Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to welcome you here in Zurich or online for this Rexel 2022 Capital Markets Day. I'm Guillaume Texier, the CEO of Rexel since 10 months. Today I will, with my team, share with you our vision of the future for our markets and for Rexel. We collectively have a very strong conviction that, one, Rexel has changed for the good. Two, the market is accelerating. Three, we are ready to open a new chapter and create substantially more value. Those are, at this stage, only words, and our goal today is to put actions and trends behind those words. Before we do that, let me hand over to Ingrid Knott, our Switzerland country CEO, to tell you a little bit more about our business here.
Because indeed, there are reasons why we have decided to hold the Capital Market Day here in Zurich. In our 22 countries, Switzerland is ahead of the curve on many topics, starting with a very important one, digital. Coming here hopefully helps you understand, for those attending physically the CMD, how the future of Rexel may look like elsewhere, even though Switzerland is also a very unique country by many aspects. Enough said. Ingrid, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Guillaume. My name is Ingrid Knott, and I am very proud to be able to present you Elektro-Material here today, which is the Rexel Group of Switzerland. I also wanna welcome our guests watching on the live stream, and I'm very pleased to have so many visitors here today. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Elektro-Material. Before I start introducing you to Elektro-Material, I want to give you some of my professional background. The last two responsibilities I had before I joined Elektro-Material in March 2022 were CEO of Ledvance Switzerland in Winterthur, and key account director and business developer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Now I would like to start to give you some details on how we operate and I wanna show you how we are strong in the marketplace.
First of all, our market share has increased over the last decades, and we are the clear market leader in Switzerland. What does this mean? Last year we generated sales of EUR 546 million with 711 people, and this was done with nine branches. We were very resilient in terms of COVID crisis. We only had a very small sales decline in 2020 to rebound significantly in 2021. We are within the top companies of Rexel in terms of profitability and EBIT margin. Further reasons for our success in the marketplace are, first of all, that we have a well-balanced market exposure. This means that the installer is the backbone of our business. We know the installer very well, and we communicate very much with our customers.
We also expand our business into the industrial side, and this is with a dedicated team, again, to understand the customer and the customer needs. Our network is built along the string of population density in Switzerland. We have nine branches and three AutoStore which help us to increase our productivity in the marketplace. We are not only close to the customer, but we also strive to digitalize and automatize our business more and more. What does it mean that we are highly digitalized? 73% of our business in 2021 was based on digital orders. Digital means webshop, app, and tablet orders. Our app, our EM app, won the Best of Swiss Apps in 2021 because it contributed so much to our customers' need. Our product and consulting competence is high, and we do regular trainings with our people.
We have experts for lighting, for the industrial business, and also for new energy. I already mentioned that we operate with three AutoStores, the fourth one to come soon. Our supplier relationships are strong and long-term. This helps us in terms of crisis and scarcity of product to manage accordingly and to keep up the high service level our customers deserve. Our assortment is adapted to Swissness. That's a big word. What does Swissness mean? Swissness means a high perception of quality and a high need for quality products, but also products which are completely adjusted to the Swiss market, like the famous Swiss three-pin plug some of you might have seen in a hotel room. Our customers have easy access to our shops and to their goods. They can come 24/7. They just need an entrance code, and then they can pick up their goods during the night.
In some cases, we even have additional pickup locations where the customer can come whenever he's around and pick up the goods. Now, we don't only ship parcels, we have knowledge to manage full projects, and this is something I wanna show you via a movie. It's a project we ran on Kleine Scheidegg lift station, which is at 3,800 meters height, which means that you have to have specific products meeting these environmental conditions because temperature can go down to -25, -30 degrees. So really specific products are needed in such circumstances. Can we please launch the spot to show you the project and how we did it? You can hear the strong wind blowing. It's just an impression on what we face under such conditions at 3,800 meters height.
The team did a great job in managing this project from the very beginning, which means the planning, the product testing, the product selection, and the shipment of the products to 3,800 meters height. I hope this gave you an impression about our project competencies. I want to mention the strength of the team because nothing is possible without a good team, and we have a very good team here in Switzerland. Roberto, who just qualified for the Ironman on Hawaii, stands for the performance culture of our company. 38 nations are represented within our team. 21% out of the team are female, and we have 40% of women in management, in the management board of Elektro-Material.
The relatively low turnover rate of our people shows that people love to work for us, and they have modern conditions. Thank you very much. That was the little introduction to Switzerland. Enjoy your stay here, and I hand back to Guillaume.
Thank you, Ingrid. Before we enter the core of the presentation, let me maybe rewind for just a moment. Our last Capital Markets Day was in February 2021, 16 months ago, and it was just before my appointment as the CEO of Rexel. At the time, I had been informed and consulted by the board informally, and it goes without saying that I was fully in line with the targets which were presented at the time to the financial markets. 16 months is not such a long time, and you will see that many of the initiatives that we are going to show to you today are a continuation of what had been presented before, and that's only normal. Rexel had an outstanding year, 2021.
You have seen this morning with our guidance update that we are also going to have a record 2022. Clearly there is no reason to break a model which works. At the same time, 16 months is also long, and many things have changed, starting from obviously a few new faces around the executive committee table at Rexel, but more meaningfully in terms of market situation and market trends. Also, one thing which has changed very positive in this timeframe is I think our degree of confidence in what we are doing. We believe our current performance is due to market conditions, but also and more importantly, they are the reflection of solid underlying action plans which will allow us to sustainably take Rexel to the next level.
We think that Rexel in the future will be better than the old one, in terms of organic growth, profitability and return to shareholders. Why do we believe that, and why should you believe that? We think we are at a historical moment in the history of Rexel, with three parameters coming in line at the right moment and opening a window of opportunity, a unique window of opportunity for us. First of all, Rexel has transformed over the last few years. From underperforming the market, it is now over-performing, both in growth and in profitability. I was not here at the time, but I think it's fair to say that five years ago we were not really relevant in many of our countries, both to our customers and to our suppliers.
The management team has done an outstanding job repairing the fundamentals of trade to put us in a much more favorable position today. We'll come back to that, but bottom line is that Rexel is not the same as five years ago. Secondly, and equally more important, our market is accelerating. I know you hear that from everybody, from our suppliers, from our competitors, from utilities, and the fact is, this is true.
We can obviously all be considered as a little bit biased when we say that, but coming personally from outside of the industry, I am amazed at seeing the number of external trends which converge to push for more energy savings, more electricity, and more green electricity in the mix of electricity, creating each time new opportunities for Rexel. Thirdly, third trend, the evolution of the market will, I believe, increasingly favor large distributors like us. Our world is becoming more complex, requiring expertise, investment, and scale. I think we will see in the future more opportunities for market share gains and consolidation, as we have started to demonstrate last year with the acquisition of Mayer in the USA. Three important trends coming together at the right time to open a unique window of opportunity.
The first part of our presentation today will be dedicated to give you more color on why this unique window of opportunity. The second part will be to detail our strategy to seize it. You will see that this strategy hinges around two pillars. One, which is continuing our successful journey towards operational excellence as it is far from finished everywhere, and we still have many opportunities for improvement, especially in the field of digital. The second pillar will be about developing differentiation in a few selected areas which will shape our industry in the future. Namely those areas are energy transition solutions, advanced services, and ESG. By doing that successfully, Rexel will put itself in a position to deliver accelerated financial returns, both in growth and in profitability, allowing us to deliver greater returns to shareholders.
This is our program, and this is what we will develop today. To start this presentation, I would like to come back a little bit to the recent past. I was not part of the company at the time, but in the last 10 months, I have visited at least twice each one of the main countries. I have talked to teams, I have talked to customers, I have talked to suppliers. The constant feedback I get is that we are not the same as 5 years ago. We have worked on our foundations and have consolidated what I believe is a very good platform, solid and resilient, which we can now use to build and to grow.
If we are in a position today to write a new chapter in the history of Rexel, it is because this work has been done by the teams. Many KPIs could be used to describe, what has changed. I just picked a few ones which I think are meaningful. The first one, probably the most visible from the outside, is our profitability. Five years ago, we were at 4.2%. Last year, which is shown on this graph, we were at 6.2%. You have seen in our press release that we expect to be at circa 6.7% this year, with which is an impressive improvement in six years, approximately 40 BPS per year. Granted, we are probably at a good market moment with a combination of strong volume and inflation, which favors the top line.
beyond that, a very large part of this improvement is due to hard work and deep transformation, which is going to provide lasting results. Second very important KPI, financial KPI, is the cash flow conversion. The teams have done a very good job focusing on this to put us comfortably and sustainably in the more than 60% conversion range. This is what a relentless focus on working capital and CapEx control has allowed us to deliver. I have to say, taking a little bit in advance to the rest of the presentation, that this discipline is here to stay. As a consequence of that, our leverage is, for the first time, in years, in a very good situation, below the 2.0 ratio, which we consider as being our zone of comfort.
This, despite us having made last year our biggest acquisition in 10 years, financed on our balance sheets. This is clearly a very good position to be in at a moment when interest rates are going up and as we also may see further interesting small and mid-sized consolidation opportunities in the market. If I switch to the next slide and to the next set of KPIs, there are also business metrics behind this good performance. First of all, we are back on track to deliver growth. Organic growth from 2011 to 2016 was flat. It jumped to 3.5% from 2016 to 2021. Yes, there is a little bit of inflation in there, but not only.
As you can see in the middle graph, we have also gained market share recently in several large countries. Finally, on the right part, we have progressed materially in our push to become a truly omnichannel company with EUR 3.5 billion of our sales now digital, and with our digital sales progressing double digit every year. I guess the bottom line is that this financial results that you saw on the previous slide were not obtained by chance, but by hard work and deep transformation. An additional change that I would like to underline is that Rexel is today more resilient than it was. I know you will have probably questions about that and about the macro environment during the Q&A session. I hope that you will also have questions on the long-term strategy.
That being said, you will see that I am optimistic on the macro environment, even though maybe cautiously optimistic. You will see also that we have a robust midterm guidance based on strong belief in our business model. Independently of all of that, it's interesting to note that our journey to operational excellence has also made us more resilient to any situation for many reasons. For example, in several countries, we have changed our customer mix to be more balanced and less dependent on high volume customers. We have evolved our geographical mix towards more resilience. In some emerging countries like China and India, we have focused very much on more stable industrial automation business. We have also grown our digital sales, which over time reduces our fixed costs and makes us more agile. We will continue to do so.
Something which is especially important to you and which we will nurture as an asset is our ability to deliver on our targets. This has not always been the case, and I know some of you remember this from the past. My message here is very simple. This is not the same company, and the new Rexel is setting goals carefully and over-delivering on them. This was the case at the last Capital Markets Day, as you can see here, on which we have delivered ahead of our expected timing. Finally, maybe and last but not least, the management team. It has evolved also, but without a big revolution.
What I have found when I arrived is a set of excellent professionals having delivered the transformation of Rexel over the last few years, and having, for many of them, the right balance between experience and the knowledge of the details of what it takes to be successful in distribution and openness to the future. Yes, I have made a few adjustments, like for example, bringing in more digital and data experience at the executive committee level with Brad Paulsen, the CEO of the U.S., and Constance Grisoni, who is in charge of strategy. Making sure also that ESG was made a true priority with Nathalie Wright now focusing solely on digital and ESG. You notice also that we are striving to make the executive committee more diverse, which still has progress to be made.
I'm very confident with the management team that we have today. This is the right team to bring Rexel into the future without losing track, of what has made our success. You remember my first slide, which was about, the unique window of opportunity that we had. The first component was about Rexel and the fact that it had transformed over the last few years, which I have developed in the last few slides. Now Rexel is ready, and it is ready at exactly the right moment, a moment of historical acceleration in our markets, which will provide many opportunities to seize.
Many people have said it before me, and many people will hopefully say it after me, but what I can do is provide our specific take on this, the perspective of the distributor, who both has a central observation position in the supply chain of all the forces at play, and a unique position to influence and play an active role in the evolution of those markets. I can also provide modestly my own outside-in view as a professional who has been involved in sustainability for all of my career, basically since 25 years. My message on this electrification trend is going to be very simple. It is real. First of all, I would like to talk a little bit about sustainability, as sustainability is the main driver of electrification.
Not the only one, and we will see that later, but the main driver. What really strikes me when I look at how this topic has evolved over the last few years is a strong alignment today of stakeholders. 5 years ago, the situation was more or less the same as 25 years ago when I started working in this field of sustainability. A topic making the news very clearly, but difficulty to transform that into action and to have people pay for environment and sustainability. A few believers here and there. A few schemes, incentive schemes in countries, but nothing which would be really generalized.
Today, it looks to me that things have changed because there is a real strong alignment of many important stakeholders, and I think that is to me the main change compared to five years ago. Public authorities going from national, regional to supranational, committing to long-term money and regulations. Young generations being extremely serious about this and really willing to put their money where their mouth is. Everybody who has teenage children at home will know that. Financial markets obviously getting very serious about ESG targets, ESG rankings and so on. I don't need to elaborate on that. More and more corporates, customers, suppliers committing to net zero agendas, either as a consequence of the other stakeholders' pressure or by true personal commitment of their leadership, or probably a mix of both.
Today, there are really strong pillars supporting this sustainability trend, and this is the main difference to me compared to five years ago. This trend is here to stay, and it's here to grow. The consequence for Rexel is absolutely enormous. You may know that, but I would like to repeat it because it's quite impressive. There is no net zero agenda in the world without 1, energy savings, 2, green electrification. There is simply no other solution, whatever the economic sector. You can see that on those graphs, which are the forecasts made by the International Energy Agency, summing up what the implementation of net zero agendas in the various economic sectors would likely mean in terms of energy consumption and in terms of energy production mix.
The consequence is very clear in all sectors, with both the total quantity of energy per output reducing, which will provide as many opportunities in terms of sensors, automation and so on, and both the share and the total amount of electricity increasing, which will provide opportunities in terms of equipment replacement and grid upgrades. Here we are talking heat pumps, we are talking photovoltaic energy generation, we are talking electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, but not only. If I take the industrial sector, for example. All industries are looking at replacing their fossil fuel hot processes by electrical equivalents. It's not always obvious in some cases. In some cases, it will take a lot of R&D to get there, but there is simply no other way to achieve net zero apart from compensation.
In many cases, processes have already been developed and are spreading quickly. One example I find interesting because it was a little bit unexpected to me as I joined Rexel is what is happening in the oil and gas industry, and especially in the fracking industry in the US. Here we see many players, and many of them are customer of ours, replacing diesel engines used to run the pumping equipment by electrical equivalent, which is called e-frac. Because of our strong presence in Texas, we are quite involved in those projects, and I tend to say jokingly that if the oil industry is going to electricity, then all industries at some point are going to go to electricity, and it means the trend is really solid.
Another thing in terms of sustainability and electrification trend, which is not often talked about, which is quite interesting, is what happens when those technologies start really to get to scale. Having one charging station in a building is okay without modifying materially the energy supply of the building. But what if 50% of the cars in the building needs charging? Then you will likely exceed the maximum load of the building, and you will have, as a building owner or as a building occupant, to start thinking about grid modernization, energy generation, storage of energy, and energy management to make sure that those things and this constraint is managed carefully. We are really only at the beginning of what all of this means.
I talked about the stakeholders providing solid supporting pillars to the sustainability trends. I'd like now to talk about two additional very important, what I would call boosters, that are energy cost increases on one hand, and energy scarcity concerns, especially in Europe. With the Ukraine war, those two topics made their way very quickly to the top of the priority list for everybody. In Germany, in Austria, in France, building owners, factory general managers, and public authorities ask themselves a question which they thought they would never have to ask. What is our plan if electricity supply and more, generally, energy supply is not guaranteed anymore, or if it becomes outrageously expensive? This is what, for example, has driven our photovoltaic business to grow more than 80% in Q1 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.
We also see energy savings program accelerating and many corporates, which are launching a complete review of their locations in Europe to make sure that they revisit the payback and the attractiveness of all energy savings projects as well as all energy generation projects. This makes total sense, and we are, by the way, also doing the same for our own locations, even though it's at a lower scale, obviously. This is a trend which is probably going to also favor us. Public authorities have exactly the same concern, and this is the reason, for example, why the European Union proposed recently a program called REPowerEU.
The consequences of this program, you see them on the graph, are material for us in many categories, but especially on the photovoltaic side, I was just mentioning. Once again, I have to remind that when we are talking photovoltaics, we are not just talking, PV panels, but also inverters, mounting accessories, electrical system revamp, energy management, sometimes energy storage, and also services. Clearly, sustainability is an accelerating supporting trend to our business. Interestingly enough, it's not the only one. Another one I would like to mention because I find it quite interesting is labor scarcity. We all know that this is becoming an important topic in all countries in the world and especially in North America. Here I'm not really talking about it as a threat, but more as an opportunity. Why so?
Because we can help solve it. Obviously, we don't have the ambition to be the solution to labor scarcity problem, but more modestly to be a part of the solution. First of all, because of what our business is fundamentally about. We handle the supply chain hassle for our customers, and they have dozens of examples of customers telling us that this increasingly is important for them. They want their crews to focus on electricity cabling, on installation, what they are paid to do, what they call value-added tasks for them. Those value-added tasks in their book don't include supply chain. They would rather have an external trusted partner do that for them, and very often we are this partner.
When I'm talking supply chain, I'm not just talking delivery of products, I'm talking pre-kitting, I'm talking pre-assembling and many additional services that we are going to talk about. We have the ability to build on this by adding also digital, which increases even more the productivity for our customers, removing the need for additional people on their side and on our side. Scarcity of labor also plays a role in the increasing interest that we are seeing in automation solutions. Automating makes even more sense when it becomes difficult or impossible to find the right people.
In a context where supply chains are going from worldwide to more regional, I mean, everybody knows that, and even national in some cases, with relocation of more and more industries to higher cost regions, obviously, this makes all the sense in the world to automate. You will see that industrial automation is one important part of our areas of focus for the future. In general, in the world which is becoming more complex, pure financial payback, which used to be the only KPI for many of our electricity projects, is now only one of many. Let's take three examples in our three main markets. A typical home renovation, a tertiary building implementing a sustainability agenda, and an industrial automation case.
In the first example, there is obviously the economic payback, which is, by the way, more and more influenced by public incentives given the amount of money which is put towards this topic, and I think this amount will only increase. There is also a level of added comfort which comes with energy renovation and home automation, including, by the way, a type of comfort which is becoming increasingly important, and especially in this season, summer comfort in high temperature. In the second example, you know the economic drivers are supplemented in more and more countries by building codes, forcing the movement towards greener buildings, in certain time frames. There is the net zero commitments of building owners and users, themselves sometimes driven by the pressure of their shareholders.
Finally, there is the security of supply concern we were just talking about. In the case of industrial automation, you add labor scarcity as well as health and safety benefits, which come with automation. This summarizes very well what we are seeing. Financial payback is not only the only KPI. The trends are not only led by the financial calculation, but by many supporting trends which converge in the same and unique direction, which is acceleration. The use case I'm going to show you in Sweden in a video is a good example among others of the multiple factors which enter into consideration when going for an electrification project.
We have had a partnership with the Swedish Football Association for a couple of years, where we bring our specialist knowledge in energy optimization to support the ongoing renovation of part of their 1,500 owned football facilities in the countries. We have carried out several projects where we audit energy usage, identify energy efficiency opportunities, and our local customers, installers, then install lighting, solar panels in the facilities, which significantly reduces their consumption and their carbon footprint. I would like to show you a video of a testimony of the end customer. If you can launch the video. I couldn't finish this depiction of where our market is going without mentioning digital. Because digital is transforming our world, and Rexel is at the forefront of this trend.
The reason for this, or for part of it, the same ones that you would see in other sectors, a change of generation of customers and the ever-rising digital standards set by B2C. There are also digital trends which are specific to our industry, and they are mentioned in the two green boxes. For example, more and more electrical products are connected, inducing a need for our customers to go digital at some point they will be out of the market. This is particularly the case in industrial automation, where a complete solution will often include both products but also an OT layer and an IT layer. Overall, it is obvious that our market is evolving fast towards digital, which provides clear opportunities for us as a digital leader.
Opportunity for basic transaction services, easing the life of our customers, but opportunity also for advanced services and expertise, helping them cope with digital and opportunity to differentiate from smaller players who wouldn't have the ability to provide the same range of digital services. This digital evolution doesn't go at the same speed for all customers, depending on the specific needs, depending also on the country, and depending on the end market, and depending on the generation. This is what this slide highlights a little bit, I believe really well on three country examples. In this context, we must address the needs of all of our customers.
The solution is to have the right digital tools, obviously, that's a prerequisite, but also to make sure that we provide a true omnichannel value proposition, and I hope you saw that today in Switzerland, addressing the complex needs of everybody. That our sales force spends the necessary time convincing each customer of the specific business case for the digital. This business case may be different from customer to customer, and this is what we are doing. It is hard work to progress digital, but because it is hard work, it results in true differentiation once it is known, and it is often very unique. I hope I was able to convince you that Rexel's market is accelerating, and that this acceleration is not just a short-term boost because it is caused by many converging supporting trends.
An equally important point I wanted to make when starting this presentation is that Rexel is not a passive spectator. It is and it can be a true actor of this evolution. Let me elaborate a little bit on this. You know that I was lucky in my career to be both on the manufacturing side and on the distribution side. I believe I have a fairly unbiased perspective on what each one adds in terms of value to the overall supply chain. You will not be surprised to hear me say that I believe in the importance of what the distributor does beyond offering credit and moving products. I believe in our role addressing the diversity of customer, a diversity that manufacturers cannot address.
I believe in our role in helping train and educate those contractors to innovative technologies as close as possible to the field. I believe above all in the need for additional services, gaining time and money to our customers that we only can provide. I also believe, and this is what this slide is about, that the importance of distributor is rather growing than diminishing in the current environment. Why so? There are three reasons at least. First, we talked about it, talent scarcity, which is a global challenge for our customers just like us and for our suppliers. In a world where good employees are difficult to train and to retain, everybody has a tendency to focus them on where they add the most value.
As I was telling you, this is the reason why we see more and more customers asking us to manage a bigger proportion of their supply chain for them. Like utilities, for example, in Canada. You know, utilities in Canada, their side would allow them to go direct to the suppliers, but they overall feel that they are not equipped to do so and that it would be a waste of their employee resources. That's the reason why we do business with them and I had extensive talks with them to understand what the value proposition was, and this is exactly that. They want to focus on what they are good at.
We see examples of that on a daily basis, including examples of customers asking us for complex services allowing them to take, once again, non-value added tasks off the plates of their crews. This trend will undoubtedly grow in importance. Second thing which has changed, immediate availability is no longer a commodity. Since one year we experience a scarcity, it's no news for you. I'm not sure this will go away immediately with the demand for electrical products accelerating, which is going to put the supply chain, the global supply chain under tension. This again put the distributor in the spotlight, giving him a more complex role to fulfill than before. Third trend, complexity overall is rising with more innovative solutions. We're talking about EV charging, we're talking about photovoltaics.
More connected solutions, all requiring more expertise, more accompanying services, more training. When I look at these trends, I think the distributors in general have a notion of opportunities to add value in front of them. In the medium-term future, I see a bigger and more complex role to play for leading distributors, which doesn't take anything away from what the manufacturers and the customers are doing, but it's just a more efficient and more synergistic way to organize the global supply chain. This overall context will also very probably be favorable to large distributors. I don't underestimate smaller competitors, and very often in many countries there are formidable competitors, but the challenges that they face will become greater and greater as all those new trends we are talking about require scale. Going digital requires scale.
Gathering the data which are necessary to do ESG trackers, we're going to talk about that, require scale. Developing collaborative actions with suppliers and being important to them also require scale. If I had to bet, I would say that we will see some consolidation in our world in the next few years in which we intend to participate. I guess one good person to talk about those trends is Chris Guérin, the CEO of one of our important cable suppliers, Nexans, who is known to have a good and broad vision of where the industry as a whole is going. If you can launch the video.
We are at the beginning of a huge electrical revolution that will have exactly the same magnitude of investment as what happened between 1950 to 1970. Why? Because we need to shift the generation of electricity of today, which is 70% coming from fossil fuels to convert to renewable energy. We need as well to renew the entire worldwide power grid, because the electrification is the fastest way to world decarbonization. We need to electrify the usage of our daily life. This is why in Nexans we have decided to simplify to amplify, really converging all our resources R&D efforts to the electrification ecosystems.
In the meantime, to converge all our management focus on sales focus to the strongest partners of the world, like the company Rexel. We will bring them the best services, the best solutions, the best innovation in order to really help them to grow much faster.
We are convinced with the executive committee of Rexel that the moment is right to write a new chapter in the history of Rexel, as we are ready at a moment when the markets are at an inflection point. We want to write a new chapter, but we don't want to tear down the rest of the book which has made our success. This is the first pillar, the first of two pillars of our strategy, which is excelling across the board on fundamentals. Yes, we have delivered good performance in 2021, and we will deliver outstanding performance in 2022. We believe that there is more value to be extracted from our current core model. Our transformation is well advanced, but it's not finished everywhere.
The good thing is, on most of the topics, we know the winning recipe for having applied it in our most advanced countries. The rest is mostly a question of execution, and this is going to be our first priority, excelling across the board on fundamentals. We will not limit ourselves to being excellent. We also want to lead the way, and we want to do so on a few selected topics which we think are key for the future of the industry. We think in particular about three topics, innovative energy transition solutions, advanced services, and ESG. We believe that focusing on those areas will help us take the best advantage of the accelerating trends that I was talking about. In other words, we want the best of both worlds.
We want to solidify what we have done over the last few years and generalize it across the board, be it on sales excellence, operational excellence or digital. We want to organize ourselves to seize the future better than competition. This is ambitious, but we believe that we are well positioned to do this. This plan will be implemented deep into the organization, which we have already started to do. It's not about doing it in the Paris office. It's not about just doing it at the executive committee level. It is about taking those two main priorities and deciding how to best address them in each country, in each region, taking into account market specificities, Rexel competitive positioning, and how comfortable we feel about our ability to push the transformation and at what pace.
The country CEOs will clearly be the leaders of this, and they are fully on board. Let me now invite on stage, Nathalie Wright, Constance Grisoni, Ingrid Knott again, Brad Paulsen, and Thomas Moreau, as we are going to get into the details of the plan. Welcome to the stage. We will start with the first component of the plan that I was talking about, continuing to work on our business fundamentals to unlock more value. Because doing this consistently is probably the best opportunity and the best time to value ratio that you can find, in Rexel. We have spent the last five years, rebuilding our basics, and we have done so very successfully in many countries. We have not done it everywhere. There continues to be low-hanging fruits to harvest.
This is going to be our number one priority in all areas. We will highlight only a few meaningful topics today, but this goal of excelling everywhere touches all of our operations. Logistic excellence is clearly the first topic I want to talk about. You see here a slide which we have already shown in the past in our presentation, which is about the main drivers which drive our three categories of clients, residential clients, commercial clients, and industrial clients. Very clearly, in this area, you can see that three of them, the first three ones, are about logistics.
Guillaume, maybe let me just.
Yeah. I will leave it to you. Yeah.
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you, Guillaume. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. Yeah, supply chain, as you said, Guillaume, is a key topic for Rexel. I would like to focus myself on three main reason why this is such important. The first reason is supply chain is at the heart of our value proposition to our customers. As you said, Guillaume, features, the different features we presented in terms of value proposition, you can see how supply chain is at the heart. We highlighted in orange here how this value proposition depend on supply chain excellence. The second reason of supply chain, why supply chain is such important is it is a necessary enabler for digital.
It's clear that you can have any nice webshop, you can have any ergonomic webshop or any efficient EDI or PunchOut. If you cannot be able to deliver on time, it will not be efficient at all. The third reason why supply chain is so important is availability products is not anymore a commodity. We just lived today and in the past months what we had in terms of pandemic and COVID period, and if you look at what we had with the shortages now we are suffering, the capability to deliver on time is really a differentiator, and we have to develop this capability. In this field of logistics, we are working a lot, and we are doing many, many things.
What you have to know, it's our supply chain products and those who discover what we are doing in Switzerland, our supply chain products, our supply chain architecture is based on two things, is driven by two things. The first is it is driven by first country specificities. Our organization will depend on urbanization, on traffic and density, on environmental constraints, and customer habits. If you look in Switzerland here, what you could see in terms of branches in Zurich, you could discover a kind of small DC, automated DC, and this is really unique. This model here in Switzerland is a unique model that exists nowhere else in the world. The second element which driven our supply chain is our customer needs. Here we see a strong evolution in our customer needs.
Evolving in two directions. The first direction is more convenience, and the second direction is more product-ready, readily available. In fact, it means that the standard model, the historical model of branches, is not anymore adapted without any DC, without any evolution. Customers, first of all, want more SKUs, more SKUs available quickly, and customers expect a better delivery promise. A better delivery promise means better in terms of speed. We are not talking in days now, we are talking more and more in hours. A better delivery promise in terms of ease, and we have to develop customized concepts like local concepts, like integrated system concepts, all this customized systems, adapted to customer needs. What we have to do is, of course, to adapt and to constantly progress in terms of supply chain and of course enrich our omnichannel model. What do we do?
We need to invest, and we are investing, and we're gonna continue to invest. First of all, in large DC, in large automatic DC centers, distribution centers, allowing us to serve more SKUs. Today, we have six automated distribution center in the world. The objective is to progress and to reach and to triple the number between today and 2025. The second element we're gonna push and we're gonna invest is the urban model. We are addressing more and more urban zone, and we know that urban zone needs specific services, a specific model. What we found here, for instance, in Zurich or in Paris or in many big cities, we have adapted the model to urban model, to the urban cities, and we're gonna develop this model.
The last element we're gonna invest is to multiply the 24 hours, 7 days solution. Saying that our customers don't need products only from 6:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., but all over the day and during the weekend. We need to adapt this to be able to serve on a daily basis and all of the time our customers as best as possible. To illustrate my comments, I would like to share with you 2 major projects we launched in Rexel. The first one is located in Lyon, so in France, in my country. I would like to show you how we have set up our logistics to help our customers to develop their business while overcoming the constraints of a major urban area.
In fact, if you look at the map, what we have developed is to put in place a diversified DC network. This diversified DC network is based on an ecosystem of touchpoint and on several tools. The first tool is Miribel. It's our new DC, automated DC center we're gonna open in next September, which will be able to serve more than 40,000 SKUs. With an AutoStore able to stock more than 50,000 boxes. This is the first tool we're gonna create. The second tool which is part of the diversified DC network is Lyon Gerland. What is Lyon Gerland? Lyon Gerland is a unique central branch serving all the downtown of Lyon.
The objective is not to multiply the number of branches. Here is to create one center able to deliver all over the city and to be able to deliver more than 6,000 SKUs in less than 2 hours. This is an example of what is the urban model. In addition to these two tools, we have a host of small branches in the suburbs and in strategic traffic locations. It is really small branches to cover the customer needs and to give agility to our customers. Last point is all the locals. We diversify the format to be able to be as close as possible to our customers, and their jobs. Thanks to this model, we bring to our customers two added value. The first added value is to make their life easy in urban model.
You can imagine how it is tricky for them to make business when you are a professional, taking into account the constraints we have, the public constraints, the environmental constraints, and Rexel is here to facilitate their life. The second element is to improve, of course, their productivity, their efficiency. These tools are able to deliver and to give the capability to our customer to get money to develop their business. As I say to my teams, a rich customer is a rich Rexel. We have to gain the capability to our customer to develop their business. In the same time, we give them the possibility to optimize their carbon footprint with this model.
For Rexel, three advantages I would like to focus: customer experience, of course, customer satisfaction, you cannot imagine how satisfying customers thanks to these tools. Supply chain productivity. For Rexel, it represent an evolution of plus 25% productivity thanks to these automated systems. We optimize also our network of branches. We optimize the number of square meters. Taking into account you have a DC, you have a central branch, you can reduce in the other branches the number of square meters. Last point, we will reach with this system our zero carbon footprint objective on our supply chain. It's what we want to develop, and it's a concept we want to push in our customers.
The second project I wanted to share is the London DC, and we just announced also a new DC for 2023, which will allow us to be state-of-the-art in a very demanding city from a logistics perspective. Here, of course, as I said, for webshop and for digital, this is gonna be a strong accelerator, of course, of our digital performance. This is thanks to this new DC, and we're gonna be able to develop our service offer thanks to this new tool.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. We believe that, in general, a continued flow of investment in this area of supply chain is going to be necessary to make sure that we are at the top level in terms of excellence, in terms of logistics. But an important thing to add is that we're going to do this while keeping our CapEx under control, because the position we are lucky to be in is to have started this journey very early in France, but also in other countries as you've seen in Switzerland, for example. Because of that, we will talk about that in the financial part, we will be able to do that without increasing our level of CapEx.
Now that we have talked about a very important enabler of digital, which is supply chain, let's talk about our strategic roadmap for digital. I would like to invite Nathalie Wright, who is in charge both of digital and ESG, to talk to us about that.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Guillaume. Indeed, you said that earlier. Rexel today is a truly omnichannel company with digital firmly embedded in our business model. That was well illustrated by Thomas just before. That is really a central part of our transformation. Over the past five years, we've done a lot of things. We built very strong digital and data platforms. We have strengthened our IT and security infrastructure. We have developed the expertise of our teams, and we have fostered the adoption of new tools by our teams, especially in the field. From the start, we have adopted a customer-centric approach. We started with what customer wanted. That is really how we have increased stickiness across the board, leveraging both digital and physical channels. Today, we know.
We know what it takes to unlock more value and to take digital to the next level. We can accelerate our growth. We can create more value while we decrease or we reduce both the cost to serve our existing clients and reducing the cost of acquiring new customer. From what we've learned, we know that there is really three main things that we have to look at. The first one, and it was said several times already, customer experience through user experience, user interface, interfaces, search. Performing search is also important, as well as a very reliable system supported, of course, by a very strong supply chain backbone. We have to make it even easier for the various customer segments. That will really make a huge difference.
Last but not least, we need to leverage data quality to increase conversion rates at the different stage of the customer engagement, limiting churn of our existing customer on one hand, as well as targeting new customers in very attractive categories. In addition to that, having a reliable and strongly performing digital channel allows better allocation of our sales force to address the different customer segments in an effective way, addressing customer expectations. You know, you may have the curiosity to look after the mobile app that is demonstrated here close to us. It's really the way we...
What we mean by effective way, really having the right solution, the right app, the right interface, so that we can really match what customer wants and on top of that, augment that capability by bringing the expertise and the capabilities of our sales force. Ingrid, Thomas, and Constance will give you concrete examples of digital solutions that have been developed, deployed, and that are showing material results in terms of growth, productivity, and customer satisfaction. We are very clear. We will double digital sales share in the next five years. Guillaume explained earlier, digitalization is accelerating in our market under the influence of B2C experience, the emergence of a new generation, and as well as the emerging adopters that are willing really trying to take the maximum benefit of the different ways they can interact with this.
We keep enhancing our web platform to remain B2B best-in-class player. I explained that a little bit earlier. We have made strong progress building connection with the IT systems of our customers, driving digital sales and more and more transaction. We have also paid a lot of attention to develop targeted service that enrich our customer experience. Few have already been exposed here, but it's about back office solutions. It's about variety of delivery options, self-checkout in some countries. All of that is bringing value and drives additional transaction. Last but not least, we train our teams. We train them to better address the needs of the customer and to help customer to get the best value out of their digital experience. All the strengths and actions are driving higher digital sales as well as increased customer loyalty.
We confidently commit to doubling the group share of digital sales in by 2027, reaching EUR 10 billion of digital sales and knowing the value of each transaction, it's a massive volume of transaction we'll be able to perform through our digital channels. I will elaborate in the next slide what does it mean to bring all countries to best-in-class. Today in that chart, we are quite clear on who is doing what. As you can see here on the top right corner of the slide, five countries that represent 35% of our sales have already reached a very high level of digitalization. No surprise that Switzerland belongs to that category.
Ingrid will a little bit later explain to you more in depth what it means in her country. We aim to bring the rest of the country to best-in-class, and this requires two things. First, solid foundations, you know, to be successfully implemented. You see on the horizontal axis where we stand and where we are. Second, that is shown on the vertical axis, is the deployment of digital and data solutions enabling the full benefit of digitalization to materialize. 12 countries, the ones that are on the left side, representing 16% of our sales, are still primarily focused on building the foundation.
This means focusing on secure and reliable IT infrastructure, the high level of quality of product data, deployment of data-driven customer segmentation, and finally, the ability to answer customer key questions. Do you have the product I am looking for? When my product will be delivered? What's my price? Five countries representing 49% of our sales are completing the missing bricks. There is two area where they are focusing right now. The first one is digital product data, and the second one is digital adoption. When I describe it that way, it seems easy. I can assure you it's highly complex in a B2B multi-local business.
Each country has taken a very clear commitment, supported by a groupwide program that we have built together covering all geographies with the right focus, with expertise that we can bring on top, help sharing best practices and capabilities that will allow them to deliver on that journey. In addition, we push every opportunity to scale proven AI solution that have been developed. Constance will give you more details about that, and we continue to innovate. It's a never-finishing journey. We have to continue to innovate, and we continue to create value for our customers, supporting the service roadmap, for our suppliers, providing them with advanced analytics and for Rexel employees, bringing them tools and helping them to revamp their processes.
I will hand over back to you, Ingrid, to give us some details about your digitalization process.
Thank you, Nathalie. It's a pleasure.
Switzerland's digital journey started in the year 2000 with the introduction of the first B2B webshop in Swiss distribution. Digital sales got a boost when we introduced the first EM app in the year 2014, and then a mobile app in the year 2015. In 2021, our digital sales reached a level of 73%. This year we are well above 75%, and some of our branches already have a level which is beyond 80%, so there is still way to improve on that. We are at a very high level of digital penetration. Our digital strategy is clear. We want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to order with us.
Therefore, we offer additional sales processes for after sales and pre-sales, and we offer support material and support tools for our customers to offer online. Our digital team did a big installation here to show you some of our features. It's not only that we offer configurators and top article lists, but we also have tools that help the customer to be more efficient in their work process and to save time, especially when they are at work site. Potentially, we could save up to 2.7 million of shipping papers if the order process is fully followed through till to the receipt of goods. We won Best of Swiss Apps award in 2021 because our app really made an impact on the business. That's why our mobile revenue increased double in the last two years.
Our app really makes sure that the customer wants to work with the app, and this is achieved by our team that has two people from the field. Two people in our digital team are, in fact, coming from the field. They are installers. On the right-hand side, you see screenshots of our app to explain a little bit how a fully paperless product process could work. You could check it out with our digital team. Pascal and his team are here to show you how the details work. For those who cannot be here today, can follow the process on our screen here.
You scan the QR code on the delivery bag, you check the product on your app, and then you can check off if everything is okay, or you can even delete products and do corrections on your order and then transmit to be invoiced. This allows a fully paperless process and helps the customer to be speedy and efficient. Thank you very much. I hand over to Nathalie.
Yeah. Thank you, Ingrid. It will be now Thomas to explain what digital brings to his sales force.
Yes. Just sharing this image and why digital is so important today. To be honest, digital is also a fantastic driver of sales force efficiency, and it is key to understand what we can do with these tools. What is at stake, in fact, is the capability to give to our sales reps to be more speed, to be more efficient, and to be more relevant. It's a question of relevancy. Our sales reps, to gain market share, to develop their business, to develop more SKUs, more customers, need to be expert in customer jobs, customer segment, product technologies, customer preferences, and all these elements need to be integrated in the customer experience.
For this, our sales reps have specific tool to amplify and to give them the right wording and the right trends. The second element why it is so important, it's because this digital is giving us the capability to optimize our sales costs and to optimize the ROI, the return on investment, for each visit, for each customer visit. In fact, thanks to these tools, you can enrich the customer basket, you can optimize your margin, and you can optimize your customer satisfaction. Thanks to this image, this exoskeleton is illustrating my words. In fact, we are like augmented sales force. An augmented sales force has a positive effect on our sales team and the capability also to attract new people, and this is really important for our company.
We have two central tools, that are interlinked, of course, and are nourished with content, with algorithm. The first one is our Dynamics 365, which is enriched and strongly enriched, with customer data, provided by sales reps and provided by, customers themselves and provided by their consumption. The second element is the webshop. In line with Ingrid, what she was saying. The software, the webshop is much more than a webshop. It's much more than a transactional tool. It's a relational tool. It's a day-to-day tool. It's a day-to-day business tool for our customers, which is totally personalized, which is totally customized, and providing the right information to sales reps at the right moment. This is why digital is giving the sales reps the right efficiency.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Thomas. I will now ask Constance as promised to come and to give you more details on AI, and that's quite yeah. Constance is the right person because she's the one with her team that has built all of that, before taking the role as head of IT, of strategy.
Thank you, Nathalie. Good afternoon, everyone. Let me build on to what Nathalie, Thomas, and Ingrid have said by zooming a little bit more onto our AI solutions. We have developed a large portfolio of AI solutions that have now all made the proof and provided really good return in the countries and regions they've been deployed in for several months or years. Let me highlight a couple of points on the slide behind me. Sales alerts. Sales alerts started with churn, which is an algorithm that proactively identify customers at risk of leaving us to help give the sales team the right suggestion, the right actions to retain them. It has proven tremendously successful.
Now our priority is to continue to scale this tool to more countries, but also building on the same data, the same pipeline, finding new types of alerts that help us target different parts of the customer journey, sales opportunities, finding ways of increasing our share of wallet, finding ways of visiting the best customers. Let me give you another example. Assortment optimization. Here, we use AI and data to provide recommendation to the branch managers about which product they should store in the branches. There are huge benefits for our customers who find the right product when they come into the stores, as well as for our people who save time on a very complex process and benefit from all the data and knowledge that Rexel has. Here, the priority is again to scale that up to more and more countries. AI pricing.
Our pricing is data-driven in our countries today. Here we believe that AI and advanced analytics can really bring that to the next level by ensuring that all our customers get fair prices, customized and consistent prices, and that our sales teams know how to price a wide range of products in the most effective way. Here the opportunity is again to scale that up and upgrade more and more countries to our AI-driven pricing. Next best offer. Next best offer is about making sure that every single customer when they order with Rexel, whether it's online or in a branch, they get the right suggestions for complementary product to fulfill the order. Overall, our ambition until 2025 is up to 1.5 incremental sales, thanks to AI, and circa 25 basis points of EBITDA margins.
Now let us zoom in a little bit more on next best offer as a, as our case study. As I was saying, it's about bringing expertise closer to the customer. Here the next best offer tool was originally designed to provide complementary products. Recently, given the context, current context of supply chain disruptions, we have enhanced that tool to provide suggestion of similar products. The idea is that when a product is unavailable or even when a product is available, the customer will see online and offline potential similar products that could also meet their needs. It looks like you see on the screen on the webshop. This has proven tremendously successful in the recent months.
We managed, thanks to the upgrade of the AI algorithm, to propose more than 3 times products with alternates to existing ones, and that generated 6 times more revenue, so incredible benefits for us. Let me highlight two other benefits that are not listed on the slide. The first one is about customer stickiness. Indeed, this is providing a huge value to the customers, and it really helps give the value and the differentiated offer of Rexel. The second one is about our people. As we were saying in Thomas' exoskeleton, these tools are really the best tool for the people to work with. That really helps us attract, train, and retain the talents at Rexel. Now let me hand over to Guillaume.
When we talk about excellence, an important word is that we strive to be excellent everywhere. This is not yet the case. We are getting close to that, but this is not yet the case. It's not a secret that Rexel has a set of countries which is very diverse, with some outstanding in everything, and in particular double-digit in terms of profitability, and some which are more challenged and below our average EBITDA. We are progressing quickly in our journey to bring everybody to 6%+, but there is still a value reservoir in the small bubble that you see here, the less than 6% EBITDA bubble. That's what I would like to talk a little bit more about on several examples.
The first example I would like to take, because this is really what makes us particularly confident in our ability to harvest this value, is the example of Germany. You will see that we have gone through a very similar type of virtuous cycle in the US with which Brad will explain. Let me discuss a little bit more in detail what Germany did. I should disclose, first of all, that Germany is still in the small bubble on the chart on the previous slide, but showing very encouraging signs and good momentum. What is interesting in this virtuous circle is that, you know, it's a circle, basically. It starts as you gain recovery momentum. It starts with the right people and giving them confidence while also starting to fix the fundamentals.
You get initial results, which allows you to invest more, which turns into additional customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction allows you to regain market share. Regaining market share increases the confidence of your sales force and also of your employees. You can attract best people, and because of that, you get the results which allow you to reenter the cycle again and again and again. It's all about starting this cycle, and that's what Germany started over the last three years, with first the replacement of the CEO, the replacement of part of the executive committee, the switch to a sales mindset and a KPI-driven culture. Starting with that, we entered into a very successful momentum journey. In the U.S., we have the same kind of momentum led by Jeff Baker.
Jeff decided to retire last month, but it's a very good opportunity for me to introduce Brad Paulsen, who comes to us from HD Supply and had the opportunity to discuss at length with Jeff and also with the teams in all regions about their journey. Maybe, Brad, you can take also this opportunity to tell us what you think about what the remaining opportunity may be and in what areas in the U.S. which is a very important country for us.
Well, good afternoon. It's so nice to be here today to provide an update on the great progress that we've made in the U.S. business. Before we start, I'd like to share how excited I am to join the Rexel team as the CEO of the U.S. business. As Guillaume shared, I joined the team in April after almost 15 years at the Home Depot and HD Supply. I'd say I couldn't be more excited to join the team at a point in time where it has such great business momentum, and after the team has executed, again, a really impressive turnaround under Jeff Baker's leadership.
Now, this turnaround was a multiyear effort, and it started when we reorganized our business away from a banner-specific model, and we moved to an eight-region operating model where our region leaders have full responsibility for all banners. Now, this move allowed us to operate as a single entity, but it also allowed us to assign many of our key commercial decision rights to as close to the customer as possible. When you decentralize those type of decision rights as close to the customer as possible, it does a few things. It drives more customer-focused decision-making, and it also increases the accountability from our employees because their empowerment and their engagement increase. I really consider our operating model and our customer-first culture a real strength for our business in the U.S. market.
You know, at the same time, you know, we've continued to invest in the business by adding new SKUs, increasing inventory, we've opened new branches, and we've continuously invested into our team, making sure that they're trained, knowledgeable and able to service our customers. Then the last point on this slide is our team continues to do a better job of leveraging all the available data and analytics to really improve our operational discipline and drive sustained profitable growth. Again, I applaud the efforts of the team, and I look forward to working with our nearly 7,000 employees to write the next chapter in our history. My philosophy on leading organizations is really simple. You know, I believe if you take care of your people, they will take care of your customers, and the rest will take care of itself.
You know, that's why you see people at the foundation of this slide. You heard me say we are fully committed to investing in our team, making sure they have the skills they need to take care of our customers. We're also fully committed to making sure that our team has the right level of diversity that's reflective of the communities that we serve. To me, the investment in our people is the single most important initiative that we'll execute over the next few years. The top half of this slide highlights the different investments and initiatives we think will drive our near-term growth and customer service success. You know, starting on the left-hand side, we could not be more thrilled with the Mayer acquisition.
Happy to report that we're ahead of schedule in our integration and ahead of schedule in the realization of our planned synergies. We'll talk more about Mayer in a second, but I will say, when you look at our presence in the Southeast United States, which is the strength of the Mayer footprint, we think we're as well-positioned as any distributor to deliver market outperformance. You know, we're equally excited about the other opportunities that are listed on this page to drive our business acceleration. As a distributor, we will always invest in our supply chain 'cause that's how we build trust with our customers, and that's how we position ourselves as their most dependable partner. We'll also continue to invest in our digital customer experience as well as the services and solutions our customers require to run their business.
Now, my perspective on digital, just to add to what the team's already shared, we wanna make sure that our team has the tools and data they need to best serve our customers, and we wanna make sure that we offer a platform that eliminates all unnecessary friction from the order, and fulfillment process. As you can imagine, there's a long list of initiatives that fall into those buckets. Our success is gonna be dependent on our ability to be really disciplined when it comes to capital allocation, and then we need to have a high level of accountability when it comes to initiative execution 'cause we've gotta make sure that our customer experience continues to be value add and relevant as our customers' needs change.
Then the last piece on this slide, you know, we hope to continue to be very active in M&A. The U.S. market is highly fragmented, so it presents a number of opportunities for us to strengthen our position as one of the top national distributors in the U.S. and also create real value for our shareholders. You know, I mentioned Mayer a little bit earlier, and you can tell by the smile on my face, couldn't be happier with the addition of this team into our business. Truly is a world-class organization with a people and customer-first culture that mirrors that of Rexel. As I also mentioned, we are ahead of schedule in our integration and in the realization of our planned synergies.
You know, the key driver of that has been the retention of many of the key leaders from the Mayer business. Now, these individuals have provided a level of leadership and continuity that has allowed us to really execute a seamless integration. Because of that, we're in a position today where we believe we can upgrade our expected synergies from that deal from 1.5%-2.5% of sales. Finally, anytime you do an integration of this size and scale, you're gonna learn a lot, and we certainly did, and we're gonna make sure we apply the learnings from this integration to future acquisitions.
Now, I could stand up here for another 20 minutes telling you all the great things about the Mayer acquisition, but instead, we're gonna run a video so you can hear from Wes Smith, the CEO and President of Mayer Electric.
I thought I would share a little bit about how and why Mayer chose Rexel for our one phone call. As many of you probably know, when our family decided to explore options, we made one phone call, and that was to Rexel. I'll cover three reasons why. First, culture and values. I've known Jeff for over a decade and have tremendous respect for him, and what Rexel has done in the United States over the last 5 or 6 years has been very impressive. But there were a couple other things that were very important. I'm very much a student of this industry over my 35 years, and obviously the industry's changing.
I studied in depth what kind of investments various companies were making in digital, and very impressed as I studied Rexel and the digital investments to be made, and the differentiation that I think that will create for us over time. The other element was the regional structure. When Rexel USA really hit its stride in the United States is when it created the regional structure. Business is local, and having that local touch and feel and some local autonomy, but part of a bigger entity, I felt like would fit very well for Mayer in folding into and becoming part of Rexel in the regional structure.
This is a very, very good transition to talk a little bit about M&A, which I see today as a very interesting additional value creation lever for Rexel. This is a lever that we have not used very much in the last few years because we were focused on our internal transformation, and we thought that before doing M&A and being able to add value with that, we needed to have the right platform. We now think in many countries that we are at this point where we can look at M&A opportunities and create value from that like we have created with Mayer.
You know, we think also that this is the right moment to do so, because as I said previously, and as you saw in the words of Wes Smith, we think that there are many companies which are going to look at options in terms of acquisitions and sales, and that there will be consolidation activity in the market in the future, and we intend to be part of that. We will do that strategically and cautiously. Strategically by focusing on the three categories that you see here, reinforcing core ED positions, with the U.S. being our number one priority.
The example, the very good example that we had last year was Mayer or also a much smaller one, Winkle, mostly specialized in industrial automation, where the integration is taking place and with good success also. Second category, expand to adjacent specialists. Third category, develop value-added models. You see here also examples of recent acquisitions, mostly of mid-size and small acquisitions, where it's an interesting way of adding capabilities to our business and expand either into services, or into new categories of products or of customers. As you can tell, I believe that it's the right time for us to do a little bit more M&A, but as I said, we will do that cautiously.
We are very conscious of the uncertainty in the market, and I can tell you that when we look at M&A opportunities, we do that with caution, looking very strictly at the business plan, at financial criteria, which remain exactly the same as before, in terms of value creation, in terms also of reduction of net result. But if we are able to do many more Mayer in the future, we will be able, I think, to create additional value on top of the organic sales growth that I was mentioning. I would like now to switch to the second strategic pillar, which is about building a leadership position on several important topics. When I say leadership, I mean that we want to build a truly differentiated value proposition here.
When I think about Rexel in 2025 compared to competition, I see us, as I said during this first hour, excellent everywhere on our fundamentals, but we may not be the only ones. Other large players are also going to strive to be excellent on those fundamentals. The points on which I see us really building a differentiation are those ones, ESG, energy transition solutions, and on advanced services. On those topics, which I believe will shape the future of the industry, our ambition is clearly to accelerate. I would like to start with ESG, which is a topic that I have personally at heart. You may know that most of my career had to do one way or the other with sustainability, starting 25 years ago.
This way, this may be one of the reasons why I am deeply convinced that Rexel has an active role to play in ESG, more active than in the past, but beyond it being the right thing to do, there are many also good reasons to do so, and I would like to go through them very quickly before handing over to Nathalie. The first reason is that our market, as I mentioned in the first part of the presentation, is supported and increasingly supported by sustainability trends. It would be strange to me not to be 200% committed to this topic as a company participating in the market and benefiting from its trends. Indeed, many of our suppliers are also very committed and opinion leaders on ESG.
What strikes me is that all of our other stakeholders also have a growing interest in ESG. Our customer, starting with the European ones and starting with the public ones, but not only. Many corporates today have net zero agendas and want their distributors to help them achieve it. Our suppliers also want to partner with us more on ESG, which only makes sense. Our shareholders obviously are asking more and more questions on ESG every quarter. Last but not least, talents, especially in the younger generation, are particularly sensitive to what we are doing in this field. In a world where attracting the best talents in a business which is really about people, attracting the best talents is going to be crucial to our success in the future, and this is something which is not to be overlooked.
There are many reasons, not only one, why we should accelerate on ESG. This is what we are going to do, and Nathalie will explain you how.
Thank you. Thank you, Guillaume. As you said, our commitment is strong on ESG and it has been anchored in Rexel organization for a long time, even before the word ESG existed. Something very, you know, interesting or even emotional I would like to share with you is that I, taking the job, I found the group sustainability leader announcement that was made at Rexel for the first time almost 20 years ago. Let me read the nomination statement written in July 2003. The group will make commitments linked to ethics, employee development, quality-based relation with the economic and social community, protection of the environment, and respect of fundamental rights. Since then, we always had a group sustainability leader, so what a pressure to take that job now.
Over this time, we have built a sustainable plan and culture on E, S, and G in all Rexel geographies, reporting data and measuring what we do and what we can achieve, which is fully recognized, as you can see on the slide, by all extra-financial rating agencies. In addition, we are the only electrical distributor today whose CO2 reduction targets have been validated and approved by SBTi. Based on this solid foundation, as you said, Guillaume, we are accelerating our momentum and we aim to be leader in ESG, notably in energy transition solutions and services. The good question doing that is, how do we do it?
Our strong belief is that Rexel is at the heart of the value chain, with the possibility to impact upstreams and downstreams, sourcing from more than 10,000 suppliers to provide the best solution for residential, industrial, and commercial markets. On the upstream side, we succeeded in selecting the best-in-class suppliers through two main criteria. The first is to ensure that we share with our supplier the same commitment for the future. We've done that through the signature of what we have developed, the Rexel Charter. As of today, suppliers representing 70% of our purchase have signed that Rexel Charter, starting with the top 20. What we've done as well is we have leveraged the EcoVadis assessment.
We were among the first customer of EcoVadis, and we have EcoVadis assessment covering 80% of group purchasing today just to provide us with a second-party opinion and to drive the action that we are taking on that front. We, in addition, have just launched a program called Partner for Planet Program, which is to drive specific actions with selected suppliers to build advanced premium sustainability services. At the same time, we are building up our green offer to accelerate responsible sales. It's all what we do on the upstream side. As I said, we are also very committed to work with the downstream side, given our position, with 50% of the product we sell right now that are green product.
We, through our Enrich database, collecting product environment profile data from our suppliers, are able to provide sustainable information to our customers, but I will cover that more in depth in the next slide. Last but not least, we are deploying training programs for our teams everywhere, and more specifically for our salespeople, so that they can sell advanced services and responsible solutions to their customers. As a distributor, we are in close contact every day with thousands of electricians where they work. We are connected with a large number of suppliers, understanding their business processes. We understand the local regulations. We are connected with communities, and we can even address people that are very far from energy efficiency topics. We feel confident that we'll play a pivotal role in the ESG across the value chain.
The reason why is because we act where it matters, and that's the main reason why we think that there is a lot we can do on that space. Let me illustrate what we mean by provide sustainable information to our customers. You mentioned it already, Guillaume, we have developed a solution called Carbon Tracker. You see here a screenshot that represent. You see the number of 91 kilotons of CO2 that is representing the emission of the product we are selling for one year to one of the major French customer. This tool or this solution leverage our data capabilities and use intelligent algorithm in order to calculate the environmental impact of the product we sell, customer by customer, project by project.
It also allows us to identify and promote in our offer plan the most efficient and responsible solution for each individual customer needs, and it's also a way for customers to be helped to comply with regulatory requirements. The calculation, I'm not going into the detail or maybe Constance should help me there, but that's not the purpose of the description here. The calculation utilizes intelligent algorithms covering three impacts, CO2, resources, and water on the six phases of the product life cycle. It goes far beyond what the supplier can do, what the customer can see. It's really the end-to-end value chain on the six phases of the product life cycle.
This methodology was reviewed by Bureau Veritas in September 2021, and now is deployed in France with some very key customer. ESG data and digital goes really hand in hand, we see a great potential to scale and the Carbon Tracker to more countries in the short future. I think that you will be quite interested to hear from Mr. Jean-Luc Baras, the Chief Procurement Officer of Eiffage Group, who will give you his view on the Carbon Tracker. Thanks to run the video.
Sustainability is clearly a mandatory for construction activities. It is obviously the case for the different business we have to manage, such as building infrastructure, revamping, or maintenance. We have the growing need to calculate the environmental impact of every project all along its lifetime using dedicated tools and of course, BIM technology. On the other side, we have to consolidate carbon data for different purchasing categories in order to check improvement in front of our global commitment. Since early on, at very early stage, Rexel brought a clear solution with the Carbon Tracker, and has become a strong partner for Eiffage on sustainability. This partnership is particularly efficient as we use to digitalize all purchasing process through EDI.
As an illustration on major projects such as Olympic Games or Grand Paris, we use these tools to measure the environmental impact from the construction phase to the end of the building use 30 years later. In addition to estimating carbon emissions, the report includes data related to water use, primary minerals or biotic minerals such as aluminum, copper or zinc. Lastly, the partnership with Rexel is also about complying with new regulations in big cities, where the logistics of the supply chain have to be challenged. The Rexel express delivery solutions provide a last kilometer delivery with low carbon emissions by using electric vehicles or even more bicycles. Rexel's ability to offer a complete range of solutions in the face of the sustainability stakes is clearly a real added value for us. It is more and more a domain of differentiation.
Such a partnership based on the sincere collaboration is key to reinforce Eiffage capacity to meet challenges of sustainable development.
As a proof point of this acceleration and of our commitment to ESG, Rexel teams are proud to announce a new and very ambitious commitment on CO2 emission reduction from our own operations as well as on the value chain. On our own operations, as you can see on the slide, we are significantly raising our objective and moving from an initial reduction of minus 35% to an objective of minus 60% in 2030 compared to 2016. To achieve this ambitious target, we will optimize the transportation of the product. We will move everywhere it's possible to EVs.
We will also, of course, continue to optimize our buildings and reduce our footprint and as well as reduce the energy consumption of our building. We'll switch to green energy everywhere it's possible. As explained before, on the Scope 3, we are uniquely positioned to have an impact on the reduction of CO2 emissions and on the way the product used. This represents roughly 92% of the scope we can address. A very important scope of carbon footprint reduction emissions we can address. Our plan is to move from initial reduction that was minus 45% in intensity to minus 60% in 2030 compared to 2016.
With our former target, as I mentioned, we were already the only electrical distributor to have its target validated by SBTi, well below minus 2 degrees. Even with this good ranking, we are convinced that we can go one step further. Today, these new targets are under review by SBTi to be validated as net zero standard, the best achievable, as you know, ranking that SBTi can provide. But besides those financial criteria, we want our top management to take actions on ESG. We've decided to include E, S, and G in the long-term investing plan, accounting for 20% of the bonuses of our top executive. On the E side, we are introducing objectives to reduce Scope 1 and 2 and Scope 3 emissions.
On the S, we focus on diversity for our leadership as well as across the organization. We'll have also a continuous attention in the reduction of accident rate. On the G, we specifically look at stakeholders' engagement on sustainability matters and the level of commitment to ethics and compliance values. With our clear messages, as you can see here, to our top management, employees, talents, to our customers, suppliers, the market, as well as the local communities and our shareholders. We are committed to drive a very strong action plan across all geographies to reach the targets and to make a difference. Thank you. I now hand over to you, Guillaume.
Thank you very much, Nathalie. Second leadership topic, energy transition solutions. I talked about the electrification trends that we were seeing on the market in the first part of the presentation. How can we make the most of it? How can we be a trusted and preferred partner, both from our suppliers and for our customers? This is our second challenge, and I would like Constance Grisoni, our VP of Strategy, to explain to you this. Before that, I think it would be interesting to hear in a video what Jean-Pascal Tricoire, the CEO of Schneider, one of our biggest suppliers, has to say about that.
Climate change is a major challenge of our generation. It is now top of the agenda for all the countries we operate in and with all the customers we are talking to. In that domain, energy transition is a key foundation in reducing carbon emissions and tackling this challenge of climate change. It's a duty for all of us to support this transition. It's also a huge opportunity for our industry and for the partnership that we have between manufacturers, technology providers, and distributors. Distributors will play an absolutely crucial role to accelerate the movement, making technology available to every customer and to every integrator. The winners of this deployment will address it by combining electrification, digitization, innovation as a whole and ESG, and propose them into one package to our customers.
In this journey, very logically, we see Rexel as a very strong and very legitimate partner, and we look forward in deploying together these technologies, these capabilities with all our customers.
Thank you, Guillaume, and thank you, Jean-Pascal Tricoire. Electrification will indeed open multiple growth pockets where Rexel has a key role to play. As we said earlier, it is accelerating at a pace that has never been seen before. Let me highlight four of them here today. The first one is HVAC, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. As we said before, heating electrification, and in particular with heat pumps, has a key role to play to reduce our CO2 emission. AC, or conditioning, will also become more and more a necessity as extreme weather events, extreme heat events will become more and more frequent. Here, distributors have a key role to play, providing the right product and expertise to our customers. PV, photovoltaics. Here, that is an acceleration at an unprecedented pace as well, as we said earlier.
The market can be segmented in different segments. There are the large PV solar farms, but there's also a lot of solar panels that can be installed on the roof of homes, small commercial buildings or small industrial sites. That's where distributors like Rexel have a key role to play, to help our installers and contractors have the right product, the right support and expertise to install these. Electric vehicles, and in particular charging station, is also a key growth opportunity accelerating at a very fast pace. It is driven by sustainability pledges of individuals, pledges of companies, and pledges of government. Here, the market can also be segmented between large public charging stations, infrastructures, as well as charging stations that are installed at every home or at small or mid-sized buildings.
Electricians have a key role to play here, but they need the right support in terms of services, in terms of software and operating capabilities. That's where we believe Rexel has a key role to play. Finally, industrial automation. Industrial automation is a much larger and much more mature opportunity, in particular in North America. Here, we also see strong acceleration driven by relocation of industrial production as well as labor scarcity. That is a crucial opportunity for more automation to meet these industrial ambitions. Here, we see that distributors have also a key role to play to provide the right systems, hardware and software, as well as the right expertise to our customers. Overall, these opportunities, they account for about 15% of our business today, and we expect them to grow at nearly twice the pace of the rest of the business going forward.
What does it take to win in these opportunities? We identify different critical topics. It starts with expertise. Expertise is important. It's very important for all of these categories. It is particularly the case for industrial automation, where the pace of innovation and the pace of new complex solution with IT, OT software and systems is really accelerating. Here, that's something we are investing and working hard on to have the best offer for our customers. Supplier partnerships. That is also very important for every single one of these opportunities. Even more so for industrial automation, where here we want and we need to be aligned with the best partners so that we can in turn be the best partner for our customers. Dedicated supply chain tool. This is important in particular for HVAC and PV, and it is for very pragmatic reason.
A solar panel is quite big and so is a heat pump. You need to have the right processes, the right facilities and the right expertise to be able to handle them in a safe, efficient and effective way. M&A can be an accelerator for each of these opportunities and looking more customer bases and also helping acquire more capabilities. Finally, services. I mentioned it earlier, services are important for each of these categories. In particular, when it comes to electric vehicle charging stations, where you need to be able to operate them, which is quite complex, as well as industrial automation, where you need both the hardware and the software combined, which requires specific services capabilities. Now let me hand over to Thomas, who will tell us a little bit more about the services to support EV.
Thank you, Constance. Talking about energy transition and in our strategy, Freshmile is a really good illustration of what Rexel can do and where we can go. In fact, Freshmile, just to describe what is Freshmile is a service operator in the management of public electric vehicle charging stations. This is a French company, originally, and managing CPO and MSP, charging point operator, management and mobility service provider. Two dimensions. Freshmile is a leader in France with 20% market share, in terms of management of charging station, managing more than 50,000 charging station, and at the same time, with a network of more than 150 EV drivers. What is interesting in Freshmile, it's they are serving two types of customers, B2B and B2C.
B2B, first of all, it's all the companies, you, us, owning charging station and who wish to benefit from a supervision service for their charging stations. An ability to monetize this charging station into possibility of being visible from the other EV drivers. The second type of customers, it's B2C customers. Here it's Freshmile is giving the benefit from a simple solution to charge their car, so it gives you access to more than 60,000 EV charging station in Europe. Why Freshmile is so important for Rexel? Why is it quite interesting? In fact, first of all, with Freshmile, we are embracing the EV business. The EV business which is booming, of course, and you know why. What is interesting also in the EV business, you cannot sell equipment alone.
You need to add to the equipment the services. This is why it is critical to get the capability to sell equipment with the service, CPO and MSP. The second reason why it is important and very interesting, it is the fact that you have many synergies on this business with Rexel. Synergies in two dimensions. Synergies in product and synergies in customers. Synergies in product, why? Rexel is distributing a full range of EV charging station from AC to DC. We are distributing also all the protection, low voltage protection and all the energy management softwares. On the other side, you have Freshmile, who is serving softwares and all the services, CPO and MSP I was describing. Really synergies in terms of product. Another element is synergies in terms of customers.
In fact, Freshmile is able to propose you a full, complete offer from equipment to management, as I said. Here, in terms of customers, to install and to maintain, Freshmile is gonna use the network of contractors of Rexel. It’s our customers. Our customers will install, will maintain on the field this charging station. With Freshmile, Rexel is able to deliver a full equipment, a complete player on the EV market.
Thank you, Thomas. The example of Freshmile is an excellent transition into our third leadership topic, which is about services. Because Freshmile is associating both energy transition solutions and services. Advanced services. Overall, the Rexel business is mostly about service. When we are talking about advanced services, it's about offering more. I was amazed when I arrived at Rexel at both the number of additional services that we are offering or selling and the potential to do more. I would like Thomas and Brad to enter into the details of what we do in this field, why we want to do more, and how we are going to do more. Thomas.
Yeah. Thank you, Guillaume. Services, as I said, I was sharing about Freshmile. Services is everywhere in Rexel. I was speaking about supply chain before. Everything we are doing, every added value we bring on the market is based on services. For us, this is critical to develop our offer and to add new offers to increase our service offer. We have three objective, in fact, with this service offer. First of all, to enable our customers to be more efficient on a daily basis, as we said on supply chain example. First of all, enable our customers to work on innovative new markets. We were sharing about EV, about PV, about smart building. All this domain, all these products, all this technology needs an expertise our customers, all our customers cannot access immediately.
What we do with our expertise is to be able to give access to this product to our customers. Secondly, tertiary, we enable our customers to offer more services to their own customers. One element we wanna push on the energy ecosystem is the capability for our customers, for our own customers to develop return businesses, to develop services by their own. This is one of the ambition we have. Many benefits, of course, for Rexel also. First of all, it's stickiness. Of course, as you may know that if you are just selling products, anybody can sell, can distribute products. But if you can sell product with services, it's much more powerful. The second element, it's a key differentiator.
As I said, the identity of Rexel is based on the capability to propose services, to propose dedicated services depending on each customer segment and each technology. Secondly, thirdly, it's an ability to cross-sell products and equipment. It's a kind of bumper against equipment margin attacks. For us, this is critical also in terms of protection against margin on equipment. If you sell the bundle product plus services, it is a real added value for the customer, a differentiated added value, and so a margin protector. We were gonna put a very strong focus on services everywhere in the different countries. What we have to say is services will depend on one country to another. It depends on the maturity. It depends on the maturity of the country. It depends on the customer segment which we are addressing.
What we're gonna do, we aim to significantly expand our business and services by 2025, and our objective is to double revenue from new services. This slide on services explaining finally an example of list of services we could address. One more time, as I said, you have to differentiate services from one country to another. What we ask to countries is to develop their services depending on product mix, technology mix, customer mix. Here, many areas can be managed as a service. Here in the different domain, you have logistics, and as I'd shared before with you on logistics, you have all the sustainability services. Jean-Luc Baras from Eiffage Group was explaining, in fact, what kind of added value we can bring to the customer.
The capability to substitute one product to another, depending not only on the price and on the function, but also on its impact, its carbon impact on the environment. We can influence our customers and their habits. Third element is about expertise. Here, as I said, we are working with our customers on new domains, and we have design offices in our organization to support our customers, not only to buy one product, but to think about the system, to think about the opportunity they could get from this. We're gonna work also on integration services. As you may know, we are not selling only products, but we are selling systems. We are not selling only circuit breakers, but we are selling cabinet circuit breakers and a complete full scope of product, full scope of system.
Here also is a capability to propose a complete system, adapted system to our customers. It's also administrative and financial services.
Like anything we are doing, we are proposing to support any, for instance, fees from governments. We support our customer to get these fees or every software, Freshmile was an example, or any software in BIM proposing a library of product on the BIM. It's a large group of services we are proposing. In fact, this put us in a very strong position across end market to raise our game in services. Among the different markets, residential, building, commercial and industry, we are addressing today in Rexel, probably the most mature market is industry. I let Brad to explain you what we are doing in industrial automation in terms of services in North America.
Thank you. You know, we are experiencing an exciting evolution in the industrial automation space. For many years, Rexel has partnered with our strategic manufacturing partners to provide the hardware products that our customers need to automate the processes they consider vital to their business. Now, while we consider our role in providing those hardware products to continue and be a big part of our growth strategy, we also believe that we need to expand our offering to include the software and services our customers require to both implement and maintain their automated processes. Now, we're gonna be incredibly deliberate in how we enhance our own team and how we enhance our capabilities, but we're excited. We're excited because we know this is a real need from our customers, and it's also a real need from our manufacturing partners.
We're gonna build a comprehensive solution that we think will deliver real tangible benefits and also strengthen the relationships that we have with our industrial customers. Let's take a moment to hear a video from Blake Moret, the CEO of Rockwell Automation.
Hi, I'm Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation, and I'm happy to say that we have a very strong partnership with Rexel in the United States and around the world. We're also happy to see the very high levels of demand from our mutual customers. This demand is driven by very high levels of capital investment in many of the industries that we serve, along with the general increase in investment in automation and digital transformation. Our customers are looking for more services and software capabilities from Rexel and Rockwell to complement our traditional hardware offerings, and I'm very happy to say that Rexel is stepping up to the challenge. We're looking forward to adding new value for our customers together.
In addition to Brad and to what Blake Moret explained, let me show you also a video from China. China and India are, as you know, countries where we solely focus on industrial automation because we feel that there is a very interesting potential, and let me show you what we are doing and which is quite advanced in China.
Rexel is becoming a major player in China IoT market for its industrial digital capabilities, both R&D and the integration of the leading industrial automation manufacturers. This is the smart digital water system for South-to-North Water Diversion Project in Shandong. Over 1,000 square kilometer with a capacity of 100,000 ton per day, serving 2.4 million people. Rexel built all the industry digital platform and the automation system, which embedded production processes and business intelligence system. New technologies such as IoT, big data, three dimensions visualization, edge computing and cloud configuration were applied. The platform can collect data and monitor the plant uninterruptedly and remotely. Operators can get a whole picture of the water production and running system. The system assists management to make decisions of production, operation, services and help the customer to achieve the target of OEE and ROI.
Rexel China is collaborating with international suppliers to provide unique industrial digital solutions to the market.
We are now approaching the final part of the presentation, which is about financial ambition, and I welcome Laurent Delabarre with me to explain our financial targets. These targets for the medium term take into account the uncertain environment in which we are operating, and they assume reasonably stable macroeconomic conditions going forward. We may face headwinds in an environment that offers little visibility, but we will also be carried, and I think that we went at length to convince you of that, by the positive electrification trends that we have mentioned throughout today's presentation and an inflationary environment that traditionally is beneficial to distribution activities. Let me now hand over to Laurent Delabarre to present our targets, and I will come back to conclude on capital allocation.
Thank you, Guillaume, and hello to everyone. Let me wrap up this presentation by translating our action into financial ambitions. Firstly, before presenting our midterm guidance, you have already read in our press release this morning, we are revising upwards our 2022 outlook. Since our Q1 results, we have continued to record strong performance both in sales and in profitability, with higher than expected inflation, continued growth in volume versus last year in North America and robust level of activity in Europe. This, plus our record backlog and the first effects of the strategies that we presented today, allows us to upgrade our target for the year in sales and profitability. This translate, as you can see, into higher forecast, both for organic sales growth and adjusted EBITDA margin.
Concerning first the same-day sales growth, we now target to be between 7%-9%, up from our current guidance of 4%-6%. This upgrade is mainly driven by higher selling price on non-cable product, following higher price increase from our supplier than we initially forecast, and also better than expected volume in Q1. Even so, activity remain well-oriented. We have also included in this guidance, in the low-range part of the guidance, a negative volume evolution, notably in Europe in the second half of the year, to capture the current macroeconomic concern. Of course, we'll detail this more during our July press release on our H1 performance. On the EBITDA margin, we now anticipate being at circa 6.7% compared to our current guidance of above 6%.
This new guidance includes 50 basis points of positive non-recurring effect, largely from inventory price inflation on non-cable product, as was already the case last year. Lastly, our free cash flow conversion is unchanged and is above 60%. Overall, this would represent another record year for Rexel, a great place to start a new plan. Even so, it's a tough reference to beat. Let me move on now to our midterm guidance, which covers the four years from 2022 to 2025. We start on slide 81 with the improved organic sales profile of sales growth between 4%-7% on average over the period, which means, to be clear, over four years from 2021, 2022 sales growth to 2024, 2025.
This is new for us to give an absolute growth target, as we tend in the recent past to simply target market outperformance. It corresponds clearly to all that we have explained over the course of today's presentation. First, this electrification market, which will grow faster and in a more resilient way than the economic environment itself because of the multiple societal trends making it. Second, we have a sound plan to outperform this market by gaining market share through digital and a focus on the right segment as we have presented. And third, this accelerated growth will maintain the supply chain under tension, which is likely to favor some kind of inflation, probably less than in the last 12 months, which was very high, but still more than in the past.
You see, on the bottom of the slide, a footnote on the macroeconomic conditions we retain as a framework for this guidance, which we believe is realistic. Our assumption is that there may be a slowdown in the future, but no collapse, which mean possibly a slowdown of growth, but no recession, and possibly a slowdown of inflation, but no deflation overall. We feel that these assumption are reasonable given that we see today on the market. This growth target represent an acceleration over the 3.5 compound annual growth rate that we generated between 2017 and 2021, which was itself already a major step up from the flat sales we saw in the 2011-2016 period. Sorry, yeah.
On the next slide, we turn to our enhanced profitability. Here, we upgrade our ambition and now anticipate to reach between 6.5% and 7% adjusted EBITDA margin in 2025, with a clear ambition to get to the 7%. Here again, the assumption are at reasonably stable macro condition and without any one-off effect in 2025. At the top of the range of this guidance, this would mean another 100 basis points of improvement above our capital market ambition of February 2021. This will also mark a significant improvement over our 2021 and 2022 adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.2 and 6.6, respectively, both of which were boosted by respectively 40 and 50 basis points of one-off effect, so translating to 5.8 or circa 6.2, excluding one-off.
This would be another absolute record for Rexel, both in percentage and obviously also in mass of EBITDA, given what I have just said on the growth. Needless to say that this profitability improvement will go hand-in-hand with material improvement of Rexel underlying resilience. I'm sorry. Yeah, maybe this one. The reason why we are confident in our ability to make this level of profitability the new normal are listed on the right-hand part of the slide. In summary, they are mostly about increased confidence in our profitability levels. We know in what direction to go. We have experienced it successfully in some countries, as we have seen, apply it to acquisition, and we believe we can generalize those best practice. Namely, so we can. You can see on the green box, we play on several levels.
The turnaround of lower profitability countries. We discuss Germany today, whose recovery is already underway and will continue. Process optimization in more advanced country, as presented for Switzerland, France and the U.S. A positive margin impact from data and AI drop-through on growth acceleration, which means higher contribution to the bottom line of incremental sales and productivity gains from digital and automation. On the next slide, we focus on our continued cash discipline to preserve a healthy balance sheet. We expect our free cash flow conversion rate to be above 60% every year between 2022 and 2025. I recall that this ratio is for free cash flow before interest and tax relative to EBITDA after lease.
It assumes a steady working capital to sales ratio of around 11% and an unchanged CapEx to sales ratio of circa 0.9%. Our CapEx will be principally in digital and supply chain, as you have seen, and also the CapEx necessary for the achievement of our carbon reduction objective on Scope 1 and 2. In addition to the organic sales growth that we just described, we expect to step up bolt-on M&A as a consistent value creation lever. Over the period 2022-2025, we expect acquisition to contribute up to EUR 2 billion in additional sales, and this is of course on top of the contribution from Mayer to our sales.
This is a combination of what we believe will be available, what we may be interested in, depending on the financial condition and the synergy, and of course our success rate. We are organizing ourselves as presented by Brad and by Guillaume to be more systematic and more processed on M&A. We have to be very clear around this EUR 2 billion. We won't go there if we don't find the right attractive targets at what we consider an attractive price. Up to EUR 2 billion means far less and even zero, if the right conditions are not there.
Our priorities are clear and have been stated by Guillaume and remain unchanged from those that drove the 5 acquisitions that we have completed in 2021, with the 2 main priorities, which is first the consolidation in mature countries with North America as a priority as illustrated by the Mayer acquisition and the Winkle, which is again an interesting one. It's smaller, but it is in the industrial automation space. The second is small- and midsize acquisitions in adjacencies that complement our existing business, notably digital services and sustainable solutions. No need to say that this acquisition must respect strict financial criteria, as they have always been.
Namely, be EPS accretive in year one post-closing, return on capital employed exceed the weighted average cost of capital by year three post-closing, and they offer full synergy in 36 months post-closing. Now, on the lower part of the sales. In terms of disposal, we are more taking adjustment by disposal of non-core assets. Those will not be material, as you can see in the figure, as a lot of cleaning up has already been done within Rexel. We think now globally overall, we have the right geographical balance. That being said, there are still businesses or countries in which we believe we are not the right owners mid-term.
We may dispose them, and our policy remains, as always, to announce it when it will be done, of course, to minimize any disruption. Let me now hand back to Guillaume for an overview on our capital allocation policy and his concluding remarks.
Thank you very much, Laurent. On capital allocation, Laurent touched on many of the important points. The first two circles of this slide are the same as what had been said in 2021. We will keep CapEx under control at, in average, 0.9% of sales. This, as Laurent mentioned, includes our necessary investment in supply chain, in digital, and in ESG. In other words, we think that we can stay frugal while staying state-of-the-art. Dividend payout will continue to be above 40% of recurring net income, and I'm sure you have done the math, but net income is expected to grow obviously as a mechanical consequence of the previous financial targets. On M&A, as we said, we want to give ourselves room to accelerate up to EUR 2 billion of additional sales in the next four years.
Finally, we are planning to add to this a share buyback program, aiming at both offsetting the dilutive impact of our free share plan and also reducing the number of outstanding shares by, in average, 1% a year. This draws logical consequence from the fact that the Rexel share price remains undervalued in our mind compared to the industry. Overall, this balanced capital allocation will allow us to remain in our zone of comfort in terms of debt, which is around a 2.0 leverage, knowing that we expect this leverage to be lower than that at the end of 2022. Now for the concluding remarks. I would like, first of all, to insist on the factor which is going to be key to our future, our teams and their engagement.
One of my surprises in my first few months with Rexel was to see the very high level of energy of all the teams at all levels in the organization. This is really what took us where we are today, and this is what will be key in our future success and in our future roadmap. One reason for that is the strong values that we share and that are reminded here. They are the same since 2011, and the good thing is that they fit perfectly with the plan Power Up 2025 that we are presenting today. For example, customer focus is totally consistent with our digital and with our supply chain effort. Innovation is going to be required to become the leader on energy transition solutions and advanced services. Enjoy making a difference resonates with our ESG focus.
In terms of the management principles that we believe in, join forces for success and trust each other will really be going forward the cornerstone of our organization and of the Rexel management style based on empowerment in the field, but with enough trust in each other that we can also share better best practices and build very quickly on what has been tried elsewhere. The exciting part is that we are getting to this stage in the Rexel organization. Finally, building talent and becoming a preferred employer is absolutely key, and we are going to push very much on that because in the end this is what is going to make the difference between slides and results, talent and engagement. We talked about talent scarcity as an opportunity, as a business opportunity in the past.
We also have to see it as a challenge, but also as an opportunity for differentiation for our own business. Being positioned on a brilliant market with a dynamic strategy and strong values makes us, I believe, quite different when it comes to attracting the best people. Indeed, people are key to our success, and you see here a few pictures of examples of our people. Distribution, even in B2B, is all about proximity to suppliers and customers, understanding and even anticipating their needs, and building long-term, lasting and fruitful relations. Rexel's teams are fantastically committed, as they proved notably during the COVID time, when they moved the entire business online almost overnight, and I would like to here thank them and emphasize here that I regard them as a priority and a key factor of success.
The actions and targets that we outlined today wouldn't be possible without them. To conclude, I will repeat this slide that I showed at the beginning of the presentation. I hope that the discussion that we had today in between gave you some meat to make those titles a little bit more than words. There are indeed strategies, action plans and teams behind each one of those sentences. Our strategy is simple. It is very clear. It is balanced between optimizing the engine that we have built and taking it to the races at a historical moment of opportunity where our market is accelerating. By executing the various component of our strategy, we will accelerate growth, increase our profitability, and be even more resilient.
This strategy was built in full collaboration with all of the executive committee, and not only those which were on stage, and we are ready to implement it. We are excited with the moment, as you can tell, excited by the prospects, and ready to write a new chapter in the Rexel strategy book. With that, we are now open to many questions I'm sure you will have. I will please ask you to focus your questions as much as possible on today's topic around our strategy and midterm ambitions, having in mind that we have a rendezvous at the end of July to discuss in depth our Q2 trends and our H1 results. I will take every question anyway. I think we need to wait for a jingle for people being online, and then we will start to take questions. No? Yeah.
We'll start to take questions directly, I believe. Yeah. I will let Ludovic hand over the mic.
Hi, can you hear me?
Not yet.
It's on. Is this better? Okay, I'll just speak close to mic. Thank you very much for the very detailed presentation material. I've got quite a few questions, but I'll stick to, I guess, a couple on margins and one broader one. On that 2025 margin ambition, the drivers that you laid out, the green positives versus the red negative inflation, could you give us an idea of what the gross kind of positive you expect in there to net off versus inflation to drive that incremental 50 basis points?
Well, the operating leverage will be the most, and you will have on the other side the inflation, mostly the one presented there on salary and benefits for the most part. We expect also higher inflation on transport and energy costs. All in all, we have embedded, depending on the year, between 3% and 4.5-5% of inflation on cost. You have some productivity to offset part of that, plus the operating leverage on this additional sales that are dropping through the bottom line.
That being said, let me be clear, we're not going to enter too much into the details of the bridge between now and 2025, for one good reason, which is that, you know, we are all fully aware that there is uncertainty in the market. We are quite confident. We are not looking at the future with pink glasses. We are quite confident in the target that we are proposing, which are arranged to take into account this uncertainty. But in terms of the individual building blocks, we are not ready at this stage to give you the details of which one is worth what. Got it. Thank you. That's helpful.
Actually, on your topic of uncertainty, I guess the question I have is, if we do think about 2023 and a potential revenue slowdown in that year, volume slowdown, what kind of revenue hit can you take, and sustain the 6.2% underlying margin that you plan to deliver in 2022? The 2022 performance, you're talking 2022 or-
I'm thinking about 2023 as kind of one full year.
Yeah.
Assuming you deliver 6.2 ex the one-off this year.
Yeah, yeah.
We have a slowdown in 2023, could you say that maybe is it 5%-10% of revenue slowdown that you can withstand while maintaining that margin?
Yeah. We have not guided specifically on 2023. Probably there will be a bit of pressure on the volume side in 2023, but our goal is to go to this 6.5 by 2025 by the combination of action. We may have, yes, a bit of contraction of volume in 2023, but we expect to continue to have some inflation. First, the carryover impact of 2022, plus probably an additional inflation because of input costs will be becoming higher as well.
Thank you. Last question on services, kind of thinking more about growth. Could you give us an idea of the size of the services offer right now? Could you clarify on that target of doubling, I think, new services?
No, absolutely.
What does that mean in terms of kind of how you've given quite clear targets for a lot of other subjects?
No, absolutely.
I just want to square it out.
I can give you more details on that. The amount of services that we charge today independently as services is relatively limited. We are talking a few% of the sales overall. This is the amount that we are going to double. It's not meaningful in terms of the contribution to the growth that you are seeing here. It's the beginning of a journey, first of all, and secondly, what is even more important is that the services which are also part of the global value proposition of Rexel. I think both Thomas and Brad explained that.
There are the parts which are individually charged, and there is the all, the rest of the services, which sometimes are not charged as a specific line in the bill of materials, but which are participating both to the share of wallet of the customer, to the stickiness of the customer, and in the end, to the margin of the customer. We are going overall to increase the overall effort of the company towards the two types of services in terms of figures and in terms of objectives, goals that we give ourselves. We give ourselves goals on the charged services, which are once again a few %, of the total sales of Rexel. But overall, we will insist on both categories.
Got it.
It will benefit the P&L on both categories, obviously. It's more difficult to put figures behind that on the other category.
Great. Thank you. I'll stop at three.
You can come back.
Thank you. Good morning, sir. Afternoon, sorry. It's Martin Wilkie from Citi. A couple questions. The first one is the 33% of sales are in these underperforming countries or lower than 6% margin. We often think of profitability as being highly correlated to density and market share. How important is the M&A strategy on these disposals to lifting those countries out of that zone, or is it something that will be done with these other improvements in automation and so forth?
You know, I think you're right, that in general profitability comes with density, but it comes also mostly with local density. So in a given country, having a relatively low market share is not an absolute obstacle to bringing up profitability. I have in mind the list of the twenty countries which are in the 23%, and I can give you that. I can tell you that there are many low-hanging fruits which don't depend at all on M&A. The other thing is M&A is not specifically a priority for me on those countries which are low in profitability. You know, I was talking about this virtuous circle, which is that when you start to gain momentum, you attract the best teams, you attract the relationship with suppliers, et cetera.
It can go the other way also, which means that in those countries which are in a weaker situation, sometimes our team is not as solid and wouldn't be able to manage efficiently an integration of M&A. We think that, to be clear, our plan to recover profitability in those countries is mostly based on self-help and on applying the best recipes which have been tested in other countries. As said, in almost all of those countries, we are seeing a very good momentum on that, but it's not mostly going to be based on M&A.
M&A priority for me, beyond the U.S. that we talked about, in terms of countries, M&A should be focused mostly on countries which have the most solid teams able to integrate, which are usually the ones being in the top bucket above 6%.
Thanks. If I could say a second question just on the U.S.
Sure.
It looks like Mayer has been a lot better than expected in terms of synergies. Where did that come from, and what does that sort of teach you about future deals in the U.S. in terms of improved margins?
You know, when we talked about the synergies with Mayer, we gave several buckets. One of them was about, basically being bigger and taking advantage of better supplier conditions. One of them was SG&A savings and taking the benefits of scales. One of them was about implementing our best processes, and one of them was about digital, for example. You know, in terms of supplier relationship, I mean, we immediately took advantage of the bigger size that we have and the bigger importance that we have. One thing which proved even more successful than what we had anticipated is the implementation of the advanced algorithm that we were talking about. Data-based pricing, for example, is something that we put in place in Mayer with good success.
This is also something which we probably had underestimated in terms of the benefits for the business, which means being a little bit more precise in the way we price the various SKUs, for a given customer. This is something on which we were able to be a little bit more efficient. Maybe, Brad, you want to say a few additional words on that?
I think you covered it all.
Okay. In this case, thank you, Daniela. Yeah.
I go. Thank you. I have three as well. First, I thought it was interesting on slide 48, you have the data and artificial intelligence initiatives.
Mm-hmm.
which alone you say there contribute to 25 basis points of the EBIT margin gains. Enough, I guess, as of now to put you into the 6.5%-7% bracket. But one thing that surprised me on the slide is that when you have the numbers of how many countries you're gonna launch it from now to, it's sort of eight, nine, five, 11. Sounds small. Can you talk about sort of why is that the case? Does it have to be related to how the ERP systems are organized? Why is it not the full portfolio?
No, it's not the full portfolio for many reasons. I mean, there is one important reason, which is that it doesn't make sense the same way in all countries. For example, you're talking about branch assortment. It makes more sense in the countries where the branches-
Mm-hmm.
have more importance, where we have a more granular network. In those countries where the branches are bigger, for example, it may have a little bit less impact in terms of the impact. There is a prerequisite in terms of data. You're right. In some countries, the data system that we have is ready to put in place those algorithms. In some cases, it's a little bit less. Maybe, Constance, you want to say a few additional words on that to give us an idea of how the priorities are set in terms of implementation of the algorithm?
Yes. I think you said the main points. We prioritize based on the expected impact, so it really depends on the customer segment and the type of product that we sell as well. The share of sales that we do at the counter versus digital, all the solutions are applied differently there. The prioritization in terms of data maturity and systems. As you may remember on the chart with the digital fundamentals, we need to have the fundamentals in place before we can activate the solutions. We prioritize this way.
There is more beyond 2025.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Absolutely.
The second question was regarding the additional services of the presentation you had there. I think you just said it's not gonna be massive in terms of the contribution to growth, but things like integrating robots and some of the system-related things that you had on the slide can be quite onerous if there's an issue when you do an integration. How are you gonna mitigate the risk? This is gonna sit with the client if you're doing an integration. How should we think about, like, cash conversion risk, I guess?
Oh, okay. This is a very good question about responsibility when we start to install things or things like that. This is a preoccupation that we always have in mind. Very often we use third-party suppliers and provider of services when there is a responsibility in installing. We usually stop short of really doing complex installation, which is just especially to avoid this kind of responsibility. I don't know, Brad, if you want to elaborate a little bit on that, on the industrial automation part. For example, when we sell services in industrial automation, mostly external providers are third-party providers of those services. Is that right?
Yes. Today, and I should've shared this when I spoke earlier. When we partner with our customers, generally there is a third party involved who's handling a lot of the implementation and certainly the go-forward maintenance of those systems and driving that recurring revenue model. There's an opportunity for us, as I said, to really enhance our capabilities as an organization so we can participate in that process. That's gonna be critical for us in the services strategy that we have moving forward.
You know, you could think about that in the same way you think about responsibility on products. In a way, there are a few services that we will handle ourselves, and mostly logistics services. In terms of more advanced, more complex services, we will be the sales force of those services. Very often we are going to use third party.
Thank you. That's very clear. The final one, which is really a quick follow-up on one of the earlier questions on margins. How shall we look at the 6.5%-7%? Is this a peak to trough? Is it a true cycle to peak? Asking because obviously we've seen the last crisis, you cut a lot of fixed costs. I guess sort of the fixed cost ratio improved, but we also had pricing in the middle to cloud things. Example-
No, absolutely. I mean, you may think of that about 7% is our ambition, very clearly, and it's our central scenario in terms of the margins that we want to achieve. That's the first thing. We take into account the fact that there is uncertainty on the market. As you may have heard from our talks, we are still cautiously optimistic about the market. We don't think that because of both the macroeconomy and also because of the underlying trends which are supporting our business, we have a hypothesis which is reasonably stable market conditions. Which means basically no recession and no deflation. You may think about the 6.5% as a lower limit in those conditions.
Which means that it's not a peak to trough, absolute, reference for the future, but it's what we believe is our margin between pessimistic scenarios and optimistic scenarios for the future.
Thank you.
You have the mic.
Yeah.
I think that you.
Good. It's Miguel from BNP Paribas Exane. Just a follow-up from the previous question. I just wanted to get a sense of how long ago have these targets been set up internally? Because obviously the macro environment is quite different from two or three months ago. Just wanted to understand if these targets, you know, incorporate the slower macro from what you would have two months ago. And how independent are they from market conditions? I know you talked about no recession, no deflation, but just wanted to get a sense on the volume and pricing conditions. Perhaps detail, how do you think the consumer elasticity can go from here, you know, into 2023, 2024?
Well, it's a process, we organize with the bottom up from the country and dialogue with the country. It takes a couple of months to come to there. Of course, the financial part is upgraded on a timely basis. It factored what we just explained on the macro environment conditions. No big recession. In the lower part of the guidance, we could expect some tougher condition, either on OPEX inflation, either on the copper price evolution on the cable part. That kind of things, but no big recession or strong deflation.
Let me answer more clearly. The final ambition has been decided in the last week.
Yeah.
Taking into account absolutely the current market conditions and taking into account the sensitivity analysis on what we believe are possible scenarios, absolutely. It takes into account the current conditions, yes, absolutely. I can say that we have evolved it a little bit over the last week.
My second question, just on inventory buildup. You've been stocking up quite a lot over the last few quarters, especially in the second half of last year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you continue to see a growth in inventory probably in the first half of this year. We've seen a couple of distributors, especially in the U.S., a bit bloated recently, now that discretionary spending is coming down a bit. Where do you see your inventories going in the next year and beyond? I know you talked about stable inventories, but what does that mean? Is that percentage of sales?
We discussed with the operation and in the context in order to maximize our level of service with our customer. We decided voluntarily to increase our inventory to serve to have a good level of service with our customer. At the end of 2021, we were three days more the level of 2019, so before COVID, it has been done on purpose. On top of that, we have a huge backlog and some of that is sitting in our inventory. We know that this inventory is going to decrease going forward, but it's still sitting there, so we are following that carefully.
What we say is that overall or total working capital would be flat as a percentage of sales, meaning it will increase in absolute value with increase in top line around 11%. Let me maybe complement a little bit this answer to tell you that two days after the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we have had a call with all country CEOs to give them two instructions and recommendations about how to run the business, which were, one, to be extremely cautious about headcount, and to make sure that we were not considering any more the budget 2022 as a reference in terms of headcounts, and that we were limiting to the maximum what we are doing here.
Two, about the quality of the inventory, which means focusing this additional inventory that we had, and first of all, reducing it, and secondly, focusing it on the high-turn SKUs, which are going to be quicker to disappear in case we have a slowdown. It doesn't mean that we see a slowdown, but clearly the level of uncertainty has increased. I can tell you that since four months those two priorities are extremely high on our list. On top of also, I should also add a third one which is quite positive, seizing the possible opportunities. I was talking about photovoltaics, for example. Seizing those opportunities which come with the higher level of concern. Clearly the first two ones are on top of our agenda since four months.
Just a quick question. How do you categorize the 50 basis points on one-off margin? How do you calculate that? Can you give us some detail on that?
Yes. It's the one-off inflation on the inventory. We managed to pass through our price. The first one we get a price increase from the supplier, but our stock had been purchased at a lower price. Until you repurchase completely your stock, when you sell that stock, you perform, you gain an additional margin, which disappeared once you have repurchased your full inventory at the new level of price. That is creating a one-off, a positive one-off. Because of that, some country are overachieving their budget, so we have a small restatement also on the OPEX side, on the additional bonus linked to this additional performance. That gives us. It is a sum-up of the countries and gives us this 50 basis points.
Thank you.
Hi, it's Philip Buller from Berenberg. I have two questions, if I may. The first one on digital, I just wanna be clear how we should think about the margin differential between a highly digital site today versus a less digital site. You mentioned Switzerland as being first quartile in terms of profitability, but was that also the case before the digital transformation, or is it because of digital? I guess I'm just trying to figure out how much of the transition to digital and doubling of penetration will become perhaps just a necessary part of being in this business in order for sales realization purposes, or is it really a big driver of margin?
Let me take this one. I think first of all, digital will become part of being in the business because the world is going in this direction. It's going to be a prerequisite for everybody, and we may as well be in the leading pack in terms of going to digital. In terms of margin, in terms of commercial margin, no, there is no big difference between a customer being digital and a customer not being digital. Where there is a difference is in terms of total margin. If I take into account the whole back office, which is necessary to handle the orders, then because there are productivity effects which are linked to digital, then the total margin is better.
The other thing I would say is when we talk about digital, but we also talk about artificial intelligence, which is a little bit separate, but which is in the same category. A customer on which we apply artificial intelligence algorithm, because we are going to capture a higher share of wallet, because we are going to propose him matching items, et cetera, he also will probably be higher in terms of margin. But overall, it's not an immediate margin boost in terms of the price or the pricing. The pricing structure remains the same. Our customer expect us to be competitive on digital as we are competitive in the branches.
It's more the optimization of the whole system, which is going to provide an accelerator with digital in terms of mostly productivity and margin related to artificial intelligence.
Thanks. Just secondly, how should we think about the buyback decision of 1% per year? It feels as though you believe the shares are mispriced today. I think a lot of people may agree with that view. I guess-
You know, I read the sell-side analyst notes. That's all I do.
I guess if the shares are trading where they are and you believe they're mispriced today and the outlook has never been better, why would you not front-load that investment in the more near term?
No, in terms of timing, we'll give ourselves a little bit of freedom to take into account, you know, the year-end balance sheet, as well as the other opportunities, as well as the share price itself, based on that. You're right that overall, this decision of making share buybacks has been taken by the board overall with the idea that when we look at the comparison to our universe, which is made of suppliers, sometimes customers, or sometimes peers, we feel that we are trading at a discount, which may be explained by the past, by many things. Given both the trends that we're going to benefit, which are mostly the same, and you heard our suppliers during this presentation, we are on the same trends.
We are going to benefit from the same market. On top of that, I think what's important is to say that I think there is this idea in the market sometimes that the distributors are just passive in the market. I hope that in the slide that we showed to you, we convinced you a little bit that there is a little bit more active role of the distributors, which was said by several suppliers. You heard Jean-Pascal Tricoire say that, for example. There is an active role to play and an increasing active role to play for distributors in this total value chain. In terms of global margin, we may be lower in margin because our business model is different from manufacturers.
I really think in the future, the added value, which is going to come from all levels of the supply chain, are going to be equivalent, so I see no reason why there would be such a big difference in terms of valuation.
Thanks.
Oh, you go. Yeah.
Hi, it's Alexander Virgo, Bank of America. I wondered if you could just expand a little bit on your ambitions at the software and the integration end of your industrial automation business proposition. Blake Moret didn't really explain it, to be honest. He said he's hoping to grow with you, which is, I'm sure, a very
We ask Blake to be under one minute.
I just don't understand how you're gonna do that and why you wouldn't be, I guess, stepping on the toes of your suppliers who are also trying to do the same thing.
Brad, do you want to talk more about that?
As I mentioned, anytime there is an automation project, it's generally the manufacturer, the distributor and other third parties who actually do the integration. A company like Rockwell has a relationship with us, and they certainly have a relationship with the integrator. We have an opportunity, either through enhancing our own capabilities through M&A, to expand our capabilities where we're providing a lot of those services that today the third-party integrator is providing. Then once the system's in, you know, just like we talk about digital and data, you know, there is a big push to leverage from a customer perspective, the data that's being output from the system. How can you partner with them to make sure they're continuously improving their operations?
That's another opportunity that we have, given the relationship that we have with the customer. Does that make sense?
Mm-hmm.
Maybe let me add something to that. You know, this comes back to the old question about why do the suppliers go through distribution and why don't they go direct? They do that also because in some cases, for some extremely large customers or extremely large contracts, it makes sense for them to go direct. For many, for the big majority of customers, because those customers are going to need a breadth of services, a breadth of different brands of products, and also because the granularity of those customers doesn't make the supplier sales force, you know, being able to address them in terms of training, in terms of day-to-day relationship, et cetera. This is where the role of the distributor is.
I think this role is existing in products, but it's going to be the same in software and in services. You heard a little bit, I think, in the video also, Jean-Pascal Tricoire from Schneider Electric saying that. You know, they expect their distributors to be able on top of the products. If the package now includes products but also software, yes, in some cases, for some large distributors, for some large customers, they may sell the whole package directly. But like with products, in many cases, in the smaller industries, mid-size industries, they will count on the distributors and it's going to be a transformation for the distributors. It will require for them also to transform and to go to this level.
They will expect the distributors to be the sales force of the supplier, to transfer this knowledge and this innovation to the market. It's going to be a little bit the same equation. What we are seeing is that we intend to be in the leading pack, on this also, which is going to help us make differentiation also in terms of relationship with those suppliers. I think Rockwell is clearly, I mean, I don't want to put words in the mouth of Blake Moret, but I think Rockwell is expecting all of his suppliers to go to this level and is fully aware that some of them are not going to be able to do that because it's a different business.
We intend to be one of the leaders or the leader in those kind of services. Absolutely. I don't think at all it is stepping on the shoes of suppliers. From the contact that I have with them, it's not at all the case. They expect us to help them.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, good afternoon. It's Akash here from J.P. Morgan. I have three questions, please. The first one is on PV, photovoltaic business. Maybe if you can say what exactly do you offer here? Is this entire solution or just few components here and there? What I'm trying to understand is that, let's say if I am putting PV on my rooftop and it costs me EUR 10,000, for example, how much of that EUR 10,000 can be your revenues, in just simple plain vanilla example?
Everything but labor, I would say. We offer PV panels, obviously, but we also sell inverters. We sell cabling, obviously, mounting systems to go on the roof. We sell also all the electrical equipment behind to bring it to the electrical system.
Sometimes-
Energy management, energy management systems, sometimes batteries. The whole system, apart from the installation, can be provided by us in many countries. As we were explaining, in many countries, we also offer as an additional service, design systems for those electricians, those contractors who are not able efficiently because it's new, to design or to dimension the system. Basically, if you want to give me your address, I'm able to both do that and to find a good contractor for you.
Thank you. The second one is on Carbon Tracker. I mean, how unique is this offering, and is this really a differentiator against, let's say, other competitors you have? How do you monetize here? Like, how do you charge them for this Carbon Tracker or is it just goes through by having a better pricing?
Maybe because the pilot is in France. Thomas, you want to give an answer? Thomas Moreau, the CEO France.
Yes. The Carbon Tracker, we are testing the model with one of the customers, Eiffage. Jean-Luc Baras was explaining his added value for him. We are working to produce this indicator. We are working on the data, of course.
Data coming from suppliers. The question is. It's not a question of data, it's a question of how you use it, to be honest. Nobody can do it except us in France, for instance. We are the first distributor in France who did it and who provide this information for our suppliers, first of all. The second element is remuneration revenue based on this. The second element is based on. This is based on two additional value. The capability to modify the behavior of our customers and to change their habits in terms of product. It's an ability we have to promote new product instead of others based on this data, and it's what they expect from us.
In terms of revenue, in fact, these first pictures, we are not selling it at the moment, for the moment. What we expect, it's a complete full scope of data, of analysis, and this has a real value for the customers, and they know that it costs. What we wanna do, it's first of all to create a first picture. This is the first picture you show here. Yes. This is just the first picture. If I give you the full scope of analysis we are doing, we analyze everything, all the product they are buying, all their behavior, how they buy it. We give them a complete and a full scope of their carbon footprint. This has a cost, this has a real added value, and so that we expect to sell it.
Thank you. The last one I have is on your dividend policy. I mean, you said early on that you have invested, and because of that, Rexel is completely different than five years ago, you will be more agile in recession. If I look at your growth, I mean, it might be down next year because of recession or slowdown, if not recession. Margins this year have been boosted by 50 basis points of this one time, which might come down. Like, why are you not going to follow more like progressive dividend policy, and so we don't need to worry about potential dividend cut in 2023?
The guidance is at least 40% of the recurring net income. That combined with the share buyback we thought, and we discussed with the board, and it was the well-balanced capital allocation. Again, depending on. It's on the recurring net income, and this 40% is at least so we can discuss afterward with the board.
Thank you.
I think there were questions on the phone, if I understand well.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions on the phone line, please press star followed by one on your telephone. Once again, it's star one for any questions or comment at this time.
No. There are no questions on the phone?
We have no questions on the phone.
Mm.
Thank you. I see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It works.
Just got one simple question. I'm surprised in terms of guidance, you don't give any indication on return on capital employed. You give us some guidance in terms of profitability. You mentioned the CapEx, which should be under control. You mentioned M&A, so I suspect the capital employed will move going forward. I was wondering if you got any objective in terms of return on capital employed and why you don't give us any. That's my first question. Maybe a second question on, you know, on the 15% of sales in energy transition solution, you know, the PV, electric vehicle, et cetera. 15% of sales today, you mention a target in terms of growth.
Do you have any target in terms of percentage of sales generated, I don't know, in 2025 in this particular businesses? Thank you.
On the first one, you have seen that we are going back to the M&A part. You have seen our strict financial criteria, which includes a return on capital employed to exceed the WACC by year three post-closing. Depending on the phasing of the opportunity, we'll get on M&A. The first months of the acquisition we will have a negative impact on the ROCE. That's why we don't want it to be blocked by that and to have too many cornerstones. We decided not to guide on ROCE at this-
Yes, very clearly the ROCE will progress.
Yeah, it will progress, but we say by year three, so there will be a phasing well managed. But we hope we'll have different stage of and different maturity of acquisition over the next three years.
On the second question, you're asking me a math question, which I'm not able to compute fast enough. You know, it's 15%. We say that we will double the growth rate compared to the rest of the business. I mean, the rest of the business, you can say that the compound is 4%-7% because this is the growth rate that we are guiding to. Double for this category. How much is it going to be as a percentage of sales at the end? Not able to do the calculation, but it's possible. You know, it's what we're talking about really. We talked about the exceptional growth of PV right now. It's not going to continue forever, obviously.
All of those categories are fundamentally sustained by growth drivers, which make us confident that we can achieve double the speed of the rest of the business in terms of growth, which is quite something.
Fair enough. Thank you.
Yeah.
I'm sorry. I just had two quick questions, I think more on the U.S. side of the business. I was wondering if you have any commentary on the rate of consolidation in the U.S. market, if that's been accelerating. If there's any reason to suspect that operating leverage in the United States can't exceed sort of the best European countries?
Operating leverage, you mean, EBITDA margin, basically?
Yeah.
Yeah. For the first question, I mean, in terms of rate of consolidation, you know, qualitatively, and I will let Brad emphasize a little bit on that, but qualitatively, you know, what Wes Smith was saying in his video is really the reason why Mayer was sold, which is basically. I mean, first of all, you know, this market is not consolidated at all. You know that the biggest player has less than 10% market share. Secondly, many family-owned or employee-owned companies are probably looking at their P&L and saying that it looks very good, and it's a good time to sell.
Thirdly, more importantly, I think all of what we have said today about the challenges of tomorrow, going digital, increasing our effectiveness in supply chain, investing in ESG also because it's going to be an investment in terms of data collection, et cetera, investing in services, all of that will require scale, and that's exactly where the CollaCollat family who sold Mayer and Wes Smith, the CEO, were coming from. We expect more and more players, small, mid-size, to follow the same kind of thinking. Brad, maybe you want to say a little bit more.
It's hard to follow Guillaume 'cause he checks the box on all the things.
Oh.
That I was gonna share. The only thing that I would add when we think about our level of activity in M&A, you know, we have not been that active until recently, and that's 'cause we needed to go through that transformation that I described in making sure that we had the right operating model and the right culture. Once we had that in place, we were able to get active again, and we've been very active over the last, you know, 12-18 months. I agree 100% with what Guillaume shared. It's. There's consolidation that's been happening. It's gonna continue because people understand to compete you need the scale, and you need the balance sheet that bigger companies have and that bigger companies can bring to the table.
Brad, I'll let you answer first. The second question, which was about the profitability, the ultimate profitability potential of the US, and is there a reason why it would be less profitable than other countries and the best countries in Rexel?
We certainly have ambitious targets around our profitability and operating leverage. Again, this idea that we've been on a journey, we're at a point now where we've got the right operating model, we've got the right leaders, we have the right culture. Now we have an opportunity to lean in and really become what I consider is the best operating company, best operating distributor in the United States. I'm certainly not gonna stand here and say we don't have that capability. We've got a lot of hard work in front of us, but that is absolutely our goal. That's what we wanna accomplish.
Sorry, one quick follow-up on the first point about consolidation in the United States. Is there still a mismatch between sort of what family-owned companies are willing to sell their companies for and what Rexel's willing to pay?
You mean a mismatch positively or negatively?
I guess negative for Rexel.
Negative for Rexel? You know, the multiples are higher. Usually the multiples in the market are usually higher than the multiples of Rexel, but think about what happened with Mayer. We had a company. We didn't disclose the profitability, but it was, let's say, around 5%, and we are saying that we are going to add 2.5% of additional profitability to that, which means that basically we are adding 50% value. Even if the multiple is at 10x, 11x, and Rexel is listed at 8x or a little bit less, you know, you have still room to create value with the synergies as long as you have the right company, the right quality company, the right people, and the potential for synergies.
Yes, obviously the market in terms of transaction is always a little bit higher than the underlying multiple of Rexel. First of all, I hope that the multiple of Rexel is going to increase, and secondly, with synergies and with the level of synergies that we're able to add with those relatively easy things that we are talking about, think about it. In Mayer, we didn't have to close branches. I mean, you know, closing branches is difficult and it, merging teams, et cetera. In this case, we were able, and we are going to be able to achieve the synergies, by things which are, in terms of disruption to the core of the business, relatively, non-disruptive. Yes, there is always a difference. It's not specifically about family-owned company. It's about the market in general.
I think, in many cases, this difference can be overcome and still, being able to create value.
Thanks. Yeah, just a quick one follow-up from me. Can I just ask what's changed in Q2 versus the end of Q1? At the end of Q1, you chose not to upgrade the full year guidance. I appreciate, you know, today's upgrade is mostly just inflation related, but I guess it also implies that things haven't got sequentially worse in April and May, which is potentially good news, or at least not worse versus your planning assumptions. I just wondered if that's fair and if there's any color you can share about April and May versus.
No, we won't share too much color about April and May, but we are in the continuation of the trend that we have seen before in Q1, which means that the US platform continues to grow compared to 2019 in volume also, which I believe is normal because remember that the US was late in the recovery post-COVID for many reasons, including the mix of businesses that we have in the US. But it's continuing. It's a steady recovery. Europe had recovered in 2021 very strongly and was at a high level, and we are more or less stable around this level.
What changed is negatively Asia with what we consider is a temporary event, which is a lockdown in China.
Yeah.
which hurt us quite badly in April and May, but with a strong recovery and our teams are quite confident about the rest of the year and about their ability to catch up. To come back to your question, why did we wait until today to update the market on our guidance? It's simply about uncertainty. You know, for us, updating guidance after three months in a year where there is macroeconomic uncertainty doesn't make sense, and it's not cautious in terms of what I was telling you about something that we would like to be our reputation in the market, which is to be cautious when it comes to issuing guidance and trying to realize them.
That's the reason why we waited to have confirmation of those trends and to have the latest forecast of our countries and our latest assumption about the economy to be able to give the most precise guidance that we could. Very clearly, since we're going to talk to the market at the Capital Markets Day, to us it was the last limit to give our opinion on what 2022 was going to be.
Q1 is the lowest quarter for us. It's winter in most of our country, so it's not the best tracker for the year. We like to wait, April, May. May and June are big, very big month for us. With that we are more confident to upgrade the guidance.
Thanks very much.
Yeah. Hi, it's Akash Gupta again, and I have a question regarding digital. I mean, I think you highlighted earlier that that has been a key differentiator versus old Rex, old Rexel because now you have invested a lot in digital. I mean, from our side, we can't track some of your competitors which are private, but maybe if I ask you that if you have to benchmark yourself against your competitors based on the feedback you receive from your customers, in which quartile would you put yourself against the peers?
It would be against all the peers. It would be clearly in the top quartile, in terms of maturity of our tools, both in digital, in EDI and in data. I mean, the top competitors are also following the same path, very clearly, and they are pushing digital. It depends a little bit on the countries. In some countries, we are clearly better than the competition in terms of the content of the website, the content of the data, the services that we offer or our investment in digital, in data processes. In some of the countries we feel that we are late, compared to competitors or on par compared to competitors. Overall, to answer your question, clearly in the top quartile, overall worldwide, for Rexel.
Thank you.
Little bit of a follow-up. I thought the slide on 29 was quite interesting, where you talk about the electricians and their kind of whether they embrace or they push back. There's resistance to digital. I was wondering, maybe a question for Brad, how that looks for the US, that kind of breakdown and particularly in light of obviously the experience with Mayer and is that a bit of a kind of an open door to push on with M&A? Thank you.
Yeah. We certainly have an opportunity in the U.S. to continue to accelerate our digital tools. Our customers, assuming the tools provide value to them, and that's generally saving time and money, they embrace the tools. You know, I come from distributors that have had a very high level of success, not catering to the electricians, so you know, definitely bringing that experience and making sure that we can develop tools that drive that level of value. We do have pockets across the United States where we're seeing accelerated traction. You know, that's gonna be a top priority for us, certainly in the second half of this year and moving forward to have that uniform approach across the country to drive that acceleration that we're excited about.
Okay.
Mm.
Just final one from me. I mean, you said on your presentation that the old 6% margin guidance is now 7%. If I may ask, this additional 100 basis points, from a top-down perspective, if you have to put this additional 100 basis points between gross margin and SG&A, like, how would you roughly divide? Like, how much of this additional 100 basis points over 6% would be coming from better pricing over better cost optimization?
It will come before the operating leverage. We are a 75% fixed costs company, so we are with higher top line. We've got a very strong drop-through of what you call the incremental sales. The big part will come from that. Then, of course, we have our action plan on productivity, which is not so much to cut heads, but more to get more of the people, and we see in the ecosystem to have augmented sales force and to ensure good productivity on the top line. We have still some tools through the AI on the margin also to continue to fine-tune, to protect or to develop in some country the gross margin rate over the period.
You know, once again, we are not going to enter into the details of the bridge. My answer to that would be that it would be relatively balanced between those actions which are a little bit depending on volume, and those actions which are really depending on our own internal actions. It's going to be very balanced.
Yeah. Hi. Just quick follow-up on slide 69 actually, and just the energy transition categories. I don't know if I've kind of interpreted this correctly, but it's maybe a bit surprising that the kind of M&A is a kind of sort of low priority for kind of areas like HVAC, PV, EV, industrial automation, but maybe I've kind of got that wrong, so I don't know whether you can just provide some context.
No. It's not a low priority or else. I mean, yeah, it's written low priority, but there is even lower priority, which is no priority, which is a blank space. We don't rule this out. What we are trying to say here is that it's not a prerequisite for us. Meaning that in HVAC, we sell HVAC materials in many countries. PV, we sell PVs already, PV systems already in many countries. Same is true for EV and industrial automation. Obviously, you know that in some countries, in the U.S., in Canada, in India, in China, we have the capability, which means that on each one of those businesses, we have all the capabilities in the world somewhere in Rexel.
It's all a question of taking the best practices from one country and being agile in implementing it in the others. You know, very clearly, we have not been excellent at doing that in the past because we were very focused, and it was right on the autonomy of the countries, on borrowing the countries to make sure that the fundamentals were rebuilt. Now we arrive at a stage in terms of management in Rexel where we can be a little bit better at that and a little bit quicker at that. That's the reason why we don't talk too much about M&A. We feel that we have somewhere in-house the right capability, the right teams, the right knowledge, and the right supplier relationship, which is also quite important.
You know, in some cases, we may think that on this particular element, on this particular additional service which is required, we are going to do acquisitions. One good example is Freshmile that Thomas was talking about. This is something on which the knowledge which was built by this startup over the last 10 years, because they started their business 10 years ago, was so huge that it would have taken us maybe not 10 years because the market is more mature, but three years, four years to develop that. In those cases, on those innovations where we can accelerate our roadmap, then we're going to do small acquisitions. But we don't see that as a prerequisite to the success in those categories. Okay. I believe there are no more questions.
Thank you very much for your presence, physically or online, today at this Capital Markets Day presentation. We really hope that you got more color about what our roadmap is and what is backing our ambition, and that we were able, with the team, to share a little bit of our enthusiasm, despite the macroeconomic condition about the future. Thank you very much. Thank you again, and see you, for many of you, at the end of July for the first half results presentation. Thank you very much.