Okay. Please have a seat and we'll get started. With Laurent Guillot, our general manager, and all the members of our board of directors who are here. Welcome to all of you here in the room and also the many people who are attending online. Thank you very much for being present. As far as I'm concerned, three months ago, I became president of the board of directors. The board of directors was almost completely overhauled with very strong ability in health, in human resources, in governance and ethics. By way of introduction, I would like to share three convictions of our board of directors before Laurent Guillot will present our refoundation plan. The three convictions of our board of directors are, first of all, meaning, and then timing, and lastly, the conditions for success.
As far as meaning is concerned, to be very clear, the goal of our refoundation plan is clearly to go after a terrible scandal, to go from a situation where there was abuse and characterized terrible management, dysfunctional management. Our refoundation is based on two intangible assets. I'll wait for that phone to stop ringing. Thank you. Two intangibles, humans and ethics. Humans are at the heart of all of our decisions, especially those being taken by Laurent, because we have three activities and not just one. Psychiatric care, convalescent care, and then care for the elderly. These activities, of course, are essentially human activities. Our job is to take care of men and women, 72,000, who are caring for other men and women, 250,000 every year for the entire group, who are in a situation of major fragility.
This is clearly linked to their families and their loved ones. That's our profession, and this is what we love to do. It's this human dimension that we love. The second intangible is ethics. Every instant without any concessions of whatever kind. All of this because in the past, we repeat this, there was a very small minority that caused terrible consequences for a number of people, our patients, our residents in our nursing homes, and their families. The 75,000 employees of Orpea, and then, of course, our small shareholders who lost a lot. To finish on meaning, first, a word on our refoundation. Contrary to what is being said very often these days, it's not about finance. It's a refoundation at the service of the 250,000 people that we welcome every year with sympathy in care.
It's a refoundation at the service of the 72,000 employees. The 72,000 employees, believe us, we spend time on the ground. These are incredibly devoted people on a daily basis. This refoundation is also at the service of the broader public, because the broader public is right to be vigilant, more and more vigilant, more than ever as to the quality of care in our facilities. Lastly, the refoundation is also at the service of local territories and elected officials because we are. We serve the general interest, and we are vital to society. Those are the stakes that the board of directors guarantees. Now a word on timing. Our refoundation is being run by a new management team, new governance under the leadership of Laurent Guillot.
I can testify to the fact that as president of the board of administrators, it's an extraordinarily committed team, and I have rarely seen such commitment. This team has a single objective. This is to definitively move on from the terrible malpractice we saw. This refoundation begins today, and it is possible because starting from July, Laurent Guillot, so he's been with us for just about four months. He took the emergency measures which have been implemented on financial malpractices on abuse and mismanagement. He's done this with the support of the board of directors. He'll be coming back to this in a moment. Over the past four months, this is what he's been doing, and we have to see the extent of everything that's been done over just four months.
Lastly, our refoundation plan that we will be looking at in detail in just a few moments with our new board of directors, which has been providing it with our thoughts. Yesterday, we had an extraordinary session of the management board, and we are fully in support of this new plan. There's one method and three priorities. The three priorities are those which result from what I've just said. Meaning, putting patients at the center, focusing our care on them, accompanying them, and then our employees with the symmetry in our intentions. Then lastly, a new company model that has to be built. The board of directors is fully in support of this refoundation plan. It's radical and it's courageous. There's a lot of work ahead of us, and I warmly thank Laurent and his team for their work. To finish, one last point.
This is the third conviction of the board of directors, and these are the conditions for success. To give ourselves the means to succeed in this refoundation plan and to break with past strategy, our general manager is committing a conciliation procedure with the goal of putting the company under the protection of the judicial sector. Because of the malpractice, this new governance has had to adopt very strong options to put the collective interests above everything else. This is guaranteeing care for our patients and those in our living facilities. It's guaranteeing the quality of our jobs. To put the collective interest above all, and especially above financial interests. To conclude, just a word to say that you will realize this throughout the morning. We are all aligned.
We're all determined to put humans at the heart of our project, to implement new practices of transparency, openness, ethics with you and for you. We are changing Orpea for good, and Laurent is in charge of this refoundation. Over to you, Laurent. Thank you. Thank you, Guillaume. Thank you for your kind words. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here today. I'm with our executive board. This is an extremely important presentation and day for Orpea, for all of our teams, for all of our employees. This is a day, as Guillaume said, that publicly marks our break with the past. When I took up my position in July, I was able to tell you why I chose to join Orpea.
I chose to meet this challenge because I'm deeply convinced of the usefulness of what Orpea does and of what we do, and also the increasing need that this company meets. These are jobs that have meaning, that are carried out by men and women with incredible commitment that is unflinching no matter what. Our commitment and our company, our employees, our residents, our patients, all of those who believe in Orpea are worth fighting for. You have a team of fighters here before you to take up this challenge. I'm honored with all of the team around me to present the refoundation of Orpea. Orpea's situation is unprecedented in terms of financial malpractice, in terms of internal malpractice, and also in terms of the financial mismanagement. This is why we have made the bet of the refoundation and transparency.
Orpea is changing with you and for you. Orpea is changing. It's obvious, and of course, it's necessary. This will bring us to become a more ethical company, which is better managed, better organized, with enhanced performance and better financial results. With you and for you, it is through dialogue and transparency with our workers, with our patients, with our families, with our investors, of course, and with our authorities. All of our stakeholders. It's also a change for you. We aim to create even more value, shared value, shared fairly, sustainable value for the long term. Getting our company back on track, which is necessary to renew with our profitability. Our diagnosis with our new management committee is very clear. It's clear, but it's also unprecedented in its scope.
It's going to be terrible for all of us. The company itself, its employees, its patients, its residents, its shareholders, the authorities, have all been victims. Victims of financial malpractices by former directors. I won't give you a list. I won't spend too much time on this. People who have gained wealth selfishly. Just excessive expense accounts. 30 managers were concerned, and they have all left. We've also been victims, and this is less well-known, victims of dysfunctional management practices, and also excessive and uncontrolled international real estate development over the past few years. I'll come back to those last two points. Dysfunctional management practices.
As I said in July at our general assembly, and it's been confirmed on a daily basis, every time I visit a facility, when I visit a clinic, I am blown away by the expertise and the quality of the healthcare protocols. These are the two strengths of our company. Our Professor Pierre Krolak-Salmon will be saying more about this in a moment. He's much better qualified than I am to talk about this. These are important strengths of the founder of our company 30, 40 years ago when the group was first set up. This healthcare protocol and expertise in healthcare remains the backbone of our group. Inversely, human resources, IT, purchasing, real estate, and even financial sectors, the practices are not at all representative of a group that represents EUR 4.7 billion.
Another example that I'll be taking from the financial sphere, given my audience, to show the reality of our daily lives and of the daily lives of our company. At the onset of the crisis, the company did not have any inventory of its real estate. We had EUR 1.2 billion in real estate assets, but there was no inventory of it, no complete inventory. There were partial lists, and sometimes there weren't even the documents that proved ownership. We have to reconstitute all of the real estate documentation with the new real estate management so that we can actually take stock of what we own. The company did not have any subsidiary IFRS monthly reporting, which means that any fine-tuning in its management is extremely difficult.
The EUR 7.9 billion in debt at the end of 2021 had been obtained through 738 different credit lines. They were all linked to each other in the inventory. Hundreds of lawyers have been employed for hundreds of hours to simply just find out what the debt situation was. I could go on ad infinitum, giving you these types of examples. For human resources, there hadn't been any annual collective bargaining for the last 15 years. For purchasing, there had never been any category purchasing strategy, and there were some IT systems that have been obsolete for the last 15 years. Orpea grew far too quickly without the necessary underlying structure to bear that growth.
The last, and by far the most serious, thing that we noted was that growth over the last few years had been achieved too quickly and had been totally uncontrolled, financially speaking. Real estate was entirely financed by debt. Over the last few years, the group entered 15 different countries, and although this doubled the EBITDA, it was done at the price of EUR 5.5 billion investments in real estate that was financed simply by increasing the debt by EUR 6.2 billion. As you can see on the slide, this excessive real estate growth did not give rise to a proportionate increase of the EBITDA. The new real estate development abroad and in far-flung countries was much less profitable, sometimes not profitable at all.
At the end of 2021, based on these figures, the financial situation of the company was already extremely fragile. This was the situation that I found when I came on board on the first of July. With the new executive committee, we have tried to work out what to do. What should we do? The first thing, of course, was to try to renew our governance structure. As Guillaume said earlier, the board of directors was largely renewed during the shareholders meeting that was held on the 28th of last July. The team that has joined me progressively over the last few months is a team of great professionals. It is a group that has committed itself to make sure that this group becomes an ethical one, a structured one, an efficient one, and a profitable one.
I didn't want to be the only one to make a presentation to you today. I wanted them to be with us here today so that you could see the quality of the team, and particularly the commitment that they have each taken for the company. Apart from this team, there are also 72,000 employees in the group who are also committed to refounding this new Orpea. Since July, all of our actions have been in order to achieve three immediate and urgent goals. We began working around these three pillars to remedy what is the most urgent, to organize, beginning to structure the future, and to rally all of our teams and our stakeholders.
Remedy, as I already said, and I cannot hammer this home enough, is to try to put the company back on track with zero tolerance for non-ethical practices. 30 people have already left the group, and there will be no exceptions when it comes to ethics. That is part of getting the company back on track. We are also setting up transparent audits, transparent investigative procedures when necessary. It was what we did when there was an alert in Austria and also reopening the clinic of Thiviers in France. I am following extremely closely the results of these audit investigations as well as the actions that are being put into place after them.
When it comes to whistleblowing policies, we want to make sure that these alerts are directly transferred up to the relevant authorities. Every week, we are looking at how these alerts are being transferred, and we do feedback on each of the reported cases. We are giving the heads of facilities more autonomy when it comes to recruiting on fixed-term contracts or part-time contracts. The last example, which is just one of the things we're doing amongst others, is that we have done a review of the Group France support function, IT, for example, that was something that seriously needed to be remedied. If we want to better organize ourselves, then it means that we have to have a true humane and social human resource policy.
Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, we have actually reached a unanimous agreement with our employee representatives, bearing on the operating of the works councils and social councils. It was the first time that general management had actually discussed with the workers' representatives. It is a massive step forward, and I would like to warmly thank not only our managerial team, but also our social partners who have stepped forward with us in a much more positive manner. Since September, you might remember that I announced there would be 550 hires per month. Since September, we have actually recruited 800 people per month in France, and we'll talk about that a little later.
With Pierre, we have also created a steering committee on ethics and quality care, and we've done this with the support and the cooperation of Emmanuel Hirsch. Pierre will also talk about that later. Laurent will tell you how we are restructuring and reorganizing our support functions. With Gery, we are reorganizing our real estate structure. I'll come back later on to the catering plan redesign that has been planned in France. It is something that we are going to take a closer look at later. We also want to rally around this new project, rally our teams, thanks to good communications, cooperation in the field, but also mobilizing all of our stakeholders. You might remember that we carried out an États généraux process in our retirement homes. Thousands of staff participated in that.
In November, we have launched another project called the Raison d'être, The Reason for Being, which will be rolled out throughout our facilities as well. We have intensified communications. Each of us, each of the members of the ExCom and the members of the board, will go frequently to the different facilities to see what is going on, to listen to proposals, to listen to criticism, and to try to come up with answers to continually improve the working conditions of our staff. Lastly, with Pierre, we have five activities. We've got the retirement homes, home care. We've got senior residence homes. We've got psychiatric facilities, geriatric facilities, clinics.
All of these are very useful, but we have also launched something else with Pierre to try to enhance synergies between these different types of facilities, not only in the home care trajectory, but also on an in-house basis, human resources, and the quality of what we can do. You see, over the last four months, the new management team has been far from idle. They first of all have become a new management team. The new management team has organized itself, has been to the different facilities, listened to the staff, to the patients, to the residents.
We collated a lot of ideas from these États généraux, the States general meeting, and we have taken some immediate action in order to remedy, organize, and rally, and finally come up with the new Orpea's refoundation plan. As from tomorrow, we're going to render this refoundation plan operational with its vision and its targets. We have designed this plan with the executive committee team, but also with those working in the facilities. Now we have to make them operational, find the people who are going to manage them, and those who are going to follow them month after month. At the same time, we're going to try to restore operational profitability, rethink real estate ownership, and as Laurent will tell you later, return to a durable financial situation.
What I would like to reiterate, however, are the very powerful assets that the group has for success. Orpea is changing, with you, and for you because we have powerful assets. I have already told you about these assets during the shareholders meeting. We have 72,000 employees. They are engaged, they are committed. They are our biggest asset, and we must look after them. We have our care expertise, in geriatrics, for example, but not only, also in other specialties that are fundamental for any healthcare, such as psychiatry. We also have a very extended local network with, premium facilities that are excellently located. Thanks to these assets, the Orpea Group is perfectly positioned to meet the fundamental needs of our society.
Society will have ever-increasing needs that will become more difficult over time, notably with the aging of the population. Whether it be our retirement homes, our home care, our clinics, our patients, our residents, more and more, they are going to need our expertise and the health care of our health care staff. The European population is aging. They need physical care, and they need psychiatric care. Unfortunately, that is something we are seeing more and more. To tackle these needs, and thanks to its assets, Orpea has to change. We have to change, but maybe the legitimate question would be to say why. We want to change because we want, once again, to become the sector's leading player.
We want our employees to be able to carry out the mission for which patients come to us or residents come to us. They must be able to care for our patients and our residents. This has to be done based on a strong foundation of renewed trust, patients, families, community, authorities, and investors. Orpea, changing with you and for you. In order to change, first of all, we must change our method, be it concerning ethics or a collaborative approach involving all stakeholders. We need transparent and efficient operational models. In changing our organization, we need to give more independence to the facilities. We need to give a new role to support functions. The support functions are not there just to be a centralized headquarters. Support functions are there at the service of operations.
We need to change our approach to care, to support, and to human resources. We need as well to change our financial situation. Real estate should no longer be at the heart of our business. Real estate should be operating at the service of our patients and our residents. We're going to have to change as well our human resources. The buyer-payer care is something that should be done on a tailor-made basis. It should be done with the human being at the center of all of this. We need to ensure that we have excellent medical skills, and it also means that we are going to have to recover operational profitability. We can't do anything without that.
We have to rethink our real estate ownership policy, and we have to come up to return to a durable financial situation. To talk to you about this new plan today, changing Orpea with you and for you, this refoundation plan for Orpea, we are going to be looking at four different pillars. The men and women who make up our group are our lifeblood. We are going to ask, therefore, Fanny Barbier, who is the Group Executive Vice President in charge of human resources. We have to take care of our employees so that they in turn can take care of our patients and residents. We will be listening to Pierre Krolak-Salmon, who is very new, the Group EVP for everything that is medical care for the residents and help for their families. If I talk of...
I will come back and talk to you about corporate social responsibility and then Laurent Lemaire, who is the finance, purchasing, and IT manager, as well as Géry Robert-Ambroix, in charge of real estate, will tell you a little bit about how we can have a more profitable business for our investors. I've also asked Dr. Erik Hamann, who is in charge of our activities in Germany, to tell us a little bit of what our refoundation plan is going to look like in Germany, as he is at the head of the company there. I will then come back and tell you a little bit about what are some of the key elements of this refoundation plan in France.
We will end up with Laurent Lemaire, who will give us a financial snapshot of our plan. Fanny Barbier, s'il vous plaît, can I give you the floor on questions that are at the very heart of what we do, and that is our men and women working for us. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Laurent. Good morning to you all. I am delighted to be here with you today to talk to you about the Orpea's new refoundation plan. Orpea that is better managed, that is restructured. As I said, we are very lucky because the care business is an ever-growing business, and it's not by chance that the first pillar of our plan is our men and women, our employees.
Without them, we would not be able to actually help the different residents and patients who are in our company. 72,000 people who are dedicated to health and care in Orpea. When I arrived, I was struck by the diversity of profiles, by the wealth of activities. Orpea has 72,000 employees, caregivers, nurses, physical therapists, dieticians caring for our patients and residents on a daily basis. I was struck by their pride, their commitment, how exemplary they are, and lastly, struck by their resilience and their desire to save our company. They remain mobilized despite the crisis, despite a lack of resources, and despite the little amount of energy that was invested in our employees. The company did not take care of them, did not respect their commitment. As you know, there's a crisis.
Many people are fleeing the healthcare sector despite the fact that it's such an important role to play. These sectors suffer from a lack of recognition. Orpea let a vertical and hierarchical structure come into being. Very little focus on the development of our employees, looking more at finances than at the human aspect. All of these elements, with the exogenous crisis, the endogenous crisis, led to a dysfunction that was clearly visible. 25% turnover rate. That's one employee out of four leaving the company with a 10% absenteeism rate. Fifteen thousand
Short-term contracts. This of course leads to a lack of quality in the care of our patients and residents. An accident rate which is extremely high, 52%. As Laurent said, 15 years without any increase in wages in France. This is why we decided to remedy this and to bring our employees to the heart of our preoccupations. We have to restore trust. We have to offer the opportunity to give the best of themselves for the better care of our patients and residents. There's also health and security. This is the responsibility of all companies. It's even more so the case at Orpea. I wanted to focus on two topics, ethics, of course, equity, becoming a company where people learn that take all stakeholders into account, all employees and our social partners.
This ambition will be deployed with a focus on five priorities, five levers to develop a symmetry in our intentions. I'll come back to the five in turn. First of all, to guarantee the health, the security, and the well-being of our employees. Physical health, of course. Mental health as well. Even more important, because these are very difficult professions with a lot of emotional commitment, and we have to ensure that our employees feel well mentally, and also have to allow them to progress on a daily basis through training. We have to take care of our employees. This also means hiring new employees. There is a lack of staff. There's instability which has led to too much work for others. This has deteriorated the quality of our healthcare. We have to recognize these professions. We have to showcase our talent.
Pierre will come back to the comparison between our company and the public sector. We have very strong protocols, we have a very strong expertise, and we have a capacity of providing long-term professional trajectories for our employees. We have to become an attractive company once again. To attract talent, this means launching national recruitment campaigns through new recruiting models, job boards, social media. Our organization has to be adapted to the expectations of our employees, which have changed. They now seek a more balanced work-life balance. We decided to hire 800 people per month, and we are able to do so with long-term contracts, and we are bringing young people on board. None of this would serve any purpose if we weren't able to capitalize. This means making our employees faithful. This means decreasing turnover by 25 points.
That means welcoming them, onboarding them, setting up satisfactory working conditions, so that everybody understands what our expectations are, the protocols and the culture at Orpea. Making them loyal also means providing continuous training, allowing them to grow, to develop their professions. In 2023, we will be launching 1,500 training trajectories for certification. We will be investing in training EUR 10 million more than last year. We also have to recognize the talents of our employees. We have to recognize the quality of management. Financial aspects are important as well. At Orpea, we are below market standards. From September, we've been working with our social partners to make our wages much more attractive and to have a policy which will be attractive in terms of wages and in terms of perks and social benefits.
To do this, we'll be setting up an agile organization, and we'll be working on management culture. An agile company is a company that can turn the model around. As I said before, we had a top-down structure. We were not working for the establishments. Whereas it's the establishments who take care of our patients and our residents. They have to be in charge. They have to have the levers. This means training. 90% of original managers in France come from in-house positions. This means in-house promotion works very well at Orpea. But these managers have not been trained. These are caregivers who have become managers, and we have to invest in our capacity to train our managers to bring their teams together to make them motivated, to make them loyal. This also means giving them leeway so that they can recruit.
So far, local establishments could not recruit new talent without asking for permission from headquarters. Since July, we have changed this policy and now facilities can hire their own staff within a normalized framework. They make their decisions in terms of hiring and in terms of medical staff. An agile organization is also a collective organization where people work together, where they share best practices, where they are seeking continuous improvement with social partners who are committed, who contribute, and who work on projects. I'll come back to this. To do this, we will be implementing human resources teams which have been strengthened and repositioned. This can seem obvious in a company with 72,000 employees, but so far, Orpea only had human resources directors working for headquarters only on payroll and administrative aspects. We have to focus on the human aspect.
We have to invest in human resources. They are the actors of change. They are the ones in charge of training, social dialogue. This is why in France, we decided to invest in local human resource directors at regional level, but also those who are in charge of recruitment. Because right now, there were only two people at central level to recruit caregivers. We are opening up 5,000 positions in France. This is a global repositioning of human resources to bring them as close as possible to the ground. These five levers, these five priorities have a single objective, to give our teams the means to do their jobs. First of all, because they will have necessary resources and because the organization will be such and the working tools will make their lives easier.
They will be able to plan ahead, plan for their workload, plan the care to be given to residents and patients in a very benevolent and caring environment. We are going to be investing. There will be massive investment in changing our organizations with a massive influx of new recruits, especially in human resources and in training. We will also be lowering costs due to work accidents and short-term contracts. We will be investing in humans for better patient care, thanks to the stabilization of our teams, and thanks to all of the assistance that we'll be providing for them, which we'll now hear more about by Pierre Krolak-Salmon. Thank you, Fanny. Good morning. It's a great honor to be here today. I'm very happy. Just a few words on what has meaning for the group. I am a doctor. I'm a neurologist, a geriatrician.
I'm also a teacher at the medical facility in Lyon. I'm also in charge of a department for aging set up in Lyon, and this is a very useful tool used in hospitals that we created. It's extremely powerful and brings together all of the people working in the second-largest teaching hospital around elderly people. We have outpatient care. We also have home care. We have mobile teams devoted to the various types of hospitalization with a research center, research and innovation center, and a training center. It's a fully integrated service. Why have I joined Orpea? For me, the Orpea Group is a systemic group. It's a major group which is necessary in the healthcare context internationally. It has absolutely wonderful qualities in their teams, in their facilities, and these qualities have to encourage us to propose a new and ambitious project which is fully integrated.
The missions of our company are centered on health, on healthcare, and on accompanying people's life projects, including hospitalization and long-term care facilities. This is a project which is at the service of our patients, of our residents, and their families and loved ones, calling upon all of our resources. This has already been said very well. Our resources are first and foremost our caregivers, but also the support functions. The caregivers are multidisciplinary. We're talking about nurses, caregivers, doctors, physical therapists. A huge wealth of expertise that we can call upon to provide high-quality, safe healthcare with full respect for the ethical dimension, all while innovating and carrying out research. These professionals intervene in facilities where there are already the milestones in the care trajectory, starting at home with outpatient care and hospitalization for mental health, for example, readaptation, rehabilitation, assisted living, and nursing homes.
These structures have unbelievable qualities in terms of real estate with very high-quality locations and additional expertise. To accompany our new project for the care of our patients and residents, we have three major pillars for our organization and for our reflections. First of all, medically speaking, scientifically speaking, and then ethically speaking. The medical pillar will have a medical commission for each facility, as well as at group level, and then at each country level, national level, and then regional level. The group medical commission will propose cornerstones for healthcare, the invariants that we will all share and which will be adapted to each local context. Scientific expertise is the duty of our community. We will have a scientific council with international members which will carry out scientific literature reviews. With academic partnerships, but not in just a top-down approach, but also a bottom-up approach.
Because I see on a daily basis wonderful initiatives that aren't known at the level of the entire group. It's important to share these following an assessment of their impact, maybe with some pilot studies. If they are virtuous and relevant, then they should be shared as best practices. We will also have an ethics steering committee headed by Emmanuel Hirsch. A steering committee at group level, but also with local representatives. To broadcast these practices with assessment teams and whistleblowing facilities. Again, based on interdisciplinary teams, caregivers, nurses, doctors, directors of the healthcare facilities to make sure that the ethical dimension is taken into account. To be managed locally as well as at higher levels, including at group level.
Those three pillars are extremely strong and must allow us to have a cross-cutting and systemic approach, allowing us to be able on a daily basis, but to stay the course as well in the mid and long term. To respect our promises, and I will ensure this personally with the executive committee. Our teams, and Fanny Barbier said this very well, our teams need to find meaning in what they do, and that's become very difficult these days. This is a crisis in the healthcare sector very broadly, not just Orpea. What is it they need? They need more time. Time to spend with their patients, time for optimal care, time to establish links, human bonds. To mobilize all of their energy and to feel skilled.
Again, we have to all work in order to provide tools to improve the expertise of all of our employees, our doctors, our caregivers. We need agile tools, maybe through digital tools with online workshops. With trainings by doctors, by experts, so that as people join us, we can have a training trajectory for preventing falls, among others. Agility of information accessible to all of our teams on the ground. This organization is at the service of quality care for patients and residents. Laurent Guillot said this. We have a wealth of protocols, of quality benchmarks to keep us up to speed and to make us even more operational. Protocols aren't a way of making things more unwieldy. It's to make the lives easier of our teams for better quality care. We also have to monitor these benchmarks.
There are very formal indicators to certify facilities, and this can be traumatic for some teams. We also need to have indicators which are more meaningful, clinically speaking. Psychic wellbeing, nutritional quality in our medical prescriptions. This is very important for mental health and for geriatrics especially. We will also, more than ever, base ourselves on a culture of learning, of benevolent quality without attaching any stigma, 'cause this means sharing our experiences, positive experiences as well as negative ones.
It has to be done in the teams. It has to be done with every individual. As time goes by, following all of these indicators, anonymizing the indicators, we will be able to share together and progress together. This medical health project also has to go hand in hand with all of the components of care and living conditions. Part of it will be to propose activities, collective activities, individual activities based on what people want, based on what the residents and the patients want to do. We would also like to make sure that the intergenerational link is enhanced and the links between teams. We could have students visiting the different retirement homes or kids from crèches coming in as well. It's a win-win situation for both generations.
We must also pay particular attention to the very strong demand of our elderly to feel useful. They want to be useful in their collectivity. They want to be useful in their territories. They want to be useful in their different homes. That is something that they want, and we must listen to that. In order to do all of this, of course, we have to communicate. It's what we're doing today, but we have to communicate locally in each of the facilities so that the quality of care and services is well known. Then we also have to officialize the actual welcome time. It's the welcome time of the patients and the families.
That is so important because that is where we can talk about the services that are available for the patients, and that is where we can hear what the requests of the families and the patients are. The teams, the patients, the residents have to communicate, and in order to do that, you need the digital technology, of course, not just, however. It's good to have digital technology, so they can lighten our workload, but they are not the be all and end all. We also have to be, to have all of the links with those working in primary care, the general practitioners, those working in territories, all of these that we must keep in touch with. Now, I was talking about personalizing support to our patients and residents. Let me tell you a little bit more about that.
We have to personalize the welcome, the arrival, and that is sitting down around a table, sorry, with the patient or a resident and their families. It's sitting down and talking about the right balance between healthcare and liberties and freedoms. You have to find the trade-off. There's also the trade-off between the quality of life versus safety, and then the trade-off between privacy and collective time. If we do that with the people who are concerned and with their loved ones, we will be able to reassure those who are anxious, who are stressed, and we will be able to preempt any conflicts. We must also work on our care journey, our care path.
We must make sure that there is continuity between the care at home and then the outpatient clinics or the nursing homes or the actual residential facilities. That means that we have to be proactive, and we also have to personalize our services, doing it constantly based on the person's expectations and needs. If we're talking about an ambitious healthcare project, we also have to factor in all of the components of our medical, social model. The doctors, the caregivers are not disconnected from all of this. We are not an island, and it is our duty to work on the occupancy rate. What does the occupancy rate reflect? It reflects the quality of care for our patients. It reflects the fluidity of the path.
You have to make sure that you have a personalized offer, and you also have to prepare the different types of the outings, the activities, quality management of the budget for our teams. As we if we come up with a segmentation of our offer, then we will be able to develop the most relevant and personalized offer that will meet the needs of each and every patient and resident. You've understood that our project of health and care and a good accompaniment is an ambitious one. It is one that we need to do all together, thanks to transverse across-the-board changes. We have to adapt locally to the national level. We have to recognize and identify the wonderful projects that are already being put into place by our teams. Thank you very much.
I'm now going to give the floor to Laurent, who's going to talk to you about the societal obligations of the group. Thank you very much, Pierre. We have already talked about the two things when we talk about societal obligations. We've got the human resources, and we've got the healthcare path as well. Let me just very briefly come back over three things that seem to me to be our short-term priorities. They are part of a CSR policy, but not all of it. These three things, however, have to be dealt with very quickly. First of all, given our recent past, ethics. Secondly, because buildings in Orpea is the most visible carbon footprint that we leave. Thirdly, the roots.
The way in which our company can root itself in the local community, which is so necessary if we want to be able to continue to carry out our activities locally. These are the three themes that I would like to take a closer look at today because they are so crucial to the company. The first topic, ethics, I have already talked about, so I'll be brief. We have already overhauled the board of directors. You have seen that. We've also renewed the executive committee. Pierre talked to us about local ethics, but we're also going to be having a national ethical team. For prevention, it's an.
A question of accelerating training sessions on anti-corruption, on ethical codes, and making sure that as far as medical ethics are concerned, everybody has to be trained in France and abroad. The last facet of this triptych, governance, prevention, and whistleblowing, is to enhance visibility and simplify access to the internal reporting whistleblowing platform, if you like. It's a platform that already exists. It functions. We have feedback, but it is not sufficiently well-known. We don't publicize it enough. The more we have alerts, the more capable we are to actually tackle those alerts and come up with an efficient solution. Of course, we've already begun the group campaign on the declaration of conflicts of interest.
Not only will we be doing a campaign on that, but we are also going to shoulder the responsibilities should there be all of a sudden a conflict of interest that crops up. Secondly, we have our green building strategy. As I told you, the most long-lasting footprints that we have are our buildings. Every day, we are going to be taking decisions that are going to have an impact on climate and on the territory for the next 20 or 30 years. It is now that we have to commit ourselves. We have to aim for certification on all of our buildings. There'd be two advantages here. It would decrease the use of energy, decrease our carbon output, but it also has an economic advantage.
2% of our turnover is given over to energy and electricity, so that is the fundamental challenge for us. It also has another aspect to it. It is going to increase the value of our buildings if we adopt a policy of green building. The third aspect that I would also like to pause on is our responsibility in our territories, how firmly we are rooted in our territories. We need stronger ties with our local communities. That is a prerequisite condition for us being accepted in our local regions and being accepted by our patients and residents. If we can strengthen the links with local communities, if we can get local people to work for us, if we can perhaps identify the elderly in our
reach out to the elderly in our region and also the elected representatives, that can but be to the advantage of all. We could come up with partnerships to make sure that we have a complete healthcare path, and that would be for our residents, for our patients. We could have open days in our facilities. We could make sure that these facilities are more accessible to the public so that they can come and see and visit. That would but improve our image, and it's a prerequisite condition for carrying out our activities and for improving our occupancy rate. The last element that I wanted to talk about concerning our societal engagement is that today, our transformation has been launched, officially launched.
Quite apart from this refoundation plan, we are also launching things on an in-house basis, and we are beginning to work on our own purpose, on our brand, our name, the in the plural. We have a lot of them. We want to work on follow-up indicators that correspond to our mission, to our purpose, so that in the long run, we can become a mission-driven company, as I announced back in July. The last pillar, which is yet again a fundamental one, is the pillar of profitability. A model that is transparent, of a very high performance. This too can be broken down into four things. First of all, real estate. We need to put real estate back at the service of operations and review our asset ownership policy. We have a lot of assets, real estate assets.
We also need to provide more effective support to our facilities. We need to share reliable, enhanced, and transparent external reporting. A reporting that is enriched, that is transparent, and we need to reshape our group's future scope of action. Géry Robert-Ambroix is now going to come and talk to us about our real estate assets. Gerry, please.
Thank you very much, Laurent. Let me just briefly introduce myself. I joined the company and the management team only in September of this year. I have 30 years of experience in real estate behind me, and in particular for 15 years, I was the general manager of 2 listed real estate companies, Mercialys and then Carmila, within the Carrefour Group. Held by the Carrefour Group.
The first cornerstone of Orpea's real estate policy, as Laurent told you, is to put real estate back in its right spot. It should be just a business line in our company, servicing operations. It's a strategic activity, of course. All of our core business is carried out in buildings. They are real, and we know that that is a key element for any operational excellence. Our staff works in these buildings, and our residents live in them. Putting real estate at its right place also means that we have to recognize that developing new clinics or retirement homes is a profession, and the group truly has a veritable know-how in that respect. I have been able to see that since I joined in September, and that's a very rare thing to find.
Lastly, let's not forget that this is a business that is going to participate in creating future value for the Group. Thus, we have to adapt our ownership policy to the facilities we have. The real estate assets that we would like to target would be 20%-25% of owned real estate in our portfolio, far from the 47% that we had at the end of 2021. On a short-term basis, we have already begun a sale and leaseback project, as our English-speaking friends say, to the amount of more than EUR 1 billion. These sale and leaseback operations will be financed as soon as market conditions permit it. On the medium term, Orpea would also like to create a real estate vehicle that would be dedicated to us.
We would be the principal shareholder and the principal operator. The whole idea would be to open the capital to long-term investors, and the vocation of this dedicated vehicle would be to finance the Orpea's developments. I'll come back to that in just a moment. To roll out this real estate strategy, the Group already has a quality portfolio. In the first eight countries in the Group, whose flags you can see on the right-hand side of your screen, 44% of assets may be considered as what we call trophy assets. By trophy assets, we are talking about assets that combine the quality of the real estate, its locality, but also a certain level of profitability for operations. 39% of the assets are considered as what we call tier two assets, where the situation is more an intermediate one.
For those two categories, tier one and tier two, these are still quality assets. This is what is going to allow us, on the one hand, to constitute the very basis of our sale and leaseback portfolio, but it will also allow us to actually make up the portfolio of the dedicated vehicle, which will have an initial portfolio that will be of a good, if not a top quality level. As I said earlier, Orpea truly has know-how when it comes to developing new facilities in France and abroad.
We must use that savoir-faire, take advantage of it, but be very selective when we are deciding exactly what operations we're going to invest in. What does it mean if we want to be selective? It means that we must focus on activities and markets where we have a leading position. The second criterion for future developments is to come up with operations that are financially sound, i.e. they must be profitable and they must be long-lasting. Long-lasting because we are signing long-term leases, and therefore we must be certain that there will be a two-digit EBITDA margin over the long term. This also means that you need a high single digit development profit margin as close to 10% as possible.
The next, the third selective criteria for future developments is to have a real estate offer that serves innovative approaches to care. For example, we have a perfect illustration in Holland, DL, where they have a very small facilities, 20-25 beds. They are very popular, and they satisfies the group's profitability criterion. What you also have to remember is that, Orpea's ambition is to have most of property development activities carried out in the future by the Orpea dedicated property company vehicle. This will be key to our equity story for our future long-term partners in this real estate endeavor. Thank you for your attention. I will now give the floor to Laurent Lemaire. Thank you. Hello, I am Laurent Lemaire, the Group Executive Vice President in charge of Finance, Purchasing, and IT.
I've been with major groups for over 30 years, mostly listed companies. To begin, I would like to talk about the changes we'll be making to allow our facilities to focus on care. First of all, this concerns high-performance IT. IT isn't working very well at Emeis. There's a lot to be done. We have committed to an action plan based on three main approaches. First of all, bringing our IT up to standard. There's a lot to be done. It's going to take several years to have top quality IT, thinking about governance, architecture, material choices, so hardware. This will be long-term, but at the same time, we have broken it down, and we have 14 priorities for 2022, 2023. These will be a return to basics just to make our position more solid.
A particular focus on the short term, and short term is important here, to ensure that our operational tools work as intended. Our teams are facing daily problems. In some cases, this leads to people actually quitting Orpea because of these IT problems. We have strongly committed to obtaining results in the coming three months. Lastly, it's more to do with the mindset, but it, our future success is based on this, and this is to refocus our IT on our users' needs. We have to identify and satisfy these needs. This is something we'd never done in the past, and this will have to be developed through dialogue, for example, user groups. The second. I was about to forget. You can see at the bottom that we have a very high budget for this transformation of our IT department.
EUR 370 million for the period from 2022 to 2025 to fully implement our plans for the IT overhaul. The second sector is efficient purchasing. Our top priority is ethical purchasing practices. As you know, often, if it's ethics, this improves efficiency, so we will do both at the same time. It will be particularly efficient for society. This was not the case before. We also provide our facilities with quality purchasing at the right price, and which will also be easy to implement using all the tools they need with portals, with quality assurance to really provide an operational framework which is sturdy and trustworthy. Thirdly, this concerns local procurement. This has already been mentioned by Laurent Guillot. We have to accelerate our policy in this field for more local presence in full respect of traceability and quality assurance issues.
Lastly, to strengthen the contribution of purchasing in Orpea's CSR policy. There's a lot of room for maneuver here as compared to what's being done currently. Over the duration of the plan, we believe this will represent EUR 30 million in savings. Simply by playing on the size of the group synergies and taking into account efficiency measures in purchasing. This should, so as I said, contribute to EUR 30 million in savings. Lastly, simplified finance and administrative management for our facilities. First of all, simplify processes and reporting, provide more automation, and then secondly, this is the idea we're currently working on, which is to pool some tasks within dedicated support teams at centralized level to relieve facilities of some of the tasks they have to currently carry out. Now, moving on to transparency. The goal here is to share reliable, enhanced, and transparent external reporting.
Four main work strands to carry this out. First of all, support data production. We absolutely need to progress in-house to obtain reliable and robust internal processes and information systems. Right now, this is not the case, but that's the foundation for everything in-house, but also in our outside communication. The second work strand is to gradually enrich reporting. Currently, Orpea's reporting is mostly based on financial aspects, and we believe that we should broaden this to take into account non-financial KPIs I've already mentioned before, occupancy rates, safety, quality, patient and resident satisfaction. We can also have medical indicators, so we'll be moving in that direction little by little. Three and four are based on the more fine-grained analysis of financial performance.
First of all, distinguishing between the performance of operational activities and real estate activities, because currently, when we publish our figures, it's very difficult to see what is due to what. Then 4, distinguish between the performance of mature activities and ramp-up facilities, which are much more recent. The group has had intense ramp-up activities, and this also makes understanding performance of the company a little bit more difficult. More robustness, more transparency, new indicators. To finish, to bolster our performance, we are currently analyzing the geographies where we are present, and we have retained 4 criteria for analysis. First of all, where we're in a leadership position in the private sector segment, where we're among the top 3. The second is our ability to manage the safety and quality of operations with notions of distance, management quality, asset quality, practices in some countries.
Thirdly, has to do with financially sustainable operations, generating double-digit EBITDA margin after rent to above 10%. The last, this has to do with the potential for profitable development in all of these countries, either organic growth or through M&A. This has led us to separate our assets into two main areas. First of all, core and value-creating markets. You have the countries here with their flags. In 2025, this should represent almost EUR 5.3 billion in revenue and EUR 371 million in EBITDA. EUR 697 million by 2025. We also have the structures which do not meet the criteria. We have Belgium and Italy, and then in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and then China.
These are activities which represent just below EUR 900 million in revenues by 2025, but they're currently showing losses. EBITDA in 2022 is -EUR 12 million, and despite a lot of efforts, by 2025, it will only represent EUR 48 million in EBITDA. We're working at individual levels to see if there's any way we can bring them back on track. If that's not possible, then we will probably adjust our parameters, and this may lead to divestments. That's it on efficiency, and I will now give the floor to Dr. Erik Hamann. As you will have guessed, I am CEO for Germany, and I will continue in French rather than in German. Orpea has been present in Germany since 2014. Germany is a country with 84 million inhabitants. The average age is much older than in France.
Here you can see on the slide in the middle that Germany has currently 840,000 beds in nursing homes, to be compared to 560,000 beds in France. In Germany as well, there's additional demand between 12,000 and 15,000 additional beds every year because of German demographics, which is negative for the country, but positive for us. Furthermore, there is the necessity of replacing beds because over 40% of the beds are over thirty years old. Huge needs of investment in Germany. This makes Germany very attractive. If you look at Orpea's presence in Germany, currently we have nearly 200 units in Germany, 154 nursing homes and 41 clinics. This includes outpatient clinics, SSR, as well as 2 mental health clinics. Germany is also a premium player. How do we measure this?
Well, first of all, there's the price. The current rate for is EUR 100 per day per bed. Between EUR 100 and EUR 110 for the market average. Also nearly one-fifth of our beds, 18% to be precise, are premium room capacity. I'll come back to this later. We're pursuing several avenues for development, not only in the assisted living segment, which is seeing strong growth in Germany. We have identified clear objectives for each pillar. We have applied, or we're going to apply the strategic plan after consultation with stakeholders in Germany. In Germany, everybody has to be involved in order to apply anything, so you imply to apply. We have improved recruitment and retention through strong initiatives. For example, we have set up a Orpea school for nursing. I'll come back to this.
With personalized options for rooms and activities. We also have done our best to have a positive social and economic impact. We source locally. We pursue green initiatives with green buildings. For insulation, lighting, building materials, and we do our utmost to be as close to the markets as possible. As close to the demands of our clientele as possible by, keeping costs down and by careful selection of our products. Our employees are very important in Germany for two reasons, because caregivers are a limiting factor in Germany. It's not the residents, it's not the patients that are a limiting factor, it's the caregivers. We don't have enough. There are nearly 11,000 FTEs, nearly 6,200 care staff, but 620 vacancies in care staff. That's a huge problem. We also have a 25% turnover rate.
It may seem a lot, and it is a lot, but it's less than market levels, market averages. It's also less than what we saw a few years ago. We've implemented many measures in human resources to recruit and retain staff because our retention rates is the cheapest way of having staff. We have opened a Orpea school near Strasbourg, on the other side of the Rhine River. We have an employer brand campaign that we've launched. We recruit nurses abroad. We've even went to the Balkans, to Serbia, and to Albania, where I carried out interviews at the very beginning. I'm not part of human resources, but just to understand, what these people were interested in, what they were looking for. Also we have promotion of long-term career paths with in-house promotions and especially a retention policy for leaders.
We set up an academy with continuous training. Everybody goes through this academy with a feedback loop where everybody is open, honest, positive when things are positive, negative when things are negative. We want people to be honest. We have a transparence, transparency, long-term career paths, and attractive salaries. Now let's talk about our products. First of all, our nursing homes. In Germany, we have to go beyond isolated nursing homes and assisted living. Currently, the demand is for a mixed model with nursing homes and assisted living. People want to feel safe in their homes. Residents ask us to make all the products that we have available within a single site. For example, in March, we will be opening the Dortmund site. This is a site with 80 rooms in nursing homes, 90 assisted living apartments for 1, 2 or 3 people.
We will have over 200 people who will be living on-site in Dortmund. This is to meet demand of the residents themselves. It's wonderful that our residents are happy. In addition, it also allows us to combine reimbursements from insurances that are often capped with non-fixed prices for rent and services. A second example is outpatient clinics. Outpatient rehabilitation services, it's usually 3 or 4 weeks. In Germany, this is what they, we call stationary, so it's almost a year long. What we've seen is that demand is shifting. Our patients now, lots of patients want to spend their nights at home, so we have to find outpatient solutions. In Germany, this is Salus Group. They have 40 units.
They offer the same quality of care as in-house rehabilitation services, but with the possibility for patients to go home at night, and this makes them happy. The third example is comfort and quality of life, so comfort premium. Rooms in nursing homes in general were okay, but nothing more. They were average. Currently, what many residents demand is much more than that. They want standards that are above normal for Germany. We have created. Well, 5 years ago, we set up these three different levels of service. We have basic comfort with a television, a bedside lamp, a small fridge. This, you pay between 8 and 10 EUR per day out of your own pocket. Then there's a level which is comfort, basic. Small built-in fridge, a quality bed, wall coverings, wardrobes.
This costs between EUR 10 and EUR 20 per day out of pocket. Then we have premium comfort. Often these are suites with high-end furniture and a full bathroom. This costs EUR 25 or up to EUR 35 per day. The margins on these products are very high. Currently, we have 18% of our rooms which are comfort, and we're going to be increasing that percentage from now to 2025 to reach 25%. Once again, it's a combination of the two which works well. Additional sales, additional beds, but also customers and residents who are happy. That's what matters. It's to have happy customers. Thank you for your attention, and I will now give the floor to Laurent Guillot.
Dr. Hamann.
Thank you very much, Dr. Hamann. Thank you very much, Eric, for that very clear presentation and for the way that we are going to improve and continue to improve our performance in Germany. It's one of our beautiful assets. I would now like to come back and talk to you about France. France is and will always be the group's flagship, but it's also because in France that the past dysfunctionings were the most serious, and we had to react extremely quickly. As you can see, Orpea in France is not just the retirement homes. We have home care. We also have clinics. We have rehabilitation clinics that are extremely useful for our fellow citizens and that are very profitable.
I'm not going to come back over all of the initiatives because France, of course, is just one facet of the initiatives that Fanny has already rolled out to you, and Pierre and Laurent and Géry. We are simply one part of this program. I would just like to talk about some things that I particularly care about as the managing director for France, and that is health and safety of our workers, the autonomy of our facilities managers, links with the family, quality of care, and also catering. Catering in France is somewhat atypical, specific to Europe. France and Italy are probably the only two countries where we have demands, and these demands are extremely high. First of all, safety.
For those of you who've known me for some time, you will know that that has always been one of the first things I look at when I join any company. The accident rate with sick leave in the past few years has been very high. One employee out of 12 in France every year has an accident that gives rise to sick leave, and that's unacceptable. It's a frequency rate that is twice as high as in public services. It's 10 times as high in the best public service establishments, and it's 100 times higher than in other private establishments. We have to change something, change our methods, invest in the safety of our staff. Physical safety, but also psychological safety.
These are difficult jobs that they have to do, and our staff are in extremely difficult conditions when they work. We have to look after our patients and our residents. I'm very happy to announce that in a few weeks' time, we're going to be having a director in charge of safety and security in France, but also in the group at large, who has more than 10 years experience on this subject, and who will be at the heart of the rolling out of this methodology, commitment, and new culture. Second priority is the autonomy for the directors of facilities to fulfill their care mission. You might remember that this came out of the report by the Health and Safety Committee.
If we want to be better, more adaptable and more proactive in meeting the demands of our residents and our families, then we have to give more autonomy to local teams. It's not from Puteaux that we're going to be managing 350 different facilities in France. This has been the case since July. Our local teams are able to recruit themselves, long-term and short-term contracts. They can carry out works without having to ask for authorization from their regional director. It will, of course, be very strictly managed. There will be a framework for it. This framework will be revised for 2023 and 2024, and there will be a framework that will also be a budgetary framework for each local team.
The third thing that is very important for us is to foster a very close relationship between our residents, patients, and families. The launch of a type of États généraux for our activities, the first one we had, was a great success. We had a lot of recommendations and suggestions that came out of that, and much of what we're doing today is inspired by the results of that big meeting. We're going to continue on a regular basis to take the pulse of our patients and our residents, thanks to these types of États généraux meetings and all of those working in our environment, our communities, and our stakeholders. We are also going to offer families, when they take part in these social committees, they're going to be able to take part in the social committees.
They will be able to discuss with the directors of local facilities. Sometimes they feel that they are very alone, that they are not supported, that there is no possibility to exchange. In the regions, we're going to be creating committee meetings where these residents, patients, and families can participate and therefore play a role as veritable partners. Fourthly, quality of care. Pierre covered this quite succinctly, but I'd just like to bring up two points that I find to be crucial. First of all, we need to have some type of department that is in charge of healthcare, the actual care. It existed on a local and a regional basis, but we didn't have anybody in charge of that on a national basis.
Heads of the facilities must not just be motivated by financial results, they must also be motivated by the quality of healthcare performance. This is what we are trying to do. You've seen already that I've accepted a drop in salary and in bonuses as well. All of this is part of the life of a company, and it is so very needed. The last point is catering. In France and also in Italy, catering is fundamental. It is part and parcel of healthcare. Feeding a patient is a technical action. It is part of the healthcare program, and it should be designed as such. You're not just feeding for healthcare reasons. The moments of meals should be moments of pleasure. They're very convivial moments.
Our catering should have more fresh products, more local products, more seasonal products. It's also very important because the quality of catering is going to depend on the quality of our chefs. We have to train, select, and manage the chef career paths. This, of course, goes hand in hand with an increase in the daily cost price of meals. We're ready to do that. That is one of the major elements to re-bolster Orpea's attractiveness. Important for our financial viability. Now, Laurent is now going to come back and talk to you a little bit about what exactly our new refoundation plan means in terms of the figures.
Thank you, Laurent. As Laurent has mentioned, I would now like to tell you a little bit about the financial side to the transformation plan, and I'll begin with the summary of the 2022-2025 operational figures. Now, these figures are based on a geographical perimeter as at 2022, so we haven't actually been able to factor in anything new. There are no M&A operations foreseen in this plan, and there will be no major real estate divestiture planned either. There are some smaller projects that will be done in 2022 and 2023, but no great operations that are going to change the group's financial position. Let's get down to the figures.
Revenue would go from EUR 4.7 billion in 2022 to EUR 6.1 billion in 2025, which would be an annual progression of 9%. The EBITDA, which is the operational results before rent, would increase from 800 million in 2022 to EUR 1.2 billion in 2025. That's an increase of 16%. The EBITDA rate would hike from 17% estimated in 2022 to more than 25% estimated in 2025.
The EBITDA minus all of the external rents that we pay to external landlords would increase it to EUR 750 million in 2025, which will be an increase from 7.6% to 12-point-something% in 2025. Concerning the number of facilities by the end of 2022, we will have some 1,053 facilities. We should be increasing that number by about 120 facilities between now and the end of the plan. That would be an increase of some 4%. For the number of beds today, we have about 90,000 beds, and we hope at the end of 2025 to have 96,800, which is an increase of some 3%.
Today, in countries such as the Netherlands, we are also building smaller facilities. On the right-hand side of your screens, you can see something that is very telling. 75% of the increase in the group's EBITDA margin rate comes from improvements in France. That is, the occupancy rates that have been recovered and a tighter cost management. Only 25% stems from the turnaround of international business. Laurent gave you some figures previously on countries that were on the right-hand side of the screen. Here you have an idea of the EBITDA over the same period, broken down into four blocks from EUR 797 million to EUR 1.2 billion. The first block that we have called the post-COVID block corresponds to the end of the subsidies that we were receiving.
We continued to receive subsidies in 2022, but that was the last financial year. As from 2023, i.e. the entire plan, that would be some EUR 60-70 million. You have block B, which is the pricing policy net of cost inflation. That's for about EUR 70 million. It's slightly positive because we're catching up for the 2022 inflation that will only be felt in 2023. We suffered from inflation in 2022, but a lot of our prices didn't change at all, which explains why we have a surplus of this price policy for some EUR 60-70 million. Block C concerns all of the strategic new strategic initiatives concerning the occupancy rate.
The last block from EUR 170 million to EUR 180 million corresponds to the ramping up of new facilities. The EBITDA then goes from 17% to 20.4% over that period. If we take a closer look at these different blocks, there are three components in the first block. The first has to do with the people themselves. As was already said, we've made a choice to invest in human resources. That was a deliberate choice on the part of the company. An investment always pays off. The economic growth is favorable. It was a good decision to make for the company. We talked about some of the key initiatives. There are others, of course, but we've managed to hire additional personnel. We've spent money on that.
We have internationalized a lot of our staff who were on short-term contracts. They now are on long-term contracts. Obviously, staff costs are going to increase, but this is something that is part now of the company's model. You have the second block that has to do with patients, residents, and families. We need to increase our occupancy rate. Before COVID, the average of occupancy rates was 92%. Today, we've dropped down to 82%, and France is even lower than that. We have a margin for maneuver that should allow us to increase this occupancy rate, and I see no reason why it doesn't do so.
Of course we have a lot of work that has to be done with our staff, but we also have to segment our offer, make sure that the offer it correlates with the price, and Laurent gave you some information on that. We have the personalization of the rooms, specialization of care, improvement of activities offered to residents. This is in line. These are things that should help us. The contribution will be some EUR 165-170 million over the period. We also have a part that is on the transparent high performance model. The impact on the EBITDA will be to the extent of some EUR 35-40 million. Most of it will be because of the improvement of the purchasing policy, especially on maintenance and indirect purchases.
Overall, the BPs impact on EBITDA 2022-2025 will be EUR 250 million-EUR 280 million. If we take a look now at CapEx. CapEx has been dropping sharply. That might be good or bad. It depends how you look at it. What you have to realize, first of all, is that it's the dark green part that is dropping the most drastically, and this corresponds to greenfields. These are all of the new buildings that we are building. We will build them ourselves, we will keep them, and we will operate them. All of this part is going to strongly decrease over the period. There will be a mechanical decrease because the plan will take several years.
This decrease has also been hastened by the deliberate choices of Laurent Guillot and management with the projects that we've rolled out because profitability wasn't enough. We have moved from EUR 584 million in 2022, and we hope to drop to EUR 8 million in 2025. The only thing that this graph actually tells you is that we're no longer going to mobilize our capital to finance this real estate. We will be using third-party capital, using the real estate company that we are setting up. Maybe we can find direct investment with certain investors in other countries. We're going to be divesting the company of this enormous amount of CapEx that was much too high.
However, if you look at the other items here, you can see that we have managed to maintain, sometimes even increase. Maintenance has increased between 2022 and 2023 to end up at EUR 150 million. IT, that we talked about, we have substantial amounts. We're going to need it to transform the company. Everything that has to do with renovation and extension, we've begun to correct things. We hope to correct things in 2023. We have a lot of catching up to do. The last two years were particularly low, so we're going to continue to strongly invest in renovation and extensions to maintain our buildings. Don't be misled by the drop in CapEx. It is simply because there has been a change in our strategy to use capital that is not our own capital.
Let's move now to another additional version of cash flow. On the first line, you've got the operating cash flow, and down the bottom, you have a footnote that says it's the same as EBITDA minus external rents, minus CapEx, minus maintenance, minus tax. I didn't put financial costs because that would just complicate things. The first thing is that even in a difficult year, in 2022, we've generated an operating cash flow of EUR 59 million. What we're doing is generating cash. This correlates to what I showed you with the EBITDA. In 2023, we hope to increase from EUR 59 million to EUR 132 million. The gap between 2025 and 2022 is + EUR 412 million. Most of this will be because of greenfield.
You can see we saw that before, that greenfields will have dropped over that period. You can see that in 2022, we were using EUR 646 million of our operating cash flow, whereas in 2025, we should drop that by about half. Which means that the gap will be some plus EUR 985 million. We're going to be decreasing CapEx, which means that the conclusion is that the operational viability of Orpea per se is not a problem. The company is viable, as these figures show. They show that we can get back to a configuration where the company automatically finances itself. Now, moving on to another aspect. Here, well, the situation is complicated for the reasons that Laurent mentioned.
We accumulated a lot of development in real estate. Most of this was funded by debts, reaching debt amounts of EUR 10 billion. We often get a question in exchanges of this type, and Laurent's also had it many times, is: "So you set up a plan in May and June, but now you're saying that actually you can't execute that plan. So we're just four months down the road. Why the sudden change?" Well, we've summed up the reasons here on why we've made these changes. First of all, and the first is extremely important, the plan we came up with in May and June was based on massive divestment of real estate. We had made firm commitment to sell real estate of at least EUR 2 billion, so EUR 1 billion in 2023.
We also had an internal plan which went beyond that. We had announced EUR 3 billion for 2022-2025, including EUR 700 million in the first quarter of 2023. That was the corner plan of that, the cornerstone of that plan. In the second quarter, we had advanced discussions. We hadn't yet started divesting after the summer, but then before we had signed an agreement with the banks, we had advanced discussions with. Of what we started talking about intermediate-sized operations and then very significantly sized operations where we're all around the table, we exchanged documents, we shared portfolios. The company was very active, starting in the second quarter to carry out these divestments. Then, the third point here, the context changed considerably.
One that had nothing to do with Orpea, and that's the real estate market, which was strongly impacted between May and today by the fact that interest rates have increased 300 basis points. Just imagine the systemic shock triggered by that. The real estate market, independently of Orpea, has significantly decreased the number of transactions. Then there's the perception of Orpea, which has also changed. An assessment of its financial situation, making it very difficult for us to divest, and that's very important to understand. We are not going to sell real estate to investors who then use it with others. These aren't shops in shopping malls. These are leased back to us. These are 10-15-year investments. Return on investment with a horizon of 10-15 years.
When people look at our financial situation now, since the fact that we announced less than planned financial returns. People are seeing the rate of return and the fragility of our covenants, that perception has deteriorated. This backdrop with the real estate market and then the assessment of Orpea means that we cannot set up these divestments. We did carry out one operation, EUR 125 million in the Netherlands in very good conditions, but since then, we have not been able to carry out any other operations. Since October, we've seen that our discussions are becoming much more difficult. People have pulled out. Things have become much more difficult. We could perhaps complete some intermediate-sized divestments. We have some in our plan, but no perspectives for a large deal in our portfolio in the foreseeable future.
The fact that we cannot divest real estate has had a huge impact on our plan. Real estate was the cornerstone. There are other operations which was returning to financial markets. All of this cannot be implemented because the financial solidity of the company is not there. This is why we have had to overhaul our plan, and this is why Laurent Guillot decided to open up a conciliation procedure, because the plan, which was fully viable at the time, was based on a real estate market. Everybody was saying these assets are very valuable, but that's impossible to monetize today, and it would have been irresponsible to continue along those lines. Now, where do we stand? First of all, we need new money. This is indispensable.
Because we cannot dispose of real estate, liquidity will come under pressure starting in February. Secondly, as we've mentioned, we have little visibility over R1 and R2 ratios. We've talked about variability of our EBITDA because of inflationary policies, occupancy rates, which are impacted by the crisis, and also there's the depreciation in our real estate. Our R2 ratio takes into account this depreciation. The solution would be to adjust R1 and R2 ratios for the debt and all covenants. Then there is the financial structure as per se. If you look at our net debt ratio, we're at about 25. I don't know if this is meaningful for all of you, but it's extremely high. Something reasonable for our activities would be about 5-6. We're very far off.
Our financial structure is imbalanced. This has led to a loss in credibility, making it impossible for us to dispose of the real estate. Based on existing debt structures, we cannot service this debt. That's why we have to implement an action plan, which is to reduce the financial leverage. We need new money. We also have an adjustment in our covenants, and we need to significantly reduce our financial leverage. We have a conciliation process on the 25th of October to talk with our financial partners and to obtain new resources, new funding within a judicially secure framework. Another thing that you have to keep in mind is that we commit to complete overhaul, but we don't yet know what the effects of that are going to be.
To be able to carry it out, we need the financial restructuring, but we don't yet know what all the financial impacts are going to be of this restructuring. There's a lot of uncertainty, but I won't enter details. I just wanted to make that clear from the outset. Now what solutions can be proposed? First of all, to reduce our excessive financial leverage, this would be to an equity conversion of ORPEA S.A.'s unsecured debt. The conciliation concerns ORPEA S.A., which is the head company. There's no conciliation for the rest of the group's activities. Even though it is a conciliation procedure, this has nothing to do with our employees or our suppliers. Everything is business as usual and can continue. This only concerns ORPEA S.A. The second lever, so our need for cash inflow.
We need secured liquidity until our financial strength has been restored, so we need new secured debt. This is to meet our need for liquidity. We need new debt and equity resources. In the proposed project, there will be EUR 800 million in new secured debt, made up of EUR 200 million by the A4 tranche put into place in June 2022, with the agreement we signed in May, June 2022, with a MoU on a real estate disposal. We're having difficulty doing that, so we're currently talking with our partners in G6 on this. Also new debt of EUR 600 million real estate-backed loans to be drawn down in February 2023. That's everything to do with the EUR 600 million in new debt.
We also have a we're planning an increase in capital between EUR 1.3 billion and EUR 1.5 billion. Those two operations would increase our liquidity to have acceptable financial strength and would allow us to significantly improve our company. There's a part that has to do with implementing the agreement in June 2022 with some amendments. This is mostly lengthening maturity. We've mentioned June 2028. Then a return of a lower interest rate. 1.75 basis points has been mentioned, do away with all the anticipated reimbursement clauses. This is currently being discussed with our partner banks. This has not yet come to fruition. One last point here, this has to do with various amendments.
I won't go into detail, but the main one has to do with the R1 and R2 covenants on all debts. This isn't only in ORPEA S.A., so we'll have to make adjustments, and it won't just be ORPEA S.A.'s debts, but also all subsidiaries. That's it for me on financial aspects. Now on the timeline, as you will have understood, things are moving very fast on debt. In December, we should have firm offers, and then we'll have the drawing rights in February. We'll have the first firm indications in December, and then for the implementation and our capacity to obtain cash will depend on the plan itself being implemented in its entirety. This will probably be at the end of June for the implementation of the whole plan. Influx of new capital would depend on that. Thank you.
Merci. Thank you, Laurent. Thank you for your presentation, which was very complete on our current situation and how to get back on track. As you've seen, Orpea is changing, has already changed with you and for you. The re-foundation of Orpea is due to our employees, to our caregivers, to our residents, to our patients, and also to our investors, to the community that we operate within. You've seen with our new executive committee, which is almost fully present here today, and with assistance of our renewed board of directors, we are going to become a reference player in this sector. It's going to be a difficult journey. There's going to be a lot of hard work. Employees are already used to this. We will continue in the same vein in implementing immediate actions which are already underway to correct past practices.
We will be applying immediately in France and abroad the plan that we've presented today, that has been co-created with our colleagues and which has already begun its application. Very quickly, we will be affirming our company purpose and embodying our values. This is the work which we have underway for the coming months. Also, as you've seen with Laurent and all of our financial partners, we will be working to restore our financial solidity, which is sorely needed. We are confident that we will succeed in the refoundation of our company. We have very little time to do so, but you can count on all of our energy and all of our capacity of the management team, but also of all of the 72,000 professionals who make up the workforce of our group. All of the steps that we've presented today are indispensable. Orpea is changing.
Orpea has changed, but there's something that will never change. Something that ever since I've been with this company, I have found extremely striking. This is the commitment, the unbelievable commitment of these 72,000 employees. They went through COVID. They went through a cyberattack. The last 12 months, where they've been under constant attack linked to malfeasance by the previous management. Every day, they are by the side of our patients and our residents. Every day, these 72,000 professionals have to make us proud of our profession, and this pride makes it necessary for us to succeed and to move forward without any hesitation. I want you to be aware that you can count on all of these 72,000 collaborators and workers and on the new Orpea team, and you can count on me. Thank you for your attention.
We're going to slightly change the setup, and then we'll be with you in just a minute for questions. Several questions. Hello, I'm with Ella Nevare. I have two questions, in fact. The first concerns the capitalization of the debt that is part of the plan. We understand that it will also be equitization. Converting into equity all of the debts, or at least the secured debt. You've also said that the R1 and R2 ratios would be part of this action plan. The debt that's said to be reassured or secured, and what's an R2? The R1 and R2 ratios, would that remain on the books? Then the new loan, EUR 600 million, which would be guaranteed. Could we have some more details on this?
What are the conditions for this loan, and what would be the guarantees for the lenders? Yes, of course. Two very technical questions. The secure debt of ORPEA S.A., it's important to make this distinction. Our proposal is to have it to be completely capitalized. There would be outstanding debt, but it wouldn't be ORPEA S.A. It would be in the subsidiaries, which are much smaller.
Those would not be effective, and we would have to create amendments and readjust the R1 and R2 ratios. As for new debt, we want it to be secured by real estate assets. Hello, I'm from CIFR. Thank you for your presentation. I have three questions, if I may. First of all, for Laurent Lemaire, and this is on the presentation on the objectives. So you've talked about EBITDA between 2022 and 2025 and the changes. Could you detail the six percentage points that are lost between 2019 before COVID and your goals for 2025? And then the second question concerns the funding plan. You're talking about EUR 2.5 billion between 2022 and 2025. Could you tell us what the amounts that will be invested in JVs, in joint ventures?
I'm sure some of these will be real estate operations and not just providing assets to finance growth. Then the last point, this is as Mediapart published an article about the courts in Nanterre that is launching an investigation for abuse, and several families have pressed charges. I'll take the last question first, and then I'll let Laurent answer the other two. Concerning the searches this morning, I think that I was very clear this morning when I told you the state in which the company was when I joined it on the first of July. The type of management in the past was such that today we are absolutely cooperating 100% with justice, with the forces of justice.
Now you also said that the margin was slightly higher than 19% in 2019. We will be finding a margin a little higher than 20%, so that's a 600 basis points difference. If you analyze these basis points, 400 come from France and 500 come from the division of international activities that actually accelerated quicker than the average of the rest of the group with profitability rates that are lower than the group average. You have these two figures. About two-thirds come from France. In France, you also have 300 basis points due to different parameters. We've invested a lot in personnel, whereas in 2019, the company had different priorities. This accounts for 300 basis points. That's the performance side of the company.
You have 100 BPs which arises out of Covid-related business, the Ségur, for example, that increased the revenues, and you didn't have the same in the EBITDA. You also talked about JVs. We're not going to be putting any money in there. What we put in the JVs are the assets. It's the other way around. It is people who are going to pay. We're going to be opening a capital. We're going to remain the reference shareholder there, but we are not going to be investing in the JVs. The company's ambition is, insofar as we can, to use all of our future assets in order to develop things and put it in our new vehicle.
That will be based on the financial partners who have joined us and become shareholders. When you want to sell off real estate today, it's very complicated. You can't just do it batch by batch. The new projects actually become. It's a type of industrialization of the refinancing of our real estate that up until today was done one by one. We have single agreements with the owners, the lenders, and so forth. It's much too complicated. Patrick Dussaut, Société Générale. I also have three financial questions. What level of net financial debt are you expecting at the end of 2025?
What are your assumptions for asset disposal and for developments in real estate ownership, whether you do it per divestment or at putting them into the new ad hoc vehicle? Secondly, the EBITDA margin of some 20% that you're expecting by 2025, is that in line with the depreciation of EUR 800 million-EUR 1 billion in real estate that you presented just a few weeks ago? Thirdly, concerning the financial restructuring, the share reference price, will it be the same for the debt conversion and for the capital increase, or are you envisaging having subscription rights with very low rates as we saw on previous operations? Will there be any preferential subscription rights?
Let me try to answer the question on the EBITDA margin. The asset depreciation that we are going to do and that won't be completely realized, this is an estimate that we did because the realization itself will be at the closing end of December. We have estimated that based on the business plans that we received in October and which we used as the basis for the plan that we presented to you today. It was when drawing up this plan that we noticed this discrepancy in the asset valuation. Coming back to something I said earlier, it was the very first time in the company that the company was doing a business plan asset by asset bottom up. Normally, it was done in a centralized fashion. It was a centralized financial team that did the business plan.
It's always better to have information coming up from the grassroots, but it's a completely atypical situation. Laurent, you want to tackle the other questions? Well, on the financial debt, already in the plan that we have presented today, as I said at the beginning in the figures I gave you, there is hardly any real estate divestment. There are some that we had in 2022, 2023, but the sum of it is EUR 250 million, EUR 125 million from July, from the Netherlands. There is nothing else in the figures, and we have not considered in these figures opening up the real estate business. We think we'll have a debt situation around EUR 9 billion, an estimation in 2025, some EUR 5 billion, a little bit down.
If you combine what I've just said with the 2025 EBITDA, do you remember I talked about our very high leverage? It would be 6x at the end of 2025. We would be coming back into an acceptable range given the activities that we do. All of this can only be done if there are the capital increases that we mentioned on the capitalization of the unsecured ORPEA S.A. debt. Otherwise, if you don't do those operations, then your leverage actually will increase by some 14x. We are still in a financial situation that is impossible at the moment.
If we don't do these operations, we will never actually gain back the market's trust, and that's why we've taken this decision, and we consider that it is the right decision for the company today. Coming back now to the capital increases, what was your question? You were asking whether there were going to be any preferential drawing rights? Preferential shares? Yes, there will be a first capital increase with preferential rights for existing shareholders. It will be backstopped by the unsecured ORPEA S.A. debt, so people can follow that operation, and there will be no dilution in investing in the company in that first capital increase operation. There's two parts.
First of all, it will be for existing shareholders, and then there will be a second part on new money that will be a second capital increase that will correspond to the EUR 1.3 billion-EUR 1.5 billion. That would be for that share offering. It'll be done in two different parts. Will it be done at the same valuation price, those two? Well, we haven't actually made any decision on that. It's going to be the result of a discussion that we have over the next few weeks and months. We are discussing with interested parties. We are going to be discussing with independent experts as well and put all of that together, then we will come up with a valuation. On the special drawing rights? Oh.
No, we didn't mention that. Good afternoon. I have several questions I would like to ask. On the occupancy rate, when you look at, you have all of your facilities are 3%, so the occupancy rate is 9%. How do you correlate those two figures? The second question, maybe for Madame Barbier, during your presentation, you said that you were out of the market when it came to the salaries for the care staff. Can you tell us to what extent are you out of the market? You talked about efficiency, the need for efficiency, which would have a positive impact on EBITDA, so I don't quite see how you can be out of the market for salaries and still be efficient.
Thirdly, for the turnover, the part of the turnover that is going to be ramped up, can you tell us a little bit about the number of facilities you have today? What is the linear aspect? What will be the impact of your greenfield buildings? In one of your slides, Laurent, I think you told us about the long-term contribution of this plan. Is the contribution of your facilities actually going to decrease the impact on the EBITDA over the long term? Well, let me get back to the first. I'll answer the first and the last question, and I'll leave the other to Fanny and Laurent. For the occupancy rate, the plan that we are presenting today presupposes that we get back to an occupancy rate that we had in 2019.
We want to recover that rate. It would go from about 85% today to about 95% by the end of the plan. That essentially is what is going to drive the increased turnover, including an increase in rates and in prices, because we're in an inflationary period for everything, for food, for electricity. Part of those costs, of course, will have to be borne by our clients. The 85%, is that the whole that you told us about is for the group? No, it's only for France. In the group, what figure do you have? Because the 95% occupancy rate, well, the group has 82%. Actually, Laurent's just talking about the French retirement homes, the French EHPADs. The other thing are the ramp-ups.
Over the last few years, a lot of facilities were opened, and that, of course, has dragged our EBITDA margin downwards. If we try to forecast for the future, this ramp-up period is going to last some 2-2.5 years. That is still going to have a heavy impact on us over that time. Even if there are fewer projects, even if we're just going to be ramping up certain facilities, we're not gonna be building new ones. There might be some, but much less. The impact will be negative. What Laurent said earlier is that these are elements that we're going to communicate progressively as we little by little, as we get a cost accounting that actually functions properly. The minute we have it, we will communicate it.
We will be as transparent as possible. What is the as-is impact? What is the impact of the park of facilities that is going to be developed? Now, you talked about the 9% annual growth. What is your assumption? Our assumption is a 3% increase in prices. Knowing that, given inflation, it's probably going to be a little higher at the beginning of the plan. We should recover in 2023. Because we have a certain amount of 2022 that has not yet been covered, but then in 2023, we should reach cruising speed. A question, there was a question on salaries. In the group, there is a lot of heterogeneity internationally.
Germany or Belgium are very much in line with their market, but I was referring to France in particular. For salaries, you have the basic salary, and then you have what we call the add-ons to the salary. You have the payments in kind, you have the restaurant coupons, you have mutual insurance companies. We normally are 10% under the market average in France, and that market average is what is offered by the public hospitals and by private hospitals. You know that the public hospitals are trying to outbid each other. It's very difficult to find somebody to accept a job with a basic salary. We think that we are probably some 10% under the basic salary, payment in kind included.
There was also a question as to how can you say that there is going to be a ramp-up of human resources, and then I talk about, again, savings. Well, we are going to be making savings in the past because we don't pay enough, we can't recruit, and therefore beds are shut down. Because we don't pay well enough, we don't have any long-term contracts. We have short-term contracts, and they cost much more, and we are always finding ourselves with people who are coming in, newcomers, and then leaving again. We have tried to decide with Fanny to invest to avoid that situation. We've come up with certain assumptions. We think that we can do something intelligent. We're not going to be able to increase everybody's salary by 10%.
That, that's not the point. Overall, we are going to be investing in training, we're going to have more long-term contracts for our staff, and we should have operational savings, so that we will end up with a positive balance, which is the one I mentioned. It's a virtuous model because we'll find ourselves with employees who are happier, who will work better, our facilities will be more attractive. All in all, it will be a positive outcome. Maybe we can also add so that the wage packet is a little bit less than 60% of our expenses, with a precarity rate of some 20% in the entire group. That means that 20% of the employees are in a precarious situation. As Laurent said, this is costly.
Short-term contracts cost about 10% more than a long-term contract. We're spending more money on people who are going to be leaving the company than on those who are staying within the company. We have some questions on internet. Yes, again, on human resources, do you think that you are going to be able to carry out the 800 recruitments that you're aiming for in 2023? Does it mean that there will be more people to care for the patients? Do you have any figures on the medium- and long-term turnover rate of employees? Let me tackle the simple part of that question. Since September, we have already recruited 800 people per month. My ambition at the time was not that ambitious after all.
This is a Herculean task that the teams have done, and we've been able to recruit some 800 people per month. We're going to continue to drive that in 2023. What is also important is that progressively, we are transforming these recruitments into long-term contract recruitments, people who stay. As Fanny said, our turnover is some 25% at the moment, but we would like to see exactly how things are going to pan out in the next few months before trying to come up with any concrete objective for the company as far as turnover is concerned.
On recruitments, we're quite confident. If we look at the recruitments in 2021, on average, there were 350 open-ended contracts per month. That's what's in the data. The 800 recruitments per month can be explained by the fact that we have dedicated resources because recruitment takes time. It takes specific expertise to reach out to candidates to finalize their recruitment. So it takes resources and also the ability to mobilize and to meet market expectations. When somebody answers a job offer, as a company, we have to answer them within a week and not wait for three weeks like we used to do because it's a very active market. We're confident because we can see that the national campaigns, which have been quite aggressive, are working. Orpea has assets in the public eye in our ability to invest in our employees.
Also, we can see that systems of sponsorships where employers recommend candidates, and this is something that works very well. We're quite confident that we'll even be able to go beyond those figures per month. Then to stabilize with the turnover. There's the average turnover in a people intensive service company, which is a turnover about 10%. From 25% to 10%, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Are you going to be paying on the twenty-fifth of November, your long-term bond coupons? I think that question's for me. We haven't said anything to the contrary.
Bank Europe SA. My question is, we noted that you intend to convert from debt to equity for those unsecured debts. Question is, have you considered other options rather than something that would have this more harsh impact on our unsecured debts? Thank you.
I'll be answering in French. We have looked for other options, but this is the one that we chose because it seems to be the most efficient in rebalancing our financial structure for a lasting financial situation, given the imbalances that I showed formerly with our 25x leverage ratio. We worked a lot with our board, our board members who are here, and this seems to be the best adapted to our company's situation today.
Sure. We considered all possible options, including, disposals from, real estate assets or from operational assets. The only consequences of these operations would have been to increase the difficulty for the company and to make the situation on the unsecured debt even worse after than before. That's the situation that we are facing as a company for the consequences that we propose this transaction.
Mathematically speaking, I think what Laurent is very important. If you dispose of operational assets, even at 12x EBITDA, or you dispose of real estate assets at 5% cap rate levels, the leveraging effects that I mentioned actually deteriorate. The more operational assets and the more real estate you sell, actually, the higher the ratio goes. We thought that might be a good solution at the very beginning, but then once we did the math, we realized that that would not have evened out our situation. The only situation is the one that we mentioned, the only solution. I have a question on the financial leverage. You talked about a level of 5.5x or 6x for real estate. I would like to know how you calculated that level. Why do you consider it reasonable? I can't remember.
Comfortable, I can't remember what term you used for, your sector. Yes. We looked at the situation of comparable companies, our capacity to service the debt, to reimburse our debts. We looked at the levels of sustainability. We did carry out that study, and our reasoning, we separated the company into areas for the different ratios, depending on what's true in the market. We averaged the two for those two activities, which have very different financial logics. That led to this type of situation. That's pretty much what our competition do as well.
Thank you. My name is Rafik Shafik from Agricultural Bank of China. My question is, following the last question regarding the unsecured debt. You mentioned that you assessed several options, and you came to the conclusion that the best option is to transform the debt into securities. If I look to the presentation where you mentioned that you had a Q2 plan to dispose the real estate, however, it did not work well due to macroeconomy environment and interest rate changes. I believe everyone knew in Q2 what is the macroeconomy environment and the interest rate situation. However, you still took such a decision. How can we know that the decision now is the right one if the one you took in Q2 did not work one month later? Thank you.
Yeah. Two ways to answer to your question. If in May, June, you were anticipating, right, the rate increase that you have now and that we experienced in September, October, well, I'm happy for you. You may probably be a very rich guy now, which is great, but that was not the mainstream at that time. We were anticipating some rate increase, but not to the extent that we experienced afterwards. What it created to the market is a kind of freeze on, from the part of our counterparts that were uncertain about the future evolution of the interest rate and asking more and more questions about, "Okay, should we go?
Should we not go?" On top of that, this is not the only reason, because on top of that, what happened is that, we announced a deterioration of our financial performance in September. Seen from our counterparts in terms of the guys that would like to buy our assets, this is creating an additional risk and even more pressure on them not to do a transaction with us. We saw during the months of September a little bit, but even more during the months of October, we were in discussions, and Gérý can testify on that. We were in discussions with some partners, and they were progressively, one by one, withdrawing from the discussion that we had. Remember, it's not for EUR 100 million transaction that we are aiming for.
It's for EUR 600-700 million that we need in the first quarter of 2023. We were needing in the first quarter of 2023. That's when we realized that we changed our mind because we were really focused on delivering on our plan that the company signed before I arrived in May and June last time, last May and June. My answer was clear. You have a follow-up question, or is it clear?
Yes. Your answer is definitely clear. However, at the end of the day, we are not sure if this is the right direction, because we are talking about a discussion now on an amicable basis with the unsecured lenders. However, we see that you already took the decision. We saw in the presentation that you removed the unsecured debt from your balance sheet. From my perspective, I see that decision has already been taken by your good company, without giving a chance to the lenders to express their view, to have open discussions about how to ensure the best outcome for both sides. We want Orpea to remain there. We want as well the lenders to still be active and support your company, support other companies.
If every company will go in such difficulties and just decide to transform debt into securities, it will be difficult for you in the future to raise capital.
Sure. I'm very conscious of that, and we had lengthy discussion in the management team with Laurent, with our advisors, and we had lengthy discussion with our board. This is not with a light heart that I have taken this decision. At the same time, you know, I'm responsible. I had to take the decision knowing what I knew at that time. I knew that the company is and was at risk at that period of time, and that this was the only way to continue to move ahead and is his decision.
I'm deeply convinced, and we've tested that with the market participant, that we are not anymore in a position to make disposals or at distressed price, unreasonable price for everybody, and not in a timeframe that is needed to comply with our commitments concerning the debt. Hence, the only solution that was left to us was this decision. I do not took this decision in a light manner, you can imagine.
Hello. Hello, this is Bank of Communications. We are a bank from China. I have one question. How much likelihood do you think we will successfully transfer or convert the lenders from senior unsecured loans into equity? If this deal cannot be reached, what's the next step or measures will you take? Thank you.
I'm always very confident. I think this is a transaction that is needed for the company, and that is in the best interest of the lenders to transfer the debt into equity. If it were not the case, that can happen, but I think it is unlikely, then we have other mechanism in the French law that can somehow force this to happen. Oui, s'il vous plaît.
I'm gonna do this in English. I think one point that has been quite disturbing for lenders in this meeting is that the level of leverage at the beginning of the year and the level of leverage today didn't dramatically change. Meaning that you mentioned that today you're above 10 times the EBITDA, and at the beginning of the year, the level of leverage was roughly the same. And yet, at the beginning of the year, there was a first conciliation without all the lenders being present to it, which led to an elevation of certain creditors that became secured. And now, with this second conciliation, we understand there is a dramatic change of strategy in order to reshape the company, and you explained at length why.
The question is regarding what can you say to creditors that were not involved in the first conciliation that are here now, and that you're saying that the sole solution is to convert into equity? I think that Sam maybe will take this one.
Two points. First, I think Laurent had a full slide devoted on it and spent some time in explaining line after line what's changed and why we had these two periods. Second, there is a forum dedicated to that this afternoon on all these questions. I think you keep your question for this afternoon, and we let the other people discuss not only on debt matters, but on financing restructuring matters, but also on other topics that we have. Do we have questions on the internet still or is it, are we done with there?
Oui.
Oh, sorry.
Oui.
Finalement, l'enquête faite.
Finally, the investigation done by journalists has been your saving grace. Well, in a certain way, yes, I would have to say yes. There are two things that are different in our books. What the books don't entirely show is.
That is the remarkable commitment of our employees. A lot of our employees were profoundly moved by elements in the book that actually they had seen every now and then, but had not been a routine part of their lives. Some of the employees did not recognize themselves in the book. Everything concerning financial embezzlement that came out in the book, a lot of that was they felt was something that they had encountered, and it was very just. We haven't talked a lot about regulations here. In France, there are bound to be changes in regulations, changes in rates in April. Could you give us an idea as to what the practices will be, what the staff ratios will be?
What are going to be the changes in regulations now that the book and the fallout from the book will have had such an impact? Secondly, what about the analysis of price in the market? You talked about an increase in prices of 3%. We know that there is inflation today. There's the problem of purchasing power. The actual profession is highly unpopular. I've understood that there are going to be competitive prices, and there is excess capacity in the south of France and in the Paris region. I have questions for Laurent Lemaire as well. If we divest of EUR 1 billion over the period, what impact will that have on the 1.4% EBITDA rate that you have put here for 2025?
Isn't that going to have an impact on your EBITDA in 2025? Well, on the first question, regulations, I think that that's a question that you should really be asking the minister concerned or the trade unions. What is quite clear is when I see what is happening on a European level, yes, I do have some ideas, maybe some suggestions. When I discuss with Eric, it's quite clear that in Germany and in Austria, there is much more control over all of this than in France. We don't have any difficulty in France.
You know, there are 162 facilities in France were audited in the first half of the year, and the result was that only 1 of them was temporarily shut down, and we solved that problem, and it has already opened up again, which just goes to show that the actual investigations in the Orpea facilities go very well and are productive. That's good news for us all. That's an objective view of what I was saying about the quality of care and the commitment of our staff. We don't try to avoid these investigations. We know how to work in environments where there are investigations and would be quite ready to continue to work even if there are more investigations. Now, concerning the prices, the rates, I understand your question.
When I joined Orpea, I saw that there was a flagrant lack of any marketing policy in France. What Eric had developed in Germany is simply not reiterated in France. We don't have a proper marketing department that is powerful, that can think about any segmentation strategy, and that can segment within a town the different types of facilities and segment within the facilities to have certain categories of care. When I'm talking about controls or investigations, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any, but we should be aware of what discounts are being done, and today the company is not even aware of that. I think that if we have better controls, we will have better prices.
If you ask those who were there before in this sector, are there any possibilities of upselling? They say, "No, no, it's impossible. The residents don't want it, the patients don't want it, the employees don't want it." In actual fact, that's not the case. We had problems with our teams in the past. Five years ago, we said we have to do upselling. It's necessary to keep in line with market prices and market demand. Actually, it's somewhat arrogant not to offer something if it is something that people want. If people who think they know what the residents want or what the patients want are deluding themselves. The whole idea is to try to find products. Nobody is forced to buy them. There is no difference in the quality of healthcare. That will remain the same everywhere.
It's not a question of higher quality of healthcare. This issue of upselling, well, I always compare it to first and second class on a train. You know, the train still arrives at the same time and still goes from A to B, but you have a first class with leather seats, and in the second class.
You don't have as much room for your legs. There is always a possibility to upsell no matter what sector you're working in. I think that we are going to talk even more in the future than we have in the past to try to ramp up these products and make them more available everywhere. Thank you, Erik. Was there a question around EBITDA and then the disposal of EUR 1 billion? I'm not gonna do the math in front of you. You've already done it. EBITDA as such is not a performance indicator for our company. EBITDAR, yes, that's operational capacity, but EBITDA is just a result. Whether we hold real estate or not, everything changes. It's a policy decision. It's a financial policy decision and not an operational one.
If you consider EUR 1 billion at 5%, that's EUR 5 million difference. If I sell, then the EBITDA will go down. We're taking it the other way around, and that lowers the debt. What we've started doing internally, and we're working with Géry every day, the decisions won't have any impact on the operations. We're simply thinking about being able to bill for virtual rents. The OpCo operating costs will remain the same. That won't change. It's just a question of the PropCo. Here we will have trade-offs. The last thing I wanted to highlight is that in current market conditions, we're actually quite neutral in our net results. If there's an arbitrage right now at the borrowing rate, about 5%. We're at about the same level. The net results of the company are quite neutral.
This isn't currently a situation where we have much more servicing debts than what it is we're losing. That's how I would answer that. We think in terms of OpCo and PropCo. One last question. I have a question here. I have three questions. First of all, how long will it take to finalize all of your negotiations with the lenders and then to reinforce your balance sheet? The same question for strategic exits from countries which are not profitable. Then the last question is, could you say more about collateral divestments, so percentages? I'll take the first two, and maybe, Laurent, you could answer the last one. The time of the procedure, it's between six and nine months. We hope to wind it up around next June.
As for the assets, operational assets, Laurent's presentation was very clear, I believe, on this topic. We haven't made the decision yet, whether we're going to restructure or dispose of these assets. There are some assets which we will be disposing of. We'll try to do it as quickly as possible. On the other hand, a reorganization or restructuring is necessary. We will implement that. If we have the conviction that the same activities can meet the four criteria Laurent mentioned, then we will keep them in our portfolio. We're working on the question currently for divesting marginal assets and also restructuring other assets, and we will be communicating around these results as we go. As for the last question, I'm not quite sure I understood. The collateral level? No, go ahead. What do you
Remains in assets that are not collateralized. In real estate, we still have a lot of available room, several EUR billion, which are not collateralized. In the first phase of our plan, May, June, we didn't collateralize any real estate assets. It was only shares. Clinea in France and the German part of our business. It's the real estate assets that we want to collateralize for the new EUR 600 million in debt. Okay. We have two hands which were raised at the same time, and we'll have the second one, but this will be the very last question. Yes. Thank you. Negotiations with public authorities, you mentioned. Where do you stand now, in paying your fine? And what I can't understand is whether you're more profitable or less profitable in France as compared to the rest of the average.
Profitability is higher in France than the group average. Sorry, the occupancy rate is higher in France than elsewhere, but as for the occupancy rate, I believe we put France, Belgium, and the UK all together. France was particularly profitable in the past, if you take 2019, for example. I was talking about the 600 basis points. France represented 400 basis points. France has lost a lot of its profitability between 2019 and the end of 2022 because of the crisis and because of the drop in the occupancy rate in our nursing homes, and also because of hiring new staff. We are strongly impacted by inflation. France had very low energy costs, but now these are going up significantly, and we have not increased our rates. Currently, France is much less profitable.
There was a question. I'm answering it, yeah. Before it was 26% of EBITDA in 2019, and we'll probably be at 20% now. We do have a very ambitious plan for training. This is extremely important to come back to a normal situation in our facilities. As for discussions with state authorities, we are currently still in discussions. Very good. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Just one word to conclude, since you are leaving with 4 or 5 words, I want you to take away with you. First of all, Orpea is changing. Orpea has changed. It's a more ethical Orpea, refocused on care and accompaniment on humans. We take care of our caregivers, and we take care of everybody working for us. We aim for sustainable profitability, higher profitability, and a more stable financial situation.
Lastly, you've seen that we have a wonderful team here by my side, and we're very strongly motivated. Thanks to all of you.