Good morning, everyone. Before we start, a few safety guidelines because, as you know, safety is paramount for Bureau Veritas. There is no plan to drill today, but if there is an alarm, please follow the exit door located on both sides, on the right and on the left-hand side. Please, and don't panic. Walk slowly but surely. Okay, this being said, welcome to Bureau Veritas 2024 Capital Markets Day. Glad to see many of you today in Paris, and a warm welcome to those following us on the webcast. For those who don't know me, my name is Laurent Brunelle. I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Bureau Veritas. As you know, the job of investor relations is to manage market expectations. Hopefully today we'll meet, even beat, your expectations.
So we spend the day presenting our new vision and our new strategy for 2028. So you will hear about step change. You will hear about growth, about leadership, sustainability, shareholder returns. So let me take you through the day. During the first morning sessions, Hinda Gharbi, our Group Chief Executive Officer, will outline her vision. Then Juliano Cardoso will deep dive into the strategic framework with a focus on portfolio, followed by Vincent Bourdil. He will talk about two key growth engines: buildings and infrastructure and sustainability. Then we'll have a 30-minute Q&A session. Be ready for that. Then a deserved 30-minute break. After coffee, Vincent will be back. He will walk through the second pillar of our strategy, which is performance. And that will also include innovation that will be led by Philipp Karmires, our Chief Digital Officer.
Then you will hear about people from Kathryn Dolan, and she will explain to you how we are evolving our people model. Then Hinda will return to share our CSR strategy with you. And last but not least, François Chabas, Group CFO, will give you the numbers that underline this strategy. That will be followed by a closing remark from Hinda. Then we'll have a lunch all together, which will be a good opportunity for you to meet the management of Bureau Veritas. And in the afternoon, we will have breakout sessions, and we will be focusing on five very interesting topics, but I'll give you more details before lunch. So time to start. And before welcoming Hinda, Group Chief Executive Officer, let's watch a short video.
The world is rapidly changing, accelerating faster than ever before. In this fast-evolving world, Bureau Veritas's role has never been more important. We broker trust between companies, governments, and society. We act as a bellwether, constantly moving forward, alerting on change and risk, charting a course of progress, always acting with independence, impartiality, and integrity. This has been our mission for nearly two centuries. We have supported our customers through every major development: technological, economic, and societal, managing risks related to quality, health and safety, and environment. Today, our vision is to be the preferred partner for customers' excellence and sustainability. Our high-performing team of experts put their knowledge to work on every continent, innovating with agility to meet the market's needs and deliver outstanding performance.
We are working hand in hand with customers to safely accelerate the energy transition, build transparency and accountability in an increasingly digitalized world, help companies tackle their environmental impacts in the face of climate change, and protect their reputation. This is how we are building on our mission to ensure responsible progress and shape a world of trust.
Thank you, Laurent. Good morning to our guests in Paris, and good afternoon and good evening to those listening online from elsewhere around the world. Thank you all very much for joining us. This is my first Capital Markets Day as CEO, and I'm proud to be leading our great company. Since I joined, I have spent tremendous time with colleagues and customers around the world. I have witnessed how unique our company is, and I will be sharing with you in the next 20, 30 minutes how Bureau Veritas will reach new levels of performance. I'm joined today by our executive committee team members who will be presenting several aspects of our strategy. I will start by sharing with you what defines our company, the new vision we have built, and the strategy we have developed with the help of many senior leaders from around the world.
So what defines Bureau Veritas? I will start with our first defining attribute: our brand. Bureau Veritas is a company with a long history. For 195 years, we showed how we continuously accompanied our customers and society through every major change. While we trace our roots to shipping, we evolved to support critical industries that accelerated global economic development by improving safety practices and risk management. In the last 30 years, we played a key role in a globalizing and connecting world supported by our long-term investor, the Wendel Group. We are known for our independence, our integrity, expertise, and a global footprint. These allow us to assure the safety of many industries, the integrity of trade, and the quality of goods, supporting regulatory compliance around the globe. Beyond the 2020s, we will continue to broker trust between customers, governments, and consumers to navigate this constantly evolving world.
The second defining attribute of Bureau Veritas is our purpose. Bureau Veritas's purpose of shaping a world of trust by ensuring responsible progress is timeless and timely. It guides the company, and it articulates what every Bureau Veritas employee believes in and works towards. Our customers need us to understand the changes around us and to anticipate what is coming ahead. It helps them comply with regulations, manage risks, and become more sustainable. Our customers' expectations and our purpose require us, Bureau Veritas, to be an exemplary company and to contribute to responsible progress. We have designed our corporate social responsibility program to address environmental, governance, and workplace aspects. I'll be sharing with you in a later session this morning our CSR targets for the next five years.
The engagement of our teams globally is strong, allowing us in 2023 to get multiple recognitions that acknowledge the strides we have made towards meeting our ambitions. Let me now talk about our third defining attribute: our global and sectoral reach. We operate in 140 countries through a network of 1,300 offices and over 300 testing labs supporting global and national customers. With this footprint, we serve over 400,000 customers in multiple markets worldwide, allowing us to have holistic views on how industries are developing, how regulations are evolving, and how environmental, social, and governance practices are changing. This provides us with a significant opportunity to leverage our customer base as we create novel solutions to address new needs. In 2023, we delivered EUR 5.9 billion revenue derived from six businesses, with 30% from our largest one, Buildings and Infrastructure, followed by Industry, Commodities, and Consumer Products testing.
Certification and Marine and Offshore are our smallest businesses, but among the most profitable. Geographically, Europe is our largest and most developed market, followed by Asia Pacific and North America. Now, our final defining attribute is our capabilities. We are a technical knowledge company, with over 2/3 of our 83,000 employees possessing specific and deep technical expertise as technicians, engineers, scientists, or other specialists. Our strong purpose supports our employee value proposition, allowing us to attract global talent. I have seen firsthand the global talent base we have and the strong contingent of our local experts embedded in the industrial and economic fabric of the regions where we operate.
This gives us a deep understanding of our customers and the environments where we work, and the strength of our talent base, in fact, is reflected in the nationality diversity for our top 135 leaders representing today 29 nationalities. Before sharing our strategy pivots, I would like to reflect on Bureau Veritas's recent business record. To understand our portfolio evolution, it is important to understand the market dynamics that brought us to where we are today since our successful 2007 IPO. In response to the severe oil and gas slowdown in the mid-2010s, the company had to accelerate diversification. The building and infrastructure business expanded then outside France, and additional capabilities were acquired in commodities and consumer testing. Geographically, the company also grew outside Europe, in China, and North America.
In the last five years, the focus has been on organic geographical scaling of existing businesses with some small investments in renewables and cyber. This effort, combined with the favorable trends around sustainability and energy transition, enabled high single-digit organic expansion and growing earnings. I believe that the diversification of the last 10 years was necessary then to address oil and gas cyclicality and to build portfolio resilience. It resulted in a highly diversified portfolio that hedges different economic sectors. However, the company did not always leverage the full potential of the markets where we operate, considering our different market positions. Also, while the breadth and variety of activities increased our revenue stability, the limited synergies and heterogeneity of our regional makeup reduced the effectiveness of our scaling. Today, we are navigating a growing market underpinned by powerful secular trends.
This is our opportunity to accelerate our next phase of growth and to increase shareholder returns. I want to emphasize that this new phase will require us to pivot on specific fronts and will entail an active management of the portfolio with a focus on market leadership and returns. So what are these powerful secular trends? The sustainability drive supported by climate change, you can see on the left there, resource scarcity and heightened consumer awareness is pushing organizations to transition to a more sustainable state. In this context, our customers' increasing demands for sustainability services are driving this market's high annual growth to 17% by 2028. We believe we have a role to play, and we must expand our solutions to address these pressing new needs. On energy transition, the trilemma of energy security, energy affordability, and decarbonization are driving a rapid increase in total energy spending.
There is an acceleration of low-carbon energy investments with renewables new capacity development for the period 2023-2028 expected to at least double versus the preceding five years. You can see that on the right-hand side of the slide. Now, this re-engineering and building of the world's new energy system is creating new assets. Bureau Veritas services will be needed from the build phase continuing throughout the asset lifecycle. There are also trends that are profoundly impacting how we live, where goods are produced, and how industries are operating. Three other trends are therefore reshaping everything around us. First, population growth, generational mix, and expectations around Health and Safety and sustainability are driving massive urbanization, with 65% of people expected to be living in urban centers by 2040. This is ushering in new urban planning standards, updated building codes, and an increase in transport infrastructure investments.
Bureau Veritas will support the infrastructure and construction CapEx deployment phase and will assure the safety and integrity of existing buildings. Second, geopolitics are reconfiguring supply chains, reframing global trade, and defining new producing regions. Many of our customers are developing new suppliers and gradually moving their supply chains to new geographies where Bureau Veritas's help will be needed. As an example, you can see the trade exchange between Mexico and North America of consumer products within our scope is expected to grow by 21% by 2028. Third, given the rapid adoption of IoT (Internet of Things) technology and acceleration of digitalization, there is an increased need for real-time monitoring of the integrity, safety, cybersecurity, and environmental impact of connected products and assets. Bureau Veritas's expertise, again, will be critical for our customers to ensure transparency and compliance.
Now, all these defining secular trends I have covered have positive implications for our market and for Bureau Veritas, spurring new regulations and leveling up standards around the world. In this context, our company can make a step change in our revenue and earnings growth in the coming few years. It does require a new vision to make an impact on our customers and one that our people can rally around. Our new vision is a unifying vision that puts the customer at the center of how we operate and one that our different businesses and regions will work towards. Our teams around the company pride themselves on understanding our customers' local environment. We are building on this proximity in a crowded and growing market, and we want to be the preferred partner for our customers' excellence and sustainability.
What that means is that we want to be top of mind for our customers in our market verticals with tangible differentiation and superior service quality. This entails building long-lasting relationships with customers when tackling their current and future challenges. It is therefore our responsibility to anticipate change and to innovate to serve them as they manage risks and seek sustainable development models. To deliver on this vision, we have developed a new strategic framework. Our new strategy is an ambitious, customer-centric strategy that pursues a market and disputed leadership position with a differentiated service to our customers. We will support our customers in their transition to a new sustainable state through the development of novel solutions and with an active network of experts to support their transformation.
When building our strategy, we focused our efforts on key priorities with the highest potential for impact, growth, and returns, anchoring it around three pillars. First, by reshaping our portfolio and by focusing on markets where we can achieve differentiation and durable growth. Our intention is to serve markets where we are or can develop to be market leaders. Second, by modernizing how we work through innovation and technology adoption to shape a performance-driven execution platform. Our customers will benefit from superior service quality and unique customer experience. Bureau Veritas and return will increase customer loyalty and long growth through more efficiency and workforce productivity and deliver therefore increased earnings. Third, by evolving our people model, we will be leveraging our knowledge and expertise to train our employees in novel ways. New ways of working and new competencies will enhance our competitive advantage. Let me start with our portfolio.
We are actively managing our portfolio to attain market leadership positions in our served markets. In doing so, we will be able to shape industry practices and innovation directions, building higher customer loyalties and allowing us to secure market share and premium pricing. Juliano will cover shortly our portfolio plans in detail. I will just share a few thoughts to explain the key pivots. First, we want to further expand our leadership in markets where we already have a top three leadership position through a combination of rapid organic scaling and inorganic expansion. B&I is one such business. Second, we want to invest early to build new leadership strongholds in high growth and strategic markets where today we are delivering fast growth, but from a small revenue base. We will allocate capital to acquire needed capabilities early in this space. Renewables will be one of these businesses.
And third, to optimize value and impact from the remainder of our portfolio in a granular and consistent way. This will imply that businesses that do not meet our financial performance hurdles will be candidates for performance improvement programs or high grading. Our portfolio-focused approach will ensure then that we derive 80% of the organic revenue increase between 2024 and 2028 from businesses that represented 55% of our revenue in 2023. This is a major shift. It also means that 90% of our revenue in 2028 will be from businesses that have attained a market share position in the top three in their respective markets, from 75% in 2023. Now, delivering on this portfolio growth ambitions requires a differentiating execution platform that increases, again, customer loyalty and that unlocks productivity and efficiency, which brings me to our second pillar, performance. Our strategy performance pillar will unlock growth and maximize earning.
We have built our performance programs to leverage technology and the full scale of our enterprise. Vincent and Philipp will explain these programs in subsequent sessions. I would like to share the key tenets of this strategy pillar. Our objective is to ensure more granular performance management and measurement of our day-to-day operations. We also intend to re-engineer select operational and functional processes, allowing us to extract operational efficiencies and increase workforce productivities, and then delivering operational leverage and functional stability, scalability through an innovation framework. We will focus on modernizing our operations system and creating novel solutions by accelerating AI adoption, developing technology partnerships, and committing to solid OpEx investments. We will measure success through the rapid acceleration of our organic growth, and we expect our performance progress to contribute up to 180 basis points of setting investments and delivering consistent margin improvement in the next five years.
These performance programs require upskilling of our people and the development of leaders to drive a performance culture obsessed with customer service. Our portfolio and performance pivots will not be possible without an aligned people strategy. As a company, we have been able to recruit and train top talent wherever we work. Among our global workforce of 83,000 people, 2/3 are experts at different levels. 72% of our employees are digital natives. Our company's generational mix reflects the evolving demographics we see actually around us. It also explains our employees' higher expectations around modern ways of learning and working. Taking those factors into account, it became crucial for us to evolve our people model to achieve our ambitions. Kathryn Dolan will be sharing with you later this morning how we will be doing that. Two points to highlight.
First, the limited availability of new economy skills and technical skills requires a new and systematic approach to how we facilitate learning and how we develop our people skills. And second, we want to free our experts to focus on value-added activities, improving our productivity and enhancing customer service. This will require technology-augmented new ways of working and new competencies. Before concluding with our outlook for the next five years, let me summarize our strategy, and I appreciate that there are many pieces to it. We have defined an ambitious 2028 growth strategy that puts the customer at the center of how we operate and ensures that sustainability expertise becomes a leading and competitive practice in our market. We have three strategic priorities.
First, pivoting from portfolio diversification to a strategy focused on accelerating growth and maximizing earning by actively managing our portfolio will ensure that most businesses will be in a market leadership position and the remainder will be managed to optimize value and impact. Second, we will transform our execution platform to unlock growth and reduce our cost to serve through operational leverage and functional scalability programs. And third, our accelerated growth strategy necessitates that we evolve our people model through novel ways of developing skills and competencies. This strategy is LEAP | 28. We're mobilizing our full organization to execute it and to fulfill our vision of being a preferred partner for our customers. Our commitments are derived from tangible plans from across the organization.
Our intention in the five years 2024-2028 is to create a step change in organic growth to a durable mid to high single-digit CAGR from a refocused portfolio, to roll out an accelerated M&A program that will be highly targeted and robustly executed, complemented by a high-grading approach that optimizes value from specific businesses, to execute performance programs that will allow us to extract productivity and efficiencies, funding investment, but also making a step change in our profitability through consistent margin improvement, to generate cash with a strong conversion above 90% to pursue higher shareholder returns and to allocate capital to support our growth ambition. These combined commitments will provide us with high single-digit total revenue CAGR at constant currency that we have not seen since the 2000s, double-digit shareholder returns based on earnings CAGR plus dividend yield.
In 2024, we also intend to allocate EUR 200 million to acquire shares within our previously approved share buyback program. This reflects our confidence in our company's financial health and in the robustness of our new strategy execution plans. As I conclude this presentation, I want to reiterate that Bureau Veritas is a unique enterprise, a trust broker whose services are essential to economies around the world. I take this opportunity to thank our teams globally for their contributions and for making Bureau Veritas the great company it is today, one that is ready to leap and reach new levels of success. My team and I, throughout the rest of the day, will share with you our plans to show you why we believe our ambition is attainable and how we will be working to deliver to all our stakeholders.
Please enjoy the rest of the presentations, and thank you very much for your attention. I hand over now to Juliano for the portfolio presentation. Juliano.
Thank you very much, Hinda. Good morning, everyone. It's good to see a full house here in Paris this morning. And good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening for the ones joining from the webcast. As our CEO, Hinda Gharbi, just explained, our strategic framework is built around three pillars: portfolio, performance, and people. I will now walk you through the focused portfolio pillar. Our ambition is to actively manage our portfolio to ensure we become the leader in prioritized and focused businesses we serve through a clear plan and capital allocation. Market leadership positions confer unparalleled influence, granting the power to shape the industry's standards and trends while securing premium pricing, enjoying brand loyalty and trust from our customers.
The global TIC market is estimated to be around EUR 300 billion, of which half of it is outsourced and accessible to Bureau Veritas. Due to the complexity and specificity of the local and regional regulations, the TIC market is by nature very, very fragmented. This brings complexity to the industry, but also opportunities for global players like Bureau Veritas, as barriers to entry are steep-high, such as local presence, license to operate, brand loyalty, global sales coordination, just to name a few. In line with the secular trends presented by Hinda, 4% underlying market growth underestimates the growth we perceive in several subsegments of the TIC market, with higher and faster growth opportunities to explore. For example, renewable energy, sustainability, cybersecurity, technology, and the list goes on. This is exactly where we want to be positioned and focus our efforts going forward.
Our portfolio strategy aims at positioning Bureau Veritas in markets where we have leadership or strong positions in terms of market share, expertise, and brand recognition with substantial growth opportunities. To us, leadership equates to healthy growth and healthy returns. To illustrate that, we have conducted a very thorough business review applying three different lenses to our portfolio. First, on your left side, you can see our analysis through leadership positioning. You can perceive that 75% of our revenue is concentrated in markets where Bureau Veritas is the leader or within the top three players. If you look at the center by market growth, also 75% of Bureau Veritas' revenue is derived from at least mid-single-digit and above growing markets. As you know, we have been outperforming the market growth for at least the last four years, and more recently, we have outperformed our closest competitors.
We actually have been increasing our market share. If you look at the portfolio by returns on the right, 84% of today's business delivers above double-digit margin. Our conviction is that we still have many opportunities to improve the mix of our businesses, delivering higher growth and higher returns. Let's look at our portfolio by business now. When assessing our portfolio using our own competitive position and market attractiveness criteria, it was clear that we benefit from a well-performing portfolio with leadership positions in many key markets. This has defined our strategic priorities in the way we want to manage our portfolio going forward. Our ambition for 2028 is to capture more value in fast-growing markets, be more active in the way we manage our portfolio in order to expand our leadership and maximize returns.
The three priorities to achieve our ambition for 2028 are, first, expand our leadership in existing strongholds through a combination of rapid organic growth and also inorganic expansion. Second, accelerate our positioning in selected growth markets to create new long-term strongholds by investing in fast-growing new economy markets where the group already enjoys fast growth but from a rather small base. And third, optimize value from our mature businesses in a consistent way to ensure appropriate capital allocation for maximum returns. Let's now deep dive in each of our three priorities. Kicking off with expanding leadership in existing strongholds. Today, this category represents 45% of our current revenue, and it should account for 55% of the total organic revenue growth between 2024 and 2028. We will expand our leadership in businesses where Bureau Veritas is an established leader.
This concerns the current strongholds of the group in terms of market share, expertise, and brand recognition with substantial growth opportunities. Our priorities by 2028 will be delivering organic growth and merger and acquisitions investments, allowing us to outperform market growth with the objective to reinforce Bureau Veritas' position as a market leader. It's probably not a surprise to you that Buildings & Infrastructure Systems Certification and Industrial Product Certification are in this category. Concretely, we want to scale our leadership platform to remain the undisputed leader in Buildings & Infrastructure, maintain our leadership position in Industrial Product Certification, and reach the number one position in System Certification globally. Turning to our new strongholds, these are very fast-growing markets where Bureau Veritas is well-positioned already, but with a rather small footprint representing just 10% of our current revenue.
However, it will account for 25% of the total organic revenue growth across the plan. Concretely, we have the objective to develop a scalable portfolio of Sustainability Services and Solutions across all markets we serve to help our clients in their different transition stages, also become within the top three players in renewable energy tech services provider. Today, we have strong attributes coming from our conventional energy business that we can leverage to accelerate our growth and lead the cybersecurity tech market globally. This is an area which we have already started to invest with the recent acquisition of Secura in the Netherlands, which is a winning organic platform we will keep building on. The businesses in this category will be the number one priority for investment through relevant M&A, building platforms we can scale globally and also accelerate the development of new skills.
The third and final priority concerns the value optimization of the remaining part of our portfolio, representing 45% of our revenue, which will account for 20% of the total organic revenue growth. Some activities in this category remain key for us as they contribute to the group's business resilience and generate high returns. We have here, though, a mix of different types of businesses: high-performing businesses in more mature markets where we have strong positioning and, again, generating high returns, businesses which are attractive but where Bureau Veritas' position is too far from the leadership, and also low-performing businesses which generate limited returns. We will manage this category by monitoring our different businesses, investing where appropriate to defend our position and enhance our returns.
We will actively manage our portfolio by performance programs and portfolio high grading to design a business mix focused on growth and scale with improved returns. To summarize our future expectations, we want to build a portfolio with a higher strategic value by 2028. To do this, we will expand our leadership and strongholds across markets, and we will accelerate our growth in fast-growing markets. To conclude, I really expect that it's clear how Bureau Veritas will manage its portfolio to achieve an undisputed market leadership position. This new vision translates into an ambition, customer-centric approach focusing the group's efforts on key priorities with the highest potential for impact, growth, and returns. Let's turn to M&A now as a key enabler and a strategic lever to achieve our portfolio ambition. Sustaining higher growth will require investments, both organic and inorganic.
Our strategic vision for 2028 includes the acceleration of M&A, which I will develop now. As I mentioned before, the TIC industry remains very fragmented, creating opportunities for the top players to consolidate the market as they overlap with some of those competitors is actually minimal. As you can see, 70% of the outsourced market sits outside the top 10 TIC players. Bureau Veritas, as a lead TIC player, is well-positioned to seize these opportunities. We do have an acquisitive DNA, as you may know, with 59 companies acquired since 2015, which added EUR 600 million of revenue to our portfolio. We have a mature M&A process which takes advantage of multilocal sourcing and central governance with a strict financial and investment criteria. We also have recently strengthened our internal M&A capacity, and we are very confident in our ability to execute our M&A plan.
Looking back, we have an established track record of acquiring and integrating high-growth companies to create new business platforms. Some examples are shown here, like cybersecurity in Europe and Buildings & Infrastructure and Consumer Technology Services in North America. Now, looking forward, I'd like to reinforce the message that our M&A priorities are strongly geared to expand the leadership of our current strongholds and create the new strongholds of tomorrow. Our M&A strategy will focus on market share gain and access to new markets, acquiring licenses to operate in key geographies, and accelerating geographical and portfolio diversification, following, of course, our investment rationale of strategic fit and growth and returns attributes. However, we will, of course, remain opportunistic in other market segments.
I'd like to finalize saying that we have a robust pipeline of opportunities, particularly in key markets such as B&I, cybersecurity, sustainability and certification, consumer goods, and renewable energy. As you know, strategy is important, but execution is key. We have already started the execution phase of our 2028 strategy with several important acquisitions closed in the first quarter of 2024, particularly in CPS technology. Some of them just announced today in the press release: ONETECH and KOSTEC in South Korea and Hi Physix in India, on top of ANCE in South America. Thank you very much for your attention, and I'll be happy to answer your questions during the Q&A session. Now, I'd like to give the floor to Vincent Bourdil, who will cover two leadership and strongholds examples of Buildings & Infrastructure and Sustainability. Thank you very much.
Good day, everyone. So Hinda and Juliano have given you an overview of the concepts and what we mean by our portfolio strategic ambition of leadership and strongholds. I will now shine a spotlight on two of our strategic portfolio strongholds: Buildings & Infrastructure and Sustainability. So why these two businesses? There are two reasons. First, because they epitomize our high-growth business ambition: Buildings & Infrastructure leverages our existing leadership in a very large and fragmented market, and sustainability is a fast-growing new stronghold. And second, because these two business lines are very important to us as we anticipate they will represent 45% of our portfolio by 2028. So let's focus first on Buildings & Infrastructure, or B&I as we call it. Let's start with an introduction video. So why are we so positive about Buildings & Infrastructure?
So first, you're looking at the largest market within the TIC space with almost EUR 40 billion value and where Bureau Veritas has built an undisputed leadership position, being now three to four times bigger than our next competitor in the TIC space. The market fundamentals are strong, fueled by population increase and urbanization. In 2040, as Hinda was saying, 65% of the world population will live in cities. The net-zero agenda is another key megatrend with retrofitting of existing buildings well underway and booming transport infrastructure projects. For instance, in Europe, around 85% of buildings were constructed before 2001 and are mostly heated by fossil fuels. So the European Green Deal aims to boost energy efficiency by renovating 250 million buildings by 2050. This only represents a massive opportunity for us.
We are positioned in some of the highest growth verticals and geographies, yet our global market share remains below 5%. This represents another massive space for us to grow. So what makes us so unique in the B&I market? So first, by design, we have a balanced portfolio between CapEx and OpEx services, which makes us very resilient to cycles. Second, we have extensive coverage breadth and deep domain expertise across a wide range of assets, whether that's related to buildings, residential facilities, new smart cities, or infrastructure projects: metro, train, airport, roads. And third, our geographical coverage gives us exposure to the fastest-growing markets, which, coupled with our vertical expertise, positions us to win relevant new projects wherever they are in the world. And this explains why we have been able to outperform the market growth very significantly, growing 8% per year since 2017. Let's take a closer look.
So here you have the map that splits our B&I 2023 revenues by region and by service segmentation: CapEx and OpEx services. Three important things stand out here. First, as you can see, we are truly global with sizable businesses in all main geographies and regions. Second, regulations, they vary by market, which explains the relative size of OpEx services or CapEx services if you take Europe compared to Asia-Pacific, for instance. But third, and that's the most important, all regions are growing with particularly high growth in the Middle East and North America. And I will deep dive in the North American market a bit later. Now, turning to our strategic priorities. So as you have seen, we segment the market by services related to the asset lifecycle, CapEx stage down to OpEx stage, and by asset type: buildings, infrastructure. Obviously, in much more detail than we show here.
This is the framework we use to determine our growth priorities with dedicated expansion roadmaps, first in CapEx services for both buildings and infrastructure assets, and then in OpEx services. Three strategic objectives drive our expansion thought process. First, we look to fill gaps in our portfolio in a synergistic way. Second, we target underlying growth, booming projects such as data centers or transport infrastructure. And third, we expand in higher-margin activities, working on the mix within highly technical value-added services such as Code Compliance or Energy Efficiency Services or highly regulated niche markets, for example. Ultimately, what we want is to reach clear leadership positions in all the service and asset markets that we choose to serve. Another interesting perspective is to look at how this strategy affects a particular geography as B&I is made up of many regional and local markets.
So North America, if you look at the North American market, for instance, look, we have established over the past five years leadership positions in the segments of the market that we choose to play, largely in the building space with very interesting positions such as Code Compliance , for instance. So what is Code Compliance, you may ask? So in Code Compliance, what we do is we act for U.S. municipalities as a trusted third party to verify compliance with building code for new construction permits, all types. We do this in many counties in the United States. More recently, we have started to move in the North America infrastructure space, leveraging on the U.S. infrastructure massive new build cycle. We've grown rapidly, but we remain a challenger as we don't have the national presence yet.
So our existing platform is a very solid foundation to execute our B&I North American strategy, both to drive growth through expansion of faster-growing businesses and margin expansion from improving network density. So in CapEx for buildings, first, we will keep expanding in high-value markets like data centers to round out our portfolio and high-value services such as Code Compliance by looking to expand again in states where we are not yet present. And second, we will benefit from accelerated market growth in energy efficiency and other net-zero services, leveraging the many opportunities created by the Inflation Reduction Act. And third, in CapEx for infra, we will add more capacity to capture more projects in more states. So that is our B&I strategy in a nutshell, a fantastic opportunity for us to expand our existing leadership, continue outperforming the market, and to scale in the segment that we choose.
Now, let's turn to our new stronghold, sustainability. Again, a short introduction video. Thanks. Three years ago, recognizing the rising demand for sustainability, we have inventoried our services that contribute to greening the economy and help our customers become more sustainable. We call this the Green Line of Services. We have been extremely successful with the Green Line over the past three years. Its foundational services are well entrenched in our portfolio and will continue to grow. Now, it is presenting us with subsegments of very significant high-growth opportunities where we want to invest to rapidly build leadership positions. We have sharpened our pencil, and we will be focusing on two subsets of the Green Line: one, Transition Services, and two, Green Objects.
So Green Objects are mainly the green energy-producing assets that our customers are building and operating, such as wind and solar farms, hydrogen plants, and battery storage systems. But first, let's take a closer look at what we mean by Transition Services. Transition Services are the fast-growing and fast-evolving services that are helping our clients on their ESG transition from their footprint, initial assessment, design of their transitional roadmap, effective operational implementation and monitoring, through to reporting. So that Sustainability Transition Services market is growing super fast, estimated 17% per annum to reach $20 billion by 2028 from literally zero a few years back. And this market is a natural extension for our company.
Of course, not all the market is our natural playground, as consulting and auditing firms are more relevant at both ends of the value chain, in the advisory and strategy design space, and in the reporting space, especially for large customers. But this leaves us with the main piece of the market, a very significant opportunity, which is the operationalization support of the ESG transition roadmap of our customers. And this space is natural to us as we already verify compliance to many of our clients' commitments. It also leverages our natural attributes: global footprint, technical independent expertise, and ESG know-how. We see a lot of traction today from two different sets of Transition Services. First, compliance with new upcoming ESG regulations, mainly today related to greenhouse gases emissions, but increasingly to other compliance requirements over the ESG spectrum.
For example, we help a major customer in Europe with their CSRD readiness by developing a comprehensive assessment of their operations. Second, we also support the monitoring of voluntary plans, mainly related to supply chain verification. For example, we work with a major sportswear manufacturer in the United States to assess its Scope 3 through Tier 1 and Tier 2 supplier greenhouse gases emission calculations. Transition Services. The second high-growth sustainability category relates to green objects. Here, we include all the services that we execute on objects that are green by design. As the global energy players shift their investment towards green energy production, this represents a unique opportunity for us to quickly build leadership in this new asset class, leveraging our current expertise and footprint.
In the space of three years, we have gained significant contracts in both our traditional services such as QAQC, quality assurance, quality control, and in the new high-value services such as owners' engineering for a wide spectrum of renewable energy assets such as complex offshore farms or large-scale solar plants. So what is owners' engineering? So owners' engineering is where an asset owner would use a third party like us to manage all aspects of the new planned CapEx project from design review, quality control, construction management, down to commissioning. And those contracts, they are multi-million euro contracts. So our sustainability strategy can be summarized in this slide: a sharp focus on all objects that are green by design across all sectors, combined with a horizontal approach on Transition Services for all our markets.
In terms of quantum, this more narrowly defined subset of Su stainability Services, both Transition Services and Green Objects, these two combined represent only 5% of our 2023 revenues. With our strategic plan, we will increase these to 15% of our 2028 revenues. That is Sustainability, very fast-growing business that we are scaling rapidly, our future stronghold. I'm coming to the end of my presentation. I hope it's clear now why Buildings & Infrastructure and Sustainability are the two core components of our leadership and stronghold strategy. Expanding this existing leadership in B&I and building future leadership in Sustainability will require investment, both in capacity and capability. It will also involve a significant step up in M&A, as Juliano was saying. How to extract value from our business to fund this investment, this will be the focus of the second pillar of our strategic plan, performance.
Many thanks for your attention.
Okay. So now starts for the first Q&A session. We'll have 30 minutes to discuss many topics. People from the audience and from the webcast will have the opportunity to ask questions. Please hold your financial-related questions for the second part of the Q&A session. The idea here is to focus on high-level strategic questions. We'll start with questions from the audience. But before that, we ask our speakers to come on stage. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead, Annelies.
Hi. Hi. Good morning, Annelies from Munich from Morgan Stanley. I have two questions, please. So firstly, on the ESG Transition Services , you've talked a lot about the opportunity there and both on the consulting side but also the verification side. I'm curious, do you have a sense of how much of that market share you can capture from the auditors, for example? I'm assuming today it's more about consulting and getting your customers ready for CSRD compliance and so on. And how does that evolve then into more of the verification and the certification side once CSRD comes into play next year? So I'll start with that one.
All right. Do you want to? Again, I'm going to start a little bit, and then Juliano will add on. So I think the way to think about Transition Services is it's going to be multiple things that different customers, depending where they are, what regulations are compulsory versus voluntary, and what kind of plans they have. So it's very, very hard to try to pin it down right now. This is fast evolving and very immature. It's very embryonic. A lot of things, in fact, many of the—I think it's the CS3D—is actually being re-questioned today while the CSRD is actually progressing reasonably well. So you have to keep that in mind. I think the best way, Annelies, to think about this is to see it as customers accelerate their plans, we want to be prepared to accompany them there.
That's how we will gain share and grow. Whoever moves fast to have the right expertise at the right places will gain market share. That's why for us, when Kathryn talks about our development plan, the trick today is to find the people. They just don't exist. Whoever develops these folks very fast will be able to get market share much, much faster. Thank you. Did you want to add anything, or?
I actually haven't nothing else to add on it.
Great. Thank you. My second question was just on B&I. On the chart you showed about your OpEx and CapEx exposure to different geographies, clearly in the U.S., it's much more CapEx-heavy versus OpEx in Europe. Could you talk a little bit about how you expect that to evolve in the two geographies and globally, and also if there's a margin differential that's significant between more of the OpEx activity and the CapEx activity?
Okay. So thanks. First, you will be having this afternoon dedicated sessions by business where you can ask many of the questions related to particular markets, subsegments, geographies. You have many Executive Vice Presidents of the company here, especially you have Shawn Till from North America. He leads that business, and he knows that very well. So I encourage you to ask later. But in general, the mix in B&I is very interesting as a topic. So it's a great question. The reality is it's a mix of many countries, many geographies. What you have, what we have shown is that, yes, we've been growing faster in the CapEx segment, which is normal because it's a build phase. Whenever there is a build phase, there is business for us.
There is so much business for us, in fact, that now, I think with this strategic framework, we will pinpoint the subsegments much more carefully where we want to develop, such as Code Compliance, because Code Compliance, it's CapEx, yes, but it's very high margin. That's the luxury that we will get is trying to pinpoint the right markets with the right subsegments so that we engineer really a mix in B&I, which is coming back to where we want.
Just to complement on the margin mix, a couple of examples. If I want to be very direct, I would say it's very easy to make good margin on CapEx. You get your contract nicely drafted. You manage to fulfill your client expectation. It's one project that's in your hands, right? Or you don't go for the project at all.
When it comes to OpEx, it's all a question of density. And we are here in Paris, nice place. But Vincent has shown to you the different size of businesses and platforms. And what we do in Paris, and let's say its region in terms of OpEx, represents 1/3 of what we're doing in all of the U.S. So the margin you can leverage on an OpEx service where you have density, that's where actually our stronghold and doubling down on places where we are already makes sense because that drives value. That drives margin. And typically, in an OpEx business, if your inspector does five inspections a day instead of four, you do the math. It works.
Thank you.
Hi there. Arthur Truslove from Citi. So first one from me was just around why you think now may be a better time than previously to consolidate the testing and inspection market. Are there things perhaps that have changed a little bit that might mean now's a better time to consolidate than before? Thank you.
Thanks for the question. By consolidate, you mean focus? Is that what you mean?
More on the M&A side. Is there a reason now why M&A within the space should accelerate and why the big players should sort of take over more of the smaller players?
No, I think the key point we're trying to make is there are opportunities in this market, really. It is a fragmented market. It will always be fragmented simply because just from a license-to-operate perspective, you always have new small outfits that will come up with will work on these LTOs and will always go after them to make sure we continue to expand our LTO. And then you have others that will discover particularly small niche that will go after also. So that is the message we're trying to say. There are many more opportunities. And we are well-positioned because we have a very global footprint that allows us to actually have an intimate understanding of these smaller players in the market. So it's not that the market is becoming more fragmented than it was today.
It's just we are saying that today, as we accelerate our plans, the market has opportunities. There's no shortage of targets provided they fit within the attributes we're looking after, which Juliano explained quite well before.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes. Suhasini , maybe in the front.
Hi. Good morning. Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs. Two from me, please. When you talk about the acceleration in the M&A program, do you have any internal objectives on what this should be? Are you planning to maybe double the growth contribution from M&A compared to history, for example? And would you reconsider larger transactions, which is something that you've probably avoided historically? And maybe relating to that, have valuation multiples actually corrected in the market? The second question is on the marine and offshore business, which I see that you have included in the portfolio for optimization in one of the slides. It's been growing strongly in recent years, and you probably have marine decarbonization that helps you by 2030. So can you maybe discuss and give some color on what needs to improve here, please? Thank you.
Thank you, Suhasini , for the questions. I'll keep the first question for Juliano, and maybe François want to add to that. I'm going to answer the question on Marine and Offshore. We are very happy with our Marine and Offshore business. It's our foundational business. It's the business that started this extremely technical, highly valued by our customers, stickiness of clients. It's absolutely amazing. Now, it sits in that category because it is a mature business, even if actually there is a massive innovation there. So the best way to think about that optimized value and impact is it's a mix of businesses with different mature markets that they don't fit in the two other categories. So we kind of group them there. But the key thread is it's all about the optimization of their impact on the company in terms of growth and in terms of returns.
Frankly, M&O has done very well. Will continue generally to do well. I know that Matthieu this afternoon will share with you the plans and many of the innovations that M&O is actually doing, considering the decarbonization backdrop and the shipping. So there is no concern about M&O. We know what the market is. We understand the trends. We are, of course, happy with the performance, and we will see what other improvements we can make there. So I'll let Juliano perhaps address the M&A question.
Yeah, of course. Thanks for your question on M&A. The short answers will be yes and no. Yes, we have specific targets. Yes, we know the markets we want to go. I showed you before. We do have financial targets on them, but we cannot guide on it. And no, we do not envisage at this point making a transformation on acquisitions. I think we know very well our territory in terms of bolt-on acquisitions. Maybe with a renewed ambition for creating new strongholds, we'll certainly accelerate. But maybe bringing mid-cap targets, yes, which we still consider bolt-on, and that we're comfortable to integrate within our operations and make it to grow and increase the returns. Thank you.
There is a question from UBS, Rory, in the middle. Please.
Yeah. Good morning. It's Rory McKenzie from UBS. Can you say how granular you went with the portfolio review? How many individual units are you tracking? For example, would you allocate some countries or labs within Consumer Softlines , as an example, to performance improvement plans, or would you treat that as an overall business line globally? And then secondly, Hinda, you commented that in the past, Bureau Veritas might not have made the most of some of its leadership positions from what you could see. That might often just be a feature of the industry. There are little synergies between services or regions. So what are you doing to try and change that? A big focus is leadership, but how will that drive better growth for you overall, do you think, than the past?
Thank you for the questions. I'll let François answer the first one on the modeling, and then I'll answer your second one. Go ahead, François.
Thanks for the question. I don't want to hijack my own presentation in half an hour's time. But we are a very granular company by essence. We have more than 6,500 P&Ls that we work with, not just think of but work with. When it comes to this analysis, we went as deep. But then, as in any analysis, if you want to make decisions, you need to simplify somewhat. Otherwise, you get lost in details. So to take a very simple view on things, this plan has been based on roughly 16 objects, some of which being more or combined with a geographical mix on the largest platform of ours. So if you do the math, you get 16 times six platforms, geographical. So that gives you a little bit the framing of the plan and the way we are looking at those objects.
Juliano showed to you earlier on a nice map with dots and colors. So this is the 16 segments that the outcome of course, we know who are sitting behind the dots, but we don't disclose. But that's the basis of the plan, the way it has been structured.
Yeah. On the second part, if I understood well your question, it's true that we have different businesses, and there are local specifics of each businesses. But I think the strength of a group like Bureau Veritas is that collective knowledge and being able to replicate not exactly the same way, but replicate the innovation that today is happening in situ in many of our regions and other regions. That's a competitive advantage because oftentimes, particularly in the super-localized businesses, you're actually competing against other local players. And what differentiates a Bureau Veritas from a local player is, one, is a global track record, is visibility on so many variations of issues and problems that you can use. And I, frankly, believe that any company that is not taking advantage of its scale is missing an opportunity. So that is new.
To be claiming to be leader, we have to be able to differentiate in every market. Not enough to say we're a global company. We have a great brand. We have been 200 years. We need to also show that the service is superior, the innovation is different, that ultimately, we help the leveling up that we're seeing in many industries. And I have to tell you, in many places where I have traveled, and I know the team as well, the customers are looking for Bureau Veritas to bring them something new. They're not looking for Bureau Veritas to say, "Oh, no, no. You're a local market. We're just going to give you a local solution." They're looking for best practice. So I think this is a very opportune time. There is a leveling up of standards, as I said.
Many regulations, even in emerging markets, are moving because expectations of consumers are converging. So when you take that into account, this is the best time for us to make sure that we replicate, that we innovate, and that we scale. I hope it answers your question. Thank you.
So Pablo, just over there, please. Yeah. Yeah, please. Just there.
Thank you very much. It's Karl Green from RBC. Two questions from me. Just firstly, in terms of the durable mid- to high single-digit organic growth, clearly, that is predicated on businesses that you don't currently own. So just thinking about how much you're likely to spend. I mean, again, apologies if this strays into the financial questions. But just roughly, in terms of CapEx plus bolt-on acquisition spend as a percentage of sales over the next five years, kind of what sort of combined number should we be thinking about for the balance sheet expansion that goes with that? That's the first question. And then the second question, unrelatedly, just thinking about political risks and how you're synthesizing those into your budgets. I mean, clearly, there's a lot of backlash against net-zero ambitions now. Germany is seeing real-time deindustrialization.
Just particularly in Europe, in terms of actually capturing those risks in terms of your thinking around projects and opportunities, that would be really interesting. Thank you.
Perhaps you want to if we can just wait for your first question to the financial section; it would be good. It gives you more color and, therefore, it will be a better answer. Look, I think the best way to think about decarbonization, net-zero, is to think about the customers and what they think. Even if there is, we read a lot about backlash against decarbonization in general and regulations. Ultimately, consumers, communities are asking for it. And governments are trying to, of course, navigate different stakeholder needs. What I have seen, and I know our team as well, customers must do this. They consider it a competitive advantage to be a decarbonized company. They consider it a competitive advantage to have resilient supply chains from all aspects of ESG. So it kind of moved from being a compliance problem to being a differentiation and a competitive advantage.
And frankly, even in the U.S., the large groups are looking at that. So for us, this is an important factor on the way we think about sustainability. Regulation is very important, but not only, not only, because customers increasingly are looking at voluntary schemes beyond regulations to make sure that they are actually transforming themselves. I'll ask maybe Vincent if he wants to add to that.
Yeah. So on the last point regarding the backlash that you mentioned, so I just want to bring one example here. A few days back in Paris, 1,500 people came from all around the world. They sat in the Palais de Chaillot. And what happened is then there was the Déclaration de Chaillot. And 70 countries around the world, they pledged to actually create new regulations for the construction industry to decarbonize that industry because 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions are made by the construction industry globally. So 70 countries since delegate, they agreed on a plan which says three things. First, they committed to put in their country regulation, new frameworks, two regulatory frameworks to foster net-zero buildings.
Number two, they said, "We need to incentivize, give fiscal incentivization." And three, they said, "We need more green standards for buildings." So all these three, actually out of nowhere, create a complete new market for us that will come in the coming years. So this is happening all the time. And this is giving you a combination of our main vertical, Buildings & Infra, and Sustainability, which I found was very, very strong on that today example. Thank you.
So the next question for Kepler. Pablo, go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Pablo Cuadrado from Kepler Cheuvreux. Two questions. The first one, a little bit on the global picture, on the TIC market. You presented this morning that this is a global, clearly sizable market, which part of it is fragmented. The question that I will have here, if you can share your thoughts on how do you think that level of outsourcing in the global TIC market has evolved, let's say, since the beginning of the century? And at the same time, if there is any kind of alternative for, I don't know, yes, ways that this level of outsourcing could be enhanced in the next few years, let's say, to move up from that 4% CAGR that you said. And the second question will be, clearly, there is in this plan a little bit of an M&A push. We have been talking about it.
I was thinking maybe in asking on disposals, actually. You also presented that, let's say, that still somewhat that more than 10% of the group revenues are generating less than 10% margins. So I was wondering whether if you can or you are including or you are considering to maybe make some portfolio rationalization there or if you are thinking in setting a minimum level of return for businesses to remain in the portfolio, that would be good to know. Thank you.
Juliano, you want to take the question on the market, please?
Yeah. So thanks. Thanks, Paulo, for a question. Look, I don't have a track record from the beginning of the century, for sure. But from the past 30 years I've been working in the industry, the level of outsourcing has been increasing, for sure. There are two factors here, economical. So sometimes, it's much more economical for clients to hire a company like Bureau Veritas, a TIC company, to perform testing, inspection, and certification service for them. And the other part is the necessity of having a third-party checking their products, their assets, their commodities, and so on because the regulation is evolving. And the regulation has been evolving, certainly, since the beginning of the century, but since the past 30 years, for sure. So we estimate the outsourced market to be between 45%-50%.
And certainly, it was less than these 30 years ago, but there's no precise number and so on. But of course, our strategy is not going through the betting on the outsourced part of the market, but is conquering market share. And of course, having an acquisitive DNA, as I said, is also bolt-on companies that open up avenues for us in new geographies and to acquire new LTOs. This is a way to get more access to the 45%-50% of the outsourced market. That would be my take on it.
Yeah. Thanks, Juliano. I think, look, when Juliano presented the portfolio, and I alluded to it in my introduction, we talked about optimizing value and impact from the remainder of the 45% of our portfolio. In general, not only that 10% you mentioned with the margins below 16%, what we're looking at in this portfolio is to make sure that these businesses because they are very diverse, so there's no one answer that applies to everyone. But what they have is they're not in the fast growth, but small position market, and they're not leaders, or they are in a leadership position that is a bit different.
What we're trying to do there, if a business doesn't meet the financial hurdles we have in mind in terms of growth and in terms of returns or a combination of the two, depending on the business, then there is a possibility that we might high-grade that portfolio, which means that we might indeed decide to dispose of. But we are very deliberate in how we do this. We're very granular. We look at options because we want to improve our position. But the key thing for us is any business we stay in, we have to be in the leadership position. That's critical. We have a finite leadership bandwidth. We want to focus it on businesses that we can have tangible capacity to drive so we can manage the growth and get better returns. Thank you.
Hi. Sylvia Barker from JP Morgan. Two questions, please. Firstly, on B&I in China, could you just update somewhere that sits within that kind of blob chart? And then secondly, I guess you show Sustainability as a category, but who is actually accountable for that growth? Because that clearly spans all of the divisions. So from a management perspective, who is actually on the hook for that performance? Thank you.
I'll let Vincent answer the Sustainability, and then I'll get back to you on B&I.
So who is on the hook, you're asking? So all of us. That's the quick answer. Look, the truth is, in the framework that we have presented, Sustainability is at the core of the company, meaning that it's what we do to our clients. This is how we want our clients to perceive us. So there is this very strong CSR element, internal element in it, which makes ultimately everyone on the hook. But more specifically, on building solutions for our clients, as you can see, we've decided to focus on two sub-elements of the Green Line because they are growing very fast, and we want to build positions. So we've decided today to focus on Green Objects. And I presented two large contracts that we won for energy objects. But you have biofuels, green fuels. That's also a Green Object. You have green ships, also a Green Object.
So as you can see, you have Green Objects all across our business lines. So that means it's happening everywhere. And Transition Services, by definition, they are market agnostic because all our clients across the markets, they need those services, again, translating their commitments into true operational plans and how to measure that compliance to that plan. So this is where we come in. When we verify, we check, we measure. So that's really across the board. I think that's the best answer I could give.
I think, no, thank you, Vincent. I think what's important also to understand is we are, as we mentioned earlier in the presentation of Vincent, we're developing new solutions here. So this is still the early stage. So you have a stage of developing different services and solutions, and that mostly sits under the team of Vincent. And then we have our regional makeup, our operating groups, who execute some of these and some of the solutions that might be developed locally for very specific applications. So the roles are well understood. The key thing, though, for us to build a sustainability practice that is competitive and that can actually move much faster than the others is to coordinate these two parts because no one really can claim the space today in sustainability.
There are a lot of people who are vying for the space, but no one really has put the flag and said, "This is the leader," because capabilities are not there. The solutions are still embryonic. The regulations are moving fast. So for us, we're developing on the side of new solutions. That's Vincent. And then the regions, of course, have to implement. And we have actually some very good examples. If I look at Europe, we've developed a lot of local solutions for very specific customer needs. We are moving fast with that. And those solutions then can be taken by Vincent's team to replicate elsewhere, which is back to the earlier questions around why do we need to replicate? Because that's the only way for us to grow fast. Okay? Sorry, I forgot the second question. Could you please repeat that?
It was B&I China, just wanted to mention.
Oh, B&I China. Look, Juliano, up until two months ago, was running the Far East. So I'm going to let Juliano give you a bit of color on B&I China.
Okay. Thanks for our question. Look, I read the Western press every day because it's the language I speak, so not the Chinese press necessarily, but also in English. Look, we've been reading all the news about the capital shortage in the B&I sector in China. I think we need to be selective on how we read those news. We know that the real estate market is under pressure in China, but it falls 90% on the residential sector of the market. This has been really, really under pressure. We certainly follow the news on Evergrande and others that really are in difficult situations because they've been building, building, building, bet on government lending to the individuals to mortgage and buy units, and then the government stopped lending. And this is problematic, obviously.
Luckily, and because of decisions we made 10, eight years ago, we decided not to enter that market in China. Our share of the market is in public infrastructure mainly or public-private infrastructure. This market is still okay. During the pandemic, everything slowed down, but now it's rebounding. Last year was probably the first year of rebounding because China had an extra year of pandemic impact, as you know, because of the lockdowns and so on. But the market is rebounding in that sector, and we continue to rebound. China is the second economy in the world. This sector employs a lot of people and moves a lot of money in the Chinese economy. We are confident that this market is still solid, and we continue to grow in the future. So that's our interpretation of not always easy to understand Chinese politics.
Thank you.
Maybe one more question from the audience, and then we'll move to the webcast.
Hi there. It's James Rose from Barclays. A broad question, please, on market share gains. It seems that Bureau Veritas is taking share in the marketplace now. What do you think has changed? What have you changed as a management team to be able to enable that in recent years and going forward?
I think there's been quite a bit of effort for a few years now, not only recently, to make sure we have a good sales organization, a good setup around sales. It started many years back to build the capacity in terms of salesforce numbers. More recently, there was an investment into a sales management platform. That's very important. I think later on, Philipp will talk about our foundation in terms of digital systems. Those are very important things because that brought visibility on opportunities. The opportunity pipeline is very visible, very granular. We can go all the way down. That is very important in a company with such a broad portfolio. So visibility on the pipeline. There is more focus on very specific strategic priorities in the portfolio that need to grow very fast.
So focus, visibility, that is a winning combination, and we can see the impact. That's why when we talk about our outlook, this is really a data-driven perception of our outlook. We're not guessing on this particular side. We have also put in place an organization now. We're connecting the different regions through an integrated sales organization. It's a very important standing subject at the management level. Everyone understands. We look at the pipeline, the conversion rates, the accounts, the specific contracts. So very, very granular work. It's not particularly different than what you do in many organizations, but that consistency in doing it is very important. Thank you.
Okay. Now we'll take a question from the audience from the webcast. So it's about the portfolio mix and the cyclicality. So the question is, have you improved the defensive heft character of Bureau Veritas' business portfolio? And do you feel that do you feel like BV is immune to cycle now?
No, I won't bet on the future. Nobody's immune to cycles. No industry is immune to cycles. But we certainly have built a very resilient portfolio. We can notice by the recent events of pandemic, geopolitical, I mean, wars, some sectoral crisis. Look, our portfolio is resilient, and we always think we can protect more by leading the parts of the market because when you're a leader, you have a lot of capacity to maneuver, and you have a lot of capacity to change focus from CapEx to OpEx very rapidly to adapt regarding your technical capabilities and so on. We manage a very, very resilient portfolio.
Just to add on that, if you look at our mix, 25% of our revenue comes from CapEx today, which we have over time decyclicalized. We removed some of the elements like Residential and B&I. We removed that, and we have worked for a number of years. And those are the things that we'll continue to do is this expansion into the lifecycle of the assets. If you think about it, 50% of our revenue is actually coming from Inspections. Those are inspections on different types of assets, and we continue to expand the type of assets. Vincent talked about Green Objects. We will create new Inspection Services, OpEx services on our Green Objects. So while we don't control geopolitics and different economic events, we control the mix of our portfolio. And the mix of our portfolio is resolutely towards resilient types of revenue, OpEx, expand into new services.
That's what we want to do. In markets where we are leaders, we want to make sure that we're expanding from the CapEx phase into the OpEx phase. We continue to do that. That's a winning formula because what you're doing, you're creating an annuity on those assets that becomes essentially your installed base. So we will continue to do that. That is actually an excellent strategy that started many years ago. We continue to look at moving across the value chain of every industry. This afternoon, for those of you who will be visiting with the renewable team, they will talk about that, and so will the B&I team as well.
Thank you very much, Hinda. For the sake of time, let's stop the Q&A here. We now have a 30-minute break. Please be back at 11:15 sharp. Thank you very much.
So welcome back. Let me take you through the second pillar of our strategy framework: performance. During the next 15 minutes, I'll explain to you how performance programs will help us improve efficiency and productivity. To deliver a step change in growth, it's not just about adding new people, adding new capacity. We need to do more with our existing resources. We need to improve our operating model, create more innovative solutions to maximize impact for our clients and maximize the time of our people. This is why performance is a key pillar to the delivery of the overall strategic framework as it addresses two important questions.
One, how can we create the extra capacity that we need to deliver the higher growth that we have? And second, how do we translate this higher growth into higher shareholders' return? So more specifically, today, I will focus on two aspects of our strategic pillar. I'll start with operational leverage and functional scalability, the first layer. And innovation will be covered by Philipp Karmires, our Chief Digital and Information Officer. So let me take you through the first one. So as Juliano explained, our portfolio ambition, leadership, and strongholds will position us to gain leadership in our targeted markets. Now, what we want is to translate that growth into higher earnings to maximize returns for our shareholders. This is the focus of our operational leverage, first layer, and scalability initiative, second. So why? When we talk about operational performance, we are looking for three types of gains.
First, improved service quality and higher customer satisfaction. Why? Because that differentiates us from competition. Second, very important, reduce our cost to serve so that one extra euro of revenue costs less to produce than the previous one. Third, enable that strong expected growth that Juliano and Hinda introduced earlier. How do we plan to achieve this, you may ask? Through two centralized group-wide programs, one focusing on operational leverage, which is about improving gross margin, and the second one focused on scalability of our functional costs where we intend to keep those functional costs as low as possible. But ultimately, these two programs will benefit our operating margin. The ambition attached to each of these programs is significant: 100 basis points and 80 basis points of improvement, respectively, which can be reinvested to drive growth and also will contribute to lift our margins.
So there are multiple subprograms behind these two initiatives, but which, for simplicity, we have grouped by category: for scalability, shared services and procurement, for operational leverage, performance management, process improvement, and tech-augmented service models. Philipp will give you examples of our tech-augmented ways of working later on. Performance management. So do you remember Juliano showing this chart of our portfolio categorized by margin? Well, performance management is central to our efforts to improve profitability across the group, but particularly in those areas where we are not satisfied with the margin, and we want to reduce this proportion of revenues to as close to zero as possible. And we'll do this in the same way as we do active portfolio management. We call it active performance management. We centrally monitor operational KPIs for non-performing business units with a dedicated focus.
We actively implement, monitor, and support turnaround plans that revolve about top-line quality, cost control, and process re-engineering. So process re-engineering, process improvement. So we have ranked within our company our processes by revenue coverage and potential impact and are looking at practical ways to improve them. What does it mean? Here, you have a typical example of an asset-field inspection process in a European country. So you plan, you do the job, you monitor time, and you issue a report. So what we do here is our teams are looking at how we can standardize, streamline, digitalize the different parts of the process from scheduling, field inspection, through report preparation and final report issuance. Automation, standardize.
What we want is a faster, more efficient process, raising the productivity per inspector but also allowing for a more data-centric and qualitative approach that improves customer value proposition and will command a price premium. On such example here, it is not uncommon to achieve five days turnaround time savings and five points utilization rate improvement. This example gives us confidence that we can achieve our ambition. Finally, before I hand over to Philipp, I'll give you some details on our functional scalability programs. The basic principle here is that we want our functional costs to grow at a slower pace than our revenues through efficiency programs. First one, Shared Service Centers. What we want is to industrialize our approach using standardized blueprints for national shared service centers supported by regional centers.
Today, our functional costs will represent between 10%-15% of our revenues, very depending on divisions, countries, particulars, 10%-15%. We will reduce that range and bring it lower. And second, in Procurement, the foundational work has been done. We are now ready to move to the next step, which is strategic supplier management through the rationalization and the streamlining of our purchasing categories. Functional scalability, we're targeting 80 basis points of margin improvement through the program. But what's very important to remember is that both these programs, operational leverage, functional scalability, they are engineered to take advantage of the scale of our footprint. So as you can see, our ambition with both programs combined shows 180 basis points of margin improvement. This will obviously positively impact our margin, but we also aim at reinvesting some of those gains to capture the growth and to accelerate innovation.
On this, let me hand over to Philipp, who will take you through our innovation plans. Thank you.
Thank you, Vincent. Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to be here and to discuss a topic I'm personally very passionate about: how to use technology and innovation to enable the business and our customers to be more successful, enabling performance. I will use the next 15 minutes to share the why, how, what. Why innovation is required, how the tech industry is evolving, and what we are doing at Bureau Veritas to take advantage of it. I will also take you through two examples to illustrate how we improve our performance with innovation and technology in core services and core assets. So why innovation is required? Let's take a look at the challenges our customers face today, in particular, three secular trends also highlighted by Hinda in the morning. First, an emphasis on sustainability. Businesses are focusing more on eco-friendly and socially responsible growth.
New technologies help ensure their operations are transparent and accountable. Second, changing supply chain. The pandemic, among other crises, kicked off a supply chain reconfiguration with emphasis on flexibility and security over cost. Digital tools allow companies to manage risks in a more environmentally friendly way. And third, digital and connectivity. The use of digital technologies, from data capture to artificial intelligence, is making systems more interconnected and accessible. These three trends require our clients to keep up with technological advances, to stay efficient, sustainable, and competitive. So what are the consequences of this changing world? Let me explain the paradigm shift the tech industry is facing and how Bureau Veritas is responding to these evolutions. So you need to thank you. Trends are reshaping our client operations.
From many isolated transactions in a physical world to one based on fully integrated systems, interconnected and interacting with each other, the new imperatives of transparency, brand protection, and the increasing demand for sustainability require a constant data flow. This constant data flow, be it via sensors, visual capture from cameras, drones, or satellites, or just simulated data via predictive models, requires continuous active management to navigate risks and opportunities. Ingredients to successfully navigate this new normal have evolved. Today, among others, we need to foster the right partnerships, gain constant access to data, build agile ways of working. All are critical to provide innovation on demand. The example of food production and supply chain from farm to fork illustrates this shift, something everyone here can relate to, how your food comes to you, basically.
Previously marked by segmented operations and minimal data sharing, this is now transformed by digital technology and artificial intelligence into a transparent, interconnected chain. This enables tracking from origin to consumer, improving safety, sustainability, and logistics, but also introduces reputational risks for companies if they don't meet high standards. This highlights the importance of proactive brand protection and maintaining quality, all of which benefits our business at Bureau Veritas. Last but not least, let me explain what we are doing to adapt to this new normal. In short, we are enhancing our digital backbone to become even better at what we are good at. Here's our three-layered approach. At the foundation, we've updated our infrastructure with scalable cloud-based enterprise systems for human resources, for finance, and sales to improve global operations.
These partnerships with leading providers like Salesforce for customer relationship management, among other tasks, and AWS for hosting and compute boost efficiencies and reduce costs. Operations systems sitting on top of the foundations. On this solid foundation, we now operate our day-to-day business systems in the field, labs, and offices, delivering scalable customer solutions. Our key systems for inspections, certifications, and reporting are largely cloud-based, which has lowered TCO by 9% and reduced capital intensity as we shift from CapEx to operational cost. And on top, you have the innovation platform. The final layer involves working directly with clients to co-develop and scale new solutions utilizing advanced technologies for data capture but also processing and automation like artificial intelligence. This approach not only enhances our service quality and productivity but also drives new revenue opportunities while reducing cost.
Through these layers, you can see how technology is central to our operations, allowing us to scale efficiently and leverage data for innovation and cost reduction. We are committed to continuous improvement and innovation in our services. Now, let's bring this to life through a couple of examples. The first one relates to our operations system. This is second layer in the pyramid I've just shown. It also relates to our certification business. To give you some background, Certification is a core business activity worth EUR 465 million, around 8% of group revenue last year. We are presently re-engineering our offering using enhanced automation that should deliver a 10%-15% productivity improvement per contract over the next three years. This not only improves customer outcomes but frees up resources to fund future growth and drive margin improvement.
To remind you, we are leveraging the foundational layer that we've put in place and scaled cloud infrastructure to do so. The second example focuses on innovation. It's the top layer in the pyramid and our core asset, our people, where you'll hear more about from Kathryn in a second. We have 83,000 employees and a significant portion work in the field at customer sites. We are increasingly delivering tech-augmented ways of working, as mentioned by Vincent. You see here an example of an initial implementation for an asset inspection, condition monitoring to be precise, which allows us to detect corrosion and assure quality and safety. Today, these tasks are increasingly tech-enabled. We can now inspect physically using computer vision, which means we capture data, in this case, visually via cameras.
In addition to LiDAR, which is a laser technology, we are scanning to generate digital twins of the real world. This allows us to migrate tasks quickly from the field to the desktop, which improves outcomes and drives productivity gains as it allows our surveyors to spend more time on customer-facing and value-added work. It's a great example of our strong tech foundation combined with the right operation system, allowing us to ingest vast quantities of data to build new innovative customer solutions. Given this setup, we are now in a position to scale and replicate —Hinda mentioned it in the Q&A briefly— these initial implementations to capture greater value. In summary, our commitment to technology and a strong digital backbone is at the heart of our innovation strategy.
Our technology platforms and investment enable us to create and scale up targeted solutions that drive productivity gains and enhance the quality of our work, benefiting our performance and our people. And it's all connected to our push for tech-augmented ways of working. With these pieces in place, we are excited to take on the future's opportunities. Thank you. And now I will hand it over to Kathryn to talk more about our people strategy. Kathryn, please. Thank you.
Thank you, Philipp. Good morning, everyone. Today, I'm pleased to be sharing with you the evolution of our people model and how it is critical to drive the future performance of Bureau Veritas as part of our LEAP | 2028 strategy. As the third pillar of our strategy, over the next 15 minutes, I'm going to share with you how we'll embed new skills and a performance-driven culture at the heart of Bureau Veritas. As a technical services company, our people are the key to our success and the glue between portfolio and performance. As highlighted by both Hinda and Philipp, we are in a dynamic macro environment. Before going into the detail of our people strategy, I will share how this rapidly evolving context has shaped our thinking. Today, we are delivering on growth and delivering on margin.
But in a fast-moving world, our competitive edge will come from Bureau Veritas being faster, better, and more agile in responding to the world in which we operate. If we consider the labor market, today, Bureau Veritas is a hiring machine. But with global demand for skilled labor outstripping supply, every organization is competing for skills and talent. We need to ensure that the availability of skills at the right price point is not a barrier to our execution and performance. As the new economy accelerates, estimates point to a global skill shortage in the green energy sector alone of seven million workers by 2030. So broadening the talent pool will be critical to our success.
Considering the acceleration of technology, having spent 10 years in the IT sector before joining Bureau Veritas, I have direct experience of how the pace of technology is driving new ways of working, new employee and client expectations, and the need for new workforce skills and organizational agility. We can leverage breakthrough technologies such as AI and wearables to create value for our clients, our people, and unlock the operational performance that Vincent and Philipp have outlined. Our people strategy must support this tech-enabled step change in growth and performance. Bureau Veritas already has a strong platform from which we can pivot, and we understand how to address the challenges that we face. As a company built on the expertise of our people, our strength lies in our global scale, a global presence, and the strength of over 62,000 technical experts.
We have a strong track record of attracting around 13,000 talents to our company annually. This hiring excellence is built on a strong employee value proposition of a purpose-led, entrepreneurial, and performance-driven culture. 65% of our people are directly incentivized on the performance of our business with role-specific schemes and targets. These incentives are a key lever that we can pull further to drive this step change in performance. From this strong base, our people performance will be accelerated through two key streams: ensuring the supply of new economy skills and leveraging the new ways of working through tech augmentation. Our competitive edge will be our ability to hire and develop these strategic skills faster and more efficiently. Today, for key areas of our portfolio growth, as Hinda already mentioned, those skills do not exist at scale in the market.
Our resourcing model will shift to be less dependent on external hiring and focus on developing technical expertise in-house. It's about pace, control, and a more cost-effective way to secure the skills we need. For tech-augmented ways of working, as Philipp and Vincent explained, through the performance pillar, technology offers new possibilities to improve productivity. Accelerated by COVID, we have already demonstrated our ability to shift to these new service models. With our digitally native workforce, we can scale at speed, generating value for our clients, our employees, and unlock group efficiency. To be more concrete on what will be different, I would like to share two specific examples. I would like to take some time to share in some detail on building our sustainability capability given its centrality to our strategy. As we've already highlighted, our clients are under pressure from increased regulation and stakeholder expectations.
They are telling us they trust us to have the expertise to support their business. Yet the current skills gaps I previously outlined present some of the biggest obstacles to overcome. So how will we respond to our clients and fuel our growth on Sustainability? Our plan is to develop sustainability capacity and fluency across our workforce at scale and speed. Our sustainability skills strategy is centered on resilience in how we resource our business, how we build the advanced expertise that we need, and how we have a widespread baseline knowledge across all employees, and the skills that we will also acquire through M&A. Our hiring excellence will continue, and we've already invested in AI to increase our recruitment efficiency. And in parallel, we will invest at scale in structured training programs to become a school of sustainability.
Through this, we will secure a cost-effective and scalable pipeline of resource by investing in graduate and trainee programs, a global structure but tailored and adapted to the local market. To build this advanced expertise that we need, we plan focused investment in upskilling our existing technical experts through skills academies, prioritizing carbon management, life cycle assessment, and CSRD. Today, we already have existing competency centers: Net Zero in Paris, Life Cycle Assessment in Abu Dhabi, Carbon in Poland, and Environmental Advisory in the U.K. Through a focused investment in skills academies, we will move from these competency centers to integrated hubs of technical excellence. These connected technical hubs enable us to get geographical leverage, improve efficiency, and minimize duplication, as well as increasing our capacity and capability in an efficient and cost-effective way.
We also know that the development of our people is critical to protect our base and retain our expertise. Through our annual engagement survey, training and career development are consistently rated as critical for retention. Over the last three years, we have continued to improve our attrition rates, and this investment in upskilling is key to retaining our expertise. For our workforce at large, we will increase the core knowledge of our people in ensuring sustainability is functionally embedded in our DNA. This brings three clear benefits. Our employees understand how Bureau Veritas creates value for our clients in their own sustainability journey. We build our own organizational capability to deliver on our own sustainability commitments, which Hinda will share with you shortly.
By incubating knowledge and practices internally, we equip our own people with practical sustainability in emerging fields which we can then reorient externally for our clients. Finally, we will acquire new and strategic skills through M&A, which will complement and accelerate our own plans to develop our own capability. If I move to the second key stream, tech-augmented ways of working, you may think, "What does this mean?" It means for our clients, we deliver faster with increased flexibility and efficiency. For our people, we connect people and technology to change the way we work. As 72% of our workforce are digital natives, we have the digital readiness to adapt to these new service models. In fact, our people demand it. Tech-augmented service models are innovations that we already have within Bureau Veritas. This is already real.
We will scale these innovations to enable new ways of working for our clients and our people. Our clients benefit from reduced downtime and total client flexibility. It revolutionizes safety protocols by conducting inspections in even the most hazardous locations and eliminates data gaps and time spent analyzing data and compiling reports. These additional client benefits strengthen our pricing model. For our people, we are convinced that this has the potential to transform the life of our inspectors. Job and organizational design are adapted to this tech augmentation and creating new ways of working. It increases the utilization of our people even further through the use of new tools and reduced field visits, and our people can work more safely. In this specific example, over 30% of inspections are already performed remotely today.
This success can be replicated and expanded at scale, contributing to the step change in performance that Philipp and Vincent highlighted earlier. To summarize, our value is ensuring our people's expertise and that we have the right skills, and the talent is critical to how we will drive future revenue growth. Our relentless focus on building our own capability will give us competitive edge, and it does differentiate us in the market. This is a fundamental shift from how we resource today. It's not just addressing a skills gap issue. We are a hiring machine, and complementing this with upskilling is far more cost-effective and margin-accretive way to drive the business forward. We've proven our capacity to adapt to new technologies and bring value for our clients, our operational efficiency, and our people.
There is even further scope for us to drive new service models as a progressive and digital company. Our people really are the essence of this company, the glue between our portfolio and performance. I would now like to hand over to Hinda to share with you our CSR ambitions. Thank you.
Hello again. As I shared earlier, our purpose anchors our plans and vision and defines our commitments toward all our stakeholders. For our commitment to our clients, I hope we showed you this morning and we have shared earlier our vision that puts the customer at the center of what we do. We're also reshaping and focusing our portfolio so we can deliver differentiated services to our customers. This will support them reach their own excellence targets and become sustainable enterprises themselves.
For our commitment to our employees, we have just discussed now with Kathryn our people model and what we will change to ensure we're equipping our people with new economy skills and competencies to work in new tech-augmented ways. For our commitment to investors, we explained our performance and innovation programs and how those will unlock growth, ensure margin improvement while enabling investments. François will further talk to you about our full financial plans. I would like now to reflect on our CSR journey, our commitment to society so far, and to share our ambitions. I shared earlier that staying true to our purpose and to support our customers with integrity, we must be exemplary ourselves in our own sustainable development. Our Corporate Social Responsibility Plan is comprehensive and is articulated around the fundamental concept to shape a better world.
It is driven by our engaged employees to shape a better environment, to shape a better workplace, and to shape better practices. This was a result of multi-year efforts. Our sustainability journey started several years ago when we first deployed our Bureau Veritas sustainability framework. To ensure full understanding of different stakeholders' views, we set up an external stakeholder committee. This allows us to proactively engage, understand, and adopt our actions and to be exemplary in our own sustainability pursuits. Last year, we accelerated our sustainability journey as our CO2 emissions reduction trajectory for our Scope 1, 2, and 3 were endorsed by the Science-Based Targets Initiative, or SBTi. This emphasizes our commitment to follow a trajectory in line with the Paris Agreement's goals.
Our company governance also evolved, and our board of directors created a new CSR committee tasked with reviewing the development of our CSR programs and with monitoring progress and compliance. The executive management committee now includes a CSR owner to ensure steady progress and consistency in programs implementation. We continue to progress, and this year we will be reaching several milestones ahead of the CSRD directive timeline. This journey demonstrates Bureau Veritas's resolve to transparency, clarity in its own sustainability journey, and therefore living up to our stakeholders' expectations. Our 2028 ambition framework shows our future commitments that will be covered in this slide here. To successfully achieve our objectives, we must secure full engagement of all our employees and other stakeholders through aligned targets, increased awareness, and targeted training. Our targets are built around five priorities: climate, health and safety, human capital, diversity, and ethics.
We have updated our climate objectives with SBTi endorsed targets of reduced absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 42% by 2030 from a 2021 base year. We're also seeking higher ambition in our gender diversity and in learning. All other targets have been expanded to reflect our new 2028 ambition. I want to thank all our colleagues around the world for their engagement in delivering on our CSR commitment, and I'd like to thank you for your attention on this particular subject. I'll hand now to François to present our financial plans. François.
Thank you, Hinda. So I'm very disappointed. I would know more of those microphones they have in the musicals, so I have to revert to the good old ones. Happy to be with you here. So since the beginning of the day, you've seen, let's say, senior members of the Bureau Veritas Executive Committee who have presented to you the new framework of the Bureau Veritas strategy. As you have understood, it combines three very simple elements. First, a pivot from a diversified to a more focused company in terms of portfolio, so that's the portfolio segment. Second, a transformation of the execution platform to unlock growth. That's what Vincent just presented. And reduce cost to serve. So that's the performance pillar. Third, an evolution of the people model to further develop skills and competencies. So that's what you've gone through with Kathryn just a few seconds ago.
So I will now detail to you how it all translates from a financial point of view. It's almost 12:00. I know you are dying, so we go straight into it. Starting first with the journey so far. You've seen this slide before. That was an in-depth presentation. And as in any journey, you always have a bit of a. It's always good to take a few seconds to look back. And where we are coming from, a number of the executive members have been around for several years within BV, so they know this story. But there have been three phases since the IPO. First, the build-out phase initiated in the mid-1990s with, by the way, the participation of Wendel, very early onwards. So it's a good curve. You see the mauve one.
This is the EPS, strong growth, strong EPS revenue, globalization, oil and gas contracts, everything was fine. Then, second phase, starting with 2012 through COVID, there has been a phase of diversification that Hinda has already indicated. Why? Well, that's pretty simple. In response to a reduction of oil and gas CapEx investments, we had to accelerate diversification. Buildings & Infrastructure, I think we have presented to you that we have now three platforms: U.S., France, or U.S., Europe, China. We were France-only at the time. Second, Commodities. We've built all of the capacity we have. And third, Consumer Products has as well expanded out of the China-only zone. So geographically, we grew outside Europe, in China, and North America all the same. During this phase, which, and I will go off-script, so I know Laurent will not be happy.
But this phase, which is this pale curve, this is the death valley of EPS growth, zero growth at all. I know we have a lot of analysts here, and we have been discussing time and again, no EPS value creation between 2012 and 2018, to be precise. So why? Because in parallel, as has been discussed, diversification was happening. Finally, last phase, post-COVID, the trends are better. Company rebounded strongly, organic growth, margin, and as you see, EPS creation. So on the EPS front, Bureau Veritas is now 25% ahead of what it was back in 2019. So there was a question about resilience. I think that's a good answer. So this is the setting of the 2028 plan.
Let me now be precise, and that's important in a company like Bureau Veritas, the key assumption based on which we have built this 2028 vision together with the executive leadership team and under the leadership of Hinda. The most important element regards the portfolio of our activities. First, and that sounds obvious, but in a company as broad and large as BV, it's a tremendous work. We have assessed the characteristics and the parameters of our portfolio. So these are the 16 units times six geographies in order to focus on the most promising one. Second, we have aligned our capital allocation based on this assessment. And third, our vision has been backed, and I would spend a second on this, by a rigorous bottom-up approach. It's quite an important element in a company like Bureau Veritas. We are in 140 countries, 82,000 employees.
If you build a plan from an office in Neuilly, you're not sure it will happen for real. So the bottom-up approach has confirmed this vision, and we're happy to present to you this type of plan today that is both top-down and bottom-up backed. Coming to the macro perspective, so that's the part I love the most, as you know, we have assumed when it comes to inflation, based on the consensus view of the leading public forecasters, we know everything about inflation, so World Bank, EET, and so on, that we will have a kind of a normalization of inflation. So this plan has no surge of inflation or no sudden decrease whatsoever. It's regular across the duration of the plan in terms of normalization. We expect financing costs to be dearer than in the previous period.
When it comes to foreign exchange, the plan is built with a view that foreign exchange will be broadly neutral over the duration of the plan, over the next five years. As usual, our plans have been submitted to our internal stress test rated to various execution risks and macro scenarios. This is the way we thought it through. I will now cover how it translates in terms of financials, starting with the revenue. Thank you. The first priority mentioned in the portfolio session was to drive a more focused portfolio. As a consequence, we expect that 55%, that's the first bucket, of the growth will be generated by businesses which represent today 45% of who we are and where we have already strong leadership positions. The second bucket of growth will come from what is called new strong goals.
So this is the middle bucket. These new strong goals, we expect them to represent 25% of the growth in the plan while they represent today only 10% of who we are. So creating these new strong goals is a priority for Bureau Veritas. So these are the two buckets representing the fast-growing business where Bureau Veritas has compelling niche positions with a clear path to leadership. And then finally, what about the rest? So the rest are the 45% of the current portfolio. We expect them, as they are a more mature business, to account for the remaining 20% of the growth we have by 2028. So this section, this bucket, we go through a thorough review in a granular and consistent way.
This will imply that businesses that do not meet the financial threshold, the financial performance holders, those guys will be candidates for performance improvement in the wise hands of Vincent and his team, or high grading, which in good French may go as far as divestment. All in, this equates, when you look from left to right, to mid to high single-digit compounded annual revenue growth over the period. Then there is the last box on the right, which is our M&A and portfolio high grading contribution, which will add some more growth and bring the total company at a high single digit at constant currency. So for those of you who are not native speakers in terms of financial analysts, I mean 8%-9% overall over the duration of the plan. So we expect now all of our business line to contribute, and that's the next page.
Here, this is the same story translated into our usual divisions. So the usual six divisions of Bureau Veritas, starting with Marine & Offshore on the left, ending with Consumer Products on the right. So we have applied, of course, this leadership, stronghold, and maximize bucket to this division. We expect 4 business lines: B&I, Buildings & Infrastructure; Industry; Certification; and Consumer Products. So those ones are more centric, to generate 3/4 of the growth. So three-quarters of ambition are focused on those four divisions. B&I, Industry, and Certification areas where Veritas is already a leader, so they go into the leadership box. But we have as well Sustainability, which will drive new stronghold within Certification and within Industry. So this is what Vincent has shown. The Renewables, we go into the Industry, and the Sustainability Transition Services, we go in Certification.
Finally, Consumer Products division, we further grow and consolidate through the development of its Consumer Product Technical Test arm, which is an add-on that has been starting to be developed over the last few years, but where we will accelerate. You will ask me, what about the two others? M&O, Agri-Food, and Commodities. These businesses have good fundamentals, sometimes superior margins, in particular for Marine & Offshore, and good cash flows. Their growth potential, as we see it, is less strong in our view for the duration of this plan. That's why we expect them to contribute less in terms of growth. If you add to these trends our M&A program and portfolio high-grading, then it will bring, again, the total revenue growth at high single-digit over the period.
So to sum it up, you have on this page and that's a page that I know we'll use time and again during our coming roadshows. This is the overview of our ambition by division. The upper hand is a descriptive aspect of it, that's the respective size of our businesses. You have three businesses above the EUR 1 billion mark, which is Agri-Food, Industry, B&I, and three others being below, so Certification, Consumer Products, and Marine & Offshore. You have their respective positioning in terms of margin and the positioning in terms of market. So that's the starting phase. That's where we are starting from. And then the most important part are the last two lines where we summarise here. First, the ambition, where do we categorise those businesses? So we have the ambition line here.
Two, Buildings & Infrastructure and Certification, where these are mainly positioned on expand leadership, industry, which is mixed, expand leadership, and new strong goals. And we have optimized value and impact on Marine & Offshore and Agri-Food & Commodities. So related to this, that's the last line, the capital allocation. So we're starting to get there. We have very clear priorities, again, aligned with the ambition we have.
So priority on B&I, priority on Certification, sub-priorities on Industry and Consumer Products. So we are coming back to tech for CPS and Industry, the Green Objects. And then we are more opportunistic when it comes to the other two. So that gives you a bit the overview we have when it comes to our view by divisions. If we go to the next page I think the guy running the prompter is getting lost because I've gone too much off-script. So don't worry.
Slow down. So this is the margin bridge. The margin bridge, when it comes to our plan, is very clear. We start from 15.9%. Everybody knows the number. It's been disclosed by the end of 2023. Then in kind of green-blue, you see the ambition that is driven by our performance program, up to 180 basis points, 100 on operational leverage, 80 on functional cost scalability. So these two areas of improvement are where the performance bid is kicking in. This gain will materialize as our performance programs are executed, right? So don't expect to get a sudden surge of 180 basis points margin improvement in the next 12 months, right? That will not happen like this. Time and focus, like for revenue growth, are the key component of the success on that programs. Parts of this margin improvement will be reinvested, especially at the beginning of the plan.
This investment, and I'm here talking mainly for clarity about OpEx investments, not much CapEx, will be conditioned by the execution of the performance programs that have been presented to you. So it is essential to finance our organic development ambition across our main platform, leadership, strong goals. However, it is our strong belief that execution of performance programs should come first. So it will finance our development efforts. Now, before moving to a financing point of view, the commitment of the company when it comes to guidance, as you will see in my conclusion, is and remains a consistent margin improvement as a result of this combination of performance program and necessary investment. Coming now to the money, to the financing point of view. We've come a long journey since 2018, and I think truly it's one of the achievements I'm the most proud of.
The company, as you see somewhere on the right, has reduced its working capital broadly by half. It has increased its cash flows. Despite the numerous COVID disruptions and whatever macro events we've gone through, the company has brought down its leverage from close to 2.5x to less than 1x in five years. All of this has been done in a way I'm used to say, in a good old way. I mean, no artificial billing securitization, no factoring whatsoever, just making sure our clients are paying their bills on time. Provided we've done the job right, by the way. Focus and discipline throughout the whole company, showing progress each and every year. Not very sexy, but very, very continuous and consistent.
It's, by the way, I think, a clear evidence that driving a step change in a company, the size of BV, disseminated in 140 countries, is possible and in a relatively short period of time. So anyhow, we are now looking ahead. Bureau Veritas can start, sorry, its 2028 journey with a very healthy financial structure. I think the healthiest financial structure since I'm looking at our investors of choice. We've been looking at the company even before my time. I think it's the healthiest structure we ever had. So 100% of the debt is at fixed rate, no maturity until 2025, leverage below one. So from here, the Bureau Veritas capital allocation will look like this. That's the next one. Thank you. So accelerated M&A and portfolio high grading. As you know, we do not guide on quantum or investment on M&A.
However, I think it suffices to say that I think Hinda and myself are very comfortable with the leverage anywhere between 1x and 2x. Then you do your math, but that's, I think, the bracket you should keep in mind. CapEx, we have between 2.5%-3% of the revenue in terms of investments, a bit higher than the usual. Now, I don't think it's necessary to get too excited. We remain a very low CapEx-intensive company. That will not change over the duration of the plan. You've seen the angles of attack, leadership, stronghold. Most of them are focused on non-lab intensive services. So we remain within this bucket of CapEx intensity.
And in addition, that's an important change. I think I'm sure we got questions at some point. Confident in our financial structure and supporting our strategy, Bureau Veritas intends to acquire its own share up to EUR 200 million in 2024 using the approval given by the boards in our normal programs. So that will happen in the course of this year. So coming now to the guidance, the official guidance, which is on the last slide, I think. Thank you. So our ambition is structured around those four boxes that you've seen at the introduction. Now, I'm recapping here. On the revenue front, we are making a step change. We were guiding so far on mid-single. So we are moving now in terms of organic from mid-single. We commit now to deliver mid to high single compound annual growth rate over the duration of this strategic plan.
So we will focus our investments and effort to build those platforms that have been mentioned in the previous presentations to be able to build so indisputable leadership positions. So that's the first part. The second part is M&A. So we roll out an accelerated plan that Juliano has shown to you before, complemented by a high grading approach that optimizes the way we can monetize our businesses. So it will bring the overall revenue growth to high single digit over the duration of the plan, compounded annual growth rate. The performance buckets so this program will allow us to extract value, productivity, efficiencies. They will finance investment. Cash, I think we don't change a recipe that works. We remain very focused and disciplined. I would like just to ask a second for the guy doing the prompt. Just going a bit off-script.
What Vincent has shown to you in terms of time to or time spent on operational activities. You've seen that's an inspection work, 20 days. 20 days, even though the work itself is four. So think from a working capital point of view. You have a guy who spent 20 days before you start to issue the invoice. So accelerating this time will accelerate the way we build, will reduce further working cap. So we are not letting it go on working cap. I will not promise too much yet, but I think we have, through the performance program, ways to get working capital further reduced. I'm coming back to the line. Thanks. So the combined outcome of all this should provide a clear increase in shareholder returns. So as a consequence, we guide for double-digit growth in shareholder returns based on EPS, CAGR, and dividend yield combined.
So in conclusion, I think I hope you've got the message that our plans are ambitious, but they have been well tested. They have been well accepted by the organization. They reflect the three pillars of the strategy that Hinda has presented in the introduction. So I'm looking forward to very soon a report on the progress made in the next future publication of Bureau Veritas. And before that, I think we have the Q&A session. I'm looking at Laurent.
Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you very much and perfectly on time. So thanks for the different speakers. So we'll have our second Q&A session, another 30 minutes to ask questions. This time, you can ask financial-related questions. So the one that has been answered initially this morning could be asked this time. So we are ready to start, and we'll start with questions from the audience. Yeah, over there.
Thank you, Laurent. Arthur from Citi. First question from me on the margin improvement. Based on what you said, it sort of sounds like that's sort of back end of 2024- 2028 or potentially mid-end of that. Are you able to comment a little bit more on when you think that margin improvement will sort of properly start to come through?
I think, like many things, it started already. So in 2023, you got 20 basis points of margin improvement at constant currency. I think what we aim at is a consistent margin improvement year on year. So we can't give much more precise than this, but I think we don't expect ups and downs. We expect consistent margin improvement year on year.
Thank you. And then the second question I had, you talked a little bit about operational leverage in the discussion. Do you have a sort of rule of thumb that you use for how incremental revenue potentially drops through? I know it's possibly a bit simplistic, but just sort of keen to hear how you think about how that drop-through happens as revenue increases?
No, look, I think first of all, as you well know, our portfolio is quite diverse. We just mentioned it, and we are trying to converge. The whole focus leadership is to converge on businesses that are leaders. And the reason that's important, it will allow us then to understand how we can actually fall through. So giving a drop-through today is actually practically impossible on a business that moves in different directions, such a large portfolio. I think the best thing to think about is to think functional scalability differently from the operational leverage that is more around the operations and the processes. And I think you mentioned it, and you did as well. The functional scalability, we're looking to grow our functional cost much slower than our revenue. So that's one thing that we'll do everywhere.
Then the operational leverage coming from operations is all about the processes and how we get that additional utilization and productivity. I think it's very early to make these kind of predictions on the fall-through exactly, in general, as an aggregate, that is.
Thank you.
Just adding one thing because I think it's very important you don't consider the performance pillar being separated from the portfolio pillar. You can get scalability only when you have size. So the whole idea is to say, "Look, we are big here. Let's get bigger," because then there is a chance we get a common process, a common tool. If you have a business somewhere in South Africa, EUR 15 million in size, we don't have a cent to invest to improve the efficiency of this business. This is simply too small. So you need first to get bigger, and then you get your scalability through tools and systems. I think, in my view, that's the way to articulate those two pillars. Thank you.
Laurent's not given the green light. Sylvia Barker from JP Morgan. Two questions, please. One is on pricing. How is it monitored? I guess it's not a topic that we've covered today. And I guess where does your pricing sit today for activities where you are top in that specific area? And then maybe just a second question on investments. Could you pinpoint some of the areas that you are investing in today? Thank you.
So I'll start with the pricing part of your question. So pricing, you can write books over it in this company. The reason is very simple. I think even sitting around or you've seen Juliano there. He's been into covering China for ages. He will tell you pricing is at its lowest ever in China for the last 15 years. Inflation is gone, so pricing is basically inexistent. And we have people coming from Latin America that tell you pricing is the better and better what we do because if we don't do it, we die. So talking pricing globally, Bureau Veritas-wide, it's a bit of a conceptual thinking. So what we focus our attention on is first that our commercial teams are equipped with the tools and system to be able to address this.
I think it's fair to say that what was in the DNA of our Latin American teams had gone a bit lost in the U.S. and Europe, which remains kind of 60% of who we are. So we've gone through 20 years without price, without real inflation, and we had to relearn this over the end of 2022, the all of 2023. So it's been tough, frankly speaking. But I think we have now all our contracts are covered with legal clauses. There is a very personal involvement of the Executive Vice President of each of the region. And if you have the opportunity later in the day to talk to the person in charge of Europe, Laurent Louis, he will tell you how personally he's been involved. Not that they're getting to level three, four, five. He himself, and I'm speaking under his control.
So we have the tools. Philippe discussed about Salesforce. So we have the tool to track the things. We have pricing specific by regions, etc., etc. So I think, like any crisis, we came out sorry, we came out stronger having our two big U.S. and Europe platform getting back the pricing muscle into their DNA. So looking forward, we've based our price estimate first on inflation and then with a bit of a plus on those where we thought the leadership position will matter. The leadership position will mean something.
Maybe just to complement because it's true, we didn't discuss in detail today pricing, but it doesn't mean it's not a subject we actually looked at because the best thing that happened to us in many ways is the inflation, like François explained, because that raised the awareness around pricing. But pricing is not only about inflation. Pricing is about the value you're actually selling to the customers. And if you look, we talked about sustainability quite a bit today. Sustainability, there is a serious supply of resources in the market that needs to be priced. And over time, where there are resources that are not available, whoever has the resources and the capabilities can actually price that. So to me, we rather need to start pivoting to commercial excellence rather than just pricing, which means that every contract needs to be optimized to the maximum. That is performance.
We didn't discuss today, but it's definitely a stream in our own thinking in terms of performance and what it means in sales.
To follow up maybe on pricing, a couple of questions from the webcast. So as you expect to expand I mean, to gain market share in some of your markets, what should be the balance between price increase and market share gains? That's the first one. And there will be a second one for Kathryn on wage inflation.
I think the best way to think about our growth in our portfolio is we're looking at market traction. We want to grow with the market, but then on top of that, we need to gain share. Then we need to expand the scope so we can bring in new capabilities. That's how the growth is actually built. Pricing is going to be part of that. It's part of growing. It's part of essentially coming up with new capabilities others don't have, having the right supply at the right time, and then, of course, being very vigilant to things like inflation, to using the terms of the contract to the maximum impact. So I wouldn't want to distinguish, but I think the key thing to retain from this is that this growth is going to be volume-driven. It started.
If you look at our growth, actually, in last year, we essentially grew our volume more than our pricing.
The second question related to wage inflation coming from Bank of America. Given the potential shortage of skilled workforce in the market, how do you plan to manage wage inflation? In that context, how should we think about pricing in the midterm as wage inflation has partially weighed on margin of tech companies post-COVID? That's a pretty long one.
Okay. So in terms of wage inflation, we have been managing that extremely closely. Part of our resourcing strategy is because historically, as I mentioned, we recruited at mid-career level where we know where there is demand for skills. Our resourcing strategy will shift much more to be recruiting at more entry-level where actually we can have more emphasis and more control over the salary positioning that we will offer. So part of our resourcing strategy is very much recognizing how the skill shortage plus inflation will continue to drive wage increases, but we manage it very, very, very carefully. And François, pricing is certainly part of that discussion to make sure that we are taking that into account as part of that thinking.
Yeah, just to complement for the person who has the question, a big piece of news, we are not a manufacturing firm. So when it comes to cost increase, we are indeed exposed to salaries but not very much exposed to much bigger things like energy and raw materials whatsoever. So the cost aspect within the Veritas portfolio is pretty well managed. We have yearly budget, which under Kathryn and their control. So this is all weighted up. We have as well a way to work with subcontractors to make our workforce more flexible. And I may disclose a small secret here, but when it comes to margin erosion, the businesses within Veritas portfolio, which are more exposed to margin erosion, are lab-based businesses because you buy your machines, you buy your equipment, you buy the energy, you buy all of this. And without a machine, you can't operate.
You don't decide ahead what is the budget for your salary increase of the machine. Again, I think that's a bit of a false impression that salaries represent a big, let's say, risk on our margin. Don't think so.
I'm at the back. Thank you. Nicholas Duncan from Acuris Global. If I could ask a non-financial question. There have been a couple of passing references to artificial intelligence. And I'd like to know to what extent you've built AI into the strategy in all three pillars. So into the people strategy, the upskilling, which you've been talking about, into the performance strategy. What are the customer's expectations on AI, and how are you going to deliver those? You talked a bit about remote inspections. And then on the portfolio strategy, to what extent is tech going to actually be part of the portfolio of products, either licensed or used in inspections or used in other ways? How much will tech be part of the portfolio in the future? Thank you.
Thanks, Nicolas, for the questions. Let me just take one part, and then Philippe will take on the other one. The customers today, and that was what Philippe was explaining before, the paradigm shift. The customers today, they have to live in a more interconnected ecosystem. The kind of transactional relationship that we have had for a long time, ourselves and other suppliers with customers, are evolving because the minute you start thinking about transforming to be sustainable, to be transparent, to be more traceable, etc., you have to be interconnected. So reality is it's not really a choice, right? So we're seeing that happen today. What we are trying to do is to use this paradigm shift and say, "What does that mean for Bureau Veritas? How can we actually play a more active role because we need to be in that ecosystem? We are needed. We are essential.
What do we need in terms of capabilities, and what are the technologies and partnerships we have? AI, at the end, is a technology that is part of that. I'll let Philipp take on the AI challenge.
The AI challenge. Thank you, Hinda. Thanks for the question. I think the important piece is to always acknowledge that AI is an enabler for what you do. So it's a means to get better at what we are doing good. So that's the key focus. And then when you look at AI or artificial intelligence, it has subsegments. It's basically around automation of certain tasks. And you have tasks that focus on numeric information. So like processing of numerically collected data, then you have text, which is knowledge. A lot of the stuff we do is in between humans. So there's a lot of information around text. That's what's very hot right now. Large language models, ChatGPT, it is mostly around text. And the last one is visual information, like inspection. So these are three categories. And we have different maturities in those, right?
For numerical information, we're doing this for a long time using machine learning and other mechanisms that also are AI to automate tasks, to be better on predicting and diagnosing. On vision, I think there are even examples today in the session from M&O, how we use computer vision to do those corrosion detections in very advanced ways. And the elephant in the room is always large language models. What are you doing like ChatGPT? And I think there you need to distinguish between what AI actually means for a company like ours who has a lot of quality data because large language models, the ones that you see in the web, work very well with very poor data at huge amounts. So we have very good data, not obviously at internet scale, but we have very good data.
So we need to have a strategy in place, which we are working on, in making sure we keep ownership on this data, compute it on platforms that we control IP-wise also, and then deliver these results to processes where they actually enable. So a chatbot might not be the solution for everything in life, as you might have figured out yourself, but it might be in some cases. But the key message is we will use a lot of this technology in a way that it enables us, and we keep control of the knowledge and the data we have collected. So we see a huge lever there for our business. But there's also some considerations to make before just rushing off the next shiny object.
I think just one more point. On your point on what kind of business models, etc., again, we're using the data and digital technologies so we can deliver new services to customers. Some of them might include subscriptions to certain solutions, but not only. We're trying to be careful here. We're not a software company. We're not going to become a software company. In many ways, if we are not taking advantage of these technologies, we're missing an opportunity to deliver new solutions because it is an interconnected space. This is an area we are focusing on. That's really the innovation layer that Philippe talked about in his presentation. The trick for us today, we have a lot of innovation in situ around our business around the world. The key thing is to replicate these solutions.
Most sectors, be it B&I, be it M&O, Marine, be it Consumer, digital is key because there is really a need to accelerate, to reduce costs, to be more sustainable. This is an enabling technology.
Yep. Thank you. It's Karl Green from RBC. Two questions from me. We've had a lot of focus on the P&L benefits of the strategy. Just going back to the question I think I asked in the first section about the impact of M&A. Would you commit to having materially higher return on invested capital by 2028? I mean, I think in terms of the organic dynamics, it sounds like maybe slightly higher CapEx to sales will be offset by better working capital. So organically, that's kind of reason to be positive. But if you're targeting higher growth, M&A targets, bolt-ons, multiples, and goodwill and intangible assets could be that bit higher. So just a comment about how you see ROIC would be the first question. And then a second question, I suppose, linked to that would be just in terms of the high grading dynamics.
As it stands at the moment, if you've got assets in the portfolio which don't quite get to your expectations, what's kind of the maximum level of high grading you could foresee by 2028? Thank you.
I'll let François answer the first question on the ROIC. But on the high grading, obviously, we're not going to be able to guide today. But the clarity we have is that any business in our portfolio today has to earn its keep in being in a leadership position and responding to certain returns, mostly in terms of margin contribution. So that's how we will look at it. It's very hard today to share. As you can imagine, we are looking through the portfolio, okay?
On the first part, I'm sorry. I think I haven't got what your question was. Would you mind just repeating in?
Sorry. It was very long-winded. Just very simply, I mean, there's clearly going to be margin improvements. You're going to be acquiring businesses. That's the ambition. Do you think we're going to see a material increase in return on invested capital over the next five years?
Okay. Very clear. So as you know, we do not publish or guide on return on invested capital, one. Two, when it comes to M&A, I think what is very clear is we have set a number of clear parameters, financial parameters about what do we want to buy. There is obviously the strategic fit. That's the number one. But two, we are looking for companies with an attribute of growth. They need to have growth in themselves. What may be a bit differentiated from before, which we have explained why some may have perceived us as on the low acquisitive hand, we are now offering options to find companies which have an attribute of growth but where on the margin side, they may not yet be there. And why? And again, it all relates to the focus.
Buying a company in the business you're in, in the country you're in, where you have the end on cost synergies, not the wishful thinking type of cost synergies, but the real one that you own because you're already here. So you buy the company, you reduce the overhead, and that goes straight. This is something now that we are more open to. So first criteria is growth. Second, capacity to generate margin rapidly, but sometimes starting on the slightly lower end compared to what we had in mind. And ultimately, we are looking for IRR around 15%. Obviously, this is the frame of investment philosophy. Does that answer your question? Yeah? Yeah.
Over there.
Hi. Marina Leacock, Lazard. Many congratulations on a fantastic Capital Markets Day. Thank you very much for listening to shareholder feedback. I wanted to ask you, I'm loving the not having an absolute margin target. That is a brilliant win for me. Can I just ask, on the share buyback, I can understand why you've done it. You need the operational leverage to the total shareholder return. Will you be able to spend that EUR 200 million on reducing the Wendel stake, please? Because obviously, it's helpful for everybody to increase the free float to the business.
I mean, I think we don't decide for the Wendel Group, right? They decide for their own investment strategy. What we are looking for here is to give a sign to the market that we are confident in the financial health of the company and, very importantly, confident in the execution plans we have in place. But we have really no control on what the principal shareholder or any shareholder does with the stock. We can only do our best to make sure that they stay with us.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah. On the back, please, at the end.
Hi. This is Amira Manai from Oddo BHF. I have three non-financial questions, please. The first one is on the remuneration policy. Is there any change to align it to the new strategy, especially regarding the part linked to CSR and sustainability services? And the second one is on HR. Does the strategy of building expertise internally have an impact on the turnover where you want to be? Recently, you managed to be under 15%. Do you need to be below that? And I have the third one also, but let you answer. Thank you.
All right. I'll let Kathryn answer on the attrition. On remuneration, our remuneration at the executive level is very clear. It's, of course, on financials and then on specific individual objectives to the tune of 70/30. The 30% that are CSR components there, we have had that for a while in our short-term incentive. We also have CSR components in our long-term incentive plans. And then the rest is actually geared towards strategy and sometimes specific individuals, depending on the perimeter of each one. And that kind of structure cascades down to the top leadership. So very aligned on that. And I think what we're doing today is, as we rolled out the 2024 objectives, there is an element of strategy there and always an element of CSR because that's part of our absolutes and our commitments to the market.
I think Kathryn mentioned earlier that 65% of our managers and contributors have actually an incentive plan. The work we will always be doing is to converge these incentive plans so actually we can deliver on our execution. I'll let Kathryn answer on the rest.
So on the attrition, we have continued to improve attrition year-over-year. And actually, it's now tracking at less than 11%. So it is a key focus for us. I think as we take this new investment strategy in building capability and upskilling, we do know from our engagement service that we get very, very clear feedback from our employees that this renewed focus on building capability internally, opening opportunities internally, will continue to positively impact our attrition rates. So we're confident that this will enable that.
I think the key thing on that is we want, of course, to retain our people, but we also want to make sure that we drive a performance approach in that retention, right? That's what we have been doing, and that's what we'll do more of. You had a third question.
Yes. Thank you very much. Just a detail on Health and Safety also, the target for 2028. I understand that the use of technology will also improve safety. You gave an example for Inspection. So I was wondering, what is holding you to be more ambitious on your 2028 target on Health and Safety compared to the level of the current level, I mean?
Well, actually, when you look at it, that is a target. But we are working on more fundamental things when it comes to Health and Safety, specifically on our prevention programs. You talked about technology. We're actually using technology, for example, driving. Driving is our highest hazard. So our biggest activity is our highest hazard. So we are equipping, for example, our vehicles a bit everywhere around the world with monitoring technology. So one, it serves for coaching drivers. And of course, it serves as well. But it's a data approach to understand driver behavior, journey management aspects. So we are looking at technology. We have upgraded also our systems around risk management systems that we have. So that goes absolutely without saying that we want to pursue, of course, in an ideal world, it's a zero harm, right? But I believe the targets are reasonable.
But that doesn't mean that we will stop there. And just to complete, the management, the Safety business is a never-done business. So we are every day doing something new to make sure that we never fall behind where we are, below where we are, and that we can progress actually in delivering better metrics. Thank you.
We still have a couple of minutes for additional questions. Suhasini. Now I see your face with glasses, which is good.
Hi. Good afternoon. Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. A couple from me, please. Just to clarify, you have talked about reinvestments which are going above the line. But should we think about any one-off costs below the line to achieve the operational leverage and scalability improvements? That's the first one.
That's the couple? Okay. No.
Perfect.
Next.
Very reassuring. Thank you. Just on the capital allocation priority between share buybacks and M&A, clearly, you've announced the share buyback program today. But how would you think about the capital allocation between M&A and share buybacks? Is it that if your leverage is below the targeted leverage range, you have done M&A, couldn't do anymore, and then you think of share buybacks? Or is it going to be an ongoing theme?
Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
Well, I think that the central part of the commitment of the company and here as well it's a pivot is we are committing to improve shareholder returns. So it goes through and you may have seen and noticed, we are focusing a bit less on the percentage of margin by itself, which, as you know, you've never lived off a percentage. You make a living out of hard euro amounts. So we are really focusing on improving the earnings per share. And we complement it with a dividend policy that we've maintained. And I think Hinda said very well at the beginning, the share buyback program that may come as a surprise to some of you or as a relief has been decided by the management as a practical down-to-earth element that we support the strategy of creating value for investors. So I think that's the whole story, frankly.
You know, Suhasini, if you ask me, you might have asked me six months ago, and I know some other investors here did ask me about share buyback. Six to nine months ago, I was quite categorical that it wasn't the right time. We were in the middle of really working on the strategy. We needed to keep optionality. So we wanted to understand what are the targets we're going to go after, what markets, etc. It was a little premature, I thought, at that time to think of that. Today, it's a tool in our toolbox, right? As we have better clarity on the strategy, then it's a tool we can use. We are using it because we think it makes sense.
Thank you.
Thank you.
In the middle of the room. Yeah.
Hello. Geoffroy Michelet from Oddo BHF. We all know the legendary cautiousness of your marine and offshore teams. But that implies that they will underperform group average organic growth, which they didn't recently and even on the longer term. Did you challenge them enough for setting that target?
I said Matthieu right there. So no, look, I'm going to defend Matthieu a little bit here in the M&O team. I think it's a business that depends on many factors. For a long time, the trends weren't always extremely clear. I think the decarbonization trend has completely flipped the shipping market in a sense that this renewal of the fleet is going to continue, right? Now, of course, we don't control everything in this process of renewal of the fleet. There are shipyards we need to deal with. There are financing. There are other things. But what is very clear is that decarbonization is going to happen. There are regulations on that. And more than that, there are issues of basically shipping companies losing market share. So they have to renew. So what we have done, we control what we can, which is innovation.
And that's what the team in M&O has been doing, is to innovate around new systems that help decarbonize dual propulsion systems. We're innovating around how do we optimize journeys for ships that won't be new. So it's a very complex thing. But where I'm very pleased with the team today, we have 20 million gross tons of backlog. We continue to win. We don't control how the different shipyards work. We think this is a multiyear, reasonable growth cycle. But at the same time, let's not forget, for the last couple of years, there are quite a bit of exceptional spend of customers as they caught up with either regulatory needs or caught up with some of the service they haven't done.
So rest assured, there's quite a bit of pressure on our M&O team because we think it's a valuable business in our portfolio and has potential to perform.
Thank you. We'll take now the question from AlphaValue. Kulwinder ?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you. I wanted to ask a question around pricing and sustainability. Hinda, you mentioned that you are developing new offering solutions on Sustainability. And then you eventually plan to roll them out. Does it give you the right to exact pricing power and higher margins versus the competitors? Or do you expect the competitors to keep you honest, assuming you can find the right talent, of course?
Yeah. I think the competitors always keep us honest, right? It's a competitive marketplace. I think the trick here is who moves faster to have the right resources in the right markets or the right capabilities, not only people. But it could be capabilities. It could be digital, for example. So I think our ambition is to make sure that we derive some good pricing. But we are not naive about the market. There is a rush of players into the sustainability space. You have the audit companies, the consulting companies, a bunch of digital natives who have no idea what sustainability is. But they know there is a lot of data. So it's attracting these companies. And they're trying to work there. So our ambition is, yes, to try to derive some differential of pricing where we can. But we know it's going to take a lot of work.
I think it's premature for me to say it's the case today. I'm looking at my colleagues if anyone disagrees. I think that's where we are today. We will be reporting as we grow our transition services on what we understand in this market.
Thank you. Then this ties to my second question. Could you help us understand the link between your pricing power and finding the right talent across the group? Are there any areas across the group that you see that you want to address as very critical that, "Okay. Here, I need to find the right talent to execute my strategy up till 2028"? How should we think about this?
Yeah. This is a great question. I'll let Catherine explain that. It's exactly the categories she talked about. I want to talk about where we're developing talents internally that is critical.
Yeah. So our priority is really to continue to develop these technical integrated hubs of expertise. So it is around, for sure, sustainability, the digital competence that we've talked about, but then also energy transition. So really thinking about those key aspects of our portfolio, that is where we will focus both in terms of building capability from an entry-level point of view, but also this upskilling and investment in skills academies.
So if you look at something around greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon measurements at the base level. And then as you start reducing, all companies today—in fact, 12 months ago, pretty much 3/4 of requests on Sustainability were around greenhouse gas emissions, basically baseline reporting. And we have a technical center in a couple of European countries today that specialize in that, right? But of course, the needs are everywhere around the world. So our capacity to scale these and to make sure that this kernel of knowledge is actually leveraged so we can create more is very, very important so we can get more of the market. It's all about timing. So the faster you do it and the earlier you get in the market, the more you will have leverage to, in many ways, condition how that business gets done.
Because after that, everyone will come behind trying to catch up. Thank you.
Maybe the last question before we end up, please. The very last one now.
Big pressure. Sorry. It's Rory McKenzie at UBS. Maybe linking together two big topics on pricing and on technology. When you find these new services or new ways of working, like reducing an inspection cycle from 20 days to 15 or remote inspections, how does that productivity get impacted in the contract price to the client? And how do you think about pricing that value? Are you assuming that as technology accelerates, there's more deflation around and you're going to deal with that? Or is this a way for you to gain that market share? So I think that that interplay is quite important. Thank you.
All right. Thanks for the question. So look, when you talk to clients today, so they are spending budgets. And we capture those budgets. Hopefully, we capture more of those budgets moving forward. What differentiates us in capturing those budgets is we can come with alternative ways of thinking. If you come to a client and say, "Hey, you're spending EUR 100 today. We're going to do 100 inspections.
Maybe in 25% of the cases, we'll find things where you will need to correct things. Now, I'm coming to you and say, "Hey, you will spend that money with working on existing data so that we can help you be more assertive in the way you can work on your asset to reduce your cost to operate so that we can come maybe less often but to provide you with more assertive and new ways of thinking about how you can extend the life cycle of your asset." I can tell you from firsthand experience, you will take that contract. You will keep it much longer.
So for us, it's all about pivoting in the way we deliver our services from, as we were saying, from field to desktop, from clusterised pieces of information into data lakes where we can extract risk profiles and transfer that technology to our client so that we deliver services that would make it last in the asset. I'm talking about asset because that's the examples you took in for a 20-day inspection. So today, yes, we're looking at how can we improve these 25, 20, 15? But more importantly, it's all about how can we shift the business model into a data-driven business model so that we really help answering the need of the customer in the first hand and not trying to just improve the way we work? Of course, we do that. But we have that endgame in mind. Does that help with the question?
I would just add one thing. Because when you apply technology in the field, it often simplifies a lot of things for the customer, turnaround times, people that need to be on site to collaborate with us. So there's a lot of additional value when you streamline and migrate those tasks. So always keep that in mind that there is something that also on the customer side improves as a side benefit, I would say, almost because you simplify the process overall. And I think that's added value if you look at the overhead costs that the customer normally faces.
Okay. So we are now at the end of the Q&A session. Thank you very much for your very interesting questions. So just to give you a few information, so we'll add the closing remarks from Hinda. Just after, there will be a lunch. You will have plenty of opportunity to ask new questions with the management team of Bureau Veritas. And then we will restart at 2:30 P.M. You have, on your own badge, your individual program. So you will see at what time you are expected for the workout sessions. So enjoy. And with that, Hinda, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you, Laurent. I promise it's only a few minutes. I want to thank you again for attending our Capital Markets Day this morning. I outlined why it is a very opportune time for Bureau Veritas, that some powerful secular trends are supporting a multiyear, we believe, growth dynamic for our markets, and that Bureau Veritas' strength positions us well to benefit from this dynamic. I hope you now understand that. If we can move to the next year, please.
I hope you now understand that our strategy LEAP | 28 represents a new pivot for Bureau Veritas as we turn a highly diversified business into a focused portfolio that prioritizes market leadership, durable growth, and improving returns, as we leverage technology to modernize our ways of working, to extract operational leverage and functional scalability from a performance-led execution platform, as we build competitive advantage through people by creating new ways of learning and working with an evolved people model. Lastly, I hope you have seen our reinforced focus on customer service and differentiated experience and solution. This is in line with our vision. We'll give us a strong competitive advantage to gain an undisputed market leadership position.
Our financial targets for the period 2024-2028 represent a step-changing growth, earnings and shareholder returns, high single-digit total revenue growth at constant currency, consistent margin improvement, and robust cash conversion of over 90%, a disciplined capital allocation framework that François talked about. It will enable us to accelerate M&A, allocate capital for growth, CapEx for growth, and execute divestments where needed with leverage that will remain between 1 x and 2 x. This will ensure then that we can deliver a double-digit shareholder return based on EPS, CAGR, and dividend plus dividend yield. This year, we will also execute the EUR 200 million share buyback, a sign of confidence in our company and in our capacity to execute this strategy. We believe that Bureau Veritas is a unique investable value proposition for 195 years.
By the end of this strategy time for 200 years, hopefully, we would have demonstrated a consistent track record supporting our customers, renewing ourselves, contributing to society, and rewarding our investors. Our new strategy ensures that over the next five years, we'll be able to continue to live up to our heritage, to our purpose, and to our new vision. Thank you again very much for your participation this morning. I hope that those of you attending these afternoon sessions will enjoy the update. Have a great day.