that.
And then a follow-up, sorry, on how do you field trains? Can you give us an indication of how that kind of rolling stock product will basically contribute to profitability to some extent?
Are you sorry? I was saying For
the H2 or the fuel cell trains? Yes. How profitable are they?
This one, they are average possibility today, which I say it's a good news because we are at the beginning of the market. We have just delivered the first trends, and we have managed to introduce them to the market at the average possibility, possibility, which I think is a good sign for the future because we have to pay a lot of investment so far.
It's Daniela Costa from Goldman here. If I may, just wanted to ask 3 things. First, can you elaborate on buses, why you're better positioned than, for example, truck manufacturers or someone else that is on that segment? Sort of why did you decided to go there? And then the second point, on the bridge, you had volume and pricing together.
Can you talk a little bit about the pricing environment, how you see that evolving versus past? And the final thing I wanted to ask about was on your follow-up on the M and A question. If you don't find sort of targets in or what's the horizon you give yourself until you would return more cash to shareholders?
All righty. No, I will take the first one, and my friend Laurent will take the 2 next. On buses, it's a good question. I mean buses is a relatively large sector with a number of players, and you can wonder why we have entered into this market. I think there are two reasons for that.
First, the bus world is at the tipping point, is a turning point. As I said, all the diesel world is now behind us and the electrical world is in front of us. So we are entering in the very specific moment of this market. And 2, we believe that we have a product which has been designed for this new world, whereas all our competitors have products which have been designed for the old world and they have just adapted their products to the new world by changing the diesel engines to an electrical engine, whereas our product has natively, if I may say, being developed for the electrical world. It's very different.
I don't know if you have seen it, but it's a very different product. The old the traction and equipments are on the roof like you have for tramway. This allows for a lot of flexibility. You can put whatever batteries you want. In the future, you could put hydrogen if you want.
So the maintenance is easier. So it's a it therefore has a very flat low floor. So it's a product which is really in terms of passenger experience closer to a tram than to a bus because it has been natively designed for the electrical world. And this is the only reason why we have entered. Otherwise, if it was just to bring a Me too product, it would not have been, I would say, of any interest.
Maybe, Laurent? Yes.
So on the bridge, on the volume and pricing. So as I was explaining, we have a very sophisticated market pricing analysis. So we have been, of course, carefully looking at these trends. And what we see in the last years, and we see this continuing in the years to come, is, I would say, a slight decrease of price, very slight year after year. So we are basically baking in our profitability targets, the same level of trends moving forward.
On your question on the M and A and the potential shareholder return. So on the M and A, definitively, we will be selective in our M and A selections. However, there is a lot of opportunities out there in the market. So we'll be and we are addressing this as we speak. When it comes to the dividend and return, so we just have been deciding, the Board has been deciding a dividend of €5,500,000 recently.
We'll be executing that in July. We are just articulating a dividend policy for the first time with this 25% to 35% dividend payout. For the rest, we will see we'll be so far sticking to our commitment.
We see in 2023. Yes,
sorry. Good morning. Yes, William Mackey from Kepler Cheuvreux. Three questions, if I may, or at least three areas. Firstly, with regard to the structure of the group, when you talk about the improvements of efficiency, last year, there was some site rationalization.
Is that something we should expect going forward? But more particularly, when I look at the Infrastructure and Systems business, you remain reasonably vertically integrated around of your electrification products. Is that something within the strategy or at least within the portfolio that we should consider to remain core? The second question is relates to service growth. If you can just your ambitions in growing services, you have this strength in the UK and the strength in Italy, but perhaps you could highlight a little bit which other countries or regions are going to drive that growth ambition.
And then lastly, on signaling. The signaling market is very well established with its competitive players. You have your strength on board. But when you mention your ambitions in Mainline, it seems that the Mainline players are already well established. So how do you grow your position in Mainline signaling?
Thank you, Ben. I think we will park, as we said, we'll put in the fridge the two last questions so that Bernd and Jeff would try to answer to these questions during that presentation or thereafter in the Q and A. In terms of Infrastructure and Systems, we tend to be quite pragmatic in our systems. Having said that, it's true that electrification can bring a strong value to our system, in particular when it comes to energy saving. And bringing this kind of innovation such as ESOP has played a key role in our system business, bringing innovation such as our third rail for tram has also played a key role in our system.
So we should not, I would say, forbid ourselves to bring differentiators in our systems. But having said that, on one particular project, if it happens that external parties products are more competitive for one reason or another, we can go outside as well. So we'll keep there's nothing for disposal to your question, but we keep our liberty there.
Just a follow-up.
And Jeff and Bernd have taken the point.
Sorry, a follow-up. On the slide deck, your systems revenues for the next 2 years are projected to decline. Should we think that perhaps you will deemphasize that part of the business going forward?
I think that it's a good point. There is a market evolution, which is clear, which is the fact that in Middle East and Latin America, the global projects are being delayed. And therefore, you have not as a buoyant platform as in the past. So then in terms of TRAM, it becomes less of a differentiator. So there's also a commoditization of the system part of the TRAM business.
So I would say it's mostly coming from the market standpoint. It may also come from a deemphasizing on some of our for some of parts.
Thank you. Gael De Bruyff from Deutsche Bank over here. I have three questions, please. The first one is on the I mean, one of your objectives is to be number 1 or number 2 in audio markets, geographies and so on. But if we look at the past few years, obviously, in terms of orders, Europe is probably one of the few geographies where you don't have yet a number one position.
So what would it take to become number 1 in Europe? I guess my question is more whether you need to do absolutely some acquisitions in Europe to get to the number one spot or not and whether accordingly Europe is going to be one of your core priorities from an M and A perspective. So that's question number 1. Question number 2 is on the targeted 5% draws by 2023. So I think this is an all in target, including acquisitions.
So could you be a bit more specific around that? Basically what you expect to see in terms of organic development? And the third question is on the free cash flow side. So you said this year perhaps will be a bit weak because of the working capital evolution. So I guess 2 quick ones here.
Do you expect the free cash flow to be eventually down on a year on year basis? And the second question around the cash flows is why shall we expect now an increase in inventories at least compared to the past few years when I think the group was already on a pretty strong ramp up phase? What's different now?
So yes, as you have noticed, Europe is becoming a key priority as well. It will require some investments, not necessarily M and A per se. In rolling stock, as we said, we need to enlarge our platforms. So we need to because as you know, Europe is a very scattered market with very different types of products. Just to give you an example, we have developed TRAM, which is a new platform of TRAM.
And today, we are enlarging this platform to steel because our TRAM were in aluminum, but the German market is acquiring steel. So we have developed steel and we have entered into the German market through this new product. So we are going to do this kind of investment. We need as well to strengthen our low cost base and this is the Poland footprint, which we need to continue to grow, although it has grown quite significantly in the recent past. We could have some acquisition in signaling because signaling is also a very scattered market with a lot of different technologies.
And we could either, as I said to a previous question, develop these technologies ourselves or acquire a small player, which would, I would say, master this particular technology. So a mixture, I would say, of investment and M and A. M and A will remain small. And to your point on growth, we don't expect a lot of M and A. But again, as I consider that the M and A that we are going to target can be easily replaced by investment or development, I don't think it's worth splitting between what is M and A or not, because this will be a very small M and A, no large one.
If there is a large one, of course, I would say we'll not put it in this 5% growth. It's only a small M and As in order to acquire technology or geographical spots, I would say. And the rest, maybe, Laurent, you can take it.
Yes. So on the cash for this year, Gael, indeed. So we are in a specific phase on a number of our key rolling stock projects. And let me illustrate it with a few examples. On our new core idea stream regional train, We have just entered into a commercial service with our POP train in Italy, and Gianluca is here, only 2 weeks ago.
And we are ramping up the production on this Coradia stream for ICNG and for Italy. On Praza, as Thierry has been illustrating, we have been delivered 7 trains and of course, we'll be ramping up our production in the months to come. And this is, of course, is having an impact on inventories. On Amtrak and on Iloco, LING in India from Adepoa, we are as well in the months to come preparing the production ramp up altogether. So all of these are specific cycle on some of our flagship rolling stock projects, which is then, of course, impacting our inventories.
Now wrapping up on the cash for this year, we are talking about cash generation, not talking about cash usage. So this is what we are seeing for the cash for 'nineteen, 'twenty.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. It's James Moore at Redburn. I've got a few technical questions perhaps for Laurent and then one conceptual one perhaps for Henri. So just on interest, on the interest line, on the P and L and the cash flow, after the bond, there'll be some outstanding hedging and maybe pension.
Could you give us a longer term projection on that? And what's normalized restructuring? And the 25% tax rate, how long is that sustainable for? And the conceptual question is margins. You've done a great job getting the margin back to 7%.
You've laid out your targets very clearly with a lot of very credible bottom up plans. My question is more that the industry has never really supported a 9%. It will be a new achievement for you. What is it do you think that you're going to create a sustainable comparative advantage against the obvious 2 Western peers? Or do you think the whole industry can support a better margin?
This is a very good question. First of all, I mean, it's not totally true because I think one of our global competitor is already around 9 today. And these are around 9 today because they have a better margin in terms of signaling mostly. And I think there are 2 elements to your conceptual question. The first one is the potential of our signaling business, where we need to catch up, if not to this benchmark, but to be closer to the benchmark.
I know that they are larger, and therefore, there is economies of scale. But still, I think there is a lot of room to catch up to this margin. In terms of the global margin, there are other benchmark. Particularly, the pure players usually have higher margins. And we want to combine, I would say, the lean structure that they have, the focus that they have on certain region as well as to be global.
And this is the key element of our recipe to get to a benchmark margin closer to a regional player, I would say, a type of margin for rolling stock is to combine through digitalization, a good localization, a good customer intimacy as well as a global footprint. I have to say, and this has been that's why we have shown it to you. I think India is playing a differentiator role. To compensate, I would say, the lack of scale on signaling, we have the Indian differentiator, which if you were, you could ask me the opposite question. If you were to count the saving, which is being bought by the Indian footprint, if you were to replace all the Indian engineers by Western European engineers, you would figure out that we should be much more profitable than the other players.
And if we are not, it's because we have still some potential to grasp in a number of areas, including on the platforms for singling.
James, on your technical questions, thanks for that. On the interest side, so we were in 'eighteen, 'nineteen at around €88,000,000 in the P and L. So we see indeed, €8,000,000 in the P and L. So we see indeed an improvement after the repayment of our bonds. So we'll see an improvement of €30,000,000 €35,000,000 in the midterm.
This is the remaining being indeed the hedging and the interest on the pension. On the restructuring, as I said, we were at 65 around in 'eighteen, 'nineteen. We do not have a diverse major restructuring plan, so we'll come back to a normative level that we have always indicated. In the control of my IR team, Julien and Julien, around €30 ish million on the midterm. Finally, on the tax side, we are gaining on 25% to 30% of effective tax rate.
It is depending on our mix by countries. It's a complex equation. We are operating in 60 countries. So it's an equation with 60 parameters, but 25% to 30% is a good proxy. And we are benefiting as well from our deferred tax assets that we can use to stay in this range.
Hi, it's John from Exane. Just looking at Slide 47, particularly relative to 38, so it's the EBIT bridge going forward versus how you achieved the last target. I think your sales guidance, if I'm right, probably implies something like €9,800,000,000 in revenue in 2023. So that's about €1,700,000,000 more than you did last year. And you're looking for 150 bps more margin than you did last year after adjusting for CASCO.
Looking at that bridge, it looks like it's about 50 bps from volume and price, 25 bps from mix, the rest operational excellence. If any, I'm slightly surprised by the lack of volume and price this time. It feels as though the drop through implied there's relatively anemic. Is there a negative price piece to that or are you just being conservative? I'd say the same was probably true of mix as well.
It does imply the margin on Service and Signaling certainly is just north of 10%. Again, if that was the case, that seems a little disappointing. I'd hope your Service and Signaling margins ultimately could maybe be mid teens. But are you maybe a little on the conservative side around volume, price and mix? It seems like I'm slightly surprised it's mostly operational excellence that's delivering most of it.
And then finally on operational excellence, last time you had a sourcing target and I think you had an explicit €250,000,000 This time you haven't given any explicit hard savings numbers. Was there a reason why you chose not to do that?
So we'll start by sourcing so that Thierry can speak a little bit.
No, we want to continue to have this €250,000,000 to sustain. As I said, we are not forgetting the past. We are building on this foundation, and we want to add more. So the 10% additional cost base can be factored moving from 50% today to 60% will give us additional savings.
On your general point, without going into the bps, yes, you're right. In the new plan, it's mostly based upon operational excellence in terms of margin uplift. There are several reasons for that. Yes, there is a decrease in price. So we had in the past a steady decrease in price, probably more, by the way, in signaling than in other places just because the digital matter is under more price pressure, but also with more cost, I would say, decrease than in other parts of the business.
In terms of mix, first of all, you have 2 elements. First of all, system will decrease, and therefore, this plays negatively. Secondly, as we have said, we have increased a lot the margin of holding stock. So even by uplifting to 7, rolling stock, which was very low at the beginning of the plan, is now, we said, mid teens and therefore much closer to our target. So it has a mechanical impact, which is lesser than it was at the last plan, if you were to take into account the decrease in rolling stock.
So it's clear that the mix because of these two aspects does not play such a great role that in the previous plan. In terms of volume, I would say we have kept under control the S and A in the past. It's true that the volume leverage is less during this plan than it was during last plan. So your global analysis is correct. It will be mostly based upon operational excellence rather than the other factors.
And I said, signaling, as I answered previously, signaling has a huge potential to increase its margin, but this is operational excellence. Yes, Akash?
Akash Gupta from JPMorgan. I have three questions, please. The first one is on this cost saving. How much of this cost saving is priced or let's say given to customers versus what you are retaining given you price these contracts multi years before you deliver them? So when it comes to this cost saving number that you gave us to €50,000,000 from sourcing, what is the ratio in terms of how much filtering through your bottom line and what is passed on to customers?
Second one is on Slide 44, where you showed growth in Services business, which I think one can see that the growth would be higher in FY 2023 compared to the other year. So what implication it will have on margins given this is the highest margin business in the portfolio? And finally, on industry consolidation, is this a is that a closed chapter now? Or would you be coming back on this if something changed?
No. On Service, I think Service Bernd will take it. Can you take the first one?
I mean, on the cost savings, the €250,000,000 was part of indeed the plan 2020. So this is representing in this operational excellence as a key part. Now to give you the nitty gritty of how this €250,000,000 translate into margin, we are presenting the holistic pictures. What is for sure is that sourcing is and will remain a key drivers for the next term and this benefiting to the supply chain around India and Poland. And I think that fundamentally, this is the key drivers that we are looking in terms of sourcing efficiencies.
To your point in terms of the pricing, as I said before, we see a stable trend in terms of pricing compared to the last 4 years, and we don't see any major evolution moving forward.
And in terms of global, as you can imagine, this type of global restructuring or global merger. It's not part of any plan by definition. I don't know if we will ever come back. Never say never, but there is no it's a long term. A lot of things have to be changed.
I still believe and I'm not going to regret any word that I said, during our last attempt to merge. But at the same time, I recognize that these things are not changing in the environment, nothing will be possible. So it's postponed for a long, long period. The last question is just a follow-up on the M and A. What if one of the big group in the world decide to merge, being pragmatic and exclude maybe the political aspect, decide to merge with the Chinese?
What if Siemens decide to be pragmatic and play the game of the EU Commission and merge with the Chinese player? What would be the issue for you? And what could be the alternative? Well, I don't think first, I don't think it will happen. So it's a little bit theoretical question.
I don't think today, this is the time this global we have to recognize that these global mergers are increasingly difficult to do in the current environment and the relationship between the different nations and so forth. So I don't think this is a feasible scenario. Now CRC wants to enter into Europe. How they will enter, I don't know. If they buy a small player or something like that, I mean, it will not radically change the situation.
CRC, I'm not obsessed by CRC. If I am in India, my competitors are Indian competitors. If I am in Europe, most of my competitors are European competitors. You have a number of regional players, which are my first competitors region by region. And ECRC wants to globalize.
It will become a competitor in the different region. But I don't think it will change completely the picture. Last question?
I just wanted to follow-up on the supply chain topics and your productivity gains that you're targeting. How do you view this in the context of more strained international relations, trade wars and so on? How do you integrate this into your development plans?
Well, I think it's a good question for the last question. I'm not going to enter into this political debate. What I'm going to say is that we are already in the world in rail transportation where localization plays a very strong role, where we were already asked to have a global footprint. So we are I'm not saying we are immune, but we are relatively well protected against the different tariffs, which can be put in place and so forth because we are producing locally. Now having said that, it's true that we are using our global footprint, and we need to continue to use this global footprint.
So marginally, it could have an impact. But up to now, I don't think India is part of what you are describing as a trade war, so we are protected from that. Okay. So ladies and gentlemen, I think we can take some fresh air for those of you who have survived. And we are reconvening a little bit in advance at 1:15, so in 1 hour from now, so to listen to Marc, Bernd and Jeff.
Thanks a lot. See you then. Okay. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Without further ado, I will hand over to this afternoon's sessions.
I think it's starting by Jean Francois for signaling. Thanks a lot. Jean Francois?
Thank you, Henri. Good afternoon, everyone. So I'm Jean Francois Beaudoin. I'm the Head of Digital Mobility at Alstom. I'll be the one kicking off this afternoon session with a focus on our signaling activities, which as Henri and Laura mentioned already today is an important part of the Alstom in Motion plan.
In particular because of its potential. Before entering into the content of the plan itself, I'd like to remind you a little bit what we are talking about when mentioning the railway signaling by giving you basic principles. As you know, what characterizes the railway transportation is the contact between the rail and the wheel, which is characterized by the very low adhesion, which brings the immense benefit of being unbeatable in terms of energy consumption, but which makes a trend very difficult to stop. So to give you orders of magnitude, when a TGV is running between Paris and Bordeaux, for instance, it's 300 kilometers per hour, few 100 tons of mass. And between the moment the driver actually presses emergency stop and the moment the train stops, in reality, it has run almost 2 kilometers.
So when you understand that, you realize that if you want to operate safely a railway system, you need to have a combination of intelligent infrastructure and intelligence onboard to secure that rail trans perceives its environment and is operated at the right speed and stops at the right moment. And this is basically what signaling is about. So when we are selling signaling solutions, the first thing we said is actually the safety of the railway system. The safest trend is the trend which doesn't move. So of course, you want to have as much throughput as possible under the constraint of having the railway transportation system safe.
And that's as well what Signalling is about. And of course, at the end of the day, what you want is to carry passengers or carry coal. And there is a lot of contribution of the railway of the seasoning solution to provide the proper passenger experience. Notably, when it comes to security, personal security or passenger information solutions. So after those basics technical consideration.
It's a driverless mobile. So you've got 3 different functions in the railway in the signaling system. 1 is the wood control. Basically, all the truck products that are equipped wayside to operate and to interface the railway objects together with the overall systems, railway objects being typically signals or point machines. And the vital computer, which is called the interlocking, you'll see the acronym IXL in the presentation, which basically is the intelligence of the root control system.
2nd function is called the trend protection. You'll see the acronym ATP for automatic trend protection, which is basically the systems which makes you sure that you take over the control of the train whenever it's operated unsafely. To bring an equivalent to your daily life, it would be like if you cross a red signal at a crossroad, a system would take over the control of your car and press the emergency brake to stop it, even though you've given an unsafe instruction to your vehicle. So that's the rule of the automatic fan protection. And the third one is called IT4L.
It's primarily made of control center supervision solutions to manage the fleet both in terms of instruction for routes and information for timetable. The first two blocks are safety critical in the sense that they are designed and implemented to in compliance with certain norms, which reduces the probability of an unsafe event to happen. And the third one is non safety critical. Basically, if it fails, there is no risk for a casualty. I'll put it this way.
Last comment on this chart. I'm sorry for this long technical introduction. And I'll just make sure you follow the rest of the presentation. The intelligence of those systems are distributed into 3 geographical area, I would say. Everything which is linked to the infrastructure can be distributed along kilometers, tens of kilometers, hundreds of kilometers, sometimes a full national network.
Everything which is related to the intelligence onboard, typically vital computer that you equip within the trains. And the control centers, which are usually pretty much centralized for a metro line, for instance, or for metro network, for the most advanced network or for large sections of a national network. So 3 main benefits for our customers when we deliver these kind of solutions: safety first. Under the constraint of safety, the operational performances, primarily throughput and availability, and of course, quality of service and passenger experience. That being said, at Alstom, we are one of the few able to provide any of those components of the overall system, both the train protection, the root control and the security and control solutions in the main line applications in the urban applications.
Main line, most of the time, either component by component or in an integrated manner, Urbane almost every time as a turnkey solution. The other thing which makes us a little bit specific is that we have the experience of deploying this kind of solutions in new build when you build up a new blinds or in revamping or resingling situation. Basically, when an operator wants to increase the throughput of a line or a network, the first element in which he should invest is upgrading the signaling system, because like I said, it increases the throughput when you've got the most advanced solutions. Can reduce the time gap between two trends and increase the throughput without having to invest in additional infrastructure, which from the CapEx viewpoint are obviously in another order of magnitude. And so many historical networks, either national mainline networks or urban metro operator notably in Europe or in the U.
S, are investing massively in revamping, remodernizing their CLLENITY solution to increase the throughput of their network. Last but not least, with the increased level of awareness on cyber vulnerability, we are developing solutions in all the new products we're providing to the market, which are cyber inside, I would say, which encompass all the necessary cyber requirement to secure that vulnerabilities properly managed going forward. I'll come back to that. Now this is more a quantification of the market by segment and by geographies. That's a chart that Henri has presented already, but I'll provide a few comments.
We're talking about €12,000,000,000 market all in all worldwide, that are from the Unifay, which is primarily driven by the mainline applications. Of course, because the size of the infrastructure and the networks in the mainline world are of course largely superior to the ones of the urban applications. Within Mainline, Europe contributes to the vast majority of this market. I'll come back to this. So roughly 60% of the global market being driven by Mainline.
Urband is a third of the world market, very different dynamic. I'll come back to this in a few slides. Different technologies as well. And there is one some market as well that we which is a little bit less known, which is the frac and mining. So here the applications are very different and the competitive and market dynamic is very different as well.
I'll come back to that in the course of the presentation. In terms of geography and projection of market growth, as you can notice, it's a steadily growing market, not much faster than the rest of the railway market as a whole, largely driven by Europe because of Mainline and Asia Pacific primarily because of the boom of the urban applications in China in the 1st place and India to a lesser extent. And you can see that EMEA and North America are smaller markets because of a shorter, I would say, railway history. This is where Alstom fits into the overall picture when it comes to revenue positioning. You see that today, we are in a 3rd position.
We've been more or less steady over the last few years. There are 5 major global players than a number of local or regional players in the world. And the way we want to position ourselves going forward is basically to gain product and market leadership. It has been mentioned earlier today, we want to outpace the growth of Alstom, which itself outpaces the growth of the market going forward. The rest of the presentation will be dedicated to how we plan to get there.
With a focus on 3 main markets, we believe we've got already very positive positioning and which are under very favorable conditions in terms of future growth and with key 4 key strategic levers that I'm going to describe. First important market is Mainline in Europe. Like I said, the global Mainline market is the largest in the world, more than €7,000,000,000 A large part of it is actually made of Europe, particularly Westside to a lesser extent on board solutions. You need to understand what the history of the European railway market to appreciate the market dynamics for Mainland in Europe. We come from a situation where the various countries in this continent had very specific, very national signaling solutions and operating principles defined decades ago by the National Railway Operators.
At the beginning of the year 2000, the European Commission has decided to implement, let's say, a new standard, which is called European Train Control System, ETCS or eRTMS for European Rail Traffic Management System, which is a normalized signaling solutions for which the first purpose was to allow cross border operations. 15 years ago, when you were traveling in the Thalys from Paris to the northern part of Europe, you had a train equipped with 6 or 7 different signaling systems on board to be able to cross the borders. With the deployment of ETCS, one is supposed to be enough when the deployment will be completed. There are 2 important sub pieces to this market. 1 is the interlocking upgrade.
You come from a panorama where many countries still have very, very old interlockings. Remember, the vital computer allowing to manage route control. And there is a global trend to modernize those interlocking into computer based interlocking. And that's a large part of the market, which is defined more at a national level. The second important trend is the famous European system rollout.
Today in Europe, the deployment is only 10% to 15% of the overall network, 10% to 15% of the overall fleet of trains operated in Europe. So the potential market when this rollout continues is absolutely significant and we believe we are very well positioned to tap most of its potential. There are in the very short term national wide deployment, which are planned with massive investments and that's one of the reasons why the European market is going to grow. Netherlands has announced its rollout very recently. Italy has great ambitions as well, together with Germany.
France is coming as well with a plan. Why we believe we can benefit from this overall favorable market conditions? Number 1, because we are the market leader on ETCS onboard solutions. And I would say we are the market leader by far. The second one is that one of the key assets to penetrate or expand in the Westside Mainline market is to have a non allocated interlocking in a country.
And today, we've got interlocking, which are more located in 12 different countries in Europe. And the other point is that we have a track record of deploying Westside ETCS solutions in 10 countries. This chart shows our presence in the various countries in Europe, either on Westside or onboard, sometimes in both actually, many times in both. The other element which makes us a little bit special is that we have an element of leadership in nationwide rollouts. Denmark has been the first one a few years ago to deploy ETCS in one contract, let's put it this way.
And at the moment, we are deploying wayside ETCS on half of the national network in Denmark and equipping the full fleet of trains operated in Denmark with our onboard solutions. Last year, we won a contract to equip Norway in a similar manner for all the onboard equipments. 2nd market supporting our growth is Urbane. Here, it's a totally different competitive landscape, very much a global competitive landscape with focus on new lines construction, particularly in Asia and to a lesser extent in Middle East and Africa. China being the number one market in the world with 10 new lines a year, India with something like 2, 3 lines a year going to 5 in the next few years.
The second important market dynamics is this need for network revamping, particularly in older networks, most of them being either in Europe or in the U. S. And we have like this chart is showing a track record of being able to revamp complex networks in several cities from Asia to Europe, Latin America and North America. We are the number 1 on the Chinese market through our JV Cascaux. We are the number 1 in India like Ling mentioned earlier.
And we are the world leader in metro turnkey solutions, where the global offering of Alstom together with rolling stock and infrastructure allows us to have a channel to market for our signaling solution, an RC Dynamic solution is an enabler for this success. 3rd market is the freight and mining 1, particularly from North America, U. S. And Canada. This is a much smaller market as a whole, but this is the number one market in the U.
S. And Canada. Why? Because the mainline network in these countries are dedicated to freight corridors, I would say. Totally different market dynamic.
It's a product business with private operators, our customers being all the main railroads, Class 1 railroads in this continent, BNSF, Union Pacific, Canadian National and others. And the thing which is slightly different than the rest of the market is that you contractualize a prime contract for 5 10 years. And within this prime contract, you sell products on a very, very short timescale. That long term visibility on market shares. And then you've got deliveries which are made in a few weeks.
The fact that those customers are private customers makes the procurement process totally different and the focus on innovation slightly different as well with a much more I would say value for money kind of procurement model rather than specification and RFP in public procurement schemes. Some technical specificities as well remote location, very widespread infrastructure, difficult more difficult climatic conditions and a need for customer value innovation. Here, this market is very much in line with the overall North American economic growth, which is under favorable headwind tailwind, sorry. And we are introducing new technologies there, basically with the goal to increase the throughput or increase the availability of the systems, particularly with new point machines or IoT and data analytics power systems, in particular, to avoid point machines to fail. Bernd and Julien will provide you some more details on that.
The other key assets that we have there is that the supply chain and the operational excellence for short term short cycles management is recognized by our customers and needs to continue in this direction. Now the 4 levers. First one is the global footprint that we have. As a comparison with our colleagues from Rolling Stock, where the engineering footprint and the manufacturing footprint are very connecting the one with the other, our footprint is extremely engineering focused. You see that we've got 7,000 employees in signaling in the world.
2 third of them are engineer. So first takeaway is that the engineering intensity of our activities is much higher than the other segments and the intensity as well. Then you've got 2 nature of engineering activities. 1 is development of technologies and the other one is ability to deploy. We deploy we develop technologies where we live, I would say where we are.
We deploy solutions where our customers are. And to be able to properly execute our contracts, you need to have 1 fit in both. As a result, our footprint the generic footprint is made of 2 pillars, I would say. Our technology centers, our technology hubs. Europe was the historical one.
We've developed the Indian one in Bangalore with 12.50 people there and a plan to grow this staff up to 2,000 in the next 3, 4 years. And the other part of the footprint is the deployment engineering skills, which are as close to our customers as possible. And that's what explains the fragmentation of our footprint. 2nd level is innovation towards competitiveness and efficiency. And I will give you 2 examples of initiatives that we are implementing in this area.
1 is platforming.
And I'll give you the example
of the interlocking, so the track site computer and all the associated object controllers that you Europe particular, had different specification for those interlockings. There are 3 technological bricks in interlocking. 1 is the object controller, is the interface, the physical interface between signals, point machines and the so called vital computer. The second brick is the so called computer the vital computer itself. It's a piece of hardware with a basic software.
And the third one is the applicative software, which embeds all the functionalities that are required to be able to operate within the country. Here what we've done over the last few years that we've just completed is a convergence of a multiplicity of diverse combination of those 3 pieces of technology, basically following the pattern of countries in which we operate towards one single combination with the Smart IO, Smart Input Output Object Controller, the Moon platform and an applicative software, which is flexible enough not to be rebuilt anytime you enter in a new country. Of course, by platforming both hardware and software, you gain economies of scale on the product cost itself because when you buy electronic components or electronic boards to a supplier, it's of course much better if you can leverage scale. And on the engineering activities as well because the need to support new technologies on a smaller number of solutions is enhanced. Moon development has been finalized now.
It is under unemployment both in urban applications in Middle East and East Asia and in mainline applications in Italy and in Latin America. The second example of innovations towards competitiveness and efficiency is actually efficiency driven. Thierry this morning mentioned few example of how digital processes enhance the efficiency in the rolling stock world. We are doing similar things in the signaling activities. One thing that you need to have in mind is that we need to be able to get a safety certificate and have the authorization to put in revenue service a solution.
We need to be able to demonstrate that all the requirements that we had from the beginning of the project are properly implemented in a safety critical manner until the end of the completion. That leads to a level of hours of activities for validation of our solution, which is much higher than any other verticals. Anything that can ease validation and testing in signaling brings more benefit than any other vertical. And that's the idea of digital twins or cloud based testing. Without entering the details, digital twins principle is to create a mathematical model and a numerical model of the systems you want to test before having completed the design to be able to anticipate your testing testing and verification activities as early as possible in your design process.
Cloud based testing is basically the, let's say, outsourcing of your test benches at a larger scale to be able to scale up your activities, your testing activities and to operate your testing in a flexible manner. Basically, you can test from anywhere at any time. Both have the same goal, validate and test earlier in the design process, reducing the number of hours for the testing activities and reducing the lead time to complete those activities. 3rd lever is technology is innovation to our customer value. We've got a track record over the last 10, 15 years of leading technology breakthroughs.
I gave you several examples both in urban and Mainline. Urban primarily on driverless metros and revamping of CBTC solution. Mainline, particularly around the deployment of this European Standard European, the RTMS for high speed first, then high density lines, then cross border operations, today with automatic plan operation and with the letters Baseline pre standard defined by the European Commission. Our goal is basically to continue with this direction with a focus on what we call digital train. Like I said, the intelligence being distributed west side, onboard and in the control center.
We have the control over those 3 technologies and we can manage, I would say, the balance of this intelligence within those three subsystems. The overall target is to reduce the need for heavy infrastructure and to make the trends themselves more intelligent, smarter trends, lighter infrastructures. Three examples of initiatives. 1 is automatic train operation on ETCS level 2. We've got a pilot which is running today in the Netherlands for freight operations.
We have opportunities to deploy that in commercial service in the Benelux. Driving automation that will be described in more details later. We've got a project together with SNCF on flight application with a prototype, which is expected in the next few years. And with Fluence, we will introduce in commercial service in the next couple of years the first 10 to 10 concept where most of the intelligence is on board and very little of it is on the infrastructure to secure lesser costs, ultra availability and ultra capacity. Objective being to increase again the throughput of the existing line.
4th pillar is around services. You'll see that it fits perfectly with what Bernd is going to describe in more details in a few minutes. We want to boost our service offering in signaling. It's fair to say that there is a lot of potential here given the size of our installed base. We believe we can go a lot in this area.
Few points of attention, obsolescence, very specific to signaling. Although the solution we are deploying are supposed to last in operation for 20 or 30 years, the speed at which the technology evolves is extremely high, typically electronic components or software. And so the need to support the life cycle of the solution we deploy to our customers with more and more digital content on very long period is absolutely critical. The other point of attention I wanted to raise is again cyber vulnerability. Like I said, there are 2 pillars in our cyber security approach.
1, which is making sure that everything we deliver today or we design and deliver today is cyber inside. The other one is supporting our customers who have an installed base of so called digital solutions which have been deployed and designed 5, 10, 15 years ago at a time where the cybersecurity requirement were not existing or not defined. And we need to, let's say, provide support and that's a service offering that we're putting together to enhance the cyber vulnerability management of those legacy solutions. Our ambition is to increase our share in long term maintenance. We had very little of this in our portfolio up until recently.
We've just started the maintenance of the CVTC solution of the Sydney Metro. We'll be doing the same in Riyadh, the same in Montreal. We want to excel in the supply chain management and repairs and like I said, be a lifecycle partner for the full lifecycle. Few words to conclude. 3 main markets on which we want to focus, on which we already have very strong positions, but we believe the market conditions and the investment plan will support our growth: European Mainline, particular Westside Global in Urband pushed by our turnkey capabilities as well as our leadership position in India and in China.
And North America Threat and Mining where we already are the market leader. Four levers: global reach innovation to our competitiveness and efficiency with platforming and digital processes and value creation through innovation as well as service offering boost. Like it has been mentioned, we will implement in signaling a disciplined M and A policy to target bolt on acquisitions that could help us accelerating the implementation of the spur. Thank you very much. I now hand over to Bernd, who will give you a view on what we plan to do in services.
Thank you, Jeff. I'm very pleased to be with you on this sunny afternoon. So I will walk you through where we come from in terms of service, where we are today and where we want to go in Astrum in Motion. So let me quickly focus on the portfolio. So it's more the classical split.
It's parts. That's normal. When you're OEM, you sell parts. Maintenance and modernization. And as Jean Francois said, signaling services, which is very technical.
So that's why we moved that more into the signaling world because that's the drive and the engineering power. Now if I look at the distribution, it's clear maintenance is our core market. This is where we have the long term contracts. This is where we have the highest customer intimacy because maintenance means you are daily together with your customers. And so classically, that was more focused on rolling stock maintenance.
And now we see more and more system maintenance. That means bundle with signaling, bundle with infra. And that includes Alstom equipment, but also non Alstom equipment. So quite complex. And as I said, this is a market where you have to be close to your customer.
That's why you see this nice footprint of 140 countries where we are operating depots that we are operating in 40 countries. If I look at the coverage, parts, 25% of parts that are needed for our installed base today are supplied through Alstom, also of course covering the maintenance part because you cannot sell a part twice. And modernization, clearly, a market leader here as well, focused not only on the full vehicle modernization, but also very precisely on traction upgrades, IGBT upgrades for instance. So we are clearly number 1 in that market and number 1 in terms of market share and absolute values if we compare that with competition. It is traditionally a high growth and profitability driver.
And the beauty of that activity is that we have long running contracts. So we talk about 20, sometimes 30 years and that's even more than some marriages. So it's really a long term business that we are in. If you look
a little bit where we
come from, so here is a chart. The blue bars represent the sales. The green bars, the order intake. So on sales, you see a steady growth of about 7% a year. And that despite of the order intake that normally has a time lapse until it translates into sales for service.
And then you see also the order intake, the last 5 years, very exciting, of 16% year over year with a book to bill of 1.6. Percent. So clearly, feeding the backlog with a lot of healthy long term contracts. There was a question on the geography of growth. And just looking at the order intake over the last 5 years, it's a well balanced distribution of where we won those different contracts.
There are contracts in for long term contracts for NAM. So North America and Canada, Sydney, we are talking about also Riyadh as a landmark contract we won recently. So it's a well balanced portfolio. If you look at the share of service in our activity, today we represent 20% of the total sales and service in the backlog represents even more than 30%. And clearly in that backlog you see as I said those long running contracts with more opportunities than risk.
That's the nature of a long term contract. So outperforming the market and with a share of service in the portfolio constantly increasing. What is the reason behind that success? I'd say there are 2 factors that are behind. So the first one is our cutting edge innovation and technology.
We were one of the pioneers starting to develop connected trains and to monitor performance. That was we started that when nobody even had IoT on the radar. So today, we have 60 trains, 60 fleets fully connected and covered with our monitoring solution. So it's not just connected trains, but connected infrastructure. We have here also our train scanner that is a wayside equipment to capture data from a drive through train.
We have one standardized platform to exploit this data that is robust and cyber secured enough to use it in daily business and is open enough to integrate further advanced solutions, neural networks and machine learning. So those bricks are constantly expanded in our platform. Now the beauty is to not just invent those and have it for some experts to use, but to really deploy it worldwide, so that the fleets, the maintainers on-site take advantage of that solution. And in order to do that, we have developed those fleet support centers that cover geographically fleets or also have a product fleet orientation to cover all the tramways, for instance, in La Rochelle. So we have developed that rollout that now is under full swing for deployment.
And clearly, if we see what the benefits are, it's really a differentiator. So we have now a lot of examples that demonstrate an improvement in reliability, availability and then overall cost savings that is quite impressive. And that is the differentiator versus, let's say, the classical operators that are more people driven that manage the drivers and they don't have this cutting edge technology in the back. So the second axis for our success is for sure our customer focus, constantly asking what is our added value we provide to our customers. And here is an illustration of how that worked for instance in Italy.
And Italy was already mentioned this morning of one of our key countries for service among U. K. And Spain. So we have managed to double over 10 years by 5 our sales. So it's a fantastic growth story with some different steps.
First, of course, a dedicated service organization to really make sure we focus on our customer for service for daily needs. Growing expertise either through training or through very specific hiring of high skilled experts building digital solutions and then concentrating on high value services. So with that, we have moved from a parts vendor, which is classical service business for many industries, to a service provider that covers really all the needs and even some high level engineering requirements for our customers. And to illustrate that, so just some examples of this partnership with our customers. So if you look at NTV, which is the first private very high speed operator in Italy, so they come from a non rail background.
And that's a true partnership. They totally relied on us for all the technical part in terms of running this high speed maintenance in terms of service day to day. And that's how they manage to penetrate this market. On the other hand, with the competitor of NTV, so we have a partnership with Trenitalia, instance, for their regional fleet, where they have subcontracted all the maintenance on the Minueto fleet and just renewed it recently for another 10 years. And they concentrate on the passenger side, the commercial side and their expansion to international growth.
And then also on the signaling, same story, partner to RFI to improve their operation. And that's all based on long term contracts. So it's a true partnership. Now what's our ambition? Today, we are clearly the leader in this domain.
We have been building our portfolio, our solutions that are now on the full deployment and demonstrating added value. And clearly, we want to continue this path to become the undisputed leader, increase our service contribution to group sales, of course, and focus on those high value services, yes? And service is by definition a local business. So we leverage in our presence and we'll continue to grow our presence hand in hand with the customers. So if we look at the overall market, here is an assessment of Unifay and the service market worldwide and that is passenger and freight are combined.
All service in rail represents €80,000,000,000 So parts by definition is the most accessible one because well any supplier can sell his parts. And the other areas are about 40% accessible. And that means the other half, let's say, is still covered by either national operators that have not on the radar to outsource anything or close countries like Russia or like China. So but that market will is very dynamic and will continue to grow. There are some drivers that support this growth and growth in 2 ways.
So the total market will grow, but also the accessible market will increase. The reason for that here is clearly liberalization. So the 4th railway package is now giving the option of open access and that was of course the trigger for NTV to come on the market. So there are several effects to that. Those new players not necessarily have rail background, so they need a partner.
And it will also increase further the traffic. For instance, those high speed lines, there's a clear shift from air to rail. So the passenger numbers will continue to grow in this domain. And then operators looking for more efficiency. It's also a side effect.
All those established players will face, of course, the pressure to become more efficient. And we see a whole new set of contracts like the TSSA, so technical service spare supply agreements, where for instance the blue color stays with the operator and will make sure the day to day activities on train are executed by these national operators. And they subcontract all the technical part, so processes, spares and in particular digital services. And then we see a whole new set of new value added services, technology driven data services and services around cybersecurity. So we have a very good foundation to sustain this further growth, a large installed base, customer intimacy, as I mentioned, because we have today already feet on the ground, let's say, in most of the countries.
We have a cutting edge technology. And we have highly skilled workforce with experts that know exactly what they are doing. And so this brings me to what our levers for further growth are. So Alstom in Motion is clearly pushing further our existing businesses and adding new solutions to our core business. The first one is around new revenue streams for parts.
The second one is expanding our leadership position in maintenance and that is really important because there is a lot of spin off from this maintenance contract. Once you are close to the customer, then you deal with obsolescence with additional services around modernization. So it's really the key driver and then enhance our position on green modernization. Now the first one, new revenue streams in parts. As I said, a big market, quite low entry barrier because anybody can sell his own parts.
Our ambition is clearly to continue the growth in that area. I said 25 percent of our parts, but there is also a potential to grow outside of our installed base, reduce cash and material through a more efficient supply chain and optimizing central governance versus local execution, shorter repair loops and improved the margins through both efficiency increase of our back office and harmonized pricing strategy. So the road map is very clear, worldwide integrated organization to leverage really on our size, smart diagnostic tools, so and localization of repairs to avoid that we have a traffic of repairs across the globe, Strengthen of Alstom IP rights and co development because if you do that together with the supplier, you cover more captive parts. So you are in business by definition. And then entering into new revenue streams like on commodities, so commodities, wheels, hardware, connectors and all that stuff.
Today, it's very difficult for a large organization to be competitive due to margin guidance and overhead. So here we have developed a solution. We started 1 year ago to develop Station 1, which is now in full ramp up. And what is that? That is the 1st marketplace for railway professionals.
It is, if you want, Amazon for the rail industry. So we develop a marketplace to bring together vendors and buyers. We are financed through the fee on the transaction And our added value is advanced search engine, predefined kits, cross reference of part numbers. So and that is really one element that is unique. So we are pushing that to continue this as a growth driver.
Now 2nd lever expand our leadership in maintenance. Today, the market size is about €9,000,000,000 We see here a further dynamic to increase that. Today, the schemes are quite diverse in terms of bundle contracts with rolling stock or operate and maintain where the operator then subcontracts maintenance. And then PPPs where we have of course the TCO approach. And what we see in this market is a clear technology push that kind of diversifies a bit the small players that cannot follow with the digital tools that we are developing and implementing.
So there is a little separation, the big players and the small players in that market. And then what's our ambition? We want to become the preferred partner for operators, the first go to address when they see maintenance. We will of course further increase the backlog. And we push value selling of our digital solutions.
Today, we clearly don't have digital services in the portfolio. That's purely because it is embedded in our maintenance solution. So today there is not the market is not yet big enough and attractive enough, but it will come. So we think of offering that also as a standalone. So the road map is straightforward, Xtend prognostic and health management.
So we are already leading that technology and we, of course, continue to push together with our colleagues in that domain. Full coverage with Fleet Support Center, so that's clearly the step of making a theoretical solution to the practical deployment. New partnering schemes on leasing and operating, leasing because it's think of short it's a very dynamic market. Think of short term rentals and more flexible usage of fleets. We are stepping away from 40 years with 1 fleet in 1 network and towards a more dynamic use of the different fleets.
And we are today very successful in freight maintenance in Mexico, for instance, where we maintain 500 diesel low cost. We are the biggest maintainer in Mexico. And we explore if we want to expand this to other countries. Then number 3, green modernization. You've heard it this morning.
The market is changing massively in terms of diesel ban. And imagine all the diesel fleets that are still in operation not written off. And here is a clear potential to come up to the market with retractioning, green retractioning, be that either through hydrogen. So the idea is it's not just an idea, it's more advanced than that to use our proven technology that is now running on regional trains and to make it more flexible in terms of individual bricks that are more easily to be configured and implemented on existing trains. So with relatively low fixed costs, so we are clearly more agile on this market.
So become the reference for green modernization, leverage our lead position in hydrogen. And modernization is quite a tricky market because one could think it's relatively easy, but the existing interfaces, more complex supply chains and configuration management makes it not this easy. That's why we are well positioned to be to continue to be the leader on that. So service has the advantage that it's relatively low risk based on this long term contract and the continuous flow of revenues. With our focus on more high value activity and the differentiator through digital will lift up the margin even more.
And it's very nice for cash, as Laurent said, low capital and strong cash generation. And that brings me to the summary. So today, we are the leader in this domain. We have proven to outperform the market over the last 10 years. It is a growing business as the frontier between accessible and unaccessible will continue to move on top of the market dynamics.
We have a strong base foundation that we can leverage on and we have clear roadmap, yes? And that will clearly sustain us to be the undisputed leader in this domain and strengthen our market position in this area. Thank you very much. Now, Marc, you take over for the innovation.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm the last to speak this afternoon. I hope you still have a bit of energy to share with me a few minutes to look forward to the future. My name is Marc Granger. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer covering as well innovation, and innovation will be my focus right now.
You've noticed that it is our 2nd pillar, and we have great ambition in that respect. But before jumping to the future, I would like to remind that Alstom Innovation DNA is very strongly embedded. Andre, this morning, already referred to it was 12 years ago when we broke the speed ward we caught. It was in 2007. I could also remind that we've been the first to put in commercial service a fully automatic driverless large sized metro in Singapore, one of the most demanding customer around the world or even moving the clock further back and remembering that we had been the first to implement GTO in our electronic power electronic system.
So innovation is very well embedded in the company. More recently, we've also developed quite interesting product or solution. Some have already been mentioned. Of course, the Croatia HighLink, our hydrogen train, you all know that. The new e electrical bus platform, Haptis, It has been quoted as well.
In Signaling, it has not been quoted and it's under development. It's for the future still. But Fluence is a kind of revolutionary CBTC vehicle centric solution based on communication from train to train, and that allows to reduce quite significantly the headway, the time in between two trains, but also to reduce the install base on the wayside, providing some CapEx reduction, which is quite interesting. HealthFair, I'm not going to mention that. It has been largely explained by Bernd.
We've developed as well the so called SRS, which is a static charging system, which allow to charge either trams or buses in station in a very short period of time, very interesting solution. ESOP has been mentioned as well, but it's less known than the other flagships. It's a substation that allow to regenerate a quite significant portion of the traction energy. So in parallel to that, it has been mentioned as well during the last 5 years, we've renewed all our running stock platforms. I'm not going to go back on that, but just to quote a couple of examples because the main focus of the renewal of those product lines has been on cost reduction and competitiveness.
And you may see 2 examples among other here on the screen. The new generation of metropolis for which we have reached quite significant cost reduction as well as energy consumption, as you may see. You see as well the equivalent figure for the so called TGV future, our new high speed train, very high speed train platform for which we have the same level of cost reduction or energy consumption, but also thanks to the massification of the different components of the train, including the traction equipment, we've been able at the same time to increase the capacity of the train quite significantly by 20%. And you may see that seen by an operator. When you reduce the total cost of ownership by 20% and you increase the capacity by 20%, you are gaining a lot on your both CapEx and operational cost.
We have
not innovated only on products. We've also innovated in business models. Station 1 has just been quoted by Bernd, which is a very promising new business model for us. We have also massively innovated in our own industrial activities, Industry 4.0, as we commonly say. This has been detailed this morning by Thierry Best and you have seen the result.
All that has been possible, thanks to a quite significant and continuous investment in research and development. It has been quoted by Laurent this morning, but you've noticed as well that our intention is to continue to sustain this level of investment over the plan. And it has been also the result of a quite well and widely established internal innovation contest that we named INOVU. And year on year, we are progressing both in term of number of innovation competing in term of number of sites involved of countries providing some IDs. And among the recent years, the ELFURB, the ESOP or the Khoradia Island has been the winner of this contest.
And you may see that later on, it translates in real product or solution that we are able to put on the market and to generate business like that. We have also been quite well recognized by different type of bodies on the market, 1 on our strong growth and leadership in term of patent filings. We've increased quite significantly the number of patents we are capable to issue. And we got some quite interesting, not to say impressive, prestigious recognition. And I like to quote the one concerning Airtis.
We got some question this morning on it. But there is a worldwide fair, which is named Buzzworld. And during the once every 2 years and the last one, we got the most innovative award in that fair even though we were not a player in that market for long. So having this strong DNA and this track record, one could challenge, but why having innovation as one of the 3 main pillars of our Alstom in Motion new strategic plan? The answer is very simple, and it is on this page.
The world is changing. It has been already quoted, but some very strong megatrends are becoming more and more obvious. The new technology available are growing, and there are permanently new technologies emerging on the market at a record speed. But there are also some social or business model or sharing economy, new ways of considering life in general, but mobility in particular, that lead us or that has to be considered by us as must have. And on top of that, what is very interesting for us, it's potentially create new business opportunities.
We are lucky enough to have our core business with strong sustainable growth. But aside, we have we are lucky to have potential new business opportunities. So in term of strategic priority, we've decided to focus ourselves on smart and green mobility. It has been already presented, but I want to insist on that. Those are our 2 key drivers for our innovation program as part of Alstom in Motion.
We've selected 6 different initiatives. They have been already mentioned by Henri this morning. Quickly, green traction, road electromobility and eco design and manufacturing for the green dimension and autonomous train, data driven rail mobility and multi modality and flow management for the smart mobility. What I suggest now is to guide you through those 6 priorities. So let's start by green traction.
No need to mention that among the megatrend, obviously, the need to reduce CO2 emission is necessary. And you may see that the goal by 2,050, it's not tomorrow morning, but nevertheless, it's moving fast, is for mobility, but mobility at large to reduce by 60% the emission. When I say mobility at large, it's to mention the fact that we, the rail industry, is not the largest contributor to that. And by far, airplane, ships, cars are the 1. But nevertheless, the diesel ban will come and it will apply and most probably apply first for public transportation.
This means that we will have to suppress diesel train. But we have also to mention that rail industry has been electrified, so green, for decades. But only a portion of the network today is electrified. If we take Europe as an example, only roughly 50% of the network is electrified. That means that there's still a lot to consider.
But and one could say that the best solution for CO2 emission perspective would be to electrify all the network. But obviously, it is costly. And for sure, hydrogen is quite economic alternative to electrification, which makes a lot of sense in certain number of cases. And the market has taken time to consider that erosion is a solution, But now it's starting, and I would say it is moving fast. And we are lucky enough to be ahead of the competition.
And our plan is to take advantage to be in that position and to move fast with earlier adopter in that respect. So our strategy in that respect is not only to push on our hydrogen leadership position, but also to be the top sustainable train provider. And that means that not only Hydrogen train, but also battery, hybrid and so on. And we are quite confident that hydrogen will come for sure and the other solution will be necessary and we will be ready with those in order to capture a significant portion of the market. As I mentioned, diesel are only a part of our business and relatively smaller parts compared to the electrified train.
And that means that Green Traction does not consider only the diesel train replacement, but also the electrical train solution. And for that, we have innovation plan, both at the very heart of the power electronic of our trains. And you see there a picture that is not very nice, but I'm quoting there the silicon carbide solution. It's somehow what was GTO grandfather is going to be in the future with some energy reduction, less weight and less volume and a couple of other benefits for the train. So we have still some innovation program for the future on the core of the core of our business, but also more globally at the system overall level, which is on the right hand side of this picture for which we've initiated a program together with a startup, which aims to develop a powerful tool for energy simulation at the global system level using machine learning and artificial intelligence in order once again to reduce the overall system energy consumption.
The second green priority is on road. Suppressing diesel in the rail mobility is our duty. But what we are capable to do in rail may be applicable to Road as well. And that was the first reason why we decided to enter in the electrical bus market. Just to give a few figures, we do consider, given the cautiousness of the need to reduce CO2 emission and particles.
We may anticipate a fast growing market leading to 50% of the bus market becoming full electrical bus in 2025, which is in a short period of time from now. And that will represent in Europe only 7,500 buses per year on a permanent basis. So we started to enter with our Aptis vehicle with some disruptive features as explained by Henri this morning. But it's not the only reason why we decided to enter in that market. It's also because thanks to electromobility, but even more thanks to the fact that in the medium to long term those buses will become autonomous.
They will have to be considered by public authorities and organized as a system. And there, we have significant capabilities and assets to be a player in that field. The 3rd initiative in our green mobility innovation program concerns our eco design processes and our focus on environmental excellence in our manufacturing. You may see on the screen the different quantified objective we've set to ourselves in order to be achieved by 2023 compared to what is the situation today. And you may see that we have a great ambition to push further on those different dimension.
So that was for the 3 initiatives for green mobility. Moving to smart mobility, we have notified 3 initiatives as well. The first of them is autonomous train. We mentioned already several times during the day that we have for long now driverless metro. So it should be a quite easy game to move from an automatic metro to an autonomous train.
But you have to consider that a metro is operating in a closed environment, dedicated track, no access from passenger on the track. And the problematic for a train or tram or even a shuttle operating in open field is slightly different. Here, you have to develop the capability to capture your environment, of course, without any human being on board and to be in capacity to understand what are those events you may capture outside and to make the right decision in driving. So the topic is slightly different from developing an automatic metro. And in that field, we have clear objectives.
1 is to have an autonomous shuttle system in service by 2021. The second objective is to have autonomous train capable to operate in depots and in between depots and station by 2022. And the third objective is to be able to have a fully tested prototype available and having done the demonstration that we are capable to put on the market a fully autonomous train by 2023. The second initiative in the smart mobility is named data driven rail mobility. For sure, when we speak about smart mobility, that means developing the capability to capture data, to organize them, to be able to develop the relevant application that are using this data.
And we need to, 1st, both first, sorry, build the capability second, the tools to make that happen and third, the relevant governance throughout the company. And in order to speak further about this initiative, I would like to welcome on board Julien Cabot. Julien is our Chief Digital Architect, and he will tell you what we are doing in that respect. Julien, you have the floor.
Thanks, Marc. So basically, the story about data for Alstom is not totally new. It started probably in 2006 while collecting all the data coming from the train directly from the train to the ground. And now we have a huge database with very detailed data about the train during the commercial mission that we use obviously for validation of our train, for diagnosis and for maintenance for sure. So this information is really a very important database because now our objective is to increase the number of the fleet and the train under this database and to extend the coverage of this database to signaling system and to the infrastructure.
To leverage the value of this data, the purpose is to combine this data with the data coming from our customer, from the authority, from the city to have a full representation of the mobility data to be able to design and to provide new kind of digital question in terms of predictive maintenance, in terms of smart operations, I mean about the traffic management and the energy efficiency as a digital solution and to provide a new generation of city flow management, I mean to support the mobility around the overall city and the issue related to this mobility in the urban context. And the last pillar of this kind of digital solutions is about the passenger security to be sure to use properly the CCTV that we operate to ensure the right security of the passenger and the right cyber security of the passenger.
We have now
some commercial success with this new digital solution. I mean about predictive maintenance for sure. And some pilots around the world, including Paris La Defense and other projects with Lyon and Montreal. So in terms of technology, because under the digital solutions, there is a lot of new digital technologies that we have to master and to build together to create this solution. And for sure, the new generation of IoT sensors, gateway and device give us the opportunity to collect more and more data and to have very detailed understanding of the operation of the train and the signaling system across the world and applying new data processing about this data.
Mastering the big data technologies, I mean about Apache Cassandra or Apache Spark to allow a very high level of data processing to be able to extract some pattern and information from a large historical database about the trend information is becoming a key capability and we invest a lot to master this kind of open source technology to be sure to analyze properly this data. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, as Marc mentioned, is now a key component of our digital solution to be able to predict the next failure during a predictive maintenance or to simulate or optimize the mobility flow through a multimodal solution. So our capability, I'll make some really good improvement in this field with a unique capability to mix the state of the art deep learning and machine learning capabilities through our data science team and our expertise and experience about physics, electronics and mechanics to combine really these two fields to create a new generation of machine learning algo, constituting key differentiators from new entrants and the digital layers. 4th pillar in terms of technology is about computer vision, giving us the capability to automatically detect some issues, some security suites through the CCTV to perform visual inspection of the train, for example.
And this capability associated to big data and machine learning is really a key objective in term of technology to go ahead to develop this digital solution as the eyes of on the mobility and on the train. Security and to be sure to address the right concern about cybersecurity, we have to ensure a full chain of security from the device from the IoT device to the cloud, applying the best framework in the world to secure the data and the device directly on the train. And this is part of our technical asset, and we have to extend and continue to extend this knowledge and the right usage of IoT security across our digital solution and Rolex Tongue and Sineinoung product. Containerization and automation is a kind of evolution of the technology of the train. For many years, we talk about computer based train control.
Containerization is a form a new kind of virtualization and containerization of the digital computer and application on the wayside and inside the train. And we have to follow the evolution of this kind of technology to get the best in class technology to support our digital solution. To address all this new technology and this technology, we package it as a framework, as a platform, mobility data platform to ensure the right configuration between the technology and for sure the right cyber security associated to this technology to have a kind of framework or data operating system available on the cloud and on premise for our solution and for our customers. So to end this short technical or technological introduction about our technology beyond the digital solution, I propose a short video, if possible, to illustrate the usage of this technology in the predictive maintenance field.
Thank you, Julien. So that was for data driven Reimobility. I hope you've followed all the detailed explanation of Julien. If not, we will be happy to answer to your questions. Last but not least, the 6th initiative and the 3rd for smart mobility, multimodality and flow management.
What do we mean by that? And as you know and as already quoted, there are nowadays a lot of new transport modes emerging, and that becomes a difficulty for the public authority. I've just taken and I would like to quote that for you. It's a report that has been requested by the San Francisco CTA, the County Transportation Authority. And this report found that the so called transportation network companies, Uber and Lyft of this world in San Francisco have caused a 51% increase in vehicle hours.
Uber and Lyft were also accountable for 47% of vehicle miles traveled and are reducing the speed on roadways by 55%. So what does that mean? That means that there are a lot of new transport systems that are emerging, but the reality is that for the time being, it is creating more concern for the transport authority than really providing higher transportation capacity. So at the individual level, it's very easy, very nice. It looks like a great solution.
But when you are managing a global city, it's far to be that easy orchestrate all those modes. So that is one aspect of our Maastrichtia initiative. The other one is that as the congestion is growing, is growing and growing, the transport authority, if they have not created any multi mode multi transport model approach to face some potential events, disruptive events, then the mobility could become a nightmare in the city. And therefore, they are requesting some tools to help us to optimize the different transport mode. So that is the purpose of Maastricht.
And more than speaking about it, I would like to invite you to look at a short video as well. Maybe some of you have already seen it. But if not, you will understand exactly what it is about. Please?
Here, they keep an eye on all the city's transport networks, coordinating them like a conductor. In less than a minute, Maastrichtia's algorithms had already devised steps to prevent bottlenecks, adapting the city's traffic, reorganizing it and managing the incident itself. The Maastricht operator receives the procedure to be followed. He just has to choose from among several options. He selects bus, commuter trains, passenger information, maintenance for any damage to the rails, police and the fire department.
Each of these players receives an alert in real time through their operations center connected to Maastricht. Bus frequency is increased and the commuter trains get ready for a massive influx of passengers. At the station, the agents provide passengers with updates and alternatives. Maintenance is already on-site. In just 1 hour, thanks to Mastria, Metro is finally able to get going again.
Okay. It was a short version, but it gives you a flavor of what is the purpose of Maastrichtia as a mobility orchestrator tool. The next and the last initiative is more medium, long term. While Maastricht is now, I would say, available. It runs through some proof of concept stages positively.
So it's ready for sale. What I'm going to quote there is probably more medium to long term. But the purpose of that is to explain what we consider we could do outside rail. And you may find back on the left hand side of this slide what is in blue, you will recognize the free capability and solution you need to have in order to master safely a rail operation that Jean Francois has explained previously to you. The driving so called driving automation on this slide is so called onboard system that Jean Francois mentioned.
The intelligent infrastructure is wayside and the supervision and regulation is the tower control. The wording used by Jean Francois are purely the rail jargon. Here, those three notions are exactly the same one, but worded in a way that makes more sense to be considered in a wider landscape than rail only. This is to prepare the fact that road mobility will become progressively over time autonomous, And we do consider that public transport will be the 1st to become autonomous. And I quote it here, Chotol and Buses.
And you may see that in gray there, we are currently working, but we intend to innovate and to focus ourselves on expanding our assets and capability beyond rail, both in term of driverless system for public transport, in term of connected infrastructure for public transport and in terms of public transport orchestration, which is part of Maastricht. And what is in green in that screen in that in the screen is what we could consider on the long run as potential deployment of our capability and solution beyond public transport, and that is longer term. But robot taxi will require as well a system approach, will require as well some intelligent infrastructure. And we have there some assets, some capability and we are the recognized and untrusted body for public authorities that are said that we could leverage in the long term future. And that is the last part of my presentation to position ourselves in a longer perspective.
One word to complete that is to mention that in order to make that happen, we've notified 3 enablers. I'm not going to elaborate on them, But the data innovation factory, which is led by Julien, is a key pillar or a key enabler for us, and we are going to invest further in that. We will push further our open and agile innovation ways of working, including some partnerships. We have already partnerships. I will come back in a minute, but we will push that further.
And we will reshape our internal business incubator in order to speed up our good ideas to transform that in business and impacting the top line and the P and L of the company. One word on partnership. We've already established quite robust partnership. This morning, Thierry already quoted Safran for some electric architecture approach, but we have another partnership with Safran to share our experience on electrical drive and hybrid system for motorization. We have also a partnership with Airbus for the cybersecurity, which is obviously a key concern.
But we have other partnership with Easymile as an example for you probably know that for autonomous shutters and with a quite long list of research institutes or academics. But we will strengthen that and we will change quite strongly our ways to work with those bodies in order to go faster and to adapt a much more agile approach for our innovation. So just to summarize, it is very simple. R and D and innovation is quite strongly embedded in the company DNA, but we've decided to continue to invest in that and more specifically in green and smart mobility where we intend to become the leader in that field. And in the ways of working, we will implement new open and agile innovation ways of working in order to speed up our capability to put good ideas on tests and then on the market.
Thank you very much. I guess it is question and answer session now.
So thank you, Bernd. Thank you, Marc. Thank you, Jeff. I will invite you on stage, and we'll take a few questions for this second session. Oops, sorry, lining up.
This is James again from Redburn. A question on the general future of digital. And almost every company on the planet has a digital strategy. It's quite clear that the cloud players are growing their revenues at 50% per annum from Azure to AWS. They're the guys who have the IT stack and they talk a lot about using that to provide the new level of analytics, whether it's predictive maintenance, remote monitoring, the many things you talk about from the operating industrial companies are all talking about trying to get into that space.
So far, it's mostly been collaborations between IT companies and industrial companies. But it could be that we start to move toward a battleground for trying to get into these new data driven services. So to what degree do you think the automation companies, whether it's Siemens or others, are trying to come in sideways to these areas of offering these services? And also the likes of AWS are going to be trying to offer these same sort of services. Is there a competitive dynamic already developing there?
Okay. Thank you. So it's a technical question. So it's a very good yes, it's perfectly a good one. And we by the way, we want our digital strategy with this question.
I mean today, to be clear, Azure, Google, our supplier for the digital capabilities on the cloud, okay? So we buy some services from other capabilities. What we want to keep and what is the difference between Amazon and Alstom is not only about the IT part because they are very efficient on the IT part. We have 2 key different sectors. The first one is that we belong the network between the train and the ground.
So I mean the data is collected from our product to the network that we deliver and the gateway that we deliver and are collected primarily to firstly to our database. And so we capture the data. We are on the first part. And the second one is about the analytics and the algorithm. We realize since 2006 that it's not just a question of mathematics or statistics or just machine learning.
If we apply the same technology in term of machine learning or deep learning that Amazon or Google built for the overall market, it doesn't fit. It doesn't matter. It doesn't run. Why? Because we have to train our algorithm, our artificial intelligence to understand the railway and to understand physics mainly.
This is why the combination between the expert from services, the expert from the engineering and the data science team is a key of our product. At the beginning, obviously, we tried to use what the market is offering in term of analytics and machine learning. And we need to adapt and to create something more specific for our industry and for the industry. So this means that we master this part of the algorithm. And the other part, for sure, we use what the market offer in terms of technology,
The question is extremely valid. We are protected a little bit, if I may say, by the size of our market. In our discussion with digital player, I've not met any digital player who is really interested into deep diving into the rail market. They can't go in the car industry because it's a massive consumer based market. But for the rail 1 to get to know how Rail market and the rail the physics of the rail works is too much of a burden for them just for the small vertical.
So I don't think it will add up in the battlefield in our markets. It will start by other types of massive markets where a digital company could invest into a global platform as we see a little bit in car industries coming. Yes, Takash?
I have three questions, please. My first one is on Hydrogen Train. Can you give us some sort of a statistic or a number in terms of how competitive your hydrogen train is in terms of operation, running cost per kilometer compared to diesel or, let's say, electric? Because I mean, my worry is that it may be very expensive for anybody to run and in today's environment, when you can't increase prices for rail fare, then it may not be viable in that sense.
So it's a complex question. A few numbers just to the CapEx itself will cost probably 20%, 25%. So the trend itself is 20%, 25% above under your control, above diesel trend. The full OpEx will depend on, I would say, the cost of electricity. And this is, of course, a question which has no answer because the hydrogen economy works for one reason, because you can store the hydrogen and you can store energy through the hydrogen.
So one of the key element that we are discussing with our partners in hydro chain is what is their cost of electricity. If you go in Northern Germany, I know that because by discussing with the guy, they can reach a level of cost of electricity, which is 20% the full average cost. Why? Because as you know, in Northern Germany, you have fluctuations of the price of electricity, which is absolutely huge because of the wind and there's too much wind energy and not enough stable energy. And therefore, they can buy electricity only at low point And then with a few tanks to store the hydrogen, they can achieve this kind of average price of electricity for them, which is much, much below the average price on the market.
So depending on this factor, but in the let's say, on average, the total cost of ownership is around the same level as the diesel train. Of course, it has it's much below electrifying the line. Even there as well, you have an arbitrage depending on the density of the line. On a very dense line, let's say, a suburban trend or an urban trend, you will end up saying that it's a to electrify the line is €1,000,000 €1,500,000 per kilometer. It will be cheaper to electrify the line.
If you have a low density line, then it will be cheaper to embark the energy and to embark the hydrogen. So there's not one answer to your point. There are 3 ways of when you have your diesel, you have the hydrogen, you have the electrical line. In some cases, we have looked at in South of France, it's cheaper to put hydrogen trend rather than to renovate electrical line because it's extremely expensive. And there is a trend on the market that electrification and all what is Libya infrastructure is more and more expensive.
So there are business cases which can vary.
And my second question is on Aptis. How big revenue driver it can be in, let's say, 3 to 5 years? And can you talk about breakeven, like how many units do you need to sell to reach to breakeven point?
So it is a growth driver. It will never be the half of Alstom, that's for sure. We are targeting in the ballpark 400 buses per year under Mark's control. And as we are not going to give you the price of the buses, you can figure that out. It's in thousands of kilo euros in 100 of kilo euros.
But will it be breakeven at 400?
Yes. At level, it will be at the average margin of 1st time.
And finally, on TMH, I think we discussed on everything other than TMH. So maybe if you can talk about what you are seeing there in their operations? And also on dividend policy of TMH, could that be something positive for cash flow down the line?
TMH is an extremely well run company, and they have weathered the Russian crisis extremely well, and they are back in profit. Last year, it was particularly profitable. And it will continue to grow on the back of the Russian market. It's true that it's for us a situation which is a stable situation. So we are always wondering whether we can do more with them, what does it mean to do more with them.
Fantastic potential, to be fair, fantastic company. Now it's in Russia, so there is also some country analysis to be made. So that's the balance. There is, I would say, a regular distribution of dividend, which is, on average, 60% of their net income. So and this will not change, so the dividend fluctuates depending on the results.
But it's a good in terms of financial investment, it has been a very, very good financial
investment. Good afternoon. It's Will from Kepler Cheuvreux. On signaling, a couple of questions, please. Just first of all, I think that the one of the ideas, as you mentioned, behind ER10, the new signaling system in Europe was to create standardization and to reduce the cost to the consumer or to the operator.
So can you just talk a little bit about what happens when you move to a fully standardized system? Does it change the barriers to entry for new players? And does it also change the pricing which you can achieve certain elements of the signaling system that you're selling, which is, of course, the end game for the regulator or for the European Commission? And then on Casco, can you just explain to us a little bit about who owns the technology and how do you share that? I mean, CRC is not an impartial competitor or player.
They are looking to expand overseas as well. So when they go overseas and try to promote Casco, who has the right to market and this type of approach on the signaling business, please?
To answer the ERTMS related question first. Like I said, when ERTMS has been designed, the primary purpose was to allow cross border operations across Europe. It has then been deployed and it will continue being deployed as a European standard. And in reality, since mainline in Europe is the largest market in the world, it is becoming a global standard, ERTMS being deployed at the moment in Australia or in Middle East, for instance. On your question on whether standardization will bring down prices or and or lower the entry barriers for smaller players?
I would say it's a fairly difficult question. 1, regarding the entry barriers, you need 2 elements to be able to address the European market, European country with the RM TMS technology. Not only you need to master the technology itself, but you need to have a non allocated interlocking in this country as well because more and more those markets are modern markets. If you take Denmark, for instance, when they decided to roll out the RTMS across the country, they took benefit of this large program to modernize the whole interlockings as well. So there are 2 barriers to entry.
1 is the mastering the technology of the eRTMS and second, the interlocking, which is more of a national concept. It's a barrier to everyone. 2nd element is ERTMS is a standard, but it's a very evolving standard. You heard me mentioning the Baseline 3, meaning that there has been a Baseline 1, Baseline 2. Baseline 3 is actually R2, like 3.1 and 3.2.
So there is a need for to address more and more countries and to address more and more expectations, be it ability to maintain those systems in a standard manner, cybersecurity requirement will be embedded and so on and so forth. You need to have an ability to further develop along this standard, which is fairly high and intensive, which creates a scale and rebarrier. You need to have the firepower to follow those regulations, although a standard one, increasing the scale of the market. You still need to be able to invest. So you need financial resources and human resources to do so.
So that's an entry barrier for smaller players. You will notice, by the way, that actually very few players are competing today in the RTMS market, both for the wayside and for the onboard. And we are one of those, very strong in both. The second question on Casco and CRSC. The JV with CRSC is 15 years old or so.
And as a very clear, let's say, a shareholding agreement where anything which is related to opportunities outside of China need to get a green line from both shareholders before being explored. So in simple terms, when there is an opportunity arising, I don't know, in Middle East, in Latin America or anywhere else, Where Casko would be interested to play, Casko management team needs to get a green line from Alstom to bid. Sometimes it happens. We have overseas successes. Sometimes it does not.
Does it answer your question? Yes. On the sharing of technology. So the core technology of what Casco operates, in particular in the urban market, which is basically 2 third of the revenue of Casco, is based on Alstom Technology, which is owned for which the IP is owned by Casco.
It's Guillermo Pena from UBS. A follow-up on signaling as well. Could you remind us a bit of the integration of the GE Signaling business and whether actually that is helping you to grow in a particular way in the U. S. At all?
Yes, I'll
do that. Sorry, my mistake. When I said the IP, yes, the IP of the the technology delivered by Casco is an Alstom technology with the IP owned Alstom, of course. So it's harder. Yes, so the integration of GC Darling has been an enormous success, to be honest.
You know that they were very much present in North America on the freight and mining sea lining activities. Their activities overseas was, I would say, almost marginal. And one of the reasons why we are so strong in the North American market in freight and mining is actually, as we said, a side effect of capitalizing on the critical mass given by this acquisition. We, Alstom, historically had a presence on this market from our unit in Rochester, New York State. And we created synergies, in particular, industrial synergies, through the integration process.
So today, we use the former GE factories close to Kamsa City to manufacture all the products from the historical GE portfolio as well as the historical Alstom portfolio in one single set of factories.
I have said that from a management standpoint, it has been a reverse take over because most of our team covering North America is actually coming from GE Signaling.
Thank you. Gael De Bruyff from Deutsche Bank. Two questions. The first one is on the service part of the business. I guess, across industries and not just mobility, we see a lot of clients basically willing to increase the service, the maintenance interval so that they could spend actually less and less on maintenance.
So how consider how do you wait developing predictive maintenance models, digital services offerings versus, at the same time, growing the parts business because I guess there is some sort of cannibalization effect here. So that's question number 1. The other question is on the signaling business. You said you have 12 countries with a normal location of the interlockings. So what are the key largest countries missing in your wish list?
And could you also provide the breakdown of sales between urban and mainline signaling and explain why one has been more successful than the other historically?
Yes. The first one on Service. It's clear that what we said, there is a cannibalization effect. I mean, either you do the full maintenance or you sell parts. Both together is not compatible.
And clearly, our business model is to help our dear customers to optimize, of course, maintenance cost whilst increasing reliability and availability. And yes, theoretically, it has an impact. The more you reduce the cost, the less volume there is in the maintenance market. But it is compensated by our gain in market share and an overall growing market. So that's we've seen that in the last couple of years and this trend will for sure continue.
Just if I may say, unfortunately, as you probably have noticed from Bern's presentation, the spare parts business for us is relatively small because our there are very few spare parts which we are manufacturing ourselves, which are used regularly by our customer. They are usually actually purchasing spare parts to our own subcontractor. So when through maintenance contract, we are decreasing the need for new spare parts. In most cases, these are spare parts actually manufactured by our suppliers themselves and not ourselves. So we are not in this kind of paradox, sickle situation or where we would be, I would say, tempted not to go for maintenance, to sell a lot of spare parts.
For us, it's the game is relatively simple. On signaling? So to the
first question, which are the countries in which we do not have homologous in Dialogia? You can refer to the chart I presented. You see where we are, so you will see by where we are not. Yes. And amongst the large European countries in which we are not present, of course, there is no secret we are not present in Germany.
We are very strong in the onboard market in Germany, paradoxically. By the way, one of our key customers is actually one of our competitors. But quite well known, a very well known rolling stock and signaling player based in Germany, who procures its onboard units from us. On the West side, on the contrary, we are not present. And if it was my wish list to sound down, of course, I would like to put Germany on the top of the list.
To the question, what's the split of revenue, Urband to Mainline, I won't answer this question. As simple as that.
For the future or for the past?
No
numbers. No, we were successful in urban through our globalization. Typically, India, we are extremely successful in India. As we said, our technology is number 1 in India, and this was entirely due to our globalization. As I was alluding to a little bit on the comparison between urban and Mainline, it's clear that we have more upside potential in Mainline, meaning that probably we have not grown as fast in Main Line as we have grown in urban, and we should recover that situation.
Laurent Renacher, External Asset Management. How do you compare your DNA in signaling? You've got 2 competitors who are bigger than you. So maybe scale effect would be in their favor. So to what extent you can win market shares over those 2 competitors?
And to what extent your difference may help you in the future?
I think to make it simple, I do consider that with the number 2 on the chart, we are roughly equivalent because to be clear, Thales has a ticketing business, which is included there and which does not give any economies of scale in their signaling. It's a different activity. So if you compare April to April without the ticketing on their side, it's on the same ground. It's clear that now Siemens is larger than we are both on Mainland due to a larger number of countries where they are, this interlocking and in particular, of course, of course, Germany. And in urban, they are probably of similar size on what is a standard solution, but they benefit as well from a strong market in Germany, but which is non conventional urban.
So it's not the CBDC, which is a classical one, but it's also a very locally driven technology. So on that one, they don't have so much of economies of scale. So it's true on landline, but it's not true necessarily on urban. So there is no reason with our global footprint. And as I said this morning, we have this key asset of India.
So with our global footprint, with India, with this access of resource, which has been shown by Abalene, there is no reason why we cannot compete with the number 2 absolutely clear. And also we are and I believe that being a pure mobility player is bringing a lot also in terms of systems, in terms of customer intimacy, rather having that as a very marginal activity in your portfolio. As compared to cement, it's clear that we need to push and to get some access to some markets, to some new technologies in order to catch up. That's clear.
A follow-up question on services, please. I think Europe is trying to accelerate the process of liberalization. Some of the fast main site fast lines in France are opening up by 2020. And your service provision to independent providers is very obvious. But what are you seeing in terms of moving or changing business models with 2 of your biggest potential customers that keep all their service in house?
I think of SNCF or Deutsche Bahn. How are their service operations going to come under increased scrutiny? Is there going to be a change in the business models? And is that going to lead to a big change over 3 or 5 years?
Thank you for the question. And it's really a key question on those 2 big players because clearly, Germany in terms of implemented rail solutions is the biggest in Germany. And Deutsche Bahn is very clear on their in house policy, same as for SSF and RITP to some extent. So we focus now on what is our added value for those type of customers. And we need really to ask this question, what do we bring to the table?
So these are digital solutions. These are advanced maintenance processes because who says predictive and prognostic maintenance schemes requires a whole different logic to execute those tasks. So it's highly dynamic. And we have solutions, and we will package those in order to bring that to this type of customers. So we really focus on high value services.
For sure, we will not get into full maintenance because for political reasons, they will keep the blue color. So that's why we have also talked about TSSSA, technical service and spare supply agreements. So it's really focusing on what is the value we can bring to those customers.
Okay. So thank you very much. Maybe I will so we close by 1 or 2 remarks. Just 1 or 2 key takeaways as you have seen during all the day. We have achieved our 2020 strategy.
We want to leverage on that. You have understood what is our the main philosophy of our new strategic plan is now that we are a key player on all our geographies, that we have a large and diversified portfolio and a competitive offering. We want to really grow in these markets. And we are helped. We don't need to find new hidden markets because all the markets are in front of us.
There are a lot of positives and tailwind markets. So we need to grasp these opportunities. It's just up to us. How you call it? It's a self help.
That's how you call it. It's a self help plan. So everything is in our hands. We don't need any external support because the market are in front of us in order to become number 1 or number 2 in all these markets. So I really want to thank you for being here today.
You have all been punished because you have some of you have taken the planes and therefore it's extreme temperature today. So thank you for having come all the way. All the way along, I'll give you so next time, it will be in 2022 when we'll have over performed our plan 1 year in advance, hopefully. Thanks a lot.