Welcome to TRATON CMD. Welcome to Munich. Welcome to the MAN Truck Forum, where customers come to collect their vehicles, vehicles which were produced at the production plant you've just visited. We have a fantastic collection of vehicles here for you on site. Please feel free to take a closer look at them between the presentations. These trucks literally move the TRATON share price. Talking about share price, my name is Ursula Querette, and I am Head of Investor Relations at TRATON. Welcome also to those who follow us online today. Some quick organizational information, the agenda: we will start with the CEO presentation, followed by the brands. We will then get an update on TRATON Financial Services, and we will close with the CFO part.
There will be two short coffee breaks and two Q&A sessions, the first one after the brands and the second one at the end, with more focus on financials. We will only take questions from those who are present here in the room, and please note that the pre-presentation material will be made available for download on our website at 1:00 P.M . Now, let's quickly turn to the disclaimer slide, and with that, I'm handing it over to Christian Levin, our CEO.
Thank you so much. No, yes, yes. Great! Transforming transportation together for a sustainable world, our purpose. And in the coming three, four hours, we're gonna take you through our journey, and we're gonna show that we believe that we can not only make the world a better place, but we believe that we can create a better workplace, that we can create happier customer, and that we can create more satisfied employees. To help me to tell this story, I brought some of the awesome TRATON Truck Board team with me, and I would like to start with Catharina. Catharina, will you stand up? Catharina is managing our product management, the so important role to make sure that the demands from the markets for all the brands are fed into future product roadmaps. I also have... Who's next? Well, our host, of course, Alexander.
You're not only hosting us here today at MAN, but you're also the man who turned around MAN and showed what the real realignment program actually means. And then let me go to Brazil, Roberto, our magician, who shows the rest of us that you can do really a lot with really a little, which you show every day of the week. And moving on to Mathias, you shocked us all by getting rid of Navistar, so the last time you'll hear about that was actually today, because from now on, it's International Motors. And, Johan, where are you? You are transforming TRATON Financial Services into real finance powerhouse, and you're gonna tell us more about that in a while.
Finally, last but not least, Michael, who knows every tiny detail of our result and balance sheet, and you're gonna talk about the financial ambitions and our financial strategy. Let's get going. Quick recap: What is TRATON? I know many of you already know this. We say we are a transportation powerhouse. We are, of course, four powerful brand that you all know about, and we are also a financial services arm. When we go back to our Capital Markets Day, I know many of you were in Södertälje two years ago, you could say that we were merely a collection of brands, who had agreed that we needed to collaborate.
But today, I'm really proud to say that we have decided, and we have started to transform into a real group, a TRATON Group, where we deliberately decide where does it make sense to collaborate and hence create group functions, and where does it not make sense? Because we want to keep our brands well-differentiated, and especially in markets where we have geographical co-location. So based on this, we're going to talk about, for instance, a common R&D, which is a huge thing. More than 10,000 people are going to change from their brand to being part of all brands and being part of TRATON Group.
I'm really proud of that, and I'm sure that's going to create a lot of value, but we're also very clear that we're safeguarding the brand's uniqueness, and you're going to hear from all the heads of the brands, how we do that in order to maximize the value that we create in the end with our customer, that is always related to one of our brands. Okay, size matters, right? We are one of the biggest OEMs in the world with our numbers here, 340,000 roundabout delivered vehicles last year, EUR 46.9 billion in revenues, and a decent return on sales, much improved, 8.6%. And then you have the fame to claim here, the claim to fame from all of our brands, with some numbers. I will not go through them.
I know that you already own, know them by heart. But what I always want to underline is that we are purely and only about commercial vehicle. That is, we're only into business- to- business. We're not selling anything to consumers. Just to have that said, for those of you also online. All right. Last time, we talked about adding a bubble or a circle to our strategy. That's that little white thing in the middle. It says strategy execution. When I started at TRATON, and that's actually, you reminded me, Johannes, exactly three years ago today, I added that to the strategy. Strategy was perfect. Now we also start to execute on the strategy, and trust me, there will not be a new strategy launch today.
What we have set out to do here towards 2030, we're still determined to do, and we're gonna tell about what we have achieved, but we're also gonna talk about what do we need to achieve more. But it's really all about execution. Let me take you right into what we believe are the main reasons to invest into TRATON, and we call them our seven investment highlights. Starting with where I ended the last slide, we deliver what we promise. And I'm gonna take you through what we promised last time and where we stand. But let me run them through quickly.
We believe that a clear commitment to sustainability is a do or die factor in our industry at one point or the other, whether it's not about the customers in the first place, it's definitely gonna be about attracting employees and attracting capital to the company. Electrification is gonna be the ultimate, but not midterm, but the ultimate solution to decarbonization of the transport system, and we believe that we are very, very well placed to take advantage of that huge shift that is happening in our industry. Fourth, TRATON is about growth, and we're gonna show you how we believe that we can outgrow competition in the coming years.
We are on a great transformation journey also when it comes to technology, and as I was saying, we take the advantage to also merge our forces, come onto one product system, which we will talk a lot about today, but also change in the organization to support it. We're building resilience in a completely different way compared to two years ago. We're gonna show you how we do that, and we are, of course, and this is maybe the highlight for many of you, setting up a clear financial framework. Where do we wanna be in the coming years? You remember we promised you a certain level for 2024, and there will, of course, have to be a next step. Right. We deliver what we promise. Let me take you through our promises quickly.
We promised you we would have battery electric vehicles into the market, and we have battery electric vehicles into the market. I admit they're not sold in huge quantities, but there are solutions from all of our brands in many of our applications. We promised we would finalize the realignment of MAN. This was not the first attempt, it was many attempts, and as I said, Alexander, you and your team made a remarkable job to actually carry through everything. Last time, we talked about whether the Steyr plant would really have to be abandoned or would it be abandoned? Yes, it was abandoned middle of your last year, and when you look to this year's result, it is really a clean result, post-realignment, and I think you've all noticed that MAN has showed that they can really make money.
All the last three quarters is based on a lower break-even point, thanks to the good job done here. All right, Mathias, you will talk a lot about this, but we did promise to scale the so-called Common Base Engine 1, the CBE1, with its gearbox and adjacent components. This was launched in the Scania Super back in 2021. It was launched in Navistar, International, sorry, in 2023, and we have been scaling that up through this year, and the feedback from customers so far is just close to amazing. We promised to start to build a TRATON Modular System, and of course, the Common Base Engine, to some extent, is part of that modular system, but there's much more to a modular system. But we have clearly set the pace to move in that direction, and I will show you much more about that later.
We promised to set up a common financial services company based on what we had in the Scania brand, and we can conclude that we are on plan, Johan, and you will go into detail here, but we have been doing exactly what we said, meaning that we are gradually taking over the MAN business from the Volkswagen colleagues on the passenger car side. We have started up at International, offering retail services or retail financing, and we will follow according to time plan also in Brazil. So super important tool in order not just to make money on money, but to actually sell more and sell better. We said we would go to China, and we went to China.
We had a bit of trouble getting started with the pandemic, but since then, this is moving at China speed, and everything is pointing towards the promised SOP in the fourth quarter of already next year. I'm gonna go there in a couple of weeks, and I really look forward to seeing some. I think this is a live photo from last week, but we're gonna see even more progress, and we're currently installing the equipment in for the assembly lines. We also promised to keep a policy of generous dividend, and we think with a 30%-40%, that we found an attractive, yet balanced level, paying out EUR 1.50 , which was highly appreciated, based on last year's results, which was more than a doubling from 2022.
At the same time, thinking about our difficult starting point when it comes to our balance sheet and working relentlessly to deleverage, and we will talk a lot about cash flow later on. But I think we have found, based on some feedback from many of you, a fair level here of doing what we promise and at the same time move towards a better rating, which is so badly needed, not least for Johan's business. Wrapping it all up, saying we set out to do a 9% return on sales in the calendar year 2024. It's not over yet. You know that we are over target with a half-year result. We stick to our target, and we concluded, of course, an 8.6%, which was already good and a big step up from last year. But let us come back on that, of course.
But that's the first investment highlight. We do what we say, we don't overpromise. Secondly, we have a clear commitment to sustainability because that's a do or die in this industry, further or sooner. We have identified three main impact areas. The first one, of course, by far the biggest, that's the decarbonization of our industry. We need to find a way to decouple from carbon dioxide emissions. We need to find a pathway towards a maximum 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming. We know that we're 5.3% as an industry of the emissions in the world, which is huge, and we are supposedly a sector that is difficult to decarbonize.
But from the product point of view, we have already what is needed, and every time I talk about this, I take the chance to call out to people around us in the ecosystem, including you, representing the financial industry. We need help. We cannot do this on our own, even if we are the guys who are gonna pay fines if we don't live up to the EU legislation or the American one. But we need here what the customers tells us. Three things: We need to get a good business case for customers to change over. We need charging infrastructure, and we, of course, need availability of green energy, green electricity in the places where we sell this product. Otherwise, it does not all make sense.
Circularity is becoming more and more important, especially when we move into battery electric vehicle that carries so much raw material in the battery cells, raw material that is not of an indefinite availability. Here we need to think different, and we are thinking different. We are already much more into doing remanufacturing, but more importantly, this needs to start from R&D. For every new project, we look into what is the circular strategy on this specific project. Finally, as we go more global, as we need to have better control of the supply chains, and especially in the battery electric space, we need to make sure that we're 100% on top of the human rights issues that emerge going more global. All right, third investment highlight, and this is about electrification.
Here you have a nice collection of photos representing products from all of our brands that are actually supplied in the market right now. Those of you who were at IAA saw that both MAN and Scania in the European space are expanding the offering. MAN is now going into 40-ton, and the on-highway long-haulage operation. Scania is there, but it's expanding with more performance steps. Navistar International have managed to deliver its first BEV vehicle, and Roberto, you are the first in Latin America to have a factory which is serial-producing battery electric vehicles with the e-Delivery. We at TRATON Group, of course, fully believes this is the long-term solution. It's in any, however you calculate, you come to the conclusion that the only viable business case for the customers is battery electric. That said, we see that this is moving too slowly.
However much we would like to see those volumes grow, we need to realize that we need to work with intermediate solution. The best protection we have here is that we have already the new driveline, which is the world's most modern combustion engine, which could be fueled by alternative fuel such as biofuel and later on also biogas, which could either be compressed or liquefied. We are developing hybrid solutions in order to cope with this. We are looking into hydrogen, and they saw a hydrogen combustion engine from MAN at the IAA. But ultimately, we see that the only thing that will really make it from both a CO2 point of view and a business case point of view, will be the battery electric vehicle. Services. This is something that is boring to talk about. I love to talk about it.
This has huge impact on our bottom line. This is really what is creating resilience in our business, and this is where we see much more potential to grow. But let me start, as the slide is starting, on International, which is probably our biggest growth lever. If we do this right, if we can bring now International, but I lost a pen bet. He promised me a nice International Motors pen if I did not say Navistar. I already lost it. If we can bring this brand back to its historical heights, which would be market shares in and around 25% in Class 8, in and around 50% in Class 6 and 7, with proprietary services, we see that we could do a miracle in terms of bottom-line profitability.
We all know that we're operating in the world's biggest profit pool, i.e., the North American space. A lot of weight on your shoulders, Mathias. When we met last time, you saw that our presence was not terrific in the Asian space. It's still not. It's around about 5% of our revenues is coming from there. We never, either of our brands, had industrial presence there. But with the investment in China, we are opening up. We're going to China because it's the market where you have the supply chain. We're going to get behind of the trade barriers, and we're going there for many more reasons that I'm gonna come back to. But it truly gives us an industrial footprint on a continent where closeness to customers, closeness to technology, and closeness to trading systems and open trade system is of the utmost importance.
So we're going to China. Now, I come to services. Let me see if I find my supporting slide on that one. All right, so let's divide this into three parts, and I actually think I have. I should have clicked, yeah. I actually have a slide on this one. So what is this about? Well, it's about capturing maximum amount of value on the rolling population. We do that with going more and more into portfolio management, so we increase every year the penetration. We work in all our brands to get customers to sign up to fixed cost contract, at least on maintenance, but also on repairs. With connectivity, we add up a lot of more intelligence to these offerings.
We can think of AI, and we can add even more intelligence, and we can go into services that become proactive instead of reactive, protecting uptime for customers. That's happening. However, as the landscape evolves, we believe that this is not where we can grow compared to our total share of sales, but we think this is rather gonna be flat as we see battery electric vehicles coming into the market. E-mobility services around the battery electric vehicle, however, has a huge potential to bring new revenues to us. Basically, all customers that buy a battery electric vehicle today ask us at least about charging, which gives us the opportunity not only to make money on charging equipment, but also to sell uptime services on that very same equipment.
Because in this game, it is all about uptime, and a battery electric vehicle that is not charged in the morning is not gonna do the job, is not gonna bring the revenues to the transport companies that it's serving. We think of charging in three different ways. It's the depot I just talked about. It is being a mobility service provider that is safeguarding that our customers can charge also at other people's, if we call it like that, other people's charging stations with a fair pricing and good availability. We're building that up as a TRATON backbone, as a company, but we're gonna deliver that through the brands under different brand names. And if I'm rightly informed, Alexander, MAN call it Charge & Go. Scania calls it Charging Access. It's the same type of services, but it will completely be branded by the name.
It makes sense to share the investments here on software. And then the third thing about charging is the on-highway. That's what you hear most about. That is what is lacking. That's where we call out for politicians to act, and here is where we created Milence together with Volvo and Daimler to make sure that there is a build-out along the highways. That, however, is only gonna represent some, somewhere around 20% of the total charging needs. But anyway, great way to expand our offering and make more money on services. Finally, if you think even further ahead, then you come into the world of truck-as-a-service or real autonomous solutions, where we take over the responsibility of what today is a typical responsibility for the whole company. And here, of course, the sky is just the limit. But is it happening? Yes.
I will talk about JUNA, one initiative in the group, later on. And yes, we have started to sell the first autonomous vehicles, and they will be delivered actually next year. All right. Growth lever number four, financial services. I was already into this, but of course, it's gonna be great to see if we can duplicate what we have done in Scania over the last 20 years and offer that to all of our customers in all of our brands, and not only financial services as a basic leasing product, but all the tailor-made solution that includes and enables bundling. 'Cause bundling is really the name of the game, and that is what our customers are asking for. A one-invoice solution where you have everything included from your brand on it.
It will be different, however, delivery models, depending on how we work at the front end, and I think that's really good because we are in competition on the front ends, so it's gonna be branded by the respective brand on the front end. It's gonna be run by organizations that are separated on the front end, but there's gonna be a uniform system in the back where we can hopefully also gain some scale on, for instance, IT systems, but of course, on the so important funding. But Johan, I will not steal your show. You're gonna talk much more about that in a while.
Then, where I could spend a couple of hours, the transformation into becoming truly modular, and I can just urge you to have a look on the station, if you didn't already do it, out here, where we explain more about how this works. But let me take you a little bit back to where we're coming from. When we first started, and you can say even post- or even pre-2019, we were really looking into, "Can't we get scale by buying the stuff together?" Buying stuff together does not give you any scale unless that stuff is exactly identical. We did find a few things. We did find that steel is basically steel, and you can, by bundling, gain some volume up to some point, by the way.
Because when you become too big, you're not it's not interesting to negotiate prices anymore because you take too much of the base capacity from that steel mill. But nevertheless, rubber, tires, stuff like that. But it didn't really, it could not really be measured, bottom line. So we realized we had to develop components together, and we started with the famous common CBE1. I think we started to talk about that project already back in 2018, 2019. This was a big investment. It was carried by one of the brands, back then, Scania, and then it was supposed to be licensed to the others. It has become a fantastic success, as I was into. You find it in Scania, you find it in International. It was launched in MAN during the IAA. You saw it under the name D30.
But there was one problem: this driveline was supposed to be integrated into different chassis, under different cabs, and most challenging, into different software architecture. And then integration costs occur. And what you gained, a scale on having that same basic engine, you start to lose by having huge efforts put into integration and adaptation, either on the driveline itself or on the interfaces in the chassis and the cab and the software. So from that, we draw the conclusion that, okay, it was the right thing to do. We could not have afforded to develop a completely new combustion engine driveline this late, when others are talking about sundowning. So that was good, but we have to be even smarter.
And that brings us to the decision, and I'm so happy that we could finally agree on this, that we need to step into one product system, i.e., what is called the Modular System. It is, you should think of a LEGO play box, where basically any component can be combined with any other component. There are three basic principles around modularization. I think they're also on the wall over there with our experts, but it's really about getting common interfaces. If you have common interfaces, and if you stick to the principle that the same need needs to be using the same identical solution, and then it's just a game about how many performance steps do you need on this particular component. If you think right around that, you get trillions of combinations.
You can tailor-make on the rich end to customers, but you still have limited amount of component, limited number of components, and on these components being identical, you do get scale, and that's where you can save. S o on one hand, you can charge more because you can come closer to the demand. On the other hand, you have cost advantages, and that's just in the industrial setup. If you then think downstream, what this means for every service workshop, if there are only three windscreens, you only need to deliver and store three windscreen to guarantee uptime to our customers. If you have 15 windscreens, you do the math. That's how it's working, and I think we have an animation on this, right?
This is not today, but this is the end game when we have worked our way through not just the combustion engine driveline, but of course, the electrical driveline, of course, the chassis, of course, the cab structure, and most importantly, as I was already into, the software and the electrical architecture of the vehicles. So we have projects in Catharina's roadmap that is addressing all of this with, of course, different time spans, and you can see how you, with the main components here, and here we're in the electrical world, the battery electric world, we'll be able to basically compile any other vehicle, basically from any of our brands. I think you get the concept. If I take one example, which was also showcased at the IAA two weeks ago, the so-called CCD, so that's a propulsion unit, what you have here.
That's an electric motor integrated with gearbox and with power takeoffs. We're creating that in seven different power and torque classes. It's gonna come as a two speed, it's gonna come as a four speed, and they can be combined, and they will have the exact same interfaces to fit into all of our future vehicles. As a result of this, and as I said, we also realized we have to have the engineers working together on this. It does not make sense to work on one product system and have engineers in four different brands. So we started the project with the aim to finalize during next year, to have a global R&D organization with more than 10,000 engineers. And that's gonna be headed by Niklas Klingenberg.
He's not here today, but he's part of our truck board, and he's having an offsite with the leaders who have been appointed by technology area around the world, by the way, because this covers all of our sites, whether it's Munich, Nürnberg, close to here, or whether it's Södertälje, Chicago, Resende, or somewhere else in the TRATON world, including China. I get too enthusiastic talking about this. I need to speed up. All right, sixth investment highlight: we're creating resilience. Here you see our dependence on the different regions, and by moving into North America with International, we're covering that in a good way. We just need more volumes. We're covering Asia then with our investment into a factory with a production capacity of 50,000 units, but we're also becoming resilient through the expansion of our product offering.
We're covering from the smallest 3.5-tonner, all the way up to the heavy Scanias and MANs, up to 250-ton, plus buses, plus everything we do on services, and the more successful we are on services, the more resilient we become, because services are not moving in the cyclical way that new vehicle sales are doing in our industry. Okay, so to the highlight of the day, what are we then set out to do as a management team? Well, we are gonna bring you growth, we're gonna bring you profitability, we're gonna clean up our balance sheet as quickly as we can, and we're gonna make sure that shareholders are rewarded.
So if you start from the revenue, and it's a span, but we believe towards 2029, so we put a five-year timeframe to this, that we can grow revenues with 20%-40%. We believe that we can up our return on sales margin to the double-digit territory, also here showcased as an interval. We work relentlessly to take down our net debt, and we believe that the year 2027, we should be able to get that to zero, but in any case, we should be able to manage it during this period. And we have decided to stick to our dividend policy and continue to offer the 30%-40% that we have been able to stick to so far.
I know you have many questions on this, and I know that there are many details to be dug into, but we will have to wait for Michael's presentation, when you will cover that. And, in the meantime, I'm going to invite on stage, Alexander to tell us about how you are planning to continue to contribute to the growth story of TRATON. Welcome on stage, Alexander.
Thank you, Christian. And clicker.
Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Me and my team, we had a plan to realign MAN, and we executed upon this step by step. This is what we promised to you two years ago at the Capital Markets Day in Södertälje, and here we are. We can show you that we have kept our promises and are even more robuster and resilient, as well as also flexible to deliver on the future.
A very warm welcome also from my side here, hosting you in our hometown of our headquarters here in Munich, where here we have the heart of the sales and services teams, we have the heart of our engineering, we also have the heart of our purchasing, and as you've been showing today and could experience, also where we have the heart of our production, where actually on the same production line, when we speak about flexibility, we are producing here our full line of ICE vehicles, but also on the same line, very lean investments, producing the battery electric lineup as well. You actually also have experienced then the ready trucks with already the TRATON components in.
When you came up here, up the hall, we have the D30 PowerLion , and the PowerLion drive line is giving more power, more torque, and more fuel efficiency to our customers, and that is what we need. We need satisfied customers investing in our products, investing in the MAN brands. When you walk up here, we have here our electric truck, battery electric truck, which we showcased here in the IAA in Hanover last week, and we not only showed this truck, we showed actually a whole lineup, a whole lineup of applications from 12-ton to 50-ton gross train weight. Why? Because customers not electrifying only in the long haul, customer electrifying in the various applications, and therefore, you also see here a crane tipper unit, which is also electrified. When it comes to full lining, we are sticking to that plan.
MAN is and will be a full liner from 3.5 ton, transporting goods and people, up to 250 ton, transporting the most heaviest goods you have on this planet, even in the so-called train combination. When it comes to electrification and our experience, the buses you see behind me actually made a great success and an impact in just two and a half years after launch. In two and a half years after launch, we became Europe's number one in electrification on city buses, and this well spread from northern Scandinavia to south of Spain, as well as even where last year we announced the electric chassis for South Africa and more international markets to come.
This, of course, we have been taken into our plans, how to actually grow and accelerate on our battery electric trucks, and this is for the future to deliver on. Here we love to actually soon, on the 15th of October, deliver the first battery electric truck then to our customers to go in operation. Our customer, DRÄXLMAIER from Stuttgart, is taking this truck to the area of Leipzig, where in a hub-to-hub, 24/7 operation, three of these trucks will actually sustainable transport the batteries for the Porsche Macan factory. And this is actually how our customers are also challenging us and saying, "How can we get trucks 24/7 to actually amortize this higher investment in battery electric trucks?" And here we can bring solutions to our customers.
Ladies and gentlemen, before actually talking about our future plans, let me also recap what happened since we met more than two years ago in Södertälje. Remember, the COVID pandemic was just followed by the Ukraine war, and here at our MAN, we were heavily hit because we got some of our cable beams from Ukraine, but we stuck to that. We had a production stop for six weeks, and we actually also mobilized not only our teams, but also our customers to stick to that, and they actually signed it up and continued to hold on to the order book. That, of course, gave us a quite tough 2022, but with the realignment already going on, we managed actually to still have a good black zero in 2022. Then we were breaking up in 2023 to actually deliver on our realignment program.
And in 2023, we managed to get over the year finish line with 7.3% return on sales at EUR 14.8 billion. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a result which has not been delivered by the MAN team in the last 15 years, and we are super proud that we did it, and we made it. However, of course, we have to continue. We have to continue on the deliverables, which we actually are teaming up here. So since we last met, we also have been growing, of course, in our truck deliveries. However, then also at the same time, working on our resilience, and this is what we've shown to you in the first half year.
In the first half year, we actually have been over peaking over our top 8%, which we informed to you to deliver at the Capital Markets Day in 2022. What we delivered was 8.2% in the first half year, even with 22% fewer trucks delivered to the market. So here we are delivering. When it comes to our van business, which is really topping up our full lining, not only on the vehicles, but especially also on the services growth. By the way, we started this business only in 2017. We grew even here in the last two years with another 59%. Really, customers love not only our vans and application solution knowledge, which we take from our trucks in, but also they love really our service operation, 24/7 available for van business.
In the buses, I already mentioned here, we strongly have a good lineup, but at the same time, also coming out of the COVID pandemic, where the demand for buses and coaches was pretty low, we also made a turnaround plan and also actually moved more efficiency in our bus operation, and of course, we also have been more determined to connect all our vehicles.
We actually stepped up and said, "We want to have our customers connected to operate their vehicles better, but also operate and engage within our services operation better, to provide them more uptime and to provide them best data to operate more efficient for their existing vehicles, but also for specifying the vehicles to come." And this is, of course, to connect to our service operations, but also to support our customers' drivers to take out the best from these great trucks and buses we deliver. But to get there, we of course had to invest in the execution of our resilience. I said in the beginning, as a team, we kept our promises, and we delivered the 8.2% for this first half of the year, and showing the resilience.
However, over the second half of the year, the current market environment will not allow to maintain this level, but again, we've shown resilience already. The first half of the year, there have been fewer trucks. We can actually deliver better because our bus business is there, but also our services operation has a strong growth as well as also we are looking on the efficiency of our footprint in the company when it comes to cost discipline, when it comes to driving our services, and when it comes also to retail management. Secondly, we successfully executed the realignment program. Just to recap, what does it mean? Actually, in sum, we reduced 30% of the production cost for trucks. We lowered our break-even point significantly.
That made us much more resilient, as already presented, and the production and engineering footprint was also separated but connected through different locations, where we use now Pune and Ankara as engineering as well as production locations and also Kraków. We carved out Steyr, and by that also, having less production site, we also optimized very much our logistic movements along the line. Further, we worked also hard on our portfolios, not only taking out the different variants in our products, which actually were over-engineered, but at the same time also making sure that we are working through product cost optimization and also copy-paste what we know and have in the group. So TRATON-ize our thinking on the modularization more. This realignment now led to this robust setup. However, we also had to work on our portfolio, and in the realignment program, we had a quite harsh portfolio shrink.
This we challenged, and we challenged, how can we keep to have the portfolio open but still deliver on the results you and we ourselves require? This we managed as well, and Christian already mentioned, we introduced a hydrogen combustion engine to deliver sustainable, the heavy transportation of goods, and then we think about goods transported up 100, up to 1 20 ton. But also, as to really live up as a full liner, we managed to electrify our eTGL with the fantastic components you find here on the brand. And last but not least, we also focus very much on accelerating on our services business. Nothing sells better than a dedicated service organization. That is clearly how you actually bring customer satisfaction to the market, but also how you actually make sure that customers stick to your brand and your operation.
And this we do with all our 280 workshops we have around the globe, but at the same time, we are working through this program with our dedicated service partners, because also they, of course, living and breathing the MAN brand, and that makes customers to stick. That is how we made sure to bring a robust company, MAN Truck & Bus, going forward. Now, it is time to continue. Continue on the roadmap you see here behind me. Going forward, towards 2030, we will maintain and take our lessons learned from our lean international setup. We continue to challenge ourselves on our industrial footprint, and when it comes to the industrial footprint, we do this also hand in hand with our work councils and unions.
We managed together, actually, to invest and decide in a factory battery factory location, where we produce the batteries you see on the trucks here in our factory in Nuremberg. This is second factory in the TRATON Group, located in Nuremberg, and it goes into serious production from Q2 next year. Important to ramp up our e-mobility portfolio. We will also very much take the lessons learned from our production system and realignment of the footprint, as well as the engineering realignment, and tackle our SG&A cost, because basically the same production flows you can see also in the administrative world. And we will now take this, take it into one global shared services organization and also make sure we have them at the right efficient spots, where the competence and the right cost balance meet on the globe.
Of course, we engineer. We further work on our engineering footprint. It's based on our sites in Lisbon, Pune, or Ankara, in Munich or in Nuremberg, but also here, we will TRATON-ize these teams to make sure, actually, we can, through the bundling of capacity, drive more efficiencies out of it and also share there the knowledge for the way to go. Then, of course, it's all about continuing enhancing our business areas, driving the strategy for the different business segments when it comes to van, when it comes to trucks, when it comes to bus, and also when it comes to external engines. The external engines, which you also see proudly operating in different brands in agriculture industry, like with AGCO Group on Fendt tractor units or also Claas agricultural machines.
This is where these customers love to have our brand on these engines, because that's a sign for quality, endurance, and a sign for having service. Even now, following also with the Fendt brands from AGCO Group in the Americas. In our operations, we clearly have, per unit, a strong return on sales and KPI follow-up, where actually also we have an end-to-end focus and an end-to-end organization for our business segments in place. Well, that is. What does it mean? The head of trucks at MAN moves the flow from product requirements to product development, to production, ramp up of new products, to actually the service operation and even to the used truck business. And this end-to-end dedication is the cultural re-change we have in our company. This we now driving more forward into our retail excellence, where both service excellence and sales excellence is now key.
And in most of our countries, we're actually driving direct sales, and with, of course, the digitalization of sales processes, we can also benefit from this process accordingly. Last but not least, you can see it here, but you can even experience it here in the room. It's all about making sure we are driving the common technology. And as Christian announced, the bigger products you will see by the end of this decade coming out of this, but still with a dedicated MAN branded and flavored. But we already today using the TRATON Modular System, where the Common Base Engine was first installed at Scania, then at International. Now, you see it here lined up, as well as also you see the common components in our battery electric trucks, where, for instance, software, Christian mentioned it as well, the battery management system is a TRATON Group battery management system.
The charging system is TRATON Group-wide, and here we are step by step, actually embedding our TRATON components. This, of course, with the group function integration, bringing our R&D teams, our production, and procurement teams together. This is how we can leverage and actually strengthen the MAN brand to simplify the business for our customers. Because transformation is and will come to the transportation sector, both in the U.S., but also here in Europe, where MAN plays a big role. We will see that transport demands will also have CO2 reduction demands, and this is what more and more of our customers will require. This means we need a strong services portfolio, including also captive finance, making sure we have the right fit on the components.
We have to partner up, which we in our industry have not done so well in the past, connecting even more of the vehicles, of the software, and the hardware, making sure to get that connected with the services, and ultimately going to the next step when it comes to driving autonomous. When it comes to financial services, Johan will tell you more about it, but we are rolling out our MAN Financial Services unit since the beginning of this year under the TRATON umbrella, and this is really where I can tell you that our customers love it. I interacted with many of our customers at IAA. One of the customers, he is big in Europe when it comes to air cargo transportation. He really loved to hear that, "Okay, great!
Now, I'm working again with one MAN team, with a strong background of TRATON Financial Services." They do, and they want to do one-stop shopping. Why? Because the transformation to sustainable transportation for them is already complex enough, and there they want to have one partner with actually one portfolio of solutions accordingly. This is also important on the technical side, making sure we can modularize our products, and this we do by the components presented, but then having the application in place, and here we do the same actually as we've done with our city buses. Yes, we were not the first on the market, but we are the ones with the broadest availability and application fit. This is how we actually tackle that future of e-mobility. Coming to that, there is one important lever, and that is when it comes to infrastructure.
No battery electric truck will actually move when it's not charged. And here, it's not only about the infrastructure, yeah, to partner up with the suppliers of the charging, but it's also to team up and use the strength of a company like E.ON, a large utility provider in Europe, where together in eight countries where they operate, they operate the power plants, they operate the network, and actually we said, "Well, but trucks need power as well, so let's make sure we are connecting your power, your grid, through our service locations and have there two or four charging stations available." And this is what we are rolling out now, three locations already up and running since June this year when we announced it, and this goes with the lightning speeds, and you have seen the trucks coming out of the factory plant, electrification. Here we go.
But what is powered up has to be paid as well, and that's clear. And this, again, we do with actually the installed connectivity. This is where we relentlessly now said, "Since two years, I want to have all our vehicles connected." And now we have the application, SimplePay, with some of our smart brains actually developed. What does it mean? The driver just connects and actually, automatically the vehicle and the infrastructure, whether it is the charging infrastructure or whether it is also a normal diesel station, for instance, like with BP pumps, we can actually charge up then also the invoice. Yeah, and last but not least, when it comes further into the future, we're also exploring and developing our autonomous vehicles.
We do this step by step, and we've been very much operating in confined areas, where together, for instance, with DB Schenker, we showed that autonomous solutions in confined areas in train-to-road terminals can actually get efficiency gains of up to 40%. Now, we actually got the approval to test it as the one and only manufacturer here in Germany, to test it on the highways, approved by the Minister of Infrastructure in Germany since April this year. At last, let me wrap it up. We foresee first growing customer value through the collaboration and the full integration into the TRATON Modular System. Secondly, we build further on leveraging partnerships, especially in e-mobility, to make sure we do this efficiently in scaling up, but also with a CapEx lean model.
I think we also shown that we have done our homework, driving down our SG&A costs with a lean and efficient setup to be installed, and this will further ensure resilience and profitability of the MAN. And fourth, it is all about being profitable in all our business areas: truck, bus, van, external engines, and then supported by a strong service growth, where actually we are building not only the profitability, but also the customer satisfaction and the customer loyalty. And this plan will then lead us up to a targeted return on sales of 9%. Thank you. Now, you heard me, you heard Christian, it's possible to win a pen today, so I'm very glad to hand over now to, over actually, the Atlantic Ocean, but he's still here, the CEO of International Motors, Mathias Carlbaum.
You got it. You got it, Alexander.
You won it. Good afternoon. I'm very excited to be here with you all today to share with you the International journey. It's a journey that goes way back in the past, when the company was founded in 1831 . A company founded close to 200 years ago has undergone many transformations. If you look in the 1920s , it was a leading company in the agriculture business as International Harvester, with 85% market share and the fourth biggest company in North America. Fast-forward, we go to a promising future. Promising future, as already today, the biggest profit pool in the world, and future studies show that it will continue being so and even growing as importance as profit pool, particularly the growth that we will see in the service sector.
Between these two stages, the past and the future, it's my team and I at International that are at the watch. 16,000 associates at International and 30,000 in a vast dealer network are very committed and convinced that we will take part of this huge profit pool and grow. Before that. Well, it's clicking very much on the front here, but not on my back, so let me try again. It was such a nice handover, Alexander, but you missed on the clicker. Let me see. Capital Markets Day. Well, this is the square yesterday. We got there one minute exposing this name change, more difficult for some than for others, for International. International is as we're known on the market. It's our customer-facing brand, it's our dealer brand.
So the square yesterday and here today to show you how we are going to tackle the future in three different stages: what we've done until today, what we're about to do now, and what comes in the future. So first of all, we did the small, small step, but focusing on International. That's where we have the brand equity, and to share that with you, I have a short little clip of a minute here of who we are.
How does a company that's been around for nearly two hundred years keep going? It's about attitude and grit, finding better ways to get things done. So that's what we're doing, changing what we need to, while staying true to who we are, because we're part of this nation's landscape and generations of families. We built our company by working with communities to meet people where they are and help them get where they want to go. That's why we push ourselves to move industries forward, to take care of today while preparing for what's to come, to make a positive impact on people's lives and on the planet that sustains us all. As we start a new chapter on our journey, we're new where it matters, and unchanged where it matters even more. Because we're not like anybody else, and never will be. We're International.
So the three stages. First stage is important to deliver on what we promised. I'll go through that. Again, next stage is where we are right now. Tell you what's happening right now, that's setting the foundation for the coming years that we see ahead of us. So what have we done so far since mid-2021, when the company was acquired? We have increased our market share at a growth of about 1% per year. At the same time, you don't grow without following, of course, on the return on sales. Also grown 50%, 46%, to be exact. We are setting the foundation for the future in bringing the proprietary Common Base Engine, as we call this S13 Integrated to North America. More to come on that. And we're spearheading at scale already into school buses.
So important segment, and it's a proof case that technology, business model, and adoption can be scaled. Looking into some highlights, CapEx was early addressed into this venture. We have invested into production facilities, both for the S13, producing it locally in United States, but also into a production footprint in Texas. That's giving fruit already today. R&D, 2x-2.5x R&D investments per year are showing up that we are launching our products on a continued basis. Three product platforms so far and more to come now in 2025, 2026. Easily forgotten and underestimated, but acquisition, a merge often fails around culture and leadership. Emphasis from day one, what kind of culture and leadership do we want to build on? Influenced by exchanging people across the group and building a solid foundation of what is real winning company culture and leadership.
Service, a huge potential. I mean, the business model of service. I'll come back to that, but how we're dealing and exploring on that. As I mentioned, the huge profit pool for North America will just grow, and particularly in this, and this is an area where the untapped potential is huge. There's a lot to learnings to bring from group into this, and we have our dealers and many customers on board on this. Last but not least, as mentioned, how to rebuild a brand from the bottom up. Rebranding is one part of it, but give a foundation to, let's say, to solidify the new brand. Check incremental market share gains. Some of you might say that this past, the quarter two was below. For sure, that's coming back. Now, we're delivering heavily now in Q3, so the market share journey is continuing.
ROS growth 5.5% compared to when we started, and in net cash $1 billion + compared to the first-year operation. These are underlying strength that will just continue when you see to our capability of grow ROS and generate cash. Finance company, come back slightly to that, but also, as mentioned before, started October last year, increasing portfolio very firmly with close to 70% growth on monthly basis. As said, the foundation on the product side, which will lay foundation for future, three out of five platforms are renewed, and the other two will happen in the coming two years. Most important, perhaps, proof points of the past are good, but what are we doing right now to really leverage from the market and grow into it? Let me focus on three main areas, starting with the S13 Integrated.
The S13 is appealing to all the stakeholders we have out there. If you look from the owner's perspective, the TCO, I've been through many platform launches in my career. This one, the step change that we're doing with this is just magnified. It's the appeal to the owner with the vehicles that we have out there on the field for more than one and a half year, trying demos, et cetera, are now starting to scale. Huge savings for the owner, the driver, performance, power, the gearbox, all of that, the driver likes it. The driver has more and more say into purchase decisions. And last but not least, the technicians, the people who service it. It's simple to service.
It's data-driven, it's predictive, brings a lot of advantages that we tie in a lot of services to and bundle, so we do the modeling of service subscription into the offering to this product. Something not available previously in the United States, we're bringing it to market, and it's been well received. We see a potential in our segment of the 13 L to 15 L heavy engines from today's 15% participation of proprietary to go up to 60% in our sales, and that is over a growing top line in which we will capture market share for this. Secondly, operational excellence, our own performance. How do we do? How do we—are we in charge and accountable for our performance? Quality needs to come first, second, third. Not always the mindset in our company, where time and cost could come before.
These two are important, but nothing comes ahead of quality. Let's not forget the focus of lean and cost-efficient, a trademark for U.S. operating company, and so also for International. We are lean and cost-efficient in our structure. Resilient through good and bad times. How can we cope with markets that are going up and down? Flexible in our cost, in our efficiency, as we now go through these rapidly changing stages in North America. That is underlying, so again, growing top line and keeping our cost structure in place should give leverage on the so important ROS. Last but not least, where everything starts is with our customers. Our customer-facing are the dealers. We are consolidating dealerships in North America. We've gone from 150 to 100 . That comes with a lot of investments.
The dealer body in the past five years have invested more than $2 billion in acquiring dealers from each other. Growing, they believe in the future of International. The asset value for a dealership today, compared to pre-merge, is a factor of three, and it's increasing. The fittest are winning and taking. These are the ones we build the future on. The subscription models I talked about, how do we go out there and not sell parts over counter at low margins, competing with everybody? Create value for the customer, driving uptime. We see today, benchmarking within group, that geo-fencing vehicles coming into retail, that they spend 3x longer than the best case in the group. Releasing that drives value for customers and gives us opportunity to charge for that.
So there we see already targets clearly on uptime through this contracted bundles, subscription models, driving value for a customer. Everybody's talking about electrification. I will not repeat what my colleagues have said. It's also, of course, happening in North America. It's happening in a very structured, good manner. What do I mean with that? The Greenhouse Gas 3 coming into place, 2027, has been just done very cohesively and working the sector together with authorities. What is feasible? What is ambitious? How do we reach the target stepwise? How do we tie that to infrastructure build-out? So we see that what's happening from the years from now to 2027 already counts, so the more that we do today counts into credits for the regulation. And then from 2027 and on, there's a growth into this, and mainly after 2030.
It's a little bit skewed in time, but the ambition is to go through this. What happens in North America, U.S. today? Electrification is going to happen. It's gonna drive it. It's gonna win the business case on TCO, ultimately, with some help, everybody doing it together. Even so more interesting is that a lot of this modeling will happen also combined with autonomous. Autonomous is coming first in the U.S., it's coming in the south part, coast to coast, and if electrification is evolution, the combination of autonomous and electric is revolution. We're working with strong partners on both sides, and we're prepared as TRATON to go U.S. first autonomous. Moving over to the stage, next stage, is 27. You see, if you look, well, quite self-explanatory, but where we are today, there's been significant launches into products, medium vehicle, the bus.
The bus, which was 20% common parts with the truck before, is today 80%. So we go towards simplification, modularization within that International, almost, and add to that the layer of modularization within TRATON. It's a twofold here. S13, enough said at this point, we come with a full range offering now, school buses, medium and heavy, coming up next year for battery electric. Exceptionally important, coming up, you don't see an exact date for it, but you can count yourself, we come with the revamped Class 8. Class 8 is where we have most market share to gain, most growth. Of the 400,000 market on road, Class 8 is about 200. Look into the stats, that's where we are.
The biggest growth potential for us, the combination of the S13 with the revamped cab, e-architecture, technology comes on board on this, will be the huge driver for growth for us. Add services and all of that, it comes together at this point. So we're building this foundation to really take off here. Until then, we grow, but this is the big lever. Ultimately, not last, not least, but last here, we see coming together the TRATON Modular System solutions, directed very much to common battery platform, which will come well in time to, as I said, end of this decade, when we see electrification really taking off.
Starting off in our case, like anywhere else, in the medium range, where we are--have a, today, a huge participation in the range of a little bit more than 20% with growth potential, but the medium range for us is significant. It's about 100,000 vehicles, and there we come again with a strong offering on the BEV side within this time frame. So four blocks here for the accel phase, the service solutions, the contract portfolio, resilient in good and bad times, capturing value rather than cost, plus on parts pricing. Captive finance, how to get all this together? So leasing model, finance the bundling, finance the residual, bring this together and drive it data-driven. We see a potential here of today's 21% of sales revenue for services grow up to 30%.
Not only is that important as part of sales revenue, but it's also, as I mentioned before, it's more profitable than selling parts over counter, which today is more than 70% of our sales. Dealer excellence, again, the asset we have there, together with the dealers, extremely inspired for what they've seen, what we can do, proof case of today, how we work on digital, create value for them, and again, drive up time for our customers by being proactive, bringing down the cost of serving the customer, but bringing up, at the same time, the value, and so we all, dealer, customer, and OEM International, share that part. The International way, let's not take this for granted, the cultural leadership, continue emphasizing on that. Exchange talents from the group. We are today close to 100 people from outside, from being zero, well, one, me first, at International.
Today, it's a hundred coming from group, and also the biggest amount of people from group working somewhere else. Exchange, learn, drive this, prioritize healthy leadership and a common way of working within International and within group on the fundamentals, driving operational efficiency and employee experience. Last but not least, you heard about it, product deployment. Don't forget school buses in our case. We're market leaders. It's close to 15,000 units. It won't be less. It's there to stay. There comes first, electrification, data-driven. We are leaders there and intend to stay so. Class 8 revamp touched upon, Group BEV coming also in place in this timeframe. So this is the foundation for our growth to the 20%. What do we commit to as steps for the future?
Continue, drive, enhance the journey from being hardware-oriented, transactional, to become digital-enabled, solution-led company focusing on driving customer value. Grow the S13, the spearhead. The biggest potential to grow at is around the S13. Continue driving. We drive, we want group integration. This brings technology to us, accelerates our journey into this growth, and capture the scale benefits. And last but not least, bought into the biggest service network in North America. Here we can leverage, we learn. There are group companies doing great things. Pick the best practices from that, deploy, and make the service network become the best network in the United States. So all this adds up to we come from last year, 6.6%. We'll do slightly better this year. We aim for 11%, the double-digit here, and this journey is...
We're not the end of it, we're just in the beginning. There's a lot to come. We are committed to it. We believe very much in the brand, in the future for International in North America. Thank you. I am now to introduce, not the next speaker, but the long-awaited coffee break, so let's take the opportunity. They say it's short. We know it won't be as short as they're hoping for, but make it 10, 15 minutes. I think I'm ish on that, so we're over here taking coffee and can continue the discussions there. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, please find your seats. We would like to continue with the program.
Still waiting that everybody finds their seats. Welcome back after the coffee break. Let's continue with our next speaker. Welcome, Roberto Cortes, who will present Volkswagen Truck & Bus to us. Roberto.
Thank you, Ursula. Good afternoon, everyone. I am really happy to be here today with you to present the development, the achievement of the Volkswagen Truck & Bus brand since we last met in May 2022, as well as show you our further growing plan. A good example of the achievements and also the potential for the growth plan is this beautiful picture. You can see our brand-new ID. Buzz, that we start a serious production of this model this month. After being the pioneer of the electrification in Brazil with the launching of the e-Delivery back in 2021, now we continue our journey towards decarbonation with this vehicle, which, by the way, already utilize group components in its production. So I am very proud and excited about this.
Before we go through the achievements and the future plan, let me quickly remind you who we are. So if we start here, we are a value for money specialists. Our motto is: less you don't want, more you don't need. So that shows our value for money. For developed economies, we are, our strong market presence are in Brazil, which is a good emerging market, and we also have strong presence in other emerging markets with efficient business model, which is based on the asset-light concept, where we share the production system with our major suppliers not just in the supply of their parts, but also in the production of our trucks and buses.
Compared to our fellow brands there, that we heard 260, 200 years, and so on, we are a young truck and bus company with a little bit more than four decades, but very intensive four decades. We are present in over 30 countries, in whole Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina, in several markets in Africa, and starting to test in Southeast Asia, where we are present. We have five production sites, the biggest one in Rio de Janeiro, in Resende, where we have our production concept, Consórcio Modular de Produção, again, where we produce our trucks together with our main supplier, and by doing that, we share exposure with them.
So we are a full-liner of truck and bus vehicles, going from the famous 3.5, we go until 123 off-road vehicle. You guys go 200. We are leader in Brazil one, two, three, four years, no, we are leader for 20 years in Brazil, and vice-leader in buses, and leader in school bus, the biggest school bus producer. We are seen as an innovative company. Our pioneering the electrification, our pioneer in the Consortium Modular production system shows this, and we aim it to be a collaboration people, and the execution is our core. And last but not least, we achieve 8.8% return on sales, exceeding what we promised in the last Capital Markets Day, which was 8%.
By the way, we have not delivered just the financial results, but we deliver a lot of other good things, and I'm going to list the five biggest promises that we have made. The first one is our strong revenue growth in Brazil, and this is measured by per unit, not to be adjusted by volume. So this is pure pricing and how we achieve a 25% price increase. With the introduction of Euro 6 last year, we improved quite substantially the productivity and the fuel economy of our trucks, which we were able to price. We are improving the mix by introduce extra heavy truck in our product line with the Meteor, and also introduce the added value electric vehicle, which make us to increase the revenue in a such percent.
Second achievement, we talk about internationalization last time, and we divided the internationalization in three phases. One is growing where we are, second one is growing African, Middle East, the next continent, and the third phase in Southeast Asia. This I bring it to you, the achievement in the phase one, where we said we needed to further grow in Argentina and in Mexico. As you can see, comparing the first half of 2022, when we last met, and first half of this year, we increased our volume in Mexico and Argentina by 52%. And the main reason for that is because we launching a CKD production in Argentina, and most of that increase comes from that, but I will be back on this subject.
We continue our journey in terms of decarbonization, increasing our product portfolio, new versions of the e-Delivery and the e-Volksbus, and we are entering in new markets with this electric concept, primarily in Latin America and also in some countries in Africa. Fourth, we say that we needed to strengthening our services. That may be the big room we have to improve is on the service and the achievement also on the service growth shows our potential. We grew in service by 55% in two years. And as important as is every opportunity we have to follow our friends, other brands, is we are expanding the group components. In the last two product programs that we had opportunity to do that, we did. It was in the electrification and the Euro 6.
is important to mention, this development associated with this efficiency business model, make us being in the first half of this year in a very good return on sales achievement of 11.8%. Talk a little bit about shaping the future, following the strategic priorities of the TRATON Group. We also have three pillars: the responsible company, value creation, TRATON Accelerate, pretty much in line with the TRATON. On the responsible company, is our journey towards decarbonization and also on the greenhouse gas reduction, and Scope 1, 2, and 3 is basically the ones that are present. We are also working on the 1 and 2, and the social progress to improve the situation of our communities and to bring diversity and inclusion. Value creation, I mentioned, big opportunity in the service, but the bigger one is still in the internationalization.
We are very strong in Brazil. We should replicate this business model, this concept, in other parts of the world, and that's what we believe we can grow from almost 10,000 to 25,000 in the future. Always in the value creation, utilizing the group components, primarily the TMS, and the last pillar related to the TRATON Accelerate is pretty much shaping our role in the future logistics ecosystem and providing more service, again, through digitalization and utilization of the consortium. When we launched the e-Delivery, we had to create a consortium, and we are strengthening that with new partners like ABB, Siemens, and so on. So those are the three pillars that we are focused in the future expansion. Now, dipping a little bit on the internationalization, I bring here the example of Argentina.
We took a look at what's happening in Argentina, why we are market leader in Brazil, and we have 3% market share in Argentina. Good product, good dealer network. Volkswagen brand is a good brand in Argentina, good people. What was missing to have the recipe for success in Brazil was a production plant. Didn't work on the import, export, so we built a CKD plant, and here you can see. In a few months, we almost triple the market share, and this is just the beginning. We see in the coming quarter, we keep growing this market share. So together to grow where we are, we are also taking new markets like Togo, Jordan, Qatar, and you name it, and our markets in Latin America.
Now get to the end of my 10-minute show here for you guys, just to finalizing saying that take advantage of our unique set value, which I mentioned to you regarding our production concept. Our potential to even further in Brazil, where we are market leader, but we believe that we can further grow in the market share. Although we have 25%, 26%, we can go at least to 30%, and that's what we are aiming to. Utilizing our expertise and be the pioneer in the electric to leverage from that. We have the major customer in Brazil with us, like Ambev and some others, and we want to leverage from that, always looking to benefit from the TRATON Modular System and TRATON Group. Our track record show that we can do better than the 8%.
We set ourselves less strategic target, and we are ready and committed to go from 8% to 10% from now on, and we have proven that we are able to achieve that. Now it's just to keep it up. Thank you for your attention, and I hand over to Christian to tell us about the Scania brand. Thank you.
No, you got a hand. Super, well done. All right. Before I start with the Scania, I still keep my TRATON CEO hat on, and I just wanted to say how happy and proud I am with what we have seen here from the colleagues. We're really building something together here, and not just the results, but also the efforts put into, on one hand, delivering in the brands. I think you see on the numbers that we're doing progress, but also how they're chipping into the TRATON story by supporting common values, common leadership principles, and really creating something around TRATON as a company. Good. I now change hats again. I become the CEO of Scania, and I know what you're waiting for. I'm gonna spoil that right away. What is the return on sales target for Scania? Well, it's 15%.
So that's what you'll see on the last slide and maybe already saw in the material, but that's what we agreed in the Scania management that we're gonna aim for. We've had 12% as our target so far, and we think that there is enough of more gunpowder in the company to shoot towards 15%. Let's have a look at what we have achieved over the last couple of years, and we've seen some pretty strong progress, even if it's been a bumpy road, but I think it's been mainly up. And if you look to the revenue generation, as you can see here, we have increased sales by 50% over the last six years, but if you look to the bottom line, we have doubled.
It's a 2x profit increase over the same period in time, up to EUR 2.2 billion last year. We have another figure here, which is not so much perhaps known outside of our company, but it's at the core of our operation, and especially at our dealer operation, that is absorption rate. That is how much of the service profit that can cover the service operating costs. So typically, you think of a dealership, and you think you need to sell X number of vehicles in order to stay profitable. But if you have an absorption rate above 100, it means that you can basically make money on that dealership without having any contribution from the vehicle sales, provided you have no costs for salespersons, which are typically put on variable pay, right?
Having gone here, where the industry is typically well below 100, we have worked ourselves this year up to 120, and we see that there is so much more to do if we work, and I'm coming back to that, if we work in a more, structured way also there. EUR 1 billion has been invested, as evident, EUR 2 billion on TRATON, EUR 1 billion of that is on Scania, to drive the, Modular System for battery electric vehicles. A few highlights: We won the Green Truck Award. We won that award again. It's the seventh time in eight years. It means that you have the truck that consumes the less fuel, and of course, that is one of the drivers for TCO, perhaps the most important driver for TCO.
We're very proud of that, and the coolest thing in 2024 was that it was not only the one consuming less fuel, it was the truck that had the highest payload, so the lowest weight, but it also made the test track in the shortest time, meaning the highest average speed. So that's something for the Scania team to be really, really proud about, and that is based on the Super driveline, ladies and gentlemen. What are you gonna find in the other brands coming up, where results will be probably as good as Scania's? Market shares have been growing. We see historically high level, 17.9% in Europe as we close August. We're seeing 18% in Latin America. We're seeing 20% in Brazil, which is our biggest market in the world.
If we look to the extra-heavy segment that you're not really present in, Roberto, we have 30% market share, which is really remarkably high figures, and we, of course, intend to stay up there. I also want to mention Mexico, a market where we sold vehicles in hundreds but a couple of years ago, we really invested into Mexico, and we sold last year 2,500 units, and we're aiming at a similar level when the market's actually down this year. Mexico starts to become a really important market to us. Servicing the rolling fleet is at the core of Scania. We are releasing all the time new services, using the rolling population of ten years, almost 800,000 trucks, to put more and more emphasis into broadening service portfolio. It's a win-win.
It's about offering uptime to customers or minimizing downtime and charging for the value creation rather than just charging for repairs. On the BEV, we're doing some pretty cool piloting in order to convince the world in a way that battery electric is, what I said before, the ultimate solution. Here's a picture of a Schenker. You see it's a Nordic combination, so it's a truck and a trailer. That's what is allowed to go all the way up to 25 m and 74 tons, showing just that it works. We have a good example down in Portugal with a customer driving for IKEA, called KLOG, who are doing tests now on the 40-ton tractor combination. That also works. And we have the LKAB tipper up in the north, doing 80 ton. That works. We have the SCA Forestry...
SCA company is doing paper and pulp, but they cut down trees and transform the trees into the paper and pulp mill factory. 74-ton, off-road, arctic conditions, that is working. So I think by doing all this pilot stuff, we want to just show that there is technology from a technology point of view, nothing that hinders us from transforming our industry into battery electric. What have we achieved since the last CMD? We have launched the Super. I already was into that, but to cut, to bring some more flesh to the bones, just take one customer example. One of our mega fleets in France, operating out of Paris region, distributing food, have 1/3 of their fleets now changed from the DC13, the old Scania engine platform, into the Super. They get 11%, confirmed by our data and approved by the customer.
You can imagine what that does in terms of savings on the bottom line, so truly remarkable. I was into services. We have improved the service revenue with 60%, at the same time as we have increased our total revenues by 50%. So services growth in Scania continues to outgrow the company, and of course, that's something we would like to continue to do. It's a lot based on digital solutions. I will mention three examples. One is the digital dealer, something that Mathias initiated in his time in Scania. It gives the service advisor, the person that receives you in a workshop, a world of data presented in a very smart way.
So it gives all the history of the vehicle, it proposes activities you should do proactively on your vehicle, and it gives you all the commercial campaigns that you should upsell to that customer exactly at the time when it's needed. We have something called ProCare. We already have 4,000 customers subscribing to that. That's where you stop just selling a repair and maintenance contract at a fixed cost, and you move that into saying, "We take responsibility for uptime," i.e., we make sure that we repair the component before it breaks, thanks to really good big data, really good sensing on the vehicle, and of course, connected and based on the experience that we have from that customer, and that driver in particular. Finally, we launched something called Services 360 at IAA.
here in September, which is a way to further modularize the customer, the services portfolio to the customer. So to really adapt the service offering exactly to the specification that you buy. You know, you tailor-make the vehicle with a billion different choices, it will be the same on the service side. It will follow. Hard to explain like this, but it will be something where we think we will really further increase the services sales. On the BEV journey, we have invested heavily. We did, together with MAN, win the first trade media real on-road testing of battery electric vehicles. There was all the big brands. There was Daimler, there was Volvo, there was Iveco, there was MAN, there was Scania, there was DAF. Was there DAF? I'm not sure, to be honest. Disclaimer.
But outcome Scania and MAN as the two best products in the battery electric. Well, I think that's a proof point that we're doing the right things, and as you were into, Alexander, we're sharing battery management system and also some hardware components on these trucks already. And finally start of sales and the first order received on the autonomous. Yes, it's true. So you asked me last time, two years ago, "Will that technology ever hit the market?" It has hit the market. We will deliver next year. It is not to Rio Tinto, where we have been doing development together. They have not ordered commercial solutions from us yet. But it is another customer called Rivet Group, also in Australia, also doing mining, who ordered the first 11 fully autonomous trucks to be delivered end of next year.
And what is more interesting is that this is just the first in a very long pipeline of mining companies who see the great potential in bringing the driver out. You know, the cost side of that, 3x , three shift, or rather three shift, 3x drivers, AUD 60,000-AUD 70,000 per year is what you save. Four years, five years lifetime of the vehicle, and you can make the maths, and then customers are prepared to pay quite a lot. And on top, of course, we get all the other services that are connected. All the traditional services are following suit. Right. So, how are we supporting TRATON? Maybe, maybe that's a given, but just a few examples on the responsible company.
That is part of the DNA of Scania since 2016, when we set out our purpose to say we're gonna drive the shift towards sustainable transport system. This has been with us. We have developed number of products from the alternative fuels into hybrids, into battery electric. We are experimenting on the fuel cell as well, and of course, this is made available to the TRATON Group . We're doing good on our decarbonization journey on Scope 1 and 2, where we promised to reduce 50% until 2025. We're struggling when it comes to Scope 3, where we have promised a 20% reduction for next year because of the lack of deliveries of battery electric vehicles. We have not given up.
There is a lot more we can do in terms of fine-tuning specifications, in terms of selling more alternative fuel vehicles, and in terms of training drivers even more extensively. On circular, I think I was already into that, how we are thinking. But to give you a cool example, we've now tested to assemble a gearbox on the assembly line based only on remanufactured component, and it worked perfectly on the first trial. So more is happening also there. On value creation, here in the middle, it's a lot about Scania's culture, always putting the customer first, whatever happens. It's about excellence in core and the Scania Way. I will talk more about that, our culture. It is also about driving programs of efficiency, but we don't call them that like that.
What we do is that I, as CEO of Scania, I launch a so-called key yearly challenge as part of our strategy process, so each year, I threw a challenge to the organization. Two years ago, it was about working with our delivery precision. We had tremendous problems, as you remember, with the supply chain challenges and also industrialization internally, starting a complete end-to-end project to up our precision. We're still not there, so we had to prolong that challenge for another year, so we're into the second year now, but that is a way to structurally improve the company.
Second challenge that is running since one year or since this year is cost and cash, where, of course, Jonas, our CFO, is deeply involved in transforming our thinking, because this was always the case in Scania, away from only making EBIT margins into really releasing cash in the company. And I think we've had a tremendous development and are up and above 80% of returns over net profits. So really good. So we do that as well. But what is then Scania really all about? What is the secret sauce? Well, this is how I explain it when I get the question. It starts with modularity. Since the 1940s, this has been at the core of the company, and I will not bore you with explaining it again, but I will say that this journey is never over.
You can always go deeper. You can go down to bolts and nuts level on the hardware and make sure you have just about the performance steps you need, and that you standardize that over the whole, product portfolio. But you can also do it in software. There we have more to do and more to learn, and you can do it on anything. You can do it in the software that supports sales. You can do it in the way you put together the lunch menu in the cantina, but we are crazy about modularization. We want everything to be modular because we know that brings scale, and at the same time, that brings multiple choices. That's one pillar of success for Scania. The next, I would say, is what has become the Scania Way, our management system.
That started with a journey together with Toyota to try to understand Toyota Production System, TPS. Back in the mid-1990s, we made the first experiments and created something we called Scania Production System. That system has evolved to go beyond what is just production and logistics, and move out into all parts of the company, and it's a structured way to continuously improve what we're doing in all our processes. It's been very successful, I must say, and I'm super proud to see all around in the big Scania world, that this is a living thing, which involves all the employees and creates a lot of motivation in terms of improving our company together, and you have heard a lot about things coming out of this. There are principles coming out. You will hear more deviations.
That's one of the holy grails of the Scania way, meaning that we don't love to have deviations, but when we get them, we love them to death, you know, and we make sure they're not coming back. So that is also part of the secret sauce of Scania. And then closeness to customer, and that's the last and the third pillar. By having more than 620 dealerships, by living our value of customer first, it is like having the factory gate at the dealer's yard, or rather at the customer, to make sure we get the understanding what the customer really needs, and bring that into Scania in a structured way, which is very hard to replicate.
And based on that, we have created a culture, we have created a kind of a Scania family feeling, where today the colleagues in commercial operation talk about customer obsession. They're prepared to do anything to satisfy customer. The way to measure their success is through the Net Promoter Score, where this year the target is to come up to 80. Those of you who are familiar with the Net Promoter Score, we're currently on 79, know that it's very, very hard, and it's a measurement on customer loyalty. Would you recommend this supplier to some of your competitors or colleagues? Super proud to see these achievements, and of course, that is bringing that service offering is bringing resilience to our brand. Shortly on the BEV, I think we've been into that, but of course, we're doing a lot to enable BEV services.
It is on the product. We're expanding the Modular System towards somewhere 2026, 2027, have complete system that can serve all segments, which we can today serve with a combustion engine. But it's also about performance. And again, to bring you a customer example, Italian customer, Chiggiato, 180 vehicle fleet, doing Italy, Switzerland, recorded, and again, verified with the customer, 102 kW, rounded figure, per 100 km. Those of you who drive battery electric cars, are there any who have upgraded? There are a few, yeah. What do you manage? 20? I do 25. I should be ashamed. But if you think then of a 16.5 m long, heavy vehicle doing just four times that of energy consumption, you realize that is really good. And I think this is, of course, where the competitive game will stand.
You have to be the best on energy consumption. I think we have a fantastic starting point there already. We have a captive network. Of course, we are preparing the entire network, not only the captive, being close to the customers who acquire the battery electric vehicles. We train, and then we do charging. Charging is three things, and for Scania, that means depot charging and destination charging through our own company, Erinion. We have chosen different path compared to the sister brands in the group. That's good. This is customer fronting. This is a way to hedge in the group, but to make our brands different, and very bold ambition, 40,000 charging points for 2030 already. That's something we can also make a lot of money on. Then it's to be that mobility service provider, which we already talked about.
And then, of course, then it's along the highway charging, where we use Milence, as we do for all of our brands. Looking forward then, and thinking where this industry. Sorry, I jumped one. Oh, my God! Business model adoption. I promised to talk to you about JUNA. JUNA is a joint venture together with a little forwarder, sennder, which is based here in Germany, in Berlin. And what we do there is we try to take away the hurdles for customer to step into the battery electric world. You actually pay per day or per kilometer. You get the battery electric vehicle from us, so no upfront investment, no risk. You decide the time frame, and if you want, thanks to sennder, you can also get the cargo, the load, with a known price level.
So here you go, dear carrier. You get the equipment, you get your cargo, and your destination, and up to you now to transport this in the best way to the destination. Very popular. We do not have enough vehicles to satisfy the demand, unfortunately, but this is one way how we can transform this industry, going more subscription-based and starting to work with, with assets. And of course, very important that we then have the financial services arm to support us. That brings me quickly into the future. What will all of this bring? What is there more to take out of this market? We go more electric, we go more digital, we go more expansive on the assets. Logistics is becoming core also of our operations. Is there something we can take out of this as business opportunity? Sorry. Yes, for sure, there is.
I just shoot a few numbers at you. If you think of the charging market, and you just take the 80% that consists of that will be the total market share of charging in depots and destinations, that's estimated to be worth EUR 30 billion by 2030. If you take asset management, such as in the JUNA case, you would estimate the total value of that, which will be more and more the business model as we move towards autonomous, to EUR 50 billion by 2030. And then, if you look into autonomous technologies and American studies, so in U.S. dollars, $88 billion worth of market by 2035. Can we tap into that in any way? I think so. I think for sure there is something where we can, where we can benefit. So back to our 15% promise. I hope I convinced you.
Four proof points, continued roll out the Scania Super. It's above 50%, but it's not all of it yet. We get EUR 3,500 extra in Europe average. We get EUR 7,000 extra in Latin America for this product. There's more to go. We're not gonna sundown this product until 2026. We have the captive service network, which has gone from a net consumer into a net producer of profits. We are 23 on a 2.8% uplift on our average EBIT. That's good, but we know we can do so much more there. We have the BEV journey, where we're sure there is more money to be earned when the transition is done.
Finally, we have what is the most valuable in Scania, excellence in core, the Scania Way, and our focus to the Scania family, and to always do what the customer would like. I think that, ladies and gentlemen, should be enough to convince you, hopefully, that 15% is not too high an ambition for Scania. I stop there with Scania. I cannot click, but I can say that with this, we are moving into our first Q&A session, and there will be a, we will all be here for you. So hold your horses one second. Am I right, Ursula? Or should I step down?
No, no.
No, I should stay? We need a few colleagues from the brands.
Yes. Roberto, Catharina, and Christian.
Super, yes.
Yes.
We're bringing in Catharina as well to take the product and technology questions.
Welcome.
Plus the brands. So the idea is that we take a Q&A now-
Sure.
... On our strategy and on our different brands. And there are lots of hands, so I don't want to be the bad guy, so I leave to Ursula to start.
Yeah. Oh, no, I didn't see who was first. Who was first? Klas is always first.
No, it was up far, left up front here. He's always first.
He's always first.
Microphone.
Let's take Klas, please.
Okay. There will be time for all of you.
Yeah.
You have a mic or?
Yeah. There's a mic coming-.
Coming.
... I hope.
Thank you very much, Klas at Citi. I first had a question on the targets. We spoke a little bit about it in the break, but I just want to raise it again, that it's a 100 basis points improvement from where we are today at the midpoint to 10%. But on slide 66, the brands and the strategic targets, they were in line with me. I guess I was lucky. But if we add them together, we get to 12%. So my question really seems to be a cushion here or 200 basis points, and my question is: Is this price cost normalization? Are you thinking about cyclicality between different regions? Is it linked to the R&D function? Yeah, I just want to understand that sort of how we get from 12% to 10%, on that. Thank you.
Although, Christian, I think that's really a question for the second Q&A session because we want to hear Michael first, and it's really because you're really asking about the trade and targets. So let's concentrate here on brands, product, strategy, and then take financial questions later. So-.
Is that also linked into growth, that you want me to ask about growth later? Because I have another one on growth.
Uh, anything-.
Okay.
... which is on the brands and the strategy and-.
All right.
... brands' targets, happy to take them.
Okay, I'll squeeze in on growth, and I sort of tilt it to the brands. It's a 5% CAGR at the midpoint, roughly, and truck OEMs typically grow 2% - 3% historically, so it's an ambitious growth target. You're baking in caution on margin, but you have a lot of growth coming, which is great to see. On slide 61, North America goes down, Europe is flat, other regions are growing. You had a lot of strategic growth initiatives, Christian. So I'm just... Out of all these brands and initiatives, like, what gives you the confidence? And sorry if that was part of this session.
No, no, that's fine. I will, I'm sure Michael can comment later. But, I think. No, but strategically, I think we are set to grow. And, as I was into the four growth pillars, of course, and I will let Mathias talk about International, but I think that's the most, that's the most imminent growth opportunity we have. I mean, if you see to where we were, if you pair the technology we bring with the fantastic iconic brand and the good dealer structure, there is growth, definitely. And then it's Asia. It will all be about execution, of course, but we will get a foothold there, which will enable execution. And then there is growth potential in Europe for both Scania and MAN to be grabbed. So we want to be bold on growth.
So I think you spot that perfectly well. You add Financial Services, which is a missing link. I mean, Scania always had it, but it is a missing link for the other brands, and that makes you ultimately stronger in doing your sales better. So I think all of that added up, I feel really confident about the sales. But I should let in Mathias, because what I really lean on is here to up our average, because you're right, 2%-3% of recycling is what our industry typically sees. So, Mathias.
Yeah, well, there's correct, Klas, you saw some kind of market figure five years away from that caught a little dip there, right? Some pre-buy effects and, you know, it's a bit too mathematical perhaps to, that the U.S. market over time will shrink. We rather see it, let's say, on a stable path, with some, let's say, over time, of course, some potential growth on the top. But the main growth driver is, of course, on our own performance. I mean, trying to show here an ambition built in for this period of time of a five-point market share growth. And if you think 5% growth, the main growth will come really on the heavy Class 8 on-road.
It is a multiplier effect on a more, let's say, on a higher asset price, a 5% over 15% goes 20%. Also, as mentioned, we do see huge potentials on the service side to grow. Yeah, we put a lot of weight on ourselves, but we see a lot of potential, as I explained before, on the growth capacity there. Again, does that add up to the whole TRATON growth? It's a big part of it, comes from North America.
Very quick, final one. Promise we'll be super quick. Is on the R&D that Scania is basically carrying quite a lot within the group, and you want to move into sort of common group. Out of the 15% ambition, which is, I think, a new truck leading benchmark, at least from a global level, not North America, how much of that is sort of contributed that R&D starts to sort of be more allocated to rest of the Group?
Yeah, it's just going to question in a way-.
Yes.
- But it's also related to our financial model.
Yeah.
We are set to change, or rather, we have decided we will change our financial model. We'll change it this calendar year, but we will not communicate that externally until next year. I think I leave it to Michael to elaborate.
All right.
A little bit on that, as well, because that though, but that's really important because it's also governing the group.
Yeah. Thank you.
Good question.
Let's take the question there, and then Nicolai.
Thank you very much. Handelsbanken and Hampus Engellau. I have two questions, and they're, they're linked. In this TRATON Modular System, what kind of a commonality between the brands are you aiming for? And the question linked to that is, what risk do you see in having a premium brand, a value-based proposition, and also mid-market segment in terms of maybe over-engineering a value product and maybe cannibalizing on a premium product? Thank you.
Super good question. I think, Catharina, would you like to start?
I can start. So, what it's all about is, of course, to create a platform, an architecture, both mechanical, electrical, and software. And what we're going to use then is what we have used in Scania for many, many years, standardized interfaces. And on those standardized interfaces, we can put then different performance steps. So, for example, the new powertrain that we have for the electrical drives that will come in, I think you said seven?
Said seven.
Seven different power ratios, and MAN has said that we will use four of those. Scania said that they will use five of those, so there are, of course, some overlapping, but we will use the performance steps on the base engine, so to say, to differentiate. On top of that, of course, it comes differentiation. We'll have different cab interior, different cab exterior. The servicing portfolio will also be different, so we strongly believe that the brands will be able to continue to serve their customers and keep their heritage on their brands.
Alexander?
Maybe how we do and anchor this in the brand is that MAN as a full liner is offering, you know, from 3.5 ton with our vans up to light-duty trucks, medium-duty, and heavy-duty trucks. And there we are differentiating very much there, where we are on the same regional turf as Scania. And this is where we find also customers who want this together with their service portfolio and the service offering. But at the same time, to afford this full line, full liner approach, of course, we need to be more precise on the number of variants we take in. And this we performed very much also actually as a lessons learned when we developed our TGX model.
So from the 2020 launch to actually now, we have reduced 25% of the variations out of it, and by that, delivered on a product cost program. And actually, we take this now as calibration to once more do this over the whole line. And this is how we, let's say, technically, from technicality to commercial proposition, are bringing this forward.
But is it still fair to assume that if you're sharing electric architecture, drive, drivetrain, gearbox, frame, and all that, that you will increase the quality in some of the brands within the group?
I think many of our customers, they really love the quality of the MAN. And of course, this is also where we have to adhere to, especially also in the different segments where we operate. I mean, we are very heavy in continental Europe when it comes to the, for instance, construction business, as well as into the medium and light distribution. And this is, of course, where we need the quality. And then I think there we owe to provide this competence from the Group R&D into our customer heritage as well. Because it's not only. I mean, the cake is much bigger than adding MAN and Scania together. For instance, in our turf here in Europe, the cake is to fight, of course, the rest of the competition.
Can I do one more question? And it's a brand-related question, and I pushed this before, Christian.
Of course.
Is the Scania V8 engine? What's your thinking on that in on International in the U.S. to maybe fight back a bit and on the market share?
Yeah, that would be beautiful, right? No, we do not in our roadmaps have a V8 for the U.S. We need to realize that also in the U.S., the combustion engine is gonna be sundowned. Again, not saying it's impossible. Once we move over to common interfaces, it's of course the lower integration cost possible, but it's not in our plans currently. Let me also comment to complement Alexander, because this is a really important question. I mean, we work, of course, really hard to make sure that we are not creating more overlap, but we're creating less overlap. So we wanna grasp as much of the European market together as possible. We have between 30%-35% market share together today.
The target must be that we can cover basically 100% of the market and get, of course, maximum result out of that. We have tomorrow a design run-through of some upgrades to the common modular system, and this is very much the target for both of us.
Thank you.
Nicolai is next.
Thank you. Hi, thank you. Nicolai from Deutsche Bank. My first question is also for Scania, and Christian, this one is for you. We appreciate the direction and that you are so ambitious on electrification, but I do miss the targets, and I think we got some electrification target share two years ago. Is there any reason why we don't get them this time around? And what kind of BEV dilution do you kind of factor in, in the 15% target?
Yeah. We actually stick to the targets, believe it or not. We realize it needs to be a hell of an acceleration to reach 10% in 2025, which is the target perhaps you referred to, or 50% in 2030. I think it's important to stick to that also in the discussion with policymakers, because we've always said that this can only happen provided that there is a positive business case for customer charging, et cetera, and we cannot solve all of that. But we're gonna make our utmost as Scania, by the way, as TRATON Group , to make sure that at least the products are available for that type of growth, including the industrialization of these products. So we stick to it, albeit realizing that, of course, as it looks now, it's a tough journey.
We're of course gonna be in Brussels with a new commission to talk about, I mean, what we can do to still stick to these targets, but do that together.
Okay. And if I can squeeze in my second one, that would be for Navistar or International. You did mention that 2024 could be better than 2023. That would imply that H2 must be much better than H1. Do you see the supply chain stabilizing? And can you also remind us on what's the current share of the new powertrain? How is the rollout progressing?
Yeah. Well, you did your math right. H2 is better than H1. And we had built up a huge inventory of, let's say, semi-finished. As you note, there's not only a market share, but tied up, let's say, capital for group we carried with us into Q3, which is now being released through the Q3, faster than anticipated, because we see supply chain much more stabilized. And on top of that, I think when these things happen, of course, it's hard to prevent a force majeure as a fire at the supplier, but we take this as a very sharp opportunity as to become better in our own, let's say, processes end to end.
So we are working into a much more stable supply chain and improving our processes, so we can, let's say, when the market picks up again, becomes, let's say, more resilient. And your last question, there are markets here on the S13. Well, we do have... I gave you the figures, what we've delivered so far this year, and if you look into our production, let's say, order book, it's around 30% of the total right now. So remember, we came from 15% with the prior proprietary, and already in this year, let's say, this is not annualized. It's in our current order book.
I saw Daniela's hand up next.
Thank you. I also have two. One is sort of follow-up on Navistar, and then the other one I'll ask International, and the other one I'll ask afterwards.
Okay.
But you clearly, I mean, you, you've gained 1 percentage point of market share already, and that's what you continue to aim. But at the same time, we also have now a couple of competitors also launching new trucks in a tough, maybe shorter-term markets, looking at the Class 8 at least. Can you sort of develop a bit more on to exactly why do you think your TRATON or your, your truck is superior to these new launches from your competitors? And, and exactly how can you gain market share and also show better margins at the same time? Sort of what pricing assumptions do you have in there?
Yeah. Key question, of course. Well, I think there's a number of drivers that favors us. First of all, when we do our product introductions now, it's very much... We are in some aspects, it's more than a step performance. It's a huge step we're doing in, let's say, the product attributes that we're bringing to market now, especially the ones I showed you in the time frame moving forward in this window of 2024 to 2027. So it's huge incremental, let's say, improvements that we're doing. We have also, with these opportunities, with coming through, as I call it, a total solution with bundling services, captive financing, we're also able to start to address a new customer segment.
Historically, International has been very dependent on huge fleets, on leasing companies, et cetera, and we find now, through our retail channel, opening doors to medium and small operators. So that's our playbook, and we are ready with all the installed capacity already-
... Both when it comes to driveline production and assembly, and with current infrastructure, so to say, we are able to leverage on this growth. So we're kind of prepared on that.
Thank you. And my second question was regarding China, and the expansion in China. And just, I think from when you originally announced it to now, geopolitics have developed. We're seeing also very fast on electrification there, at least on the car side. I know it's different, but can you talk about the timing and sort of exactly what you're gonna produce there? Are you gonna refocus it more maybe towards electric over time, or? Yeah.
Yeah. So you're right. Of course, geopolitics are changing, and with that, you could say that the argument to be in China has, in a way, strengthened. So if you take the background, we said, "Let's go to China. We need capacity, and we need to cover Asia." We cannot continue with the Scania brand to deliver from Europe because of lead times, which leads down to standardization, which is not what we're good at. And it leads to tied-up capital, which is also not good. But we need to be in Asia. China, logical choice, because that's where the supplier base is. By the way, it's the biggest market in the world. We think that will continue to be, by the way, even if we will not see 1 million anymore, but let's assume we see 600,000 , 800,000 .
So let's go to China, let's build capacity. What has happened in the meantime, and especially during the pandemic, is I think that the Chinese technology has evolved very quickly. It's not so much related to combustion engine products. True, I think both for automobiles, which I don't know very well, but certainly true for trucks. But on digitalization and electrification, there is a very strong knowledge base in China today, based on the long-term strategy with research universities, suppliers, OEMs, that have developed this. So I think it's very good for us to be there with a whole industrial setup. So that means we have now R&D in China, we have procurement in China, we have, of course, production with a big factory, the big plant, and we have our own sales organization in China.
We kind of become part of that ecosystem, meaning that we will learn and source and work together with suppliers, researchers, Chinese engineers, in order to actually cope with that competition that eventually will hit not China, but what we see partly in Europe and specifically in Southeast Asia. But it's a long answer, sorry, to a short, good question. I wanted to expand also and say we have 50,000 capacity maximum allowed with our production license, and of course, we see that as a TRATON production capacity. Of course, we are starting there with Scania, but it's not impossible, as the Modular System evolves over time, that we could think of also bringing other products out of that factory.
It will, in any case, for Scania, not be China for China. It will be China for, I won't say the world, but it will be China for the greater Asian area, and probably including Oceania.
And if I may just follow up on the China topic, why go it alone rather than get a local winner on electrification, for example, as a partner? What was the-
Yeah.
-Decision?
Look, yeah, thanks. I did not answer on your electrification question properly. Of course, we would have to have an electrification strategy ready whenever the Chinese government decides what the technology that will prevail. We currently see all sorts of experiments going on in China. You see swap batteries, you see hybrids, you see hydrogen in different shapes and forms, and once the path is chosen, we will of course be there. And with the Modular System, I think we have a great opportunity to plug in either our European way of doing it, if it fits, or going with partners on the electrification side in China, where there is very, very strong suppliers and partners available.
Yeah, there's two more questions in the first row, so maybe you can just pass on the microphone, please.
Thank you. Miguel Borrega from Exane BNP Paribas. So the first one on International, I guess moving from the previous target of 9% to 11% without ever achieving the 9% is quite ambitious. We obviously understand the current issues, but can you give us some clarity on the assumptions behind that? If you would have to split the contributions to the 11% margin by pricing, market share, and lower production costs, please.
Yeah. Okay, I won't give you the exact cut down because I think that's your job, but the in the big picture here, you see that the drivers for, let's say, both favor top line and of course, the, let's say, the leverage on the bottom line. Coming back to, again, Class 8, with our S13 Integrated, is a driver for both these. I mean, we do benefit from, let's say, our own, let's say, margins, both at the sales moment and more so important, over the life cycle of the vehicle on the service side. So I think that that's very important to remember. We do have, as I also mentioned, the same, this volume growth are. We talk about 5% market share. I mean, over 400,000 markets, it's plus/minus that.
I'm not saying that's a high market, but give or take, it's 17,000-20,000 thousand units, I mean, depending on the size of the total market. This is units that we're able to assemble and produce proprietary driveline to, with today's installed capacity. It's just to add labor, well, not just, but to add shifts and labor. So there's a good leverage on that side. So I think these two, I mean, three, rather, let's say, the top-line growth driven by Class 8 on-road. We do have strong products. We've been struggling in ramp-up capacity and deliver on that, but within the severe segment, which is strong in North America today, and we believe will prevail so for a considerable amount of time, driven by IRA and infrastructure investments.
So there is a foundational strong market there, in which we believe in the heavy side, that we have good potential, and so vehicle, parts, and leverage from installed capacity.
. Thank you. And then, switching to MAN, obviously, higher prices played a big role on an improved profitability over the last two or three years. Of course, the realignment program also played a role, but what do you think will be the next leg? Maybe give us some color on the potential for SG&A reduction now that we are in a slower market. How much would that contribute to the 11% margin?
SG&A clearly is now a next step for us to actually change the footprint, and we're going into debt. You have listened to the building blocks, actually, what we have done with the pre-realignment. A part of that, similar roughly, also goes into SG&A steps. Here you typically can see, okay, where you move your staff and competencies within Europe or even utilizing India. And then basically you can backtrack the mapping. But what we clearly will do is that we keep our own competencies there. That is what we really focus on when we discuss SG&A.
This is both then not only on the financial side, but is also on the sales side and also on the services side, where we have the different assistance services towards our customers and towards the different service workshops, either our own 280 or our private partners as well, which we are serving as well. So here we see that by utilizing the knowledge on the footprint, by maybe even going there, where we are in Ankara with our development center, or utilizing our Polish hub more, where we already are in Poznań. That is where we work on.
We should also note... I mean, that's MAN. For MAN, we should also not underestimate the value of MAN's contribution to the group's volumes on components. So now that MAN starts to deliver the D30 engine, we immediately get scale up on the combustion engine, the gearbox, et cetera, and the components therein, which goes for anything that we do in common. And that's a great volume contribution that supports, well, all the other brands more and more over time.
Right. And the other contribution, as in our presentation, it is to drive more performance when it comes to our retail management, but that also together with our partners, with our private capital dealers, also making sure they are loyal to the brand, and also that they can deploy repair and maintenance contracts and services through our systems. This is also actually then providing better customer solutions, but at the same time, also supporting profitability and then, of course, also driving towards absorption ratios, which actually Christian presented. So here we also, on the service side, learn from each other in that sense, but then in the background, in the backlog.
We have to manage timing a bit, but we had one question here, one second one there. Is yours finance-related or for this?
No, we good to go, finance.
Okay. Then let's take the three-.
All of the...
And then let's continue with the-.
Couple of quick ones. On MAN, on the brand, in the light of the weak order intake and the comments from the Hanover Fair, where we didn't hear very positive notes, if the market in Europe will be down 5% - 10% next year, what are the key actions you're looking to take to improve the profitability or maintain margins in 2025 or 2024? And then for Roberto, on the Brazilian market, which has been incredible the last 10 years, right? This goes back to when you presented at the Capital Markets Day in Rio, in Rio de Janeiro, like 10 years ago or so. But the landscape is changing, right? We have now Chinese OEMs entering the market.
So can you talk a little bit around electrification trends in Brazil and how you're getting ready to maintain market share when Chinese competitors are clearly very keen to take market share in the bus segment, and then they will continue, you know, yeah, across the other segments. Thank you.
Alexander, start with MAN.
Yeah. I can take on the MAN side, and there are four key drivers actually now. We have four. Of course, with the realignment and changing of the footprints, we also have much more flexibility in our production system, and this is now what we are utilizing going forward. Secondly, when it comes to SG&A costs and cost discipline, here, we of course accelerating now on this program. Thirdly, it is, of course, staying close to the customers. So as you also have seen, yes, we have been also jeopardizing on some market share in Europe when it comes to the realignment program.
But now we have retail excellence in place, and we are working more with the sales staff to actually improve our funnel management and definitely leverage more out of the markets, out of the German, Switzerland, and Austria organization. And fourthly, it is, of course, to drive up with our fantastic lineup for e-mobility to actually stick there to the market. Yeah.
Roberto?
Okay, I will answer your two questions. One is regarding the electrification. Different from Germany or the U.S., there is no regulation. There is nothing that you have to comply in terms of volume or... what we feel is that, there are some companies I mentioned here, Ambev, is the biggest brewery company in the world. They are looking for sustainability, and they are buying electric vehicles. So this is more those that are worried with the ESG than, TCO or... So in terms of, productivity, combustion engine is still the better solution. Regarding the Chinese, we are all worried about Chinese, but Brazil is a continental country.
I mean, going from down Brazil until north is difficult to have service network to cover all the eventual necessities. So Chinese is a threat, but more on the long term, primarily because of this advantage we have, that we have a-- I mean, we, the actual players, are very well set up, and we feel a little bit the danger of Chinese on spot deals. For instance, 100 units of electric bus in Uruguay or in Chile, but to be a base in and compete in the truck business in Brazil, they have to make some accounting before getting there. And we are-
Mm.
giving hard time for them to think twice.
I can add also from the heavy segment in Scania, in Brazil, we really see biogas as growing strongly in Brazil, and that there are plans in Brazil to become the world's biggest producer of biogas, as electrification will be difficult with the distances and with existing grid, and at the same time, they want to follow their pathway towards the 1.5 degrees Celsius . This is probably going to be an important part of the mix, and it's important to have products geared for that, which we have.
Christian, what should we do? We used our 30 minutes. We are already a bit out of time. Should we take?
I saw that Erik was waving, yeah, so.
Let's take Erik, and you had a question, and then,
We make two more, so then.
Yes.
There is another Q&A.
And then there's another Q&A. Good.
Where you can torture me, but also Michael and Johan, so.
Yeah.
Thank you for that. So two questions then. First on Scania, how concerned should we be about disruption in the supply of batteries from Northvolt, and how much capital would you be willing to directly invest in Northvolt to avoid that? And then the second question on MAN, when you look to the other brands in the group, what's the main variable keeping you from a double-digit margin?
Okay, on the supply situation of battery cells, of course, we monitor the situation extremely closely. We're supporting our supplier in ramping up cell production. We have, of course, people on the site in at factory in Skellefteå. We are getting cells. It's not right now what is limiting our ramp-up. It was. We made a new plan, which we have communicated to our customers in the order book, and we're actually following that plan pretty well. So, and then when it comes to their liquidity situation, which of course is well known and all over the press, it's something you have to direct to them. We are supporting all of our suppliers that have difficulties, but I will not go into any details. Alexander?
Yeah. And, Erik, when it comes to our end, there are two variables. One is actually the bus and coach operation. As you know, we are actually a full coach and a full bus body manufacturer. That's the majority of our business, and in that segment, actually, double-digit margins are not seen. That's one variable, and the other variable is actually our trading business with Vans. Basically, with Vans, together with Volkswagen, we do not have the vertical industrial integration, and due to that, actually, we are not double-digit, and that's the miss of that variable. But nevertheless, it supports very much, and that's why we're working on the absorption in our service network, and that's supporting very much the service growth.
Thank you.
Good.
Thank you. Björn Enarson, Danske Bank. A question for Scania, mainly, I guess, or International, you decide. But we're coming from a period of, I mean, very good demand, very long lead times, very big backlogs, and we also seen margins throughout the sector be at very high levels, versus history. I mean, and just looking at cars or yellow machines, we've seen a similar situation. We also see pricing are coming down rapidly, or at least coming down. In your margin target, are you expecting some price pressure there long term or more near term? Or are you expecting prices to hold now when the market is clearly softer or more normal, at least?
Okay, I'll do the Scania part, then, Mathias, you can comment upon North America. But it's true that price discipline improved a lot over COVID, and of course, there were shortages that was helping many of our peers to push up prices just because costs were too high to sustain, and there was a shortage of supply. We never liked this situation. I was very clear over and over again in our quarterly calls that we want to get lead times back to where lead times should be. It's not healthy to have a year of order book or longer, both for us not knowing what is actually the cost situation, and neither for customers, do they really have a demand, or do they start to put in orders that are more like speculation than actual firm orders?
What the situation is right now is, if you take Brazil, we have a booming market, and we are upping our production capacity to try to fulfill all the demands from the local market, and then we're transforming other international markets away from Brazilian production and over to European production. Doing that so far, we had to reduce our European production capacity with just 10%, and then we found a new balancing point. With that, we offered a two to three months lead time, which is what we believe should be the normal situation. And of course, then, that will depend upon the development of the order intake going forward, but that's where we are right now with the demand and from Europe and the rest of world into our European production system. That feels quite good. What about pricing?
Well, pricing, I think the industry has shown a good discipline in keeping our pricing. We are certainly not gonna be the ones who ruin that. That was always the trademark of Scania, to keep pricing up, even if it cost us market shares and volumes. Will this sustain? I can't promise you. There is, of course, a risk that the market continues down in Europe, and as a consequence, some get nervous, and then you have a price war. I hope that will not happen. I don't see so many tendencies. We see a few silly orders, especially in the market where we are now and some of the close markets where someone is getting nervous.
But it's certainly neither Scania nor TRATON Group' s job to lead such a race, because that's always a race to the bottom. I stop there and hand over to Mathias here for International.
Yeah, just, International, we, we've chosen to step away from some deals right now that are kind of coming with volumes and promises over the coming years. And referring to price discipline, perhaps in the past, International was one of the contributors to less discipline. Today, we have it. And we go away from the methodology of pushing production to retail and then stand there, I mean, on yards. If you would look into statistics, we have a low inventory level out in our, let's say, network today.
So I think it's a mindset question also, and of course, to adapt our own flexibility in production to cope with these downs and ups, both being able to produce different vehicles at different sites, which wasn't necessarily the case in the past, but also, let's say, to plan for lower production and really focus on cost.
Right.
Throughout our whole value chain, which in the past two, three years, hasn't been in focus due to the supply chain disruptions and getting every vehicle and every part in place at any cost, basically. So there's a lot of reverse engineering work to do here in our own operation to be able to, let's say, work on that, but stick to a price level and rather work through the different segments of customers, and we tend to treat the whole market as one. Medium segment is still strong in North America, severe is very strong, Class 8 on- road is weak, so we have to work between that also. Sorry for the long answer, but we stick to, stick to solid prices.
Good luck. Let's thank you.
Let's have a very quick coffee break, five minutes, and let's meet back here at 25.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please find your seat. The program will start now.
... Close. [Foreign language]. Ah, just put it here. Okay. Okay, welcome back. Next in line is Johan Haeggman, who will present TRATON Financial Services, one of the four growth levers we presented before. Johan.
Thank you. Can you hear me? So it's a privilege to be here presenting TRATON Financial Services. It was only a project back in 2022, and today we already have received the attention of all my fellow colleagues here. So expectations are clearly there, and we like that. A captive finance company in a commercial vehicle industry is a strategic cornerstone, and I think I will prove that during my presentation, and it's now, but even more in the future. We are, and I just want to state that, on a journey, we have just started, so expectations from a group like you needs, of course, to be realistic on how fast we can move.
We have, revealing also in my block, our strategic target, a strategic target of return on equity on 16% before tax, on a 10% equity level, and that's provided that we have all the portfolios up and running, so we have all the businesses in the structure. I had the same trick as you. Now it's coming. Starting, we're building the leading partner for future transportation solutions. We have a footprint today where we are present in 67 countries, legally in 66. Canada is actually a white label, it's a close partnership. So we are starting with a global reach of 66 or 67 entities. That means that we have, and that's obviously the backbone of Scania. We have already established structures, we have licenses where needed, and that will, of course, help us when it comes to speed.
We have assets of EUR 17.6 billion as per end of June, and this structure will be the lever and the backbone for bringing on the other brands into the operations, so we are building a multi-brand, forward integration, integrated, captive financial solution for the TRATON Group. We have a service delivery model starting at the base. We are really with for us, it's really key to build on funding capabilities. Funding is, of course, something that is extremely important for me, and for the financial services, but also with very build or increasing the portfolios, the size of the company, we will also be able to further enhance our risk models and our risk management. We will then create, based on the already installed infrastructure, a common operations backbone.
With IT, with policies, with AML, whatever you want, it's a backbone that takes care of all the processing you need to have in a financial services company. Then we come to our products. We have already got been into it. We are, together with the brands, really, really into the modularization. With the modularization of our toolbox, we can create customer tailor-made and brand tailor-made offerings around the globe, and that's really key here. And with the bundling, Christian, that comes very soon into what is vehicle as a service or transport as a service or whatever it is, and then we come into the subscription models, which I will come back to. So at the very core, on the top, you see what we have, brand specific interfaces.
That means that we go together with the brands, branding our products, branding our front end exactly the same way as the company. So we you don't find TRATON Financial Services sales force out there. You will find a MAN Financial Services, Scania Financial Services, et cetera. Since last CMD, besides the project, first of April last year, we restructured Scania. That means that we took 65 legal entities and transferred them out from Scania and created a legal organization of our own. And the point with that one is, of course, that we get a clear governance on all the formalistic things: cash management, equity management, funding, et cetera. We have relaunched, I think that's the word, Mathias, International Finance last year in October in the U.S. Been sleeping for, like, 15 years or something like that.
So now we're up and running for International in the U.S., in Canada, in Mexico. We have made in July, if you remember, there was a press release in July. We made an agreement last year with Volkswagen Financial Services about taking over, and Christian was into that, that we will now take responsibility for the commercial vehicles financing of MAN and Volkswagen Truck & Bus in 14 different countries. So far, we have already gone live in South Africa, in Sweden, in Poland, in Spain, in Germany, in Austria, and also in South Korea. So already 7 countries up and running, and here I just want to say how proud I am of the team. We are really, really performing well, and we are doing it, doing it in front of the customers seamlessly.
That's one of the key things we need to get the customers feeling that we have an ongoing business. The journey continues. Now we are, let's call it in the medium term. This year, we will already launch also U.K. and Ireland. That will happen in November, so another two countries, meaning we have five more to go with the Volkswagen Financial Services transfer, and those we will achieve within the first half year next year. Mexico is a very interesting one because there are all the four brands present, so that will be an interesting setup. Brazil, for Roberto and his team, is of course key, but it's also key because of the large Scania business. So Brazil is really important for us, and we are working also on that. Then we have Italy, France, and Portugal as well.
Then you see these small little circles on the slide. That's to demonstrate that we are not stopping with the 14 countries, of course. We will continue based on the pool, the demand from the brands to further expand the rest of the geography. Exactly in what order and how we are still working on it, but I mean we still have our hands full with the existing 14 countries. Long term, of course, we move also into the BEV space, slowly but surely, together with the brands. We will, at this stage, be able to enhance our operating model much better. Now, as you understand, with the 14 countries, we are maybe a little bit more on time rather than we are on actually securing cost efficiency and structure. I think you understand the balance we are trying to achieve.
Of course, we are coming into the future business models. This one is a little bit technical. This shows how we from 2023 have Scania and a sliver of International as our financed volume. Into 2024, we bring 2024 to 2026, 2024 to 2027 we will bring on the other brands, and then going further on, we of course bring in the BEV and so on. CAGR on this is above 10%. We of course follow the brands' volumes. If we have a general dip, of course, our CAGR will go down, and if we have an upturn, of course, that will come, but that's up to you in your modeling. In here, the existing portfolio of Scania will grow organically, very much similar to what you have seen. The 14 countries, there are some details in here.
There is no transfer of portfolio, but there is a transfer of a number of employees and IT, meaning that we get costs upfront. On the other hand, we take on existing business, so if you have 500 contracts per month in a market, the month before we take it over, we have 500 contracts when we take it over as well, because we bring the sales force with us. That means that we will have a linear growth of that portfolio. It typically takes three to four years to build up a portfolio in a market. That means that the ROE during the first couple of years here will be under pressure because we have a front-loaded cost, and we will have a portfolio coming a little bit later.
The organic portfolio, the rest of the world, is a little bit different because that will be more greenfield. First, we do one contract, then we do four, two, and then we do four, and here, OpEx will follow more with the development of the portfolio, so there are three different flavors of how our growth will look like. When we come into the BEVs, first of all, BEV as such is not a big challenge for us when it comes to the products. It's still asset-based financing, and it has its clear legislation around it. Of course, BEV has its challenges with the residual values. How do we do batteries? Do we swap them, et cetera? That comes into our business, but I'm sure the business, the market will develop, and we will follow.
But just as an example, a couple of months ago, we did a finance deal of 100 city buses, where it's already including a battery change for the customer's total cost, of course. So this balance sheet, when it's properly up and running, and we have enhanced our capabilities, now I'm talking at the end of the period, this is the basis for any subscription model. Think about it. Subscription, whether you call that vehicle as a service or whatever you call it, someone needs to own that vehicle... Then we are there. We are ready to take on that challenge as well. So we are a strategic platform for TRATON going forward with its new business models. Funding is, of course, at the core. Here, I would like to start with two important topics.
First, as Christian was into, TRATON is now targeting to be net debt zero by 2027. Super important for us and the rating, and by that, TRATON has also, let's say, disclosed the ambition of letting the EMTN program then fully go into Financial Services, which also will help us when it comes to volumes. If you look at the left side, you see that we have a distribution that is very heavy on capital markets. That's the EMTN bond program, et cetera, the centrally funded sources. We will diminish that dependency. We will go over towards something below 50%, around 45%. And we will also enhance more locally sourced funding. ABS's, today we're on 13% of the, on the funding. We will aim for 25%.
We have high-quality portfolios out there that we can actually utilize to fund, and we will do that locally. By that, we tap local fund sources, but we also decreases the complexity of cross-border funding, which is also a challenge in itself. And talking about local, also, bank loans and others will then increase in proportion to today, compared to today. We have created our own Treasury department for this, so we can work 24/7, right, Carl? To find different solutions and different creative setups. As a proof of actually being up and running, we did a bond in Mexico in April, and we did a bond just a couple of weeks in Brazil, both at good prices and high demand, so really encouraging. We have done also a couple of smaller ABS's already during this year.
We have an operating model that looks like this, and in a very simplified way. If you look on the right-hand side, the core of our operation is the connection to the brands and our commercial capabilities. We will connect into the brands' strategies, but also into the sales funnels, the sales systems, and so on, so we are perfectly integrated. But it's four brands, so it's rather, from that perspective, complicated and challenging. On the left-hand side, we say that we provide financial and risk capacity to the brands and to the balance sheets, and we do that through an efficient backbone. So you could talk about one machine and four front ends. So summing up, our journey continues. We are, as always, dedicated to the customer-first concept. We are close to the customers; we are close to the brands.
We are setting up an efficient operational backbone in order to be able to chase out cost and waste in the backbone. Those two together is the basis for our continuously geographic expansion. We are working already now with more diverse funding set up with our Treasury team, and we are ready to capture the new business opportunities. By that, we have set our return on equity target of 16% before tax. I also hope I have conveyed that it's not just a lot of work, a lot of great fun. I'm also totally convinced that the platform of Financial Services will be here to support TRATON also in the long run. By that, Michael, you're next.
Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much, Johan, and good afternoon from my side to everyone in the room and also to the ones joining online. My colleagues have talked to you in the last couple of hours how they're gonna develop their business in our respective brands and at TRATON Financial Services. What I want to do now is to bring all these strengths together and show you how we are going to achieve our new ambition level of 9%-11% return on sales. We as a team, we have a common goal: combining the strengths of our brands, following our group strategy, as Christian was into at the beginning of today's Capital Markets Day. Over the next minutes, there are four things I would like you to take away from my presentation.
First of all, we have delivered the financials that we promised at the Capital Markets Day two years ago in 2022. Secondly, we will operate in a still solid, structurally attractive truck market in the upcoming years. Thirdly, we are committed to our profitable growth path. And fourthly, we have a clear capital allocation strategy focusing on creating shareholder return. And now, let me go into these four agenda points in a little bit more detail. Let's focus on the first of these agenda points. We have delivered what we promised at the Capital Markets Day in May 2022. To start on the left side, revenue growth up 30%. So in the first half of 2022, we have delivered EUR 18 billion . Now, in the first half this year, it's EUR 23.4 billion .
When we look at the next KPI, return on sales, this is our key metric, and you see that we are up by 4.6 percentage points. Or I can say it differently, we achieved to more than double that KPI from 4.4% to 9.1%. And let me say that I'm particularly proud about this figure, because you heard it from my colleagues, it required hard cost work and the realignment program at MAN, as Alexander went into. It goes back to the premium offering of Scania, as Christian elaborated on, and it's based on our production system, very efficient, the modular consortium at Volkswagen Truck & Bus, as Roberto presented. And you heard from Matthias, then when we talk about International, there is more to come in the upcoming years.
There is a third aspect that we promised and talked about at the Capital Markets Day two years ago. We promised to bring the net debt level down, and here's the proof. When we look at the leverage ratio, we increased it by -1.7x to - 1.5 x. Or if I just focus on the year 2023, we brought the net debt level down from EUR 7.7 billion to EUR 5.8 billion. The fourth highlight on this slide is on the right side. Here you see the dividend growth that we were able to triple. So in other words, we can say that our shareholders also profited from our successful growth in the last two years. Now, let's have a look at the second chapter, or in other words, let's have a look into the future.
Let's look at our markets. Let me start also here on the left side with the European market. We expect the European market to increase by five points, by 5 percentage points, and you see quite a steady trajectory. This is actually pretty much in line with the macroeconomic outlook for the European market or for Europe as such. When it comes to us, to our unit sales, then we believe that we will grow in line with this market trend. The second market is the North American market. We expect the North American market to decrease by 7%. And you see here, not such a steady trajectory, but more a zigzag. Why is that? You heard it already from Mathias.
There is some EPA regulation that will lead, from our point of view, to pre-buy effects kicking in already in 2025, but then predominantly in 2026 and especially in 2029. When it comes again to us, we believe here we can outgrow the market with our S13 offering and the measures Mathias talked to you about during his presentation and also during the Q&A session. The third market is the South American market, that we expect to grow by 26%. And you know, we have two brands heavily operating in this market with Scania and Volkswagen Truck & Bus, and we are quite certain that both our brands will profit from this development. And you heard Roberto during his presentation, so the clear aim is here by going international, not just to grow in Brazil and Argentina, but in the entire South American continent.
Let me take a quick intermediate step here, because now I talked about our core three markets, our core three regions. And let me sum up a little bit. We expect, when it comes to unit sales, that we will grow in these three markets in the next five years by 3.5%, which I will refer to as conventional growth in a minute on the next slide. But before I jump to the next slide, let me first go to the fourth graph on the right side, which is the Chinese market. And here you see that we expect the Chinese market to grow by 11%. And you heard Christian mentioning before, there was a record level in the years 2017 to 2021 with over a million units.
We don't expect that in this projection for the next five years, but we believe it's a good market. You also heard Christian talking about our production there in China, starting, this is the plan, end of next year. So we will use the China hub to use our industrial system to support the Chinese market, and not only the Chinese market, but the whole Asian region, as you heard before. Let me come to the next slide and turn from the market projections to our TRATON ambitions, and come to the third and most important section of my presentation: profitable growth. Let me start with the graph on the left side. You heard from Christian at the beginning of today's Capital Markets Day, that we are aiming to increase sales revenues by 20%-40%. On the one hand, this is quite ambitious.
On the other hand, you see that we came up with quite a big range. Why the big range? I'd say it's quite simple. We live in a new normal. What's the new normal? The new normal is a world of uncertainties.... We have an upcoming U.S. election. Let's see what the outcome leads to. There are certainly various geopolitical crises at the moment, and unfortunately, likely they will not go away. And there is a question mark regarding the Chinese economy, just to name a few. And then Christian and my colleagues talked to you about what's necessary to reach our CO2 targets. It's going back to the enabling conditions. In other words, we need the charging infrastructure. So clearly, we live in a world of uncertainty. This is why we opened up the span here.
But let me be quite clear, despite all this uncertainty and challenges, we have a concrete growth plan. And to explain the plan a little bit more in detail, we have split it into three buckets. The first and the smallest bucket is conventional growth, the bucket I already tackled a little bit on the slide before. This includes our ICE business, and here we see some opportunities from our Common Base Engine, to name one, and also from our product launches in the future. We also have included the conventional services into this bucket. We have excluded everything, what you find in the third bucket with our four growth levers Christian talked about before. The second bucket includes the price upsides of all our BEV units that we intend to sell, be it in Europe and North America, and in South America.
And then let me come to the third and biggest bucket that combines all the revenues of our dedicated growth areas. So here we are talking about the BEV normalized revenues from International. We talk about the revenues coming from our new China plant. We talk about the revenues from services and solutions, and here we don't mean the conventional ones, of course, because they are in the first bucket. Here we mean new opportunities. So to be precise, we talk about Charging Solutions, connectivity services, and all the other services you heard from my colleagues during their presentations before. And then last but not least, the revenues from TRATON Financial Services are also included in this third bucket, and Johan was quite comprehensive about this topic.
So depending on the industry and macro development, we believe that this third bucket will bring up to 50% of the sales revenue. So to wrap this slide up, again, despite the question marks and uncertainties of the world we are living in, we see multiple growth opportunities when it comes to sales revenues in the upcoming five years. So let me come to the next slide. I talked about growing sales revenues before, and now it's about how to improve our margins. And here I come back to what Christian also said at the beginning of today's Capital Markets Day, our new ambition level is to become double digit in 2029. So we are aiming for the midpoint of our 9%-11% range. We aim for 10%.
You also see a range here, and similar to the range at sales revenue, same applies here. We live in a world of uncertainty, so if we see favorable conditions, we believe we can achieve 11% return on sales. If conditions are not that favorable, you should see the 9% as a sustainable figure. So also here, you see again the same three buckets: conventional growth, BEV rollout, and the four growth levers. Let me also start here with the conventional growth bucket. Here, we believe that we will see some scale effects from top-line growth when it comes to our vehicles and services business. We are also planning for a favorable price mix, but the real benefit is coming from the TRATON Modular System, and you heard all my colleagues talking about this.
This is really, I would say, the key factor where we start to introduce components generally into our products of our four brands in the upcoming years. When we look at the second bucket, the BEV rollout, then here our aim is to ensure that BEV is not dilutive to our margins. What does it need to achieve this? Well, certainly pricing discipline on the one hand side, and being efficient in our production and supply chain system on the other hand. So those are, from our point of view, the two prerequisites that are needed. I think it's a given that it will also need some investments into our BEV journey in the upcoming years.
Let me then come to the third bucket, and I think I don't have to spend too much time on International and on Financial S`ervices, because Mathias and Johan were very comprehensive and precise how we want to increase our margins here. So let me just briefly mention that when we look at China, we aim to be margin neutral. I think this also is a given, taking into account that we are in the ramping up phase here, as you heard from Christian before. And then let me spend a couple of sentences regarding new services and solutions, because there you see the minus. I think it's quite clear when we step into new services and solutions, this will directly have a positive effect when we look at our sales revenues.
But when it comes to the margins, it will take a little longer because it's also an investment and we are in the ramp-up phase. You heard the example of Erinion, and let me echo that. Erinion is one of these examples where we believe that depot charging solutions will help our customers clearly to increase their TCO, hence making our BEV offering more attractive. But I think it comes without saying, a young company at this point in time is working at a loss state, but of course, we intend to change this and see then positive margin and margin contributions in the next three to four years. So to wrap up this slide quickly, I think just like on the slide before with sales revenues, many examples and proof points, how we intend to increase our margin to a level of 9%-11%.
Let me now show you the next slide, and here, for the first time, you see all the brand targets on one slide, including the new target for TRATON Financial Services. Before I echo what you heard from my colleagues, let me make two remarks upfront that are important. First of all, and there is a difference to our 9%-11% ambition level for the group. This is clearly linked to the year 2029. When it comes to the brand targets, and this is why you have not seen a specific year in the respective brand presentations, this strategic target could be also linked to the year, for example, 2030. So this is not linked to the year 2029 for all brands. This is one message. The second message is that the targets that you see here, you should take as top-of-the-cycle targets.
These are the targets when everything, let's say, is in a supportive environment. These are the prerequisites when we look at this slide, and I think this is important to mention and also potentially addresses some of the questions you might have or you already raised. Let me quickly echo what you heard from my colleagues. Scania is aiming for 15%, as you heard from Christian, taking into account the premium product offering and also increasing efficiencies. MAN, Alexander and the team, they are aiming for 9% based on the very successful realignment program, and we had the question in the Q&As, "Why not more? Why not 10%?" I think Alexander gave the comprehensive answer here. International, aiming for 11%, and you also raised the question here: We have not seen the 9% yet. How should this happen?
I could frame it a little bit different and say, when we look at the full year achievement of 2023 with 6.6%, this is clearly the biggest step-up, but this is fully in line with what we've told you today. We believe that when we look at International, when we look at our brands, there is the biggest potential in the upcoming years. Last but not least, when we look at the brands, before I come to TRATON Financial Services, Volkswagen Truck & Bus now aiming for 10%, coming from a level of 8.8% in 2023. I think this is quite fresh in the memory, Johan talking about TRATON Financial Services.
Here, it's not in our ROS KPI, it's the return on equity because we are in the financial service business here, 16% pre-tax. You see there was no target at the last Capital Markets Day because simply TRATON Financial Services didn't exist. Let me now turn to the fourth and final section of my presentation, capital allocation. Here we have three objectives: deleveraging, investing in growth, and shareholder return. We want to make sure to deliver on these objectives by using the funds from our profitable operations as efficient as we can. Let's have a look at the five-year horizon, what you see here on the left side of the slide. To be quite clear, it still needs significant midterm strategic investments to make sure that we fulfill our growth story.
Firstly, and most importantly, we have to ensure the successful rollout of the TRATON Modular System. You heard my colleagues talk about the TRATON Modular System. It's our key strategic project, which will lead to both efficiencies and competitiveness. And even though you might have many questions later on regarding precise figures, and I might have to disappoint you, but here I would like to give you one precise figure. We will invest roughly EUR 4 billion in R&D and CapEx when we look at the TRATON Modular System in the upcoming five years to secure that we have a successful rollout. Secondly, to achieve a self-sustaining and highly profitable TRATON Financial Services business with a target equity quota of 10%, we will support the ramp-up by injecting equity in the starting phase.
Thirdly, we have a plan to complete the construction of the China plant, and then fourthly, we will invest into our Group R&D organization. I think it's quite clear that this is crucial to make sure that we will see the synergies. Also, within the five-year horizon, we are committed to continue our path to further reduce our net debt level. You heard already from Christian that we're aiming to be net debt zero in the year 2027, or in other words, this is the year when we want to build to start cash reserves. Besides the midterm strategic investments and the deleveraging, of course, we will maintain to invest long term. Here you see that we will, of course, invest into our BEV journey, into autonomous driving, into new services and solutions, as we talked about before.
Let me just say here that by far the biggest investment, of course, will go into our BEV journey. As we are enhancing our cash conversion, we will generate additional value. As you also heard before, we are committed and confirm our dividend strategy with a payout ratio of 30%-40%. Before we enter the final Q&A session, this is my last slide, so let me wrap it all up. We as a team, as we were on stage today, with everyone in the entire TRATON Group, we are ready to take the next big step. There are four points to remember, which will generate greater value and shareholder returns. Number one, we have a clear TRATON Way Forward strategy. We will implement the TRATON Modular System and bring the Group R&D organization up to speed. Both will lead to efficiencies mid- to long-term.
Number two, all our brands are guided by this strategy and are committed to our growth plan. Number three, as you heard from my colleagues, we have a comprehensive BEV offering, which will support, on the one hand, the sustainability pillar of our strategy, and on the other hand, address our customer needs with a clear TCO focus. And the last takeaway is: we have identified four growth levers, each with the potential to contribute substantially to our growth plan. So to conclude, each of these areas are going to contribute to our new ambition level, increasing revenues by 20%-40% and reaching an ROS ambition level of 9%-11%. With that, I want to say thank you very much and invite Christian and Johan to me on stage for the final Q&A session.
Just three?
Yeah.
Oh, it's here.
[audio distortion] . Do you have some paper?
Yeah.
Now come the financial questions.
Now, again, I didn't see who was first. Michael, did you see who was, where-
Who was talking? I think it was- Yeah ... pretty much.
Daniela.
Go ahead.
Can you hear?
No.
Try again.
Okay, I'll do loud.
Yeah, we can hear you. We can hear you.
Just one question for me. Just verifying, Michael, on the comment of the brand being peak margin targets and then looking at the evolution you had in the U.S. market, specifically for market for International. How shall we think about the evolution from here? Because you have the market minus seven and peaking in 2026. You want one percentage points of margin, but I guess that still means the peak is 2026. Shall we? Are we reading too much into that, or how shall we think about that trajectory?
Let me say what I showed on the slide was really the market expectation, and the zigzag is what we expect, how the market is gonna be based on the EPA regulation. But I also mentioned, and I think this is the important point, that in the case of the North American market, we believe that we can outperform the market based on the S13 offering and based on what Mathias mentioned, when it comes to International. So we will increase, but let's say there is no specific percentage point after each year. So the target is to go up to 11%.
If I may add there, I think we feel pretty sure there will be the pre-buy around the EPA 2027, and that seems to be solidly decided by, in a bipartisan support. We believe that where the pre-buy potentially could end up, 2028, 2029, 2030, that's of course depending on the elections, and it's of course very far away. So to have a firm idea where exactly the 2029 total volume will be on the market is, in a way, academic.
Actually, can I follow up on the EPA, and why do you... Can you talk about sort of how you substantiate that view? The market leader seems to be saying they're not going to increase prices for EPA. Do you have a view of how much truck pricing in the U.S. needs to go up to be compliant, to generate...? Is that dependent on that, or you just think there's going to be a pre-buy is in store?
I can give a general answer, and I don't know if you need to chip in, Mathias, but of course, typically, the emission increase cost driver are dependent on the technology you need to apply to come to these levels. We do know what we need to apply, and what that drives in terms of cost on our platform. But of course, it also depends where others which technology others will use to come to that technology or to that emission level. And that, whether that is a big step or a small step, will determine the level of pre-buy. We had reasons to believe previously that this would be announced already in 2025 by certain of our competitors, and hence. And we had reason to believe that would be a rather bigger step.
So we thought there would be a pre-buy. That has not materialized, and therefore, I think it's fair to believe that we're not rather seeing pre-buy towards 2026. To the magnitude, I don't dare to say anything.... Okay, Mathias?
There's more to say, but there's many questions.
Yeah. Let's take José was the next one.
Thank you very much. José from JP Morgan. When we look at the CapEx curve in the next two, three years, is it reasonable to assume we're gonna see a substantial increase in CapEx, maybe EUR 500 million or so? And is CapEx then going to peak in 2027, 2028? If you can just maybe help us a little bit with the CapEx curve in the next three years, when does it peak? Second, Johan, can you speak a bit about the capital increase you want to do in Financial Services? What, what's the plan? Which tools can you pull to capture additional funds for this division? And then final one, China, 15,000 trucks on the road looks fantastic. Who are your customers, and where are you going to service the trucks? Would love to hear a little bit about that. Thank you.
Yeah, should I start with the CapEx question? And maybe let me start with this year's guidance, actually, where we said that we will see a sharp increase when it comes to CapEx. So let me start with the year 2024, and the sharp increase in CapEx this year is actually going back to the China ramp-up. So this is where we invest significantly overall, and I think this is a given when you look at all the topics and projects we are in, naming the TRATON Modular System one more time, naming the BEV journey, then this requires some investment.
You asked about the upcoming years, and let me say here, then, when we talk about our funding ratio, then our funding ratio over the next five years, we believe is gonna be quite stable, and after the five-year timeframe, we believe that it's gonna reduce, based on the fact that we are then through with the major investments regarding TMS and the BEV journey.
Johan?
Yeah. On the funding, I think I spent some time on it, but anyhow, repeating, up to today, we and many, many other companies have been kind of spoiled, being using the global programs like the EMTNs. We realize that that will not fly solely for the future, also because of the ratings. I mean, the equations of the rating agencies do not allow us to be above 50% any longer. So that's a reason. But we will continue to use those programs, but then we need to go more local, and that's why I also emphasize that we have building our own Treasury team. So now we are working more surgically in the markets, searching for ABS, local bond programs, commercial papers, whatever we can find.
Hopefully, we also find green programs or pure contributions from governments, et cetera. So my point is that, that at this time and moment, with the growth rates, we are fine. But of course, we need to be much more, let's say, closer to the topic than, than maybe we have needed to be before. That goes for many, many companies, of course. I don't know if that was...
Right.
Um-
Few words on China and the production capacity we're building up. That's where we licensed to go to 50,000, five zero thousand, which of course, is huge. Added to the current Scania capacity, we're looking at a more careful ramp towards rather, you know, perhaps 1,000 first year, 10,000 second year. Could our market take that? Yes, I feel pretty confident about that. What we're doing is that we are really shortening lead times to customer in the greater Asian area, and we can open up the variability, stop selling stock vehicles and start selling tailor-made, which fits Scania's business model so much better. So that's the idea. About the success in the Chinese market, well, of course, that will be challenging. We're not making ourselves any illusions.
We see that the real A segment, as we call it, which is today only consisting of imported truck, is not growing, as one has seen in other markets, but it's rather the B and the B plus segment that are growing. We're not intending to take the Scania product down there. It should be the premium, tailor-made solution for customers who are really perfectioning their TOE and their driver comfort. So that's the segment we're aiming, which means, and I will not give you a precise figure for an individual market, but we will see growth in China, certainly. We get a lot of advantages coming inside the trade barriers. For instance, to introduce new models, which today takes us typically up to a year.
We see our Chinese competitors are doing that in weeks, and we expect to be treated in the same way once we are inside that market. So it will give us a lot of, a lot of opportunities to grow also inside of China, but that is not gonna represent all of the growth. And then finally, as I said before, we can see this as a trade and investment. We're moving into a modular system that opens up for more opportunities in terms of having industrial presence there.
I think Michael was next, who's back here.
Thanks, Mike Raab, Kepler Cheuvreux. Obviously, deleveraging yourselves is a key element of the TRATON story also, because it would remove one of the comparative disadvantages you have relative to other truck makers out there. With regard to your margin targets and growth targets, is there a particular cash conversion target of yours?
I can just first of all echo that you're perfectly right. This is one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why we want to have to see the net debt zero as quick as possible, when it comes to the rating, and then also supporting the financial services business. We have a goal for a cash conversion rate, yes, and we are planning for a cash conversion rate of 80% in the-.
Eight zero?
Eight zero, yes.
And that's as the average over those years-?
That's-.
Or at the peak?
No, that's as the average. Take it as the average.
That's the average.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you.
Sure.
Let's stay on the right side and then move back to the left side. Hampus is here. Yeah.
Thank you very much. Hampus Engellau, Handelsbanken. Maybe coming back to China, I think we've seen kind of the opposite trend in China, where the Western players aggregated market share, market share going from 2% to below 1% on a contracting market. Many years ago, we talked a lot with Scania on the back of seeing the China market getting more professional, i.e., going up in size and value and looking at uptime and going down in number of trucks sold. Are you seeing that trend taking off now as infrastructure is being built, and is that built into your kind of expectations on your volumes?
Yeah. It is certainly a tricky market, and we are currently in the launch of the Super driveline in the Scania product in China. With that, we're also expanding the number of models, and later on, when we then get in with our industrial solution, we can multiply the number of models offering. We do not see an uptake, just as you're into, of the typical 4x2 fleet tractor that you would expect to see and that we have seen in other, let's call it, developing markets, over the years, and that we see so clearly, for instance, in Latin America. We do not see that.
We see customers wanting very fast return on investment, stating out loud that, "Yeah, I know that I would get, over time, a better return, but I like to have my money back in two years, you know, so I buy cheap equipment." There are many customers now during this launch that express a different view, so it might be that the sentiment is changing. I cannot promise you that. I think what we need to work on, on one hand, educating the market, of course, but more so, be present in more provinces and be present in much more applications.
We will see Chinese logistics system be much more optimized in terms of specific transport, which mean rigid vehicles, which means special vehicles, where we have some success, both with Scania and with our MAN brands, but I think we can do so much more once we go local. And here is where we see tremendous growth potential. Not to mention the export on wheels, which is growing out of China as a complement to SEA, where you really need a quality product that well, doesn't break down when you are in unknown territory.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Let's move it to Klas, please. Thank you.
Thank you. Klas from Citi. So, thanks, Michael, for the explanation. There is the stars aligned, sort of 12% midpoint or 12%, and then through the cycle ambition, you can call it on 9%-11%. But I just want to come back to sort of the question around the R&D organization and how that will work going forward, in terms of how it will impact the modernization of Scania, potentially then boosting that as we move the cost outside more.
Yeah. No, that's fine, and Christian already indicated that. So, I mean, today, typically, when you have someone who is in the lead, then that brand, in this case, is taking all the costs and then getting the licenses later, right? That worked for the CBE, but it will not really work for the TRATON Modular System because we are talking about completely different numbers here. This is why we, as Christian indicated already, why we already have, let's say, shadow calculation, which we call a management view. We run this in parallel this year, and we will introduce it then, effectively 1st January next year, and then we will show this management view. So what we do and calculate in this management view is that you don't have these effects.
In a way, we level out the effect that someone is taking the cost first in the legal world and getting the license fees later, so that you should not see any big jumps in the margins. We plan to talk more about this potentially during the annual press conference, but of course, since you raised the question today, happy to give you an outlook here.
All right. Very good. My second one is on, to you, Christian, on something that I think you said in Hanover, which is about the battery electric targets and the emission regulations, that they look very unrealistic, at least to me, when I look at it in Europe. Maybe not in the U.S., like Mathias alluded to, but in Europe. How should we think about pricing in battery electric if these regulations gets pushed to 2035 and there is no infrastructure, there is no demand incentive, there is no push, price pressure, battery electric? I mean, what's your reflection here?
If what you speculate on would happen, I guess there would not be any price pressure because we would also not get scale, and we would not get cost down. To give you the view from the ACEA Commercial Vehicles division, we had a meeting during IAA because of what happened on the passenger car side, where they made a statement saying it's basically not possible for them to reach the targets. Our view is that we just agreed to the target, i.e., 15% reduction towards 2025 and 43%, to be precise, in our commercial vehicles, heavy commercial trucks, 2030. We still stand behind these targets. We clearly cannot achieve them with the enabling condition being asked today, hence, someone has to do something.
And in the legal framework, there is a revision point in 2027, where this exact thing should be evaluated. That's too late. If we discover in 2027 that charging infrastructures is built out to 10% compared to what is needed... Well, there's no chance for us to come to the targets 2030, and then panic will happen, and, you know, it will be bad for everyone. So our conclusion is, what we will request from the new commission is really review this every year and start by 2025. There is a directive, a law in Europe called AFIR, so the alternative.
Fuel.
Fuel and infrastructure regulation. Thanks, Alexander. Which is not being implemented already now. So we can see we're far, far behind. And based on that, you would, of course, have to start to review now, and our proposal would be if we find out in 2025 that we're still behind target, okay, then 2030 needs to be 2031. And if in 2026 we find out that we're late, okay, that needs to be 2032. It's not good for what we have invested because we don't get our returns, but at least we're not gonna face fines from our own governments for trying to do everything we can. And then, let's see, I'm very curious what the emission trading system in the EU 2027 will give when you start to really pay for emissions.
Then this burden is gonna be spread not just on us, but on the entire transport ecosystem. To prepone that would be a great method to solve the problem, but that does not seem to be in the cards. Thank you.
So let's move back to the other side. Nicolai?
Hi, Nicolai from Deutsche Bank. Yeah, thank you for a very comprehensive presentation, and I do think it's a great story. So do clients think it's a great story, and we can see the opportunities both in the U.S. and also with MAN going forward. But the key pushback I get is just the limited free float of the shares. And I know that's something we should actually address with Volkswagen, but since they're not in the room, I have to ask you. Can we have any update on what's going to happen here?
No. Quick answer. I wish I could say yes, but I can't. I think we think the same as your clients. It would be advantageous to us to have a bigger free float. I think it would be advantageous both to the main shareholder and to new shareholders. And of course, also, we believe that will happen. I think a good thing was that Oliver Blume, during the AGM of Volkswagen earlier this year, said that they are prepared to let go of 25% of the shares. And I think that would be advisable. But again, it's not our decision. We can only work with what we have, and that is to continue to increase the performance of TRATON. Greg?
[Pass through].
Nothing to add. Perfect.
Thank you, Jacob.
Thank you. Miguel Borrega from Exane BNP Paribas. On the reach to get to the 2029 targets, can you give us some color on the pricing assumptions behind that, namely on the underlying pricing for diesel? Is your starting point basically current prices, for example, in Europe, or do you assume some normalization in pricing throughout the year and maybe 2025? And then on EV pricing, maybe a follow-up: Do you also assume that EV pricing will become more affordable over time? And I mean gross pricing, not net of incentives, or do you assume current prices for EVs?
Yeah.
Let me maybe in this case be a little bit generic. As you heard from the colleagues also before, we believe that we have good arguments for stable prices, and that comes actually from our product offering, right? I mean, you heard Christian talking about the gains here when it comes to the TCO perspective and the fuel efficiencies at an Italian customer, if I remember it correctly. So when you look at our product offering, this is the best argument for stable prices. So this is my general answer. When it comes to EV prices, then, I mean, we see today that you pay 2x or even 3x as much for a BEV vehicle.
But also, as Christian went into, I mean, once we see the scale effects when it comes to more battery cells, battery packs, and so on, when we see the scale effects kicking in here, the costs will go down, and then likely the prices will go down here as well. But again, what I said during the presentation, we aim for being not diluted by the BEVs in the next five years.
Thank you. And then on Financial Services, I believe you mentioned you will inject capital. Are you basically talking about the capital raise at the TRATON level? And if so, can you give us some color on size and timing, please?
Want to take it, Michael?
Yeah, no, I mean, as I was saying, it will need capital injections for the next five years to reach the target equity quota of 10%, which is, from our-
Our point of view, necessary, that we see a self-sustaining TRATON Financial Services business that will be highly profitable, but we cannot give you here any numbers, how much we're gonna inject-.
Mm
-Over the five-year period or in what specific year.
So TRATON FS, not TRATON Group.
Shaqeal has a question. Here.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. Shaqeal Kirunda from Morgan Stanley. Apologies for being somewhat short term, but it is a key topic. How are you thinking about heavy-duty truck markets for 2025? Specifically in Europe, it feels like sentiment on the ground, looking at the end markets, is pretty weak. North America, maybe a little bit better. Are you thinking about a soft landing, hard landing? If you look at the freight operators, sentiment on CapEx there isn't great. So what's your view?
Let me say, first of all, in general, and let me start with 2023. I mean, in 2023, we have seen exceptional truck markets. Obviously, you heard my colleagues talking about the lead times that we saw last year. We're not happy with that, so for a good reason, we had the book-to-bill ratio below one, and we wanted to shrink the order books. So now, as you heard also Christian saying, we see lead times in Europe now two to three months, which is pretty much what we're aiming for. In general, and now we have to differentiate a little bit, when we look at the South American market this year, we see an exceptionally strong market. Was quite the opposite last year.
When we look at the European market and the North American market, it's very much in line with our guidance. So we said at the beginning of this year, we expect these two markets, Europe and North America, to decrease by - 15% to - 5%, and we are pretty much on this trajectory. We also have to differentiate a little bit more, and you heard also Mathias talking about this when we talk about North America. We see especially the Class 8 segment being under pressure. The medium- duty segment is going quite okay, and the vocational segment is quite strong. When we then jump to Europe, also to differentiate, we see actually quite an okay market in South Europe, but, as I mentioned also recently, especially here, the German market gives us some concerns.
And this, of course, then translates into our brands when you look at the exposure that we have in our brands. How is the way forward? Tough to say. Typically, you know, even if there are no extraordinary effects, September, October are the two months in a regular truck cycle, where we look at the order intake and where we get the first feeling how the next year might be. So in other words, it's a little bit too soon to tell how we will go into the year 2025. You mentioned a couple of topics that show more the dark clouds, I would say. There's also a rationale, I would say, on the positive side.
We see the central banks reducing the interest rates right now, and when you look at the fleets of the trucks, then this would also be a rationale to renew the fleets. So there are arguments on both sides, but to cut a long story short, it's too soon to tell, and we are happy to provide a guidance beginning of next year for 2025.
Got it.
Good.
Thank you.
I-
Just one more.
Okay.
How much progress has been made in implementing the Modular System since the last CMD? And what would you say is the next key milestone, or is it right to assume that this is something which will just continue on in the background as continuous sort of improvement over the next few years?
It's... There's been tremendous progress, so all our previously individual roadmaps for all the brands have been now worked through, and stepwise, as investment are needed in new products, we move always towards the modular, the eventual or the final, TRATON Modular System. That was not the case when we spoke two years ago. Then we had a certain individual components agreed, and that's why you actually, on the first battery electric vehicles here, for instance, Scania and MAN, you see similarities that we were into, but you also see differences that are actually not gonna bring any customer value, and that we have to work our way, work ourselves away from. It only makes sense to do that when you anyway need to upgrade the product. Otherwise, you just threw away, you know, a lot of investments.
So and at the same time said that we want to accelerate, and that's why you see more CapEx in the short term. Because when we have accelerated that, we get also the benefit. So it's a balancing act. But we will be busy, I would say, in the coming five to eight years to completely clean up. You asked what will I see first? I think you're seeing things already now, like we talked about. Alexander talked about the CCD, so the combined motor gearbox unit for our BEV vehicles. But there will be more of these components gradually.
What you will not see is the first steps into International, where it will be more on the electrical architecture side, where we see huge benefits of going common and having to write software code just once and not twice. And eventually, of course, adding MAN and Volkswagen also into that. That will kind of more happen in the background. It's not directly or not. Well, there is functionality also, but it's not directly related to customers.
Sorry for a long answer, but I mean, this, this is really, and this is the core business of Catharina and her team, together with finance, to have an eye on that this is actually happening, that we do good business cases on it, and then, of course, for Group R&D to start to execute as they are being formed, and that's also when we will gain speed in this.
Thank you.
Good. Thank you very much for the lively Q&A session. We'll now wrap it up and leave the last words for Christian.
Ah, yeah. Good. Sorry for cutting you short. If there were more questions... Yeah, we are over time, I realize, so I will try to keep it super short. Basically, just putting up this slide, saying if there is just one slide you should remember from today, it's the four E's, you know? It's again about execution. We're not changing the strategy, but we're gonna continue to drive this company towards the new target level, double digit. It's gonna be about electrification. We believe in the battery electric vehicle, and we're gonna take advantage of our strong position here. It is about efficiencies. It is about utilizing the strength of the group and still position the brands individually to cover a maximum amount of the available market, and especially in market areas where we are with several brands, like Latin America and Europe.
And finally, it is about growth. It is about expansion. It is about taking the growth opportunities that are coming at us, and you have noticed that we have a pretty, well, ambitious, someone said, top-line growth that we're aiming for. But I hope that today we could showcase that it was not just a number, but we have pretty solid plans to actually make that happen, and that goes for the conventional area of the business, moving into U.S., moving into Asia, but it also goes for new technologies and openings around both venturing and new types of business where we have not been present before. So with that, I would like to thank you all for coming all the way to Munich, from also very far, and from taking your time and for following us and for supporting us on our journey.
Have a good trip back, and hope to see you soon again. Thank you. Thank you.