Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wendel's 21st Investor Day. We are very happy to hold this Investor Day with public in the room. After two years of totally virtual presentation, hybrid is the new normal. Once again, for those who could not come to Paris, we have done everything we could to ensure that the meeting is the most interactive possible. What about the process today? You can see now the full agenda and all the speakers who are there for you. When we get to Q&A, we will start with questions from the public with us. For those who are not there, you can ask question from the web. I will read these questions. Presenters along this afternoon's session will address your question at the end of the presentation. We have limited time for Q&As, and we'll do our best to answer all your question.
André, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Olivier. Hello. Welcome to our 21st annual Investor Day. I'm André François-Poncet. I'm Wendel's Group CEO. With me on stage will be David Darmon, Deputy Group CEO, and Christine Anglade, head of ESG and Corporate Communication. Our focus is mainly gonna be on our unlisted companies, and you will hear their CEOs. We will also discuss progress at Wendel Growth, which is the renamed Wendel Lab. This time around, we will introduce its direct investment activity. Today is my last day at the firm, and it will be my pleasure to introduce Laurent Mignon, my successor. Laurent will start tomorrow. Where do we stand? I'll give you a brief overview. In Q3 2022, we've had strong performance from our companies again, with double-digit organic growth in line with previous quarters.
2022 has also been an important year for Wendel in terms of portfolio rotation and capital deployment. We sold Cromology at the beginning of the year, generating outstanding returns and proceeds. We also sold our Paris headquarters building at a record price before the Paris real estate market virtually closed down. Wendel will move into new premises in the first quarter of 2023. This will be a further boost for our team. We continue to reposition our portfolio by acquiring ACAMS in the U.S. for a total cash outlay of $300 million. You will hear ACAMS today. Perfectly in line with our strategy for more growth and more North America. We also increased commitments to the Wendel Growth Funds by EUR 51 million to about EUR 160 million in aggregate. The general idea is similar, growth and the U.S.
We supported tuck-in acquisitions at Bureau Veritas and at Constantia Flexibles. As you know, external growth is an important lever to boost our company's growth, and the post-COVID period generated interesting synergistic opportunities, helping to address high acquisition prices. Although our Investor Day is not about the performance of Bureau Veritas, and we do not showcase its management team because they hold their own events, we would like to underscore again that the company has outperformed its main peers recently and since the end of 2017. This is the result of the business transformation, deep business transformation, carried out by the BV leadership team under Didier Michaud-Daniel with Wendel's permanent and active support. Over the last 12 months, we worked with them on many topics, such as digital, sustainability and the Green Line, cyber, and the most critical initiative of all, which is Didier's succession.
We are pleased to have attracted Hinda Gharbi from Schlumberger, who is actively preparing for the role. Today, cherry on the cake, BV trades at a premium to Intertek, whereas it's historically suffered a discount to this significant peer. We therefore believe, or we believe, that there remains room for upside. I shall now hand the floor to David to discuss our portfolio of private companies. Thank you.
Thank you, André, good afternoon, everyone, in the public and everyone on the web. On this chart, you can see that the growth of our company, a few companies for the first nine months has been very strong. All our portfolio company grew significantly over the first nine months of the year. We are proud of this performance, in particular, in the current market conditions. Q3 has been strong, just like the first half. Consolidated sales have reached EUR 2.3 billion this quarter, which is 21% more than the previous year. We have had a strong level of organic growth at 12.1% and a higher contribution from foreign exchange at +6.6% compared to +4% in H1.
This is due to the strengthening of the dollar and other currencies. The scope effects have represented 2.2% positive growth thanks to the acquisitions completed by Bureau Veritas, Constantia, and obviously, the acquisition of ACAMS. Over the last nine months, the organic growth stands at +10.9%. The leadership teams of our unlisted companies, which are with us today, will comment on their performance later today. In respect to Bureau Veritas, we saw another very strong third quarter, and nine-month growth stands at +13.3%. Based on this solid performance, the company has confirmed its outlook for 2022 of mid-single digit organic growth, improvement in the adjusted operating margin, and sustained cash generation with the cash conversion above 90%. Our two minority investments, IHS and Target, delivered more than +20% of total top line growth.
A few words first about Target. Target growth was driven by its solid performance in sports and sales price increases. The company faced turbulent times in Eastern Europe, with Russia accounting for 9% of its sales. It's worth keeping in mind that around 50% of its sales are taking place in North America, including in its sports division. Now, a quick word on IHS Towers. IHS Towers posted a Q3 results ahead of expectations. They also successfully extended their debt maturities by refinancing a bridge loan with a three-year maturity instrument. Of course, we are disappointed with the company's stock price performance, but we believe its strong operational results should materialize in a better stock trading at some stage. Let's discuss now Wendel's NAV performance over the last nine months.
The NAV as of September 30th stands at EUR 155.2 per share. We have had a significant impact coming from the drop in equity markets in the first half, resulting in a -12% decrease of our NAV at the end of June. This drop both impacted our listed and unlisted asset valuation. Things have somehow stabilized since then, except for IHS, which saw its share price decrease by over 40% from the end of June to the end of September before bouncing back in November. When looking at the change in the value of listed assets and adjusting for the dividend we received from Bureau Veritas, most of the NAV decline actually comes from IHS.
The other lines within our NAV are pretty much unchanged, such that when we adjust for the dividend we paid this year, our NAV is actually only down 4.5% compared to the end of June number. What you don't see on this slide is that the strengthening of the dollar has been contributing positively since the beginning of the year, representing a positive EUR 2.5 per share for CPI and ACAMS. A quick word now on our financial structure. In current market conditions, our strong financial structure is more than ever a great asset. In 2022, to date, we have deployed EUR 380 million, including Wendel Growth and our share buyback.
Our teams are permanently chasing the best opportunities. We currently have about EUR 1 billion of available cash, complemented by our fully undrawn EUR 750 million credit facility that we have just extended to July 2027. This combined results in a total liquidity of about EUR 1.7 billion. Our debt has an average maturity of 6.6 years. We have nothing to refinance before April 2026. All our corporate debt is at fixed rates, averaging 1.7%. This is the result of an opportune liability management. As an example, this year, we issued a 12-year bond in January at a 1.375% only. We repaid our shortest maturity. Of course, our cash is offset by our debt, our loan-to-value ratio stands today at only 6%.
Combined with what we are told are very two strong BBB ratings, Wendel has probably never been in such a strong financial position. As you can see on this slide, we did replicate this financial discipline into our portfolio companies. All our control companies have significantly reduced their leverage to level which are very, very low relative to the PE industry. Our companies predominantly have fixed debt or have swapped some of the debt to fixed rates. Their maturities are perfectly manageable because of the average maturity and the intrinsic quality of the credits. This puts our control companies in a very strong position to seize available M&A and CapEx opportunities and to resist in case of a market downturn. The situation is different for our non-control investments.
Target's debt increased due to the customary seasonality of the business and to the impact of inflation on working capital. A foreign exchange effect on dollar-denominated debt also did contribute to the increase. Regarding IHS Towers, increased leverage, we must keep in mind that the company increased its number of towers it operates by around 50% over the last 12 months, mainly through acquisitions, which were debt financed. This solid performance and firepower allow us to confidently continue executing our roadmap. You can see on the right the objectives that we set and we disclosed publicly a couple of years ago. This year, we deployed around EUR 380 million, including in Wendel Growth and our share buyback program.
As you can see on this slide, we've been quite active, and we pursued a large number of different opportunities with a strong focus given to the Wendel Growth in direct tech equity investment right after the market evaluation reset. We want to continue our redeployment of capital toward companies with higher growth rates. Overall, we've been very active, making 14 offers to acquire new companies, of which half of those bids were made for direct minority tech equity investments. On the LBO side, the companies we looked out are mainly in the education, healthcare, and business services sectors. We made only one new investments, but one investment we are very proud and very happy, ACAMS, which will be presenting later by the management team.
We also did dedicate a lot of resources to help our companies in the search of accretive external growth opportunities. With our support, our portfolio companies acquired 5 add-ons since the beginning of the year. As you can expect, we keep strengthening our team with training, new hires, and promotions. In Q3, Ghislaine de Rochemaure left our firm to take on the leadership role in London for the Jacobs family. Félicité Trogne-Lachomme took a leave of absence for personal reasons. At the same time, Xavier Lemonnier and Charles Goullier are being promoted to managing director in our European investment team. Both have been very contributive, and they're very excited about their new roles, and I'm happy to congratulate them here today. Our US team has been strengthened as well, and we have added headcount to the Wendel Growth team.
I now leave the floor to Christine for an update of our ESG strategy. Thank you.
Thank you, David. Good afternoon, everyone. Three years ago, Wendel launched its ESG strategy, we are very happy and proud to have become a company recognized for its ESG performance. We all know that ESG is a long and challenging journey. We have already a number of accomplishments in our hands, we are aware that we still need to make some progress. Four priorities for us, as you can see on this slide, climate, gender, health and safety, and eco-conception. We have solid ratings, we embedded ESG through the entire investment cycle. Our responsible investment process covers the entire investment cycle. Before investing, we have an exclusion list reviewed by Executive Board every year, we carry out in-depth due diligence prior to any investment.
During the holding phase, we ask all our company to develop ESG roadmap that include Wendel priorities, as well as the material issue for their sector. One example: for Constantia Flexibles company, recyclability is a major issue. About climate change, we have asked all our controlled companies to conduct an analysis of physical and transitional risk. This year, they each will produce a mitigation plan based on this analysis. As you can see, Wendel ESG information complies with leading reporting and regulatory standard, such as TCFD, PRI, and UN Global Compact. On this slide, you can see the panorama of all Wendel ESG rating and scores. You can see that these rating are solids and consistent it, among them, given the complexity and the variety of their methodology. I believe that we are all aware that navigating an ESG galaxy is sometime challenging.
As I say at the beginning of this presentation, we have four priorities. Today, let me focus on climate change, which is a top priority for us. What you can see on this slide is that today most of the group's total CO2 emission come from the portfolio companies, which is perfectly obvious for an investment company. All our company have decarbonization plans, and today we can say that more than 99% of the CO2 group's emissions are under SBTi commitments. Our mission at Wendel level is to set a CO2 reduction target because we want to lead by example, even if it's not material when you look at Wendel. Wendel today, it's only three building and 91 person. On this slide, you can see that ESG is fully embedded in management compensation and recent financing.
Indeed, the best way to involve and engage people in ESG, is money. Very easy to say it. At Wendel, we have embedded ESG in management compensation and financing. I can give you two example at Wendel level. 17% of the compensation of Wendel CEO is linked to ESG objectives. Almost all Wendel employee receive stock option with an ESG performance condition. The last one was based on climate. As a short conclusion, you can see that ESG performance is central for us, not only because it's virtuous, but also because we are convinced that it's a strong value creation driver. I believe that you will have several example with the CEO presentation later on. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Christine. It's now time to turn to our Q&A session. This session will last roughly 10 minutes. Remember that you can submit questions in writing on the webcast platform. Let's start by questions from the public. If in the public we have a question, we will give you a mic.
Don't be shy.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Can everyone hear? my question, relates-
The mic close to your mouth.
Yes, my question, thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, Olivier. Hi, everyone. My question relates to share buyback. What is the current view and the plan? Currently, the shares are trading at a significant discount. What are your thoughts and views of this?
We're not great fans of share buybacks. We think that there are some good opportunities that are gonna arise to invest in general. We do some from time to time to signal that we think our share price is cheap and our net asset value is substantially above it. We do it from a signaling perspective, but we generally prefer to invest it in buyout deals, investments, in growth investments, in supporting our companies. That's our priority. It was our priority. You know, I should stop speaking about the future as I'm concerned. Yeah, that's...
Hello. My question relates to Wendel Lab or Wendel Growth. You state that we'll invest in startups. What exactly do you mean by startup? What is for you a startup in terms of valuation, and what is the proportion of the investment of in Wendel Lab in direct investments versus co-investments or investments through funds?
Thank you very much for your question, which will be addressed in great details today because we have a specific focus on our direct investment strategy, right after this Q&A session, actually. We'll come back to that and hopefully answer your question.
In terms of mix, we're looking over time 50/50 between commitments to funds on an annual basis and commitments to direct investments.
Sounds about right. Yep.
Another question in the public?
I have one from the web, from Sumant Gwal. I wanted to understand your views on current markets and what it means for your pipeline. One, do you expect private investment to pick up over the next year? Similarly, two, can we expect higher degree of divestment as well as part of your broader pro-portfolio rotation strategy?
Okay. I'll ask David to answer for the future for the same reason. At the moment, there is not a lot of bank financing for transactions, and therefore you will have noticed that the private market has slowed down considerably. Prices have not necessarily come down because, in a way, the market is in part frozen, except for specific segments, like infrastructure, for example. With that in mind, the focus has been to wait and see that valuations would come down because they've been incredibly high, and keep the firepower that we have for these better times. I'll turn to David, if you want to expand from there.
Yeah, just maybe on the short term, because long term, who knows? We do expect this market to unfreeze during H1, gradually when leverage is coming back. We do believe that lenders will do what they do best, which is lending. Sometime during early next year, we should see a pickup in the transaction activity. Regarding valuation, it's uncertain. Reason should say that valuation should go down, but we've been proven wrong over the last two years, so we shall see how long it will take for the market to readjust. In terms of activity, we should see a pickup early next year.
What we're seeing is a lot of pass the parcel transactions between funds, where basically people invest as minorities in somebody else's transaction, so they don't have to refinance the debt. I think there will be much more of these. Which is not to say that they're not attractive, it depends, but that's the type of situations that we will likely arise.
Thank you. Another question. In the last, capital market day, you talked about companies benefiting from ESG tailwinds. Could you quantify how much does ESG contribute to value addition across your portfolio, especially amidst the multiple challenges that we see within ESG as an asset class?
Okay. Thank you for the question. Very interesting. We have launched this strategy, three years ago, so today we are not able to do such a quantification. I believe that it will be a part of the challenging that we will deploy regarding the next roadmap. But today we really want them to focus on what is material and specifically regarding to business. You will have an overview by Constantia Flexibles later on. They will explain you very precisely how they can create value and stay as well with ESG.
I think part of the benefit has been what we have not done. We looked very carefully at some good companies which were in sectors which were quite exposed and consumed a lot of energy. We're very glad we didn't do them because of the screening, the systematic screening that we have put in place.
I would just add that, as we'll discuss later, CPI and ACAMS are mission-driven companies, and the strong growth that you just saw earlier and you're going to see in a moment are a manifest of this ESG trends.
The growth we see here for those companies are really like the tailwind from ESG, more active support.
BV benefits greatly.
Higher one. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe one figures on BV. Today 55% of their sales are coming from what they call the Green Line. This is the range of product based on the ESG trends.
Thank you. Another question on share buyback. You mentioned the preference on new investments versus share buybacks. Shouldn't the level of discount influence this preference? If you believe and deeply understands your invested company, shouldn't you take advantage of buying back shares at the current enormous discount?
I'll just speak for myself. I view that as a liquidation strategy. I understand that short-term shareholders could ask us to buy back massively our shares and sell all of our assets to do that. I must say I was totally unwilling to support that as a goal and a strategy for the company. I don't think I would have had much support if I had. We do believe that we are able to find great stories like the ones that we'll present today. We do believe that we're able to turn performance around like we have in the past with Cromology and has been happening in some of our portfolio companies that will be discussed also today. That's effectively my answer. The future is for others to determine.
I just want to be very clear about that.
Just to be precise, we did a little bit of share buyback this year to the tune of EUR 25 million, which is half of what we do in a typical year, because as you know, we have this limitation by law whereby we can't buy more than EUR 50 million approximately worth of our shares. We did, you know, half of that this year, which is a special year. I think everybody can reckon that in terms of change of the environment for valuation, interest rates, et cetera. We have a balanced approach to value creation, so buying back shares is part of it.
As Jérôme said, we are doing a bit of buybacks. We're also investing in new platforms, doing bolt-on acquisitions, creating value and helping our management team to create value in the portfolio companies. It's a balanced approach.
Thank you. The last question, from the web: Will the current strategy change with the new CEO?
The, you know, I think the question should be asked to somebody else, obviously. By the way, this has never been a one-man show. We have a partnership at Directoire. We have a partnership with Jérôme and our two colleagues who were mentioned earlier. We have a partnership with the investment committee, with the new North American team. We have a partnership with the Supervisory Board. This is a group effort. I think with the new CEO, there will undoubtedly be new ideas, new insights, new dynamism, certainly after a period of time. Maybe this whole, you know, this will result into something which will be quite different. Maybe, I don't know.
I certainly wish the best of luck to all in achieving that. We can't answer the question.
No.
I'm sure everybody appreciates.
Thank you. I think time is over. If you have additional questions, we will of course answer to you by email. We have now to turn to the next presentation. I'm talking about Wendel Growth. Please launch the jingle.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm very glad to be here with you today to go through this very interesting part of our strategy, which is the Wendel Growth. I started my career as a consultant in the telecom and internet industry, and I've worked on several tech investment opportunities in the past. It is a bit like going back to my roots at a very exciting juncture. Today, Wendel Lab becomes Wendel Growth. A lot has happened this year in the tech environment, obviously, but also at Wendel. We are not a lab anymore, but a division of Wendel with great ambitions and prospects. We felt it was the right time to transition to a name which resonates better with our environment and that is more in line with what we're looking for, growth, first and foremost.
Growth that is propelled by innovation, a key aspect of our strategy, and that can generate synergies with our portfolio companies and contribute to accelerated growth throughout Wendel. To date, we have committed EUR 167 million to carefully selected funds and made one co-investment in AlphaSense. 2022 was a significant step up with EUR 51 million additional commitments made. As you know, our ambition is to reach about EUR 500 million of net exposure in the medium term. Before going into more details, I would like to take a step back and go through the foundations of Wendel Growth. Our strategic rationale is strong and multifold.
The very fast growth enjoyed by the tech and digital companies has generated good returns on capital, provided you carefully select the funds or assets in which you invest. Investing in this space is a way to further diversify our asset base. We believe there is additional value for Wendel, as we will generate synergies between our investment in funds, direct investments, and our portfolio companies. I'm thinking of additional investment opportunities, potential co-developments, and more innovation across our portfolio. All our businesses and teams will benefit from being more current on the new winning business models, digital disruption, and the impact that technology can have in terms of driving revenues or posing new challenges. Wendel Growth is very additive to the expertise that Wendel and our portfolio co-companies can gain on these critical topics.
We have made some significant progress over the past months on this through our active involvement in funds and through conversations with founders on the direct side. We're building a rich ecosystem as we deploy capital towards our midterm objective of reaching EUR 500 million of exposure. In terms of execution, we are relying on two legs, funds and direct investments, but with a shared vision. The funds part consists of commitments to early and growth stage VC, growth equity, and growth buyout funds, where we favor quality over quantity. There, we have been building our portfolio progressively and selectively with some acceleration in 2021 and 2022. The direct side is much more recent. Antoine Izsak joined us this year, and the team is not yet fully complete. We have already worked on a lot of opportunities.
Antoine, combined with the unique positioning of Wendel Growth, our funds relationships, and our investment expertise, have generated a lot of deal flow, enabling us to further structure our model and build our execution capabilities. Our vision for funds and direct investment is to be disciplined and rigorous. Obviously, our ESG guidelines are embedded in the process. All investments, be it in funds or direct, comply with our exclusion list. We also involve our ESG team in the due diligence process. Besides ESG, our selection, qualification, and due diligence processes are very thorough. Diversification is very important here. We are pacing our investments in term of vintage, and we are looking at different sectors and business models. We think the current environment is conducive to our strategy in terms of entry points. What have we done so far?
We have invested in funds managed by firms that have consistently generated superior returns over a long period of time. They are the best within their category. We've been selecting funds in Europe and in the U.S., investing from the early stage through to growth buyouts. Diversification again. On the direct part, we made a co-investment in AlphaSense, and we have looked at many opportunities. Our ecosystem of partners is expanding and adding value to this approach. This is a tremendous growth accelerator. As you can see, we have investment opportunities coming from some of our funds, and we connect founders with our portfolio companies to open new market opportunities, accelerate growth, or help them accelerate or simplify some of their key processes, resulting in higher revenues or cost savings. First results are quite encouraging and the momentum is definitely there.
I'm very proud that we have been able to assemble a great team of highly talented individuals in only a few months. Antoine joined us earlier this year as head of growth equity, and Chris Witherspoon heads the fund investment side. You met Chris last year at our Investor Day as he presented the fund strategy in more details. Antoine, who is going to take over in a minute, has a team of three to help him on the direct side, and we also have a group of four outstanding CEOs and founders alongside us. They help us navigate the industry and identify the best companies and founders out there. They bring their unique insights to our investment process, and their expertise is second to none within their respective industries. They are very additive to our thought process and are very respected by the tech community.
I'm sure you know the names of their companies as they have been very successful. Let me now give you a little bit more color on the fund strategy. Our portfolio consists of about 20 different funds. In terms of stage focus, it is primarily venture capital with some growth equity and buyout as well. We favor technology and healthcare, two verticals of interest for us, given the long-term potential associated with them. The geographic focus is in line with Wendel's, Europe and North America. Our selection criteria rely on performance potential, the likeliness of generating synergies with our portfolio, and the quality and amount of co-investment or direct investment opportunities that we can expect.
As I said, the approach is to favor quality over quantity as we build the portfolio, which means that we are mostly investing in well-established funds while supplying consistent vintage diversification. Our total commitments to date have reached EUR 167 million. That's a EUR 51 million increase over 2021. Note that about EUR 100 million of these commitments have been called to date. Obviously, capital calls have significantly slowed down in the last two quarters, and we expect them to remain at a low level for the next few quarters, which is fine given the current meltdown in the tech equity markets that implies some adjustments to the VC market environment as a whole. Our exposure is mostly on software companies that enjoy strong growth and are well-funded. We keep a close eye on valuations and are adjusting where needed.
The level of diversification means that we have little exposure to individual companies, which is the whole purpose of our portfolio construction process. Let me now introduce you to Antoine Izsak, Head of Growth Equity. Antoine joined us in February this year, bringing his seven years of experience at Bpifrance, as well as his experience as a former consultant. He's a great addition to the team and has already been very active, generating many leads and investment opportunities. Antoine, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Jérôme. Hi, everyone. Glad to see you. I am Antoine Izsak, and I'm here as head of growth. Our focus today is going to be late-stage growth that we see here on the right of the slide. The typical portrait of the companies we look at is the following: over EUR 10 million in revenue, over 100 employees, over EUR 100 million in valuation, and usually already having a board made of earlier stage institutional investors. We will not materially address earlier stage opportunities on the left of this chart. Why are we focusing on late-stage growth? We believe that it is the positioning that is best aligned with our DNA for two main reasons.
1, the due diligence methodology and deal velocity are much closer to Wendel core know-how, the risk profile of these companies is also much closer to Wendel risk appetite. Two we believe that our value proposition is more attractive to late stage entrepreneurs than it is to earlier stage entrepreneurs, I will come back to that later in much greater details. Let's now look at the overall market. In reality, not all late stage growth companies are made equal. We could say that there are two types of companies and everything in between. The first type, on the top of this slide, is made of the hyperscalers. They are the potential winners of large categories. These companies typically have growth around 100%, investors use not to pay much attention to their EBITDA.
The second type, on the bottom of this slide, is made of the growth buyout companies. These companies typically grow below 50% and have their EBITDA fluctuating around profitability, slightly above or slightly below zero. They are increasingly valued on EBITDA multiple. Now, as you all know, the public market has significantly changed recently for tech companies. As a consequence, we believe that many hyperscalers currently need to adjust their trajectory and transition from the top to the bottom of this slide. In very simple words, I would say that our job is to be the best at identifying early which companies will be successful in managing this transition. Of course, to make sure that Wendel is considered the best option available by these entrepreneurs. How do we do it in practice? We will target companies with proven business models and clear path to profitability.
This is another typical portrait of our targets. Resilient, high growth margins, double-digit annual growth, and ambitious founder-led management teams. Sector-wise, as you have already noticed by the profile of our outstanding venture partners, we tend to like software. We will also look at other sectors such as fintech, education technology, and marketplaces. We may occasionally, very opportunistically, and of course, for a small share of our portfolio, also consider more disruptive technological companies with less established business model. How are we going to build our portfolio? What we target is the following: up to four investment a year, check size up to EUR 50 million, and above 25% IRR returns. Finally, we will always be a minority investors, but we will be agnostic to either leading or following rounds. One important word I want to have about our land and expand strategy.
We are a long-term investor, we have the capacity and we have the ambition to significantly increase our exposure to the best companies of our portfolio over time. The idea is to put more money at work at a point in time when we will know these companies from the inside, from being at their boards in several quarters or even years.
That said, I want to underline that given the overall macroeconomic context, especially in tech, we are currently being prudent, and we are now focusing on the lower end of our check size and on companies closer to profitability. At this point, enough on our strategy, because it is not sufficient. Entrepreneurs rightfully expect us to be relevant, smart money, and additive rather than redundant. We believe that we are all of this for four main reasons. One, our DNA to be long-term and to have an over EUR 8 billion balance sheet is very rare in tech. It creates a win-win environment for us and entrepreneurs, which consists in putting more money at work in companies when we know them from the inside.
Second reason, I will argue that we are a very agile organization with only 25 investors, all very involved and passionate about de-deal making. Third, we also have a lot and rare operational know-how within Wendel. Operators with financial, legal, fiscal, compliance, and data expertises, which are skill sets many startups need, and which is very different and additive to what most VCs bring. Fourth and final, I also believe that we are all very analytical and hard-working people, and that it is what is needed in the current market in which performance will be driven by alpha rather than beta. To conclude, we have been cautious since my arrival in February, given the market environment, but we have been looking at a lot of opportunities, validated that our DNA was attractive to tech entrepreneurs, and learned to work, think, decide as a team.
I feel confident enough to announce that we expect to have several exciting news to share in the coming weeks and months. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Antoine. Thank you, Jérôme. It's now time to turn to Q&A session. Once again, it will last around 10 minutes. You can submit questions in writing on the webcast platform, but I will start with questions from the public. Once again, please don't be shy if you have question about Wendel Growth. No questions in the room. I have a question on the web.
Take that.
Regarding Wendel Growth, could you detail the cumulative returns achieved, IRR, and cash on cash until now? What has been the net asset value evolution of these funds over the last 12 months is?
Thank you for the question. Well, the IRRs and money multiples have been quite in line with what you could expect from this strategy, which means 20% or well over 20%. If you look at our portfolio, this is pretty much consistent across the board. As we have diversification, we've been able to achieve a multiple, which is, you know, about 1.7x on the capital which has been called. Bear in mind that a lot of this is unrealized, as is typically the case with funds, especially for the young vintages that we invested in 2021, 2022. These have been invested, we are looking at the theoretical value, it's not realized value.
We have had a few capital returns, but it's a young portfolio, so it's pretty much unrealized. Over the past 12 months, well, we haven't seen a strong decrease in valuation because, as I said, this is a young portfolio where companies have been funded recently. Typically, VC funds will not change the value until there is a new financing round. As our companies have been funded recently by these funds, actually valuations have not been revised down. However, as I said, we are keeping a close eye on these valuations, and we have made our own adjustments where we felt the valuation was not in line because funds might hold some public shares.
If we can find publicly traded companies, in which we are indirect shareholders, then we adjust for the spot price, which has resulted in some small deviation of in terms of valuation. So far, we haven't seen a strong downward revision on our portfolio. It's quite stable, I would say, from last June or even last March.
Thank you. What is your target capital deployment mix across direct investment and funds? Two. question, what is the shareholding and control structure you are looking for in direct investments? Three. do you have a target maximum number of direct investment with Wendel Growth portfolio over time?
I take the first question, and I will leave questions two and three to Antoine. In terms of capital deployment, we are looking to grow our net exposure to around EUR 500 million. We have currently EUR 167 million in funds solely. In terms of capital deployment or net exposure, we are looking at having a balanced exposure of 50/50. We are well advanced on the fund side, have a lot of opportunities coming on the direct side, but expect to see maybe some more investments on the direct side in the coming months, or that's at least what we expect from our discussions and conversations right now, than coming from the funds.
we will consistently invest on both legs such that we have a mixed and balanced approach to towards our EUR 500 million net exposure.
Yeah. Regarding the structuration of the deals that we are currently seeing, over the last two years, the structure of a venture capital deal was very much the same across deals. You had one is downside protection on primary transaction on new money. This year, we start to see something that disappeared over the last two years, which are the structured deals. We've seen and discussed some of these opportunities at the committee, and we took the decision that we wouldn't invest based solely on downside protection, so we want to bet on the upside. If we are not comfortable with the valuation, with the upside, we won't do such deals.
Now, we will be, I think, quite agnostic in terms of structure as long as we see a balanced return. So we are not against structuring deals. Sometimes it makes sense, but we are there for the upside. Think that's a clear answer. Now in terms of how many deals we may do, it's important to manage risk. We do risky investments for sure, so we don't want to have a concentrated portfolio, which means that we would typically try to do several deals a year. I've said before four deals a year at the maximum. It will really depend on the opportunities.
For sure we want diversification, on this portfolio, so it will be multiple year, multiple deals every year.
Thank you.
There is a question there.
Question in the room.
Yes. Just a question about your strategy in term of listing company and private equity company. I think that there is a huge difference in term of valuation. You said that valuation were stable. I don't think it's the case on listing company. Do you prefer to stay in the private equity bubble, or do you intend to go to listing company?
Thank you. We are Wendel Growth, I guess we might have another answer when it comes to larger investment check sizes. Wendel Growth, we are targeting only private companies, and these are scale-ups as Antoine described them during his presentation, so companies that are growing very fast. And we are really solely investing in private companies. Now, it turns out that sometimes these private companies become public, and that's why we have a few, we have a small exposure through our funds investment to public companies and that's where we see valuations coming down.
On the private side, it's fair to say that valuations have also come down and companies have changed, as Antoine said, trying to move from the upper part of the slide to the lower part of the slide, which is, you know, investing a little bit less to accelerate the point at which they break even. Valuations are more, I would say, conservative these days than they used to be, 12 or 18 months ago.
We keep an eye on this because we've been suggested take privates by friendly firms that were focusing on that. We've thought that the growth was much lower than what we saw on direct deals, and that the conditions were not much better. I think we keep an open mind on this. So far our focus has been private only.
We have another question in the room.
Yes. If I understood well, you, your investment strategy, you don't intend to invest directly in healthcare, biotech or med tech. You will do it solely through funds. I'm correct?
No, we are looking at many different sectors in terms of direct as well. These are verticals that we like for the growth potential, and we don't rule out investing in these sectors directly as well.
We've looked at 2 digital health opportunities. One of our 4 venture partner is currently the founding CEO of a digital health company. We need to build some knowledge, otherwise we'll not be on the good deals.
Thank you. The very last short question with a short answer, please.
Have you put any thoughts in buying out GPs or the GPs that you invest in? I mean, there's been a massive decline in the valuation of the sector. Maybe it's the right timing.
Yes, we've been offered to look at GP stakes. There are a lot of GPs who are considering in the context of a transition, selling minority stakes in their GPs and in exchange for an anchor position as an LP. This is not our strategy. Our strategy is to invest in firms or direct. Investing in a GP doesn't bring a lot to us and would, you know, result in less diversification, obviously, because of this anchor position that you need to take as an LP to the GP you are investing in. We haven't pursued such opportunities. You're right in saying that there are. We have seen a lot on the market. Yeah, that's right.
Thank you, very much.
Thank you.
We now turn to the next presentation. We would like to welcome Pim Vervaat, CEO of Constantia Flexibles. After the jingle, there will be a short introduction by David Darmon, and the presentation itself. Jingle, please.
Thank you, Olivier. It's now my pleasure to briefly introduce Constantia Flexibles and its CEO, Pim Vervaat. Wendel initially invested in 2015 in the company alongside the founding family of Constantia. The group did refocus itself in 2017 around flexible packaging with the sale of the label division. Today, Constantia Flexibles is a global leader in flexible packaging for both pharmaceutical and consumer industries, and it is the number two in Europe and number three worldwide. Constantia activity has been resilient throughout the COVID-19 crisis. It's at the forefront of sustainability, and it is delivering an outstanding growth and profitability for the second year in a row despite the context of global inflation. Pim will give you more details on the action taken to reach those great results. With no further ado, Pim, the floor is yours.
Thank you, David. Just to move to this slide, this is the business model of Constantia. We serve consumer markets, mostly food packaging, pharma markets, 24% of our sales. Last year, turnover was around EUR 1.6 billion. In flexible packaging, one of the leaders globally, we do deliver all packaging in all substrates. That means both plastic as well as aluminum foil as well as paper. Focus is on Europe. As you can see, 58% of our sales are in Europe, and we have a blue-chip customer base. I'm very pleased to report that we've had a very good performance this year. In the graph at the top left-hand side, you can see the sales.
Last 12 months sales in September was a growth of no less than 24% organically, driven by price increases necessary to cover high inflationary costs on the input side. Also positive volume and mix effects. That and other measures has resulted in an EBITDA which has grown very strongly. On the bottom left-hand side, you can see the EBITDA graph, which was up to EUR 100 million EBITDA in H1 last year, and we are now at EUR 133 million. A growth of more than EUR 34 million or 30%. That is part of the internal improvement, as I alluded to, part of the growth, but also keeping inflationary costs at the level where we can pass it through to the customer base, and also the acquisition effect of Propak we acquired last year.
We are very much focused on enhancing our cash generation. We are deploying a strict CapEx discipline and targeting further improvement in trade working capital performance. That has led to what you see on the top hand right hand of the slide to leverage continually reducing. The next slide shows the raw materials, the price development. These are very important for us because they represent 56% of our sales. You can see there's been a strong rise in those prices since the beginning of 2021, has peaked over the summer and is now on the downward slope. Nonetheless, it's still at historically high levels. Typically, we pass these movements through to the customer base, albeit with a time lag. Of course, these are not the only input cost inflation.
There have been others, high wage inflation, energy, transport, packaging materials, and we have this year tested our market positions by also passing those through to our customers, and we've been largely successful. We are successfully managing our margins. We are living in an uncertain world. We know all about the macroeconomic backdrop. This slide shows you the GDP development. You can see the financial crisis in 2009. You can see the pandemic, 2020. GDP, wild swings, packaging, not. We have consistently grown throughout many economic upturns and downturns, and that's because food packaging and pharmaceutical packaging are not really discretionary items. I think that is also key when you look forward. This development and our current outlook gives me absolute confidence that we'll continue to develop the business even despite the macroeconomic wobbles that we are experiencing currently.
We have a Vision 2025 strategy. Just to remind you, we developed that in Q1 of last year with the renewed management team, new business operating model, it has four key pillars, which I'll go into on the subsequent slides. One is our self-help plan to further improve our own performance. Already touched on the topic of improved pricing discipline. Operational improvement, operational excellence, that's in our DNA. It continues to deliver year on year. The third item is improving our procurement performance. I'm delighted to announce that we have now on board our new EVP procurement, which has joined from our largest competitor, we are about to launch a procurement excellence program early in 2023. This is quite key. I mean, our spend as percentage of sales is up to 70% on procurement items.
We are good, but not best in class. That's our aim to get there. That will not only help further drive the organic profit development, but also when you enter into M&A transaction will increase clearly the synergy benefits you can have from such transactions. Cash generation enhanced, I've already touched upon it. Currently, we're running at around 30%, 13% trade working capital sales. Our midterm target is to get that down to 10%. We're launching a program to get there. Second leg of our strategy is to drive organic growth through innovation and sustainable products. We've seen strong growth in our pharma markets. We've got a very good, very well-respected team which year-on-year delivers. We've seen growth above market, thereby taking market share. Consumer markets has not always been that benign for Constantia.
Last year in Q2, we've installed a new consumer sales structure. We reviewed where do we want to win and how do we want to play, and I am very pleased to report that that's starting to bring its benefits. We're returning to growth and targeting further growth also going forward. Ecolutions materials, our sustainable products, we have tripled the sales this year, admittedly from a small basis, and we're intending to triple again those sales in 2023. The pandemic really put a little bit of a stop to that. People were reluctant to change materials during the pandemic, but we can see now a growing pipeline for the Ecolutions materials. We then go to the inorganic part, selectively consolidate the European market. This market is fragmented and the consolidation will continue whether we drive it or not.
We aim to selectively in a disciplined manner to participate in the market consolidation. It will create significant value if done right. Last year, we've acquired Propak. I'm very pleased to report that they've hit all their targets and then some in terms of organic growth, profitability, cash generation. This year, we've looked at many opportunities. Yet again, the pipeline is full, and we've acquired FFP Packaging Solutions in the U.K., a well-respected niche player in the food market with a sustainable product portfolio. As Constantia Flexibles, we are exporting EUR 60 million to the U.K. Did not have a consumer factory there. Now we do. That will significantly enhance our position in the U.K., who as you know, is now outside of the E.U. On top of that, I see commercial synergies, asset utilization synergies, and significant procurement synergies. That's another nice bolt on in our strategy.
Fourth element is optimizing our global presence. Just to remind you, our international operations outside Europe, and I add Turkey to that, was significantly below our profitability that we used to get in our poor regions. I'm very pleased to report that EUR 24 million EBITDA last year is now doubled this year. A very significant improvement. How did we do it? You see some of the items here. In Africa, our African operations, the market structure there changed. The leading competitor had their factory burned down in the riots last year. They do not intend to come back. Our team has been really successful in capturing those market opportunities. In North America, where we have a plant in Mexico and we have a plant in the USA, we can see very good growth in Mexico.
In the USA, we had an ongoing restructuring, 2 plants consolidating into 1. That is now completed, we're turning our focus on the commercial side of things and have every confidence we'll move that business towards 15%, perhaps 20% EBITDA margins. A problem child has been our Indian business, hit by the pandemic, hit also by a market which had a significant cost price squeeze in general. We are now seeing that we've turned a corner. We've initiated beginning of this year our Restore and Success program, which is our self-help plan targeting an 8 -9 million EUR EBITDA improvement. We can see the EcoLam products, our sustainable products, that pipeline filling up. I mean, perhaps to put in memory that we launched a state-of-the-art factory in 2019, just at the time when the pandemic hit, that stopped all product development.
That is now seeing its first green shoots of loading that plant with sustainable higher margin products. The market, who has been very dire for everybody, is showing signs of further improvement. Those three will definitely mean we can return to good profitability in India as well. If I look forward, I think there is in the international activities an organic growth supported by investment opportunity to improve our EBITDA by another EUR 20 million-EUR 25 million. What's the scorecard? We had the following targets: organic growth of at least 2% per annum, meaning volume and mix. We achieved 24% organic growth in the first nine months. Of course, a significant part of that has also been to cover the higher inflationary input costs, but we've been successful in doing that.
EBITDA, we said we want to achieve, again, an at least 14% of EBITDA based on 2020 price levels. As you may expect, the price level have increased because of the pass-through. If you adjust for the price levels, H1 2022 has seen a margin of 15.4%, so tick in the box I would say. ROCE, which two and a half years ago was around 10%, around the cost of capital at the time, we wanted to be well above the cost of capital. Because of the profitability improvements and the capital allocation mechanism and the improvements in trade working capital, we've been able to reach 14.7% in the first half of this year. I am very happy with the progress that we've made, but we are targeting significantly further improvement in the midterm plan we just finalized. Sustainability.
It has been mentioned a number of times already. Flexible packaging, whether it's made from aluminum, paper or plastic, has a number of advantages. It's lightweight, can be bent easily. It provides perfect protection at the lowest environmental footprint in terms of resources used. We have the opportunity and also the product range to solve the recyclability challenge with the transformation to mono-material packaging solutions. At this moment in time, 85% of our product offering is either already designed for recycling or as a recyclable alternative. We aim to get that to 100%. Where does Constantia stand with respect to sustainability trends?
As you may know, there is a huge regulatory pressure and development of new regulations in Europe and also in India to fine-tune that to have less resources involved in packaging, less packaging waste, higher recyclability content, and that all packaging actually becomes recyclable. Flexible packaging in that is expected to continue to grow. We are a leading player with our 360 degree Ecolutions product range. Which is film, which is aluminum foil, which is paper. That is not only recognized in our own customer service, but also by third party research. Customers, we can see them increasingly partnering with us in order to achieve the recyclability challenge in their pledges, which will help this partnership, of course, in maintaining our margins and indeed increasing market share.
When you look at also our M&A part, we have a synergy potential in procurement, but we also have a synergy potential in having the solution to the recyclability challenge going forward. What are the key takeaways of today? Vision 2025 is progressing well. It's driven by the renewed management team and our operating model. I have to say that I have the pleasure of working with one of the best management teams that I've had in my career. I think it's a very good business and has been performing really well in very challenging environments. Resilient business performance, we said in 2020 and 2021. It's accelerating in 2022, and we won't stop there. We have a disciplined approach on M&A. All the acquisitions we've made, the two, are value accretive, and there is a lot of other opportunities in the pipeline.
As just discussed, I think we are well-positioned to be a winner in what I would call the sustainability sweepstakes. With that, Olivier.
Thank you, Vervaat.
... I think it's time for Q&A.
Thank you for your presentation. Once again, it's time to turn to Q&A. I'm looking at the room. Is there anyone who wants to ask a question? No, not yet. I have a question on the web. With these fantastic result, why not IPO Constantia in order to crystallize its value and reduce Wendel net asset value to discount?
I think that's a question for Wendel rather than me.
Yeah, probably.
The only thing I would like to say that, I have been very happy with Wendel as a shareholder. They've been very supportive both for organic and inorganic growth. That's a shareholder's question.
I have another question from the web. Did you already gain market shares thanks to Ecolutions?
To date, very little, because that's a development which also in Europe as well as in India stopped because of the pandemic. I can only say the pipeline is booming. I fully expect market share to be gained going forward. Next year, as I said, we're expecting a tripling of our Ecolutions sales. I think that's just the beginning.
Thank you. What is your exposure to energy distribution disruption risks? Did you already change some of your energy suppliers?
We have a reliance in some factories on natural gas. We have already made investment, EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million, to be able to switch to other energy sources, and we're looking at a further possible EUR 10 million of CapEx to do the remaining part in the coming year. This winter, I don't think there's any concern.
Thank you. I have an ESG question. This week, the European Commission unveiled its plan to reduce packaging waste, targeting to ban coffee pods and throw away plastic wrapping around fruit and vegetables. Do you think this proposal will continue as it was formulated? If so, how will it affect your business?
I think the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, the way it's, it was already leaked three weeks ago, but today it got officially confirmed, is actually good news for the flexible packaging industry. It's also good news for those who have the R&D product management and the patented product range that we have. Life will become a little bit more difficult. Some categories will be affected, might be replaced. We are in all materials. We have the product range. Life is gonna be exciting over the next five years in the European packaging industry. I am confident that this will actually play to our strength and we'll gain market share.
Thank you. I have no more question. Maybe in the room. Yes, we have one. Can you please give the mic?
Two question, actually. I mean, the first is could you please remind us, I mean, how fragmented is your market and your market share? Just to have a feel of what you can do, I mean, on the M&A side. The second question, I mean, you alluded to a reorganization of your sales effort in the consumer industry. Can you just elaborate on that? Just to explain, I mean, have you chosen to not pursue some clients?
First of all, our industry in the widest, in Europe, the largest player is our main competitor, has 20% market share. We have 8, and then we're number two. There is a long list of further opportunities. I see that particularly in plastics. My view is it will go towards the concentration rates that you see in glass, metal and paper. Plastic is a younger material. It makes perfect sense. It will consolidate for the next 20 years, and there's plenty of opportunities to do large, both bolt-ons, mid-sized and larger scale opportunities. I think that is going to be well. You asked about the consumer sales. We had a sales organization in the past which was not really functioning. Silos, five silos, each having a not very aligned strategy.
This is why I said we had the where to play but also how to win. That got reorganized in Q2 last year. We are looking at specific new sectors we may want to enter. One of the sectors is coffee capsules, got higher growth rates. Pet foods got higher growth rates. We're also in Steady Eddie segments. We are targeting more specific our efforts and our time and efforts to sectors and looking for adjacencies. One of the results of that is we acquired Propak, who are a big exporter to the snacks market in Europe. We enhanced our share to up to 10%, and that is one of, in Europe, one of the faster growing segments.
Looking both for organic investment and inorganic investment on the where to play and the where to win and the how to play is we have now a far more aligned commercial structure in consumer. Also a bit more confident in terms of their position vis-à-vis the customer. In the past, we've been pushing towards higher share with large FMCGs. I think we've neglected perhaps a little bit the mid-size and the smaller customers, and we definitely are looking to regain some of those certainly because we also have big plants and we have a satellite network. In that satellite network, we can very well also service the small and mid-sized customers.
Thank you. Now a question from the room. Yes, please.
Thank you. On the price increases you implemented this year, what proportion will have to be returned by customers because of lower commodity prices? Is there some of them that will not be kept because of lower commodity prices?
We have in terms of raw materials, there's a pass-through, both on the way up as on the way down. Of course, on the way down, that means that we also have lower input costs. There is actually quite a good hedge between selling price and the raw material price. When it moves up, we catch up. It's an accepted principle, albeit there is a time lag which tends to be selling price a little bit later on the increase as the raw material input. On the way down, yes, the total revenue will reduce, but so will our input cost. There is also a time lag on the way down, which does generate a temporary benefit for us. In terms of margins, they are structural.
Thank you. I have a last question from the web. Given the state of funding markets and therefore lower competition from financial buyers in Europe in particular, is there a case for more ambitious acquisition objectives at Constantia?
We are literally, I mean, we've done two acquisition. I think it was out of 50 opportunities. There are definitely opportunities for larger scale and higher number of acquisitions, but I'm a great believer of staying disciplined. We're in it for the long game. I think valuations will be impacted, we are looking. I think there will also be impact that those companies are good companies, but do not have an answer to the sustainability challenge. I think that will drive down their relative valuation. Constantia has an answer, has an extra synergy, which is we know how to transform the existing product range to a sustainable product range, I think we will keep our valuation, and therefore I do see multiple arbitrage improving going forward.
Top of that, we are not yet best in class in procurement. Imagine source of synergy, sustainable product range, and procurement synergy best in class or day one synergy, then you really see a significant value creation opportunity, as I've seen and experienced earlier on in my career in this industry.
Thank you very much, Pim. We now must turn to the next presentation. I would like to welcome Maarten Heijbroek, Stahl CEO. After the jingle, there will be a quick introduction by Xavier Lemonnier, Wendel's Managing Director, and then the presentation itself. Jingle, please.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Xavier Lemonnier. I'm Managing Director at Wendel, and I'm very pleased today to introduce Stahl and its CEO, Maarten Heijbroek. As you know, Stahl is a specialty coating company with a clear global leadership on attractive niches and flexible substrates, such as leather. This is a long-time investment for Wendel and one that has proven to be highly successful so far. Over time, Wendel has helped Stahl become the undisputed global leader in its market through an attractive...
an active consolidation, sorry, diversification, and significant organic growth achieved thanks to a differentiated focus on innovation and sustainability. On this topic of ESG, we are extremely pleased that this year Stahl has been awarded the platinum rating by EcoVadis. Stahl has also demonstrated over the years its ability to withstand crisis and generate high margins and high cash conversion regardless of market conditions. In March 2021, we announced the nomination of Maarten Heijbroek as the new CEO of Stahl. It is my pleasure today to introduce him as he is now in his second year at Stahl. Maarten is a seasoned CEO with a long industry experience, not to be 16 years at Croda International, where he successfully helped in the strategic repositioning through organic and M&A developments, contributing to significant value creation.
Since he joined, he has reshaped the strategic direction for Stahl and delivered a very strong first-year financial performance. Maarten, welcome. The floor is yours.
Xavier. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here again and to give you an update on Stahl. As always, let me start with a high-level overview of our company. Stahl is the world's leading producer of high-performance coatings for flexible materials. As you probably know, these materials are used in everyday products like handbags, car seats, steering wheels, shoes, fashion, and furniture. Stahl typically provides the final coating layers over these materials, and the coatings that we supply need to meet very high performance specifications. Because even when the material is bent tens of thousands of times, the coating still needs to stick to the surface. Of course, it has to make the material look great, but also very important is that it has to make the surface feel nice because consumers are touching the Stahl products probably billions of times per day.
of course, it shouldn't rub off. finally, it has to make your handbags and car seats resistant to attacks from chemicals like hand sanitizers, sunscreens, coffee, and wine. these are very demanding performance requirements, and Stahl is the world leader in these technologies. These products are true specialty coatings and therefore command premium prices and margins. Stahl was an early adopter at sustainability, so today we are leaders with largely water-based and increasingly bio-based formulations. More than 70% of Stahl sales today are specialty coatings, and the remainder are chemicals which are used for the processing of leather. Stahl is a truly global company with a global manufacturing base and a large and growing presence in emerging markets, with Asia the largest region in the group. we're selling into various end markets. Half our products end up on consumer goods, like shoes, bags, and accessories.
Automotive is also an important end market for us with roughly a third of group sales. Taking a closer look at the numbers, you can see that we delivered a strong first half of 2022 against a tough comparator, which included the business bounce back from COVID. This was pleasing since the markets in 2022 are difficult, caused by raw material cost and energy inflation, and lower demand due to COVID lockdowns in China, and continued weak demand in automotive due to shortages of microchips. Top line growth was mainly from pricing and to a smaller extent for mix. We had some help from currencies, mainly from the strong dollar. Due to the market, the underlying volumes are down this year. We implemented a series of price decreases quite successfully to offset the cost inflation.
We entered the second half of 2022 with a very strong margin momentum to offset lower volumes. Where in 2021, we saw margins weaken in the second half of the year. Following a strong Q3, we are optimistic about finishing the year ahead of our expectations. The combination of high margins and a low capital intensity leads to a high level of cash conversion, and we continue to further reduce debt, which stood at 0.8x EBITDA at the half year. Where do we stand as a company? Well, Stahl actually is in a good place. In every market that we're active, we are the clear market leader. Mainly thanks to our performance coatings business, we benefit from underlying growth.
As you saw in my introduction, we're well diversified in terms of geographies as well as end markets, which makes the business robust. We tend to be positioned very much at the high end of our markets with a good exposure to the world's top luxury brands and to the high end of the automotive market, which further adds to the resilience of our business. The essence of Stahl is our customer intimacy model. In 34 countries, we're having local salespeople, local warehouses, local application labs, and every day, hundreds of technically trained Stahl people work directly with our customers on further improving their products. This gives us a firsthand and deep insight into our customers' unmet needs, which is the major input for our new product innovation teams.
For the size of company that we are, we have a well-developed global manufacturing footprint. As we are a formulating company, our operations is mainly about compounding. It's blending of ingredients, which tends to have a low capital and actually also a low energy intensity, which further supports the deleveraging of our balance sheet. Last but not least, we're also the clear leader in our markets in terms of ESG, which I will elaborate on a little later in this presentation. Where do we want to take the company? In terms of further developing the portfolio, we very much like to grow and broaden our core coatings franchise. This is also the focus for potential acquisitions, which will no longer be in the leather market.
We are the world leader in coatings for flexible materials, and we're looking to further broaden the range of substrate materials. Also several of our existing customers are experimenting with new materials, increasingly sustainability driven. For Stahl, this is a great opportunity. Since, say, whatever a car seat will be made of in the future, it will continue to need the Stahl layers over it to make it look nice, feel nice, and protect the materials. We're increasingly driving the company to more specialization and premiumization to further support our premium margin model. Our innovation teams have been busy and are still busy making our portfolio more future-proof in an increasingly sustainable world by replacing solvents with water and increasing the renewable content of our formulations.
To stay competitive and fit for the future, we are further strengthening the core competencies of Stahl by building our business model of customer intimacy combined with constant innovation. We keep step-by-step enhancing our presence in faster-growing markets. We're giving special attention to looking after our top talent, especially the technical people, for which there's more and more competition. Our ambition is that the best people in the industry want to work for Stahl. We have to offer them the most progressive technologies to work with and a great working culture as well. As I mentioned before, we're looking to put our strong balance sheet to work with targeted acquisitions of specialty coatings companies.
Let me now finally spend some words on what we're doing to enhance our ESG leadership position. Sustainability is the mega trend that is sweeping through our markets, and we are very well-positioned to benefit from it. Our customers are increasingly looking to work with suppliers that can provide them with products that will make their own products more sustainable, and most often this means reducing the carbon footprint of their products. It is just as important that we can back this up with facts by offering supporting data and full transparency of the supply chain. 2022 has been another big year for Stahl in the area of environmental action and social wellbeing.
As Xavier mentioned, we have been awarded the platinum status by EcoVadis, which means that they are placing us in the top 1% of the 90,000 companies which they have assessed globally. We are very proud of that. We committed ourselves to the Paris Agreement targets, and we are the first company in our space to have submitted a Scope 3 carbon emissions reduction target with the Science Based Targets initiative. Our ambition is to reduce the carbon footprint of our incoming supply chain, which represents almost 90% of the total of 750,000 tons, by at least 25% in the next 10 years. Which means that we have to defossilize our current raw materials and replace them with lower or renewable carbon alternatives.
We will also keep reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and we want to do that by 25% over the next 10 years, where we have already reduced them by more than 30% since 2016. We have delivered full lifecycle analysis data for our top 150 products, which is a huge amount of work, and we intend to have done the full LCA analysis for our top 300 products by the end of next year, in addition to collecting carbon footprint data for all our strategic products in our automotive portfolio. This is something that is much valued by our customers, especially in automotive. New regulations, especially in the EU, are helping to drive the industry towards a more sustainable supply chain.
At Stahl, we're trying to stay well ahead of any new regulations by proactively removing potential toxic ingredients from our products and by reducing its carbon footprint. We're also already working hard on preparing the company for alignment with the new EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive that was passed as law in November of this year. Now, coatings are traditionally solvent-based, and at Stahl we have already replaced more than 80% of the solvent-based products by water-based alternatives. Also, we've introduced new product ranges on the market of coatings and finishes with a substantial amount of renewable carbon, like our popular Nuvera range. With many of these initiatives, we are well ahead of competition.
Now, let us also touch on how we're dealing with the current business climate, with wars, geopolitical tensions, low consumer confidence, and especially with the very significant raw material cost inflation that we have experienced in recent times. As I mentioned before, we have been able to compensate the cost increases by a series of price increases over the last 18 months, which has restored the strength of our margins and is compensating for the lower volumes caused by a softer market. At the end of this year, we now see that raw material cost, the increases are leveling out, and into next year we do not expect further cost increases. Just in case we have to, we will also adjust the fixed cost base as we have successfully done in previous downturns.
Increasing energy costs is having a relatively small direct impact on Stahl since we have a low energy-intensive operation. At current elevated prices, they represent roughly 4% of our fixed cost base. This year we have successfully worked with our suppliers, increasingly outside Europe, to mitigate the impact of higher energy costs on our supply base, and we will continue to do so in 2023. Wrapping it up, let me quickly summarize the key takeaways of this session. Stahl is a robust market-leading business and well positioned to be a winner in an increasingly sustainable world. Our business model is the foundation of our success and is based on a combination of deep customer intimacy with constant innovation, which delivers world-leading margins.
We are recognized as the ESG leader in our markets, with a portfolio that can help make our customers' products more sustainable. We're looking to fast grow our attractive specialty coatings franchise, both organically and by acquisition. Stahl continues to deliver with another solid trading performance in difficult market circumstances, and we have once more demonstrated to be an agile company that can handle the challenges of an ever more unpredictable world. Thank you, and over back to you, Olivier.
Thank you, Maarten. It's no time to turn to Q&A. You know, we have only 10 minutes, so you can submit your question in writing on the webcast platform. Once again, we will try with question from the public. I see we have one.
Good morning, Nico Tabor from ODDO BHF Asset Management. first, on the expansion into the specialty coating, what exactly are the materials you're looking for in the typical end markets? Where are the ones you think you can strengthen and you have an opportunity and you can grow? Regarding the wet end, what's your view on your perspective for that sub-segment in the future? What are the prospects and what's the difference in growth at the moment between those two business line? Thank you very much.Yeah. Well, your first question is what are we looking for in terms of acquisitions? We're looking to adjacencies of our current markets. Something that makes a lot of sense is a logical adjacency of what we're doing today.
Also, in terms of technology it has to make sense. It has to be materials and technologies that'll basically have a good fit with us today. There are several ways that we can go from our existing base, and we're actively looking at a number of situations right at this moment. As far as your second question is concerned on the wet end, it is very clear that the profitability profile, the margin profile of wet end, the leather chemical processing chemicals portfolio is a lot lower than on the specialty coatings part of our company.
That's why we're heavily focusing on specialty coatings and making that a strong priority in terms of organic as well as inorganic growth. The wet end is a useful addition in our a useful part of our range because it enables us to give a full service to the customers that we have on the leather side of our business.
Good afternoon. Could you give us more details on your market share and to see how fragmented the market is in each segment? The second question would be in terms of targets as a % of sales, do you have any aims for your 3 divisions, perhaps for coatings? How much do you aim in the long run to be as a % of revenues?
Yes, sure. On the first, the, our market shares, it depends very much on, you know, we're active in a lot of different segments. In virtually every segment that we operate, we're the number one in terms of market share. For instance, take our leather business. We have a 24% market share. We have in our performance coatings business, that's a business consisting of many different segments, and each and every one we are the market leader, and in most cases with market shares of above 30%. We have a very strong market-leading position in many business.
Certainly between leather and performance coatings, we are heavily focused on further expanding the performance coatings side of our business, and we look through organic growth and acquisition. We like that to be as least as big, but preferably larger than our leather business.
Two questions, please. The first one relates to your M&A strategy for the next two to three years. Given your strong balance sheet, do you consider only bolt-on acquisitions, or you might also consider transformational deals? My second question is on your profitability. Given its top-notch level at the moment, is there room for expansion over the next two to three years?
Yes, in terms of on your first questions on the, on the type of acquisitions, we're certainly looking at bolt-ons, but we're also looking at bigger acquisitions as well. You know, as all the portfolio companies in Van Oord, we have a very disciplined approach to our acquisitions. As, also as I said, we're very actively looking at a couple of situations. Apologies, your last question?
Is there any room for margin expansion over the next two to three years given their top-notch level at the moment?
Yeah, I think our aim is to grow our top line, to make our company larger, but maintain the level of profitability that we have. I think it will be hard to further make a significant further steps in improving our profit margins. Having said that, one of the things that we do in the company, we want to have this ever-improving product mix. Clearly with the higher unit margins that we have with our products, this typically translates itself into strong profit margins as well.
Thank you. If you have no question in the room, I have some on the web. Are you targeting specific geographies for your potential acquisitions?
Yes, in principle, we're looking globally. You know, since we already have a very strong position in emerging markets like Asia, we're also very much looking into the more developed markets, you know, America is probably, North America probably number one, and followed by Europe. As I said, we're casting the net wide and looking globally.
Thank you. Another question on acquisition. When you talk about premiumization of, in your midterm plan, can we conclude that you are potentially targeting high multiple acquisitions?
Yeah. When I talk about premiumization, what I mean with that is what I said earlier, is that we are constantly driving to improve the product mix, to keep making our business better and better and better and driving it to more, more premium situation. Clearly, if we can do acquisition to support that, we will definitely do that.
Thank you. Maybe a last question from the room. No? Thank you. I think we must turn now to the next presentation. Thank you, Maarten. We welcome our American companies. I would like to welcome Scott Liles, CEO of ACAMS and Mariah Gause, its CEO, COO. After the jingle, there will be a short introduction by Arthur Maes, Managing Director of Van Den and board members of ACAMS, CPI and Van Den. Jingle, please
Thank you, Olivier. Good afternoon, everyone. As a reminder, Wendel invested about $338 million earlier this year in March to acquire ACAMS from Adtalem, a publicly traded education company in the United States. I am pleased to say that the carve-out process to transition ACAMS to an independent company is going very well and on track to be completed next year. We are joined today by ACAMS CEO, Scott Liles, and COO, Mariah Gause. Before I hand it over to Scott and Mariah, let me remind you of a brief summary of our initial investment thesis in ACAMS. First, ACAMS is a mission-driven organization addressing the global problem of financial crime. This illegal activity is proliferating, bad actors are becoming even more sophisticated, and the regulation to combat these crimes is becoming more stringent and costly.
In this environment, banks and corporations are looking to trusted partners like ACAMS to educate their staff and provide reassurance they are taking the steps required. Over our 20-year history, ACAMS has become a thought leader and de facto trade association at the center of the anti-financial crime ecosystem, helping clients remain at the forefront of compliance regulation. The company's business model has historically been quite resilient, characterized by a large installed base, recurring membership revenue, and regulatory-driven demand. ACAMS has nearly 100,000 members and 50,000 certification holders across the globe. These dynamics result in attractive growth, margin, and cash flow profile. In the transition from a division of a large public company, ACAMS has the opportunity to further professionalize and realize greater scalability. We also see substantial growth opportunities ahead for ACAMS.
The problem of financial crime is only increasing, necessitating greater attention to it. ACAMS' brand and reputation have earned the company a privileged position, excuse me, to convene and educate anti-financial crime professionals on these complex and dynamic topics. This presents the long-term potential to introduce new products, expand geographic reach, and enter new segments, many of which we have already begun working on with Scott and his team. Finally, ACAMS' mission to end financial crime and fight the funding of terrorism and human trafficking align well with Wendel's values and ESG initiatives. Where are we today? The carve-out process is on track to be completed soon, and we have built the full leadership team. Despite the carve out and the macroeconomic environment, ACAMS has grown its revenue and membership base since Wendel's investment in March.
In that time, the company has also introduced a new cryptoasset, AFC Specialist Certification, and closed another successful flagship conference in Las Vegas. In 2023, we look forward to having the carve out behind us and focusing on the company's long-term development, in particular, accelerating the enterprise sales effort. The political and economic events since the time of our investment have only reinforced our thesis, and we remain opportunistic about the growth opportunities ahead. I would now like to introduce Scott Lilies and Mariah Gause. Scott joined ACAMS under Adtalem's ownership in late 2020 before he served as president of two growth and innovation businesses under Nationwide Insurance. Mariah also joined ACAMS in late 2020 after working as an operational finance executive at General Electric and Health Care Service Corporation. Both Scott and Mariah have been excellent stewards of ACAMS, and we are honored to work with them.
I would like to personally thank them for their dedication to ACAMS and partnership with Wendel. Before I hand it over to Scott, we will show a brief video on ACAMS. Everything big once started off small. From a modest U.S. association in 2002 to a global membership organization in 2022. ACAMS has had a single mission: ending financial crime. Today, ACAMS continues to expand its global footprint, reach, and impact. Over 100,000 members in 180 jurisdictions. More than 60 chapters around the world. Ecosystem to educate, inform, and convene AFC professionals globally through continuing professional education, best-in-class peer network, and thought leadership. Professional development and networking. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Social impact initiatives to end human trafficking and illegal wildlife trade. Rapid response webinars and master classes. Thought leadership guidance and best practices.
A pulse on the news and issues that matter to the AFC professional. ACAMS is proactively fighting financial crime, raising industry awareness, convening initiatives with government agencies and private sector stakeholders. To address emerging threats and evolving priorities, ACAMS is a world leading membership organization for AFC professionals, delivering executional excellence. An extensive suite of products and services.
With an eye on future scalability and growth through its ecosystem to educate, inform, and convene AFC professionals globally. ACAMS, a mission-driven organization that matters.
Thank you, Harper. When I joined ACAMS about two years ago, I was most excited about the mission. I didn't realize then I was joining a community of real-life superheroes whose hard work literally saved lives. Whether it's reporting on the finances of human traffickers or helping institutions deliver humanitarian aid, anti-financial crime practitioners play a critical part in protecting the world's most vulnerable. ACAMS sits in a unique place. We are the fabric of the AFC industry, and our mission is to end financial crime through continuing professional education, thought leadership, and a best-in-class peer network. We bring together the best AFC minds from around the world through our ecosystem to educate, inform, and convene. What I have learned since joining is that the industry is undergoing a sea change.
Today, AFC professionals must train on how to deploy new digital tools intended to strengthen compliance safeguards while shielding their institutions from criminals exploiting similar technologies. They must flag organized crime groups profiting from pandemic-driven disruptions, contend with geopolitical changes, and manage cryptocurrency risks as governments call for even greater compliance effectiveness across the board. Our entire ecosystem is built for these changes, and we are often the trusted partner of organizations seeking to navigate new landscapes, ensure regulatory compliance, and improve the quality of financial flows globally. The willingness to put in place the necessary steps to safeguard an institution also signals, importantly, proficiency to regulators. The reason we exist is the strength and breadth of AFC regulations and the strong desire to adhere to them. Let me re-repeat that. The reason we exist is the strength and breadth of AFC regulations. This is the strategic foundations of ACAMS.
Regulations are expanding, along with the transactions being scrutinized. Regulators are clamping down with larger penalties as they connect the dots between suspicious transactions and their beneficiaries. Not safeguarding the global financial system is not an option. Regulators are requiring compliance and financial institutions, and financial institutions are being fined for not doing so. The sheer size of the fines imposed on some of the world's leading financial institutions is staggering. This figure is accelerating and has tripled since 2018. This is essentially why an estimated $150 billion-$160 billion is spent on AFC compliance annually across the globe. Non-compliance has financial and reputational risk for institutions.
Relative to the risks in the space, AFC training offered by world-leading organizations like ACAMS is an inexpensive way to protect customers from regulatory, financial, and reputational risks while signaling proficiency to regulators all over the world. Take, for example, how fintechs are refining the global payment system, putting powerful tools in the hands of compliance practitioners. We also know that cryptocurrencies and emerging payment platforms continue to be exploited by ransomware groups, money laundering networks, and sanctions of Asian schemes. The AFC department of today is no longer a back-office team and boasts sophisticated operations that can identify illicit financial flows with an adeptness once unimaginable. Ensuring that the teams managing these departments are educated, informed, and able to collaborate with their peers is where ACAMS has a distinct advantage.
While change is often the only constant in our space, what does not change is the fact that financial crime is an enormous global issue and has significant impacts on people, economies, and governments. How big of an issue? If the volume of money laundered annually was measured in GDP terms, it would be the fifth largest global economy, about the size of Germany and a member of the G7. The difference here is that the beneficiaries are criminal organizations from around the world. Financial crime is not victimless. There are around 50 million victims of modern slavery annually, 30% of whom are children. This exploitation often takes place in the shadows of the global economic system, which is why the financial sector has a critical role to play in combating these crimes. The arguments for prioritizing illegal wildlife trade in AFC compliance are significant.
Not only do trafficking syndicates generate as much as $23 billion a year, but they do it by exploiting shell companies, often mingling their profits with the proceeds from drug or arm trafficking. Illegal wildlife trade is a global problem that is inherently tied to corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking, and its proceeds inevitably find their way into the formal financial sector. There are arguably bigger concerns tied to the illicit trade of wildlife. It threatens our own global biodiversity. Fighting financial crime is an ESG agenda. As we continue to educate, inform, and convene individuals and organizations to end financial crime, one of our key priorities is engagement with stakeholders across the entirety of the AFC space. We engage with financial professionals, compliance professionals in financial institutions, mostly banks, who are our largest segment of our customer base.
We also serve new other actors in the financial sector, such as payment platforms, money service bureaus, consultancies and accountants, and more recently, regulators and law enforcement. The latter is particularly important because fighting financial crime is an issue where collaboration between private sector and law enforcement is critical. We do this through a whole ecosystem that includes conferences, symposiums, training, certificates, social impact programs, webinars, software tools, news outlets, podcasts, and platforms for AFC professionals to provide guidance and share information on best practices and criminal typologies. ACAMS is uniquely positioned to bring together leading experts in the AFC sector to join forces in fighting illicit finance. In recent years, has also forged public-private partnerships with regulators, law enforcement agencies, and specialized organizations that develop guidance to help and establish critical lines of communication to meet emerging challenges.
These efforts generated about $97 million in revenue over the last 12 months, ending September 2022, and an expected EBITDA margins of around 20%. ACAMS is a global organization with a balanced footprint across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Our top 10 countries collectively account for a little under 80% of our total sales and are reflective of the world's largest and most important financial markets. The US is the most dominant market for ACAMS, contributing about 40% to our total share. In addition to the US, other key markets include China, the Netherlands, and France. The EMEA and APAC regions contribute approximately 26% and 25%, respectively, to sales. Our growth over the past year is the result of further penetration of our core markets with existing products.
Over the past few months, we have seen our global membership base expand to over 100,000 members, and as I noted, are represented in over 100 or in 180 jurisdictions. This milestone is a result of the collective efforts of our powerful global team focused on our mission to end financial crime. Notwithstanding the challenges of building a new standalone organization this year, the ACAMS team has kept a firm grip on our strategy that requires a razor-sharp focus to deliver our promise to our customers and members alike. I'll now hand over to my colleague and ACAMS COO and fellow board member, Mariah Gause, who will walk you through our ecosystem.
Thanks, Scott. We educate, inform, and convene the largest, most diverse set of AFC professionals worldwide. Let me start with our industry-leading certifications, which make up 38% of our revenue. Our signature CAMS credential, which is a prerequisite for many AML compliance roles, is available in 13 languages. The Certified Global Sanctions Specialist, or CGSS, is equivalent to CAMS for sanctions professionals and is available in six languages. We also offer certifications for compliance practitioners engaged in know your customer controls, transaction monitoring, fintech, crypto assets, senior-level risk mitigation, financial crime investigations, and AML functions. In addition, we offer six social impact certificate programs and 21 training certificates on an array of AFC topics, including counterterrorist financing, anti-bribery and corruption, fraud, and gaming.
Our global membership, meanwhile, makes up about 31% of our revenue and opens a window into the world of AFC through thought leadership, news, and continuing education resources. Of our membership, 45% are part of an enterprise, while 55% are individuals. The re-renewal rate for enterprise and individuals is 99% and 70%, respectively. Our conferences constitute 25% of our revenue and have seen steady growth with the return of in-person events, with the recent Las Vegas conference beating all expectations. We have four flagship conferences: Las Vegas, Hollywood, Europe, and APAC. They typically draw senior-level AFC practitioners, regulators, NGOs, and law enforcement personnel. A key contributor to this segment is sponsor and exhibitor revenue.
Complementing these segments is our fourth bucket, which contributes 6% of our total revenue and comprises industry publications, webinars, bespoke trainings, and risk assessment software. The key thing to note about the ACAMS business model is that it's a resilient one with a long-term historical growth. ACAMS has seen a CAGR of 13% since 2018 and withstood the headwinds stemming from the pandemic that upended businesses globally. ACAMS conferences were significantly impacted by the pandemic. Our ability to quickly pivot to a fully online conference delivery model and an online exam proctoring format helped mitigate that impact. We've seen migration from virtual back to in-person conferences, which has increased attendance levels and associated price points. Continued strength and demand for our certifications, including CAMS, CGSS, and our new CCAS certificate, continues to fuel business expansion.
Membership has similarly grown progressively in recent years, with ACAMS exceeding the 100,000 mark in October. Over the past 20 years, ACAMS has increasingly demonstrated its value to our members globally, who see the power of our global community as we move forward with new initiatives to help them manage an increasingly complex compliance space. Partnerships between the public and private sector today are the norm. Our ongoing challenge is how to build them and make them stronger and more pervasive. Like Scott, I was drawn to the ACAMS mission. Little did I know then the true power of our mission. AFC professionals are in a unique position to protect the integrity of our global financial system as they investigate the transactional networks used by criminal syndicates to generate billions of dollars in illicit proceeds annually.
ESG frameworks direct private sector firms to promote positive contributions to the economic and environmental and social progress. Both AFC and ESG share a common goal of improving the quality of financial flows. To this end, I am pleased to share that ACAMS has formed partnerships with the World Wide Fund for Nature and Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking to develop four social impact certificates to help AFC professionals identify transaction activities linked to the illegal wildlife trade and human trafficking and to stop the flow of illicit funds through legitimate financial systems. Each of these certificates have been drawn thousands of enrollments by representatives of many of the world's largest banks, casinos, consultancies, supervisory bodies, and law enforcement agencies. The Ending Illegal Wildlife Trade Certificate was recently translated into Japanese and simplified Chinese, other similar efforts are underway in other jurisdictions.
From the moment we were acquired by Wendel in March of this year, we had a goal to be an independent standalone organization within 12 months. However, we also wanted to do that with minimal disruption to our operations. I'm pleased to report that we are on track for a full exit of our transition service agreement by March of 2023, having successfully completed each milestone on schedule and in budget. As of today, we have limited commercial reliance on our former owner, Adtalem, and we have strong cash generation that has covered our one-time cost. Over the course of the past 9 months, we have been able to deliver new products and services while in parallel building a brand-new ACAMS.
We've stood up new functions and processes, selected and implemented new tools and technology, as well as hired senior-level talent, including a CFO, a CIO, a CMO, and general counsel. The tremendous partnership across the organization has helped us execute seamlessly to plan. We are on track to be a completely standalone organization by March of 2023. Scott will now walk you through the remaining slides.
Thank you, Mariah. As we move forward with ACAMS, we see multiple opportunities to continue to drive value. We noted our strong relationships with the largest financial institutions across the globe. We have the opportunity to continue to expand even further as anti-financial crime compliance becomes more complex and the needs become greater. Also, as the regulation continues to bring in new industries and new types of transition, we have the opportunity to diversify in those industries, as has been a testament of both our CAFCA certification targeted fintechs and CCAS targeted at crypto exchanges and transactions. Increasing our attachment rates across the AFC ecosystem is another multiyear opportunity for us. We have a broad ecosystem, and we have a patchwork of success of delivering that ecosystem with our current clients.
We know the demand is there, we have the right stuff, and we have the opportunity to increase those relationships and those attachment rates. From an operational point of view, we are building scalability and operational efficiencies, which Mariah is leading, and from a geographic point of view, we are broad, and we have the opportunity, particularly within the largest financial markets, to increase our penetration. In the future, not immediately, we will have the opportunity to execute targeted M&A, and I really wanna stress targeted M&A and in the future. We've got a lot to do. We have a strong organic growth platform, but we have already started to look out on the horizon of what might be possible. Key takeaways.
It's an exciting time for ACAMS. We're today more than 100,000 strong across 180 jurisdictions, our members remain fully committed to ending the criminal abuse of the global financial system. As the dedicated superheroes I've come to know over the past 24 months have taught me, we can do more, as I noted on the previous page, with greater effectiveness to help those who need us most. To do this, we need to continue our growth trajectory, expand our product portfolio, expand into new segments, refine our global footprint. More critically, we need to stay focused on our mission. Thank you. I'll turn back over to Olivier.
Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Mariah. It's now time to turn to Q&A session. We have only 10 minutes, so you can still submit your question in writing on the webcast platform. We will start with question from the public, please.
Thank you for that presentation. I would be interested in knowing more about your competitive environment. I guess you're not the only AFC certification in the U.S. Can we know more about other companies that might also offer that type of services? How can we make sure that ACAMS will become in the future, the ultimate AFC certification? Second question, can you self-finance your development, knowing that the development prospects are important for you? Thank you.
Let me certainly take the first question. I'll ask y'all to build at all. It is a competitive environment. We don't stand alone in this space. However, we are the gold standard. The CAMS certification, which is what we started with, is today and has been in the past, the gold standard for anti-money laundering. Our sanctions compliance certification stands alone. Our crypto compliance certification is one of the strongest in the marketplace. Our competitors tend to not compete on the breadth either geographically or across the ecosystem that we offer. We do have very strong, and I wanna emphasize that, strong competitors on point solutions in point geographies. One of the strongest is ICA. They're based in the UK.
They have a very strong footprint in Europe and in the Middle East, and are burgeoning in Asia. In the Asian markets, unsurprisingly, as with a lot of businesses, we have local competitors who tend to focus on price, not on quality. Our strength in the Asian environment is on those international institutions who seek to rise to the international standard as they are, as they're engaging in the global transactions. Mariah, Harper, would y'all?
Yes. Is this working? On your second question, short answer is yes. The company's free cash flow generation has fully supported the one-time cost to effect the carve-out to date, and we expect that to continue and fund the development of the business going forward.
No, no question in the room? Yeah.
Maybe a question just out of curiosity. How does your business model function? I mean, how do you charge your customers? How does it work? You make a, I don't know, on a... It's on a timely basis, on a monthly basis? You on a... How does it work? Thank you.
Yes. There are different models for different products and services that we offer. Time of use charge for our certifications and for conferences. Obviously, membership is subscription-based. We do have some clients who pay all up front, and we have some who pay regularly. Did that answer your question?
Yes. I have a question also as well. Can you give us an indication of the difference in terms of margin by regions regarding their development? Can you give us an indication of how much cross-selling you're able to do between the subscription and the more one-off services? Is there a difference in terms of profitability between the subscription and certification and the actual training and conferences? Are they actually accretive or it really depends on how much attendance? Do you have any KPIs you can share with us? Thank you.
Across the board, we're profitable. We have a very strong profitability profile, as you would expect from information services businesses. Across the globe, we tend to have little variability between our margins. We have good portfolios of and a good customer mix and good product mix in across the geographies that tend to be very close to each other, and we're able to reflect cost and any sort of price pressures. There are differences in margin profile across our products. They are relatively narrow. Conferences tend to run a little less rich because there's a lot of variable costs that go along with those.
It's obviously very sensitive to participation, which you saw from our time with COVID, where it was sensitive. Clearly on our certifications and our other published products, we have profiles that look margin profiles that look very similar to highly scalable businesses.
Just a follow-up question. What is the reoccurring part of your business? Can you give us an idea of what you have as a backlog or recurring business?
If I understand correctly, you're asking what's the recurring revenue model?
Yes.
In terms of our business, we really look at two things. We have long-term engagement with our clients. We, as Mariah noted, we have around a 97% retention rate with our main logos. Typically, where we don't have a logo, we are adding those at pace. We tend to have recurring revenue on our memberships. That's the number one area. Also, as anti-financial crime teams grow and turn over, we have recurring revenue in terms of our certifications. I also want to point out that in terms of our certifications, we deliver training across a number of different, what's called lines of service within the anti-financial crime space, which means different levels of executives.
We have a very strong business, in terms of our second line, which is where we have the gold standard and a rapidly growing business in terms of our front line, where the most, number of executives tend to sit.
An idea of the percentage of your sales.
I couldn't hear.
With the mic, please.
Can you give us an idea of the % of your sales, which is recurring?
Yeah.
If you think about the memberships, that's about 30% of revenue. Those are renewed annually. Certifications is about 40% of revenue. Part of those are a one-time certification that someone gets, and then they renew every three years. It's a portion of that amount as well. Conferences and trainings obviously are sold on an annual basis, that is less recurring. Part of the membership number also is with enterprise customers who have the 90% renewal rate that Scott mentioned. You should look at a combination of the enterprise, excuse me, of the membership and part of the certification.
No more questions from the room. I have some on the web. Did the sanctions against Russia generated additional sales? If yes, how long did it take to respond to the demand?
Yes. The ACAMS business has a strong support when regulation's in place against any financial crime and when there's bad actors. The Russian invasion of Ukraine created both. There were new regulations that went out in terms of sanctions, which we're all aware, and there was plenty of activity to try to avoid those and evade those sanctions. It's hard to actually ever call out causality, but we did see a spike in two areas of our business. One was in our CGSS, our Certified Global Sanctions Specialist certification grew quite significantly in the United States. Also, our information services around sanctions, what the sanctions were, compliance, information hub, for Ukraine sanctions.
We also saw a huge spike in that. With our webinars, at any given time, we had 1,500 plus executives globally attending those at the height of the sanctions in position.
Thank you. Do you expect an increase of training or certification demand out of the financial industry?
Do you want to take that? I will.
Sure.
Okay. Yes, we do. Again, as regulations increase, expand, and as fines and enforcement grow, we see demand increase, we continue to see that from our customers. We're hearing that even with the possibility of recession next year, we're hearing from our customers that certainly spending on anti-financial crime is not being reduced, and in many areas it's being increased. We do expect that to continue.
Any additional question from the room? No. Thank you very much, Scott, Mariah, and Harper. I think we must now turn to today's last presentation. We have with us Tony Jace, CEO of Crisis Prevention Institute, and Susan Driscoll, CPI's President. Once again, after the jingle, there will be a short introduction by Adam Reinmann, CEO of Wendel North America, and then the presentation itself. Jingle.
Thanks, Olivier. Everyone will much prefer to hear from Tony and Susan, so I will try and be brief. I'd like to just remind everyone of the original transaction, our interest in the business, and then a quick update on where we are today. Just a quick reminder, Wendel acquired CPI in December 2019 for $910 million, including $569 million in equity. We're attracted to the opportunity for several reasons. First, CPI is the market leader providing training certification
To address the rise in workplace violence and behavioral health challenges, an unfortunately growing and underserved global phenomenon. Second, the company has an attractive financial profile and resilient business model supported by a large and growing installed base of certified instructors with regular renewal requirements, high customer retention, and a regulatory mandate for the de-escalation training in hospitals and schools, its primary end markets. Last, as David mentioned earlier, CPI's mission to create a safe working environment aligns well with our values and ESG initiatives. Despite a difficult first year during COVID-19, the company has worked hard to meet customers' changing needs and invested heavily in its team and technology to expand its offering and global presence.
Three years into our investment, and despite the pandemic, I'm pleased to report that revenue has increased more than 30% and EBITDA more than 50%, while leverage has been improved from 7 times at the time of our acquisition to nearly five times today. While we've lived through a difficult beginning together, we are of course pleased with the company's performance and its ability to navigate a difficult environment and are optimistic about the opportunity to accelerate, excuse me, accelerate growth, both organically and through acquisition over the next several years. With that, I would like to very quickly introduce Tony and Susan. Tony joined as CEO in 2009 when the company had roughly $20 million in sales, and Susan in 2017 after a long career in healthcare and education training.
They've built a strong team around them that has driven the company's recent success, and we think is well-positioned for the future. With that, I will turn it over to you, Tony.
Thank you, Adam. Come on up, Susan. I love this ’cause Adam always shares my entire presentation to all of you, we're really just going to build on a lot of what he said. This is Susan Driscoll. She has been with us for five years, a wonderful president. We have teamed together, we wish all 350 of us could be up here sharing sort of the special mission we have. Susan's role has been really focused on growth in the company by unleashing new programs and new products to the marketplace that helps our customers be safe and more caring, also led our digitization efforts, which luckily over the pandemic served us very well as we needed to reach out to other people.
Susan's gonna join us in a couple minutes, but I wanted to start out with. By the way, I've been there 100 years. You can say I've been up there for 13 years. I wanna say, first of all, thank you for all of you in the audience here in person. I know it's hot here, and you stuck through to the last one, but I wanna say thank you for your time, talent, and treasure that you've provided CPI over the years, and thank you for being partners in growth. Another thank you for Wendel and the Wendel Group in general. It's just been an amazing combination of partnership to really address some really needed training and societal issue that exists in the marketplace.
Just as I've done the last couple years, I mean, if you look at our mission, there are three things I would like to pull out. The first thing that animates us every day, the reason why we come to work every day, is the societal impact that we make. Our friends and families, our nieces and nephews, our children, exhibit different behaviors. They're in distressed states now more than ever, and a lot of times that manifests itself into crisis moments. What we do is we train the people that surround these special individuals and make sure that they have the care and the caregiving and the service and the education that they need to live fulfilled lives. In addition, a second quality or a second part of our mission is the quality that we need to bring out to the marketplace.
What we do is very important as a company, making sure that the professionals who serve our most vulnerable in our society are well trained so that they can manage these crisis moments and keep building on the relationships that they have with these beautiful people. Finally, the one that I love to talk about in this setting is really the reciprocal loyalty that we have. We love standing up here and being accountable to all of you and being able to share what we've done and as financial stewards over the past year and give you a glimpse of a little bit of how the growth trajectory is gonna be moving forward and why we continue to execute against the strategy that we put forward. Why do we exist? Why does CPI exist? Why have we been around for 40 years?
Well, there is an incredible issue out there in terms of workplace violence and also the other side of our business in terms of our parents that are living with dementia. These things are all fomenting themselves, either have distressed challenging behaviors and crisis moments in the workplaces or a new standard of care that our parents that are living with dementia require and need to have because every person has intrinsic dignity in this world, and they deserve the best care possible, and we are driven to make that happen. There are millions, tens of millions of our friends and family that go to work every day and get hurt, either verbally abused or a lot of times physically abused. What I like to do is I like to look at this from the bottom up.
The impact on the most vulnerable in our society is very large. In addition, there's a social inequality aspect to that. There's a disproportionate level of restraints and seclusions and just poor management of people when they are showing distressed behavior with those on the lowest socioeconomic scale or people of color. When this happens in a workplace setting, something terrible happens, there's a lot of physical and mental health issues that not just arise with the people, the vulnerable population, but also those that were working that day or managing that group. Finally, you can see how having an unsafe workplace and a non-caring workplace increases turnover, and that's exactly what a lot of our customers have been seeing, and it's been accelerating since the pandemic. Finally, it is incredibly costly to our customers.
If there's one thing we know that our schools need, and our social care organizations need, and our healthcare systems need is funds that are better optimized for the care and wellbeing of those that they serve. What do we do? We train professionals on how to de-escalate crisis moments. In a given workplace, there will be six crisis moments on any shift. In an eight-hour period, there may be six crisis moments. When a customer uses our training, they see that reduction down to maybe one, maybe two instances per shift. You can see there's a vast reduction in the frequency of these crisis moments and the severity of what's happening in those workplaces.
Yes, there is a regulatory mandate in a lot of the countries that we serve and a lot of the end markets that we're serving. Importantly for us to grow the business and make sure that we are purpose-built for exactly what our customers require, we need to expand our programs, and Susan will be talking about that a little bit further. There are new populations that are starting to flow through our schools. There are new populations of people flowing through our healthcare systems, and that's something that we need to work on. In addition, like I said, every person in the world has intrinsic dignity and and requires the best care possible, deserves the best care possible.
That means that there's no, like, limit in terms of the geography where our training can be absorbed and deployed into the marketplace. Next week I'll be over in the UAE opening up our business over there because there's no difference with a person who's living with dementia in the UAE as there is in Paris or a child with autism in Milwaukee versus Hong Kong. We are driven to take this training worldwide because it is that type of need, and we act, and we fit very perfectly in that. When you look at that impact, yes, there's a strong ESG aspect to that.
In addition, I mean, we have a very light, like climate change touch, like carbon consumption touch, because really we're just a people business, you know, training people on how to be amazing workers in their workplace. I mean, Susan and I were just doing some back of the napkin calculations. 58% of CPI, out of the 350 people worldwide, 58% of us are female and do the math, the rest are male. How do we do what we do? There was a question earlier in terms of how ACAMS does what they do. It's a train-the-trainer model, and this is amazing because it's really cost-effective for our customers, and it's highly scalable for our customers and for us to get this training to an amazing amount of people.
Out of the 350 of us, 80 of us are global professional instructors. These are full-time employees of CPI, they spend a couple days with our customers. The middle band here, they're called certified instructors. These customers will come to us, and we'll spend a couple days with them, and we will certify them to take our training back to their workplace. What they do then is they go on the far right, they go back to their workplace, and they will train on average 40 of their coworkers every year. You can see there was a question earlier about recurring revenue. You can see the recurring revenue element of the flywheel at work here. 38,500 active certified instructors are out there right now deploying our training to their staff.
Today, every business day during the year, 600 meetings or training events are going on. Right now there's 600 events around the world where the certified instructors are training their learners. We're just about to watch in two seconds a video of these certified instructors training their learners, and you can see this is really the education segment in the U.S., it's sort of a slice of what we do. You can see these beautiful people, you know, training their coworkers so that they can manage these crisis moments that are manifesting themselves on a daily basis. Let's run the video.
Creating a safe, positive climate for students and staff is a top priority for school communities and districts. A recent survey of school leaders found that 88% saw student health and wellbeing as a priority, and 78% prioritized staff and student safety. How do you prioritize these ideas as you're also facing challenges around budgets, staff retention, and academic standards? That's where Crisis Prevention Institute comes in. Nonviolent Crisis Intervention is an evidence-based training program that helps organizations like yours manage challenging behaviors, improve staff retention and productivity, comply with legislative mandates, and more. CPI can come into your organization and teach crisis prevention and intervention techniques to your selected staff. These people then become certified to train others in your organization.
Nonviolent Crisis Intervention training covers topics such as identifying and responding to challenging student behaviors, recognizing how your own behavior impacts a crisis, learning safety intervention strategies that minimize harm. Like all programs available through CPI, Nonviolent Crisis Intervention empowers you to change behaviors and reduce conflict for the care, welfare, safety, and security of everyone.
Okay, we're proud, obviously, of all this tremendous work, but we're also proud about the financial profile that this allows us to enjoy. This means that we are now able to amp up and accelerate our growth in just waves and waves of new countries and waves and waves of new end markets and things that we can execute against. Our annual sales are up. If you took 2019 and go all the way back to, you know, 2009, you'll see just a similar build.
When you look at first half this year versus first half last year, in those orange arrows, you can see they're going upper right, which is amazing, and, you know, nice double-digit growth that we're seeing there. You know, we introduced a new specialty program, we'll talk about in a second that really helped build and increase our revenue flow through from all of our geographies out there. The digital even though you saw a lot of people-to-people training going on there is a very strong digital element, sort of blended learning element to our training. This does allow us an amazing free cash flow conversion rate, which then we can just take with our balance sheet.
You can see how we can now plow that into these new programs that we need to do, the new geographies we need to get to, and make sure these vulnerable populations are being taken care of and receive the education that they require. We're proud of that. With that, I do want to bring up Susan to share with us sort of those growth vectors that we're executing against as we have started out the first three years here with Wendel and look forward to executing further.
Thank you, Tony. That solid financial performance is built on four key initiatives. The first initiative is just increasing the market share of the segments that we're already in. There is significant growth opportunity in healthcare and education and in social services. To realize that growth with Wendel's support, we have invested heavily in digital technologies for marketing. We're doing much more aggressive lead generation over the web and lead nurturing over the web, that's enabled our sales team to focus on lower-level conversion, converting those sales leads into actual customers. You can see that that strategy is working. In the period represented here, we've grown our new certified instructors by 33%. Second, what keeps me very excited about coming to CPI every day is our continued investment in new product development.
We've introduced programs that serve a wider swath of the markets that we're in. Where we were focused on behavioral health traditionally in hospitals, we're now extending to service nurses and other primary work or staff workers. In education, we were focused on special education. We're expanding with new offerings that are designed for general education teachers and social workers. Those new products like Verbal Intervention, like Classroom Culture, are really driving growth to the point where today 30% of our revenues are coming from new products. We also have a very robust pipeline and are expanding into mental health and social well-being products going forward. I should also mention that this past year we did an experiment, a paid experiment, I'm happy to say, where we wanted to try to adjust our training for a very different market segment.
We applied for and won a contract with Uber to deliver app-based microlearnings to Uber drivers in the United Kingdom. That product launched in August. It's been extraordinarily successful by Uber standards, and we're now in discussions with Uber to deliver training to six additional geographies over the past two years. It gave us the confidence to know that while there's a significant growth in our core markets, there's equal opportunity in other markets that we have not yet pursued. Our third strategic growth initiative is international expansion. You may know that we've entered the French market, and we're growing steadily, slowly but steadily in France. We also have realized an opportunity in the UAE and are formally opening an office there.
The international expansion, we are a people business, and our business is built on relationships, getting deeply embedded through sales and business development in a new market, really understanding and building the trust of our customers is very important. While the behaviors across the globe are very similar, the challenging behaviors, the nuances of the market require deep insight and time, frankly, to develop. Fourth, our digitization initiative which Tony Jace mentioned. We have, during the pandemic, we moved from in-classroom training to virtual live sessions, that's becoming a more important component of our business. You see that our certified instructors still like to deliver classroom training, we're moving to much more of a blended approach, some of that time off the floor can be done through online training.
We're also really working to digitize our workbooks to reduce our climate footprint, important for our ESG purposes, and to translate that all-important blue card to digital so that our customers can carry it with them and post it on media sites like LinkedIn. That leads to the key takeaways and the outlook for the business. We have a strong and we have an experienced management team. We have an incredibly scalable business model, both with opportunity in the markets we're in and opportunities to expand further. We are very focused on long-term growth through the expansion into new hallways of our existing customers through global expansion and really expanding the number of certified instructors worldwide. As Tony started out with this presentation, we have a proven societal contribution, and we have a very underserved market.
I think most importantly, at this time in society with the, with the challenges, both behavior challenges and just mental health challenges that are facing everyone, there is a huge need for CPI training. We couldn't be better positioned with our reputation, and the trust that we've built over 42 years to really capitalize on that. I like to say to new employees that by doing well financially, we're also doing good for the world. I think it's a very unique position that CPI is in that positions us well for the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Tony and Susan, for this keynote. Now it's time to turn to Q&A. We will start with questions in the room if there are some. Yeah, we have.
Thank you. Can you hear me? Yeah. Thanks for this presentation. International expansion doesn't seems to be so easy in your business. Could you develop a bit on that? What are the difficulties that you face when you enter a country, especially maybe a non-English speaking country? My second question is about the competitive landscape. Can you develop a bit on that, please?
Yeah. International expansion has always been one of the vectors that we've been executing against since the late 1990s, when we went into the UK and then Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, Hong Kong now, you know, certainly France over the past couple of years and now into the UAE. There are. We're, we've been in the UK since 2000. It's not so much complications as we don't enter a new market until we know that there's enough of a cultural acceptance of the type of training that we're doing and why we're doing it. They know that they need to take care. They can't be, you know, ostriches with their head in the sand anymore, ignoring what's happening in society with these, with these vulnerable pop-populations.
We go there, and we're there for the long term. We'll have a smattering of customers that are there, but we've grown to the point where they need outstanding customer care 'cause they have issues every day that they'll contact us with. The support of our customers is a huge differentiator than any of our competition, which we don't have that much competition. I mean, our training group, the 80 trainers are like three times larger than our top three customers put together or competitors put together. We've learned how to do that. We are patient. There are some minor nuances in terms of adoption of blended learning or, you know, the translations.
It takes us a couple runs to really, you know, make it relevant for the people that we're serving, our customers that we're serving in those arenas. Competition wise, we do have, you know, some minor sort of super regional competition, but nobody has the size, scope, breadth, deep technology, learning, amazing, you know, new product development pipeline. We're really focused on just amping up our service to our customers and getting them the highest quality, most relevant training possible for the populations that are coming into their places.
Question from me. Could you maybe also provide some financial guidance, like in terms of top line, for example, what kind of growth profile can we expect in the years to come? Thank you.
I mean, I got that last year. I mean, what we do is we are a growth company and we do have expectations to grow. We like to call sustainable growth. You'll see us in the low, you know, double digits, sort of similar to this year. This is really the perfect zone for us, is what you're seeing represented this year. It's a lot of work to do this. You know, these are industries that are not highly adaptable to technology enablement or change. It's important for us to recognize that as we continue to grow. We do enjoy, when we digitize, we do enjoy some upside, in that pricing as well as the mix, the new programs that we put out there.
You know, we price those to get a return on our investment, and the customers love it. Like Susan said, it is growing amazingly. We're in a really good zone. Your expectations should be, you know, nice solid years forever. I mean, going forward.
Yes. Can I ask, what is your minimum invoice and what has been your largest invoice last year, for example?
Minimum invoice?
Yeah.
Some of them can be quite-
Is that the same in all the geographies where you're active?
Yeah. We service a lot of very small customers. For example, in North America, there are human service organizations, group homes, where there might be 10 employees, and they deal with very extreme behaviors. We actually have I think 60% of our customers are those small ones. The invoice size can be, you know, just a couple thousand dollars. We also deal with very large healthcare systems where the invoices might be.
Half a million USD.
Half a million USD.
Yeah, as you can see, I think you guys saw EUR 117 million for the LTM or whatever as of September 30. I mean, that is made up of a lot of transactions, and that's why, I mean, with them down, this is one thing that we knew we needed to do, and we're almost done. In early Q1, we will be finalizing an implementation of a new ERP that is really allowing us now to drive, you know, double, triple the volumes that we're seeing in these invoices alone running through that system. You know, that operational excellence layer has to be invested in, as well as all the amazing sales and marketing that we have out there with the new products.
Any question in the room? I got one from the web. Did you adjust something in your product or training offer to adapt to local cultures?
It's a good question. The first thing we have to do when we enter a new market is really develop, as I said, those relationships with customers and with the thought leaders. We then make minor adjustments based on, you know, on what they say they need. For example, in France, we needed to do more on legal considerations. There's more content and legal, the legal framework in France in that. The behaviors that people deal with are universal, so overall our core training is very adaptable to different markets. It's just cultural nuances.
Thank you. How effective is your training, is there any scientific backing to this effectiveness?
There actually is. We've had, we've had healthcare in institutions do evidence-based pilots to see the reduction in restraints or seclusions or disruptive behavior as a result of our training. There really are demonstrable results from that. What we've learned is that training has to be continuous, which gives us an opportunity for more digital refresher ongoing products which are in development now. There's much more work we can do, and that's a focus for us, is to really start developing the research that supports what we do.
Many thanks. Any another question from the room? No. I think it was today's last question. Thank you so much for your presentation. Now, many thanks for your time, Tony and Susan. I'm pretty sure that this keynote gave a very strong insight to all stakeholders. We are now close to the end of this show. Before leaving the floor to André François-Poncet, David Darmon and Laurent Mignon to conclude the Investor Day, I would like to thank my team, Lucile and Alexandra, for their fantastic job, and all the Wendel, Stahl, Constantia, ACAMS, and CPI teams and top managers who made this Investor Day possible. André, David, Laurent, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Olivier. I'd like to add our thanks to your team, and your team, and to all the CEOs and other senior executives of portfolio companies that made it to Paris today. Really, our warmest thanks. It's now time for me to wrap up the day and actually to say goodbye. I guess that was in my intro. My five years at the helm of the firm are now over at midnight, I guess, technically. This period that I've been through has been very eventful and characterized by a few dislocations. I'd like people keep in mind COVID in 2021. That was an interesting period. The current war in Europe.
Since February 22, the ongoing historical interest rate and monetary policy reversal, which I feel has very far-reaching implications for valuations and also results in a particular aversion to emerging market risk today. I believed over this period of time, and I continue to believe, I guess some people never change, that these times warrant discipline. We as a firm needed to tighten our organization or our offices, et cetera, and our processes. You know, on the positive side, conversely, the period has allowed us, it's been favorable to sell a number of private assets that we just needed to sell. This has allowed the firm to start pivoting its portfolio towards the U.S. We sold many of our smaller companies at high valuations, and we acquired others, you just heard them, with far better growth prospects.
We locked in very advantageous financing terms, thanks to our able finance staff. I believe the firm is strong. I believe it holds promise for patient investors. I'm grateful for the trust and confidence of many of you during my five years, and first and foremost, the Wendel Supervisory Board led by Nicolas ver Hulst, a very exceptional individual, to whom we owe a lot. I am leaving a terrific team, and I would like to particularly thank them today, if you will allow me to do that, and David, in particular. David is an extraordinary investor. He's Every day we see it. He's a great person. He, his integrity, his courage, his direct talk, his friendliness, his modesty. I could go on and on, so I'm not. He'd be very embarrassed.
Actually, he did this whole exercise today with, you know. He sprung his ankle, not his uncle. He's in significant pain. It doesn't show. You'd agree with me. David.
Thank you.
You know, many thanks. I think now it's my great pleasure to introduce Laurent Mignon, who takes over tomorrow. Laurent has my wholehearted support. I think he's gonna be a wonderful addition, a wonderful leader to the firm. The floor is yours, Laurent.
Well, thank you very much, André. Well, I'm very, very happy to be here. It's a little bit particular for me to be in front of you today in Investor Day while I've not started, huh? It's really for me, the occasion to introduce myself. Please, if you have further question, don't ask question on the strategy because I need to take some time to work on it with the team and to revert. Obviously the discussion first, I will have it with the teams and the Supervisory Board of Wendel. Nevertheless, I'm joining tomorrow Wendel, and I must say that I'm very excited. I was really before today.
I'm furthermore excited after this Investor Day and the great presentation we had from the companies that were here today. My background is a banker, or I would say financial service more extensively. I've been in many various businesses in the banking industry, from trading to investment banking. I've been leading a large insurance company, and I've been leading a large investment bank, Natixis, and I was leading up to tomorrow a large banking group in France called BPCE with two of the largest retail bank, Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Epargne, and one large investment bank in Natixis, and a very large asset manager called Natixis Investment Managers that manage 1.2 trillion globally worldwide.
I've got a very extensive background in the banking and financial industry. I've been also active in a smaller private bank called Oddo & Cie in between. You know, it's a vast variety of experience, and I'm very excited to go in a much more, I would say, close to the business organization, more agile organization. Why do I have left BPCE to join Wendel? Why did I answer positively to the discussion we had with Nicolas, who you rightly say is a great character, and thank you, Nicolas, for having come to me, is really because, you know, I wanted to go in a company that is agile, a company that has a great potential to invest.
I think it's a great moment for a company that have evergreen capital in this period where you have a turnaround in the interest rates, where you have a turnaround in the market, where you have so much huge trend that are going on. I think with Wendel, with its long history, with its ability to capture opportunities, which is a very solid investment base, low debt situation, great talent, situation of team, with the support of David and great team. We can do a lot in the coming years, I'm sure. It's something we have to work on. We will have to work on the strategy. How do we want to implement it? Do we want to continue on what have been put forward?
I think it has been smartly put forward. Do we want to make some changes? In my past, when I joined different companies, I've been more a developer than a manager, I love developing, I love changing thing, moving things forward. I think we've got a strong base. Thank you, André, for giving that strong base. I've led two listed company. I was CEO of AGF. Well, I've been CFO and CEO of AGF, which was a listed company, and I've been CEO of Natixis, which was a listed company. I must say that dialogue with shareholders has been always a very important things to me. Creating value for all stakeholders is at the heart of my mindset.
It's really what I take as one of my duty, making sure that we create value and that value is created for all stakeholders. I will, you know, put all my energy to all my experience to make sure that we all create a lot of value and that value is spread around to all stakeholders. That's really what I see as being my main duty. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you, André, for giving such a great company. I'm very happy to step in your shoes. Your shoes are much bigger than mine, I will try to do that well. Thank you for David for being here and the team. I'm sure we're going to deliver great business.
I'm sure that we will have great moment. There will be several moment where we will have interaction, discussions in order to make sure that we deliver the most value that we can for all of you. Thank you.
Thank you. Olivier, maybe if you let me just do like a closing remark. I know I'm the last thing between you and the cocktail, it's going to be short, believe me. With André's kind word, I just wanted to say on behalf of the Wendel employees in Luxembourg, in Paris and New York, thank you. It's been five great years, five years of leadership, of thoughtfulness, kindness, businessness. I think we all grew thanks to you. It was a great time together. We wish you all the best, you will be missed.
I'm gonna kiss these two guys. Okay.
Laurent.
Thank you.
Thanks.
David.
Merci beaucoup. Merci.
Cocktail. Thank you again.