Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Capital Markets Day. It's a pleasure to have you join us here in Ludwigshafen, as well as online. We are streaming this first part of the Capital Markets Day, the keynote and the subsequent Q&A, live from our corporate headquarters. The further parts of the Capital Markets Day will not be live-streamed. However, PDFs of all presentations will be available on the investor relations website shortly before they begin, and we will offer replays after the event of the keynote and all the segment presentations. Before we take a closer look at today's agenda, allow me two organizational remarks. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements that may not prove to be accurate. We do not assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements above and beyond the legal requirements.
Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen, in the Q&A session, we will only take questions from the analysts and investors in the room. Please raise your hand if you would like to ask a question. Now, moving on to the agenda. Our Capital Markets Day with the entire Board team extends over two half days. Markus Kamieth, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, will kick off the Capital Markets Day with the strategy keynote. The keynote also contains sections that will be presented by Katja Scharpwinkel, Member of the Board of Executive Directors and Site Director of BASF Ludwigshafen, and Dirk Elvermann, Chief Financial Officer. Later this afternoon, Mike Heinz will present BASF Agricultural Solutions. His presentation will be complemented by a tour of the agricultural center in Limburgerhof. But now, without further ado, let's move straight to the keynote. Markus, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Great teams reach beyond barriers. They focus, they accelerate, they transform, they chase the win. There is a way to win and to make it a habit, a way that starts with a shared ambition, a target, a goal. Winners never stand still. They go from good to great because they adapt, they change. We are the ones at the source of change, connected to almost everything. We must drive the change. We must do it faster, harder, stronger. Let's own it. Let's drive it. Let's excel in it. The path to winning will be competitive. Things won't always go our way. We know this. We thrive in it because the goal is worth it: to be the preferred chemical company to enable the green transformation of our customers. We're stronger as a team working towards this goal.
It's about a winning spirit, because when we have the will, the right way, we have everything it takes to win. Let's do this!
So let's do this. Welcome also from my side. I'm looking forward to the next two half days, together with you, introducing our Winning Way strategy to you. And, this video that you have just seen is a video that we have produced to introduce the strategy to our employees worldwide, and it brings across already one of the two major elements of our path forward as BASF, and this is our winning culture.
There's two things that we as a board team want to stand for, and what the strategy is all about is, on the one-hand side, creating a winning culture by creating and incentivizing a more stronger performance-oriented mindset in the company, and on the other hand, value creation. And value creation for our shareholders, in particular, is really the prism and the lens through which we have developed this strategy going forward. Now, we are convinced that BASF is at a turning point. It's a real moment of truth for this incredible company. Over the last years in particular, we are aware that the value creation for our shareholders has not been according to expectations, certainly not the expectations of our shareholders, as well as our own expectations.
This is why we came to the conclusion that our strategic direction for BASF needs rethinking. On the positive side, we concluded that the chemical industry is and will remain an attractive industry. We looked at this from all kinds of different angles, through all kinds of different lenses, and whatever strategic or macroeconomic scenario you're looking at, the chemical industry will stay attractive, it will continue to grow, it will continue to be an essential industry for the successful transformation of all manufacturing industries downstream, and it will stay an absolutely crucial industry for the continuous growth of the economy and for wealth creation in all major societies. However, the chemical industry is also changing. Competitive dynamics are certainly changing.
The green transformation is changing the setup of value chains, and many other things are shifting, and this is why BASF also needs to and will change. Now, as I said, we developed this strategy through the lens of value creation for our shareholders, and we are setting a new direction for the company, in particular, when it comes to portfolio steering, when it comes to capital allocation, and when it comes to portfolio, when it comes to performance culture. It all starts with our ambition. We want to be the preferred chemical company to enable our customers' green transformation. Sounds like a little bit of a complex sentence, but it has a lot of things in it. First of all, we want to be a preferred company.
We are not talking about ourselves as being the number one, the biggest, the leading, or anything else. We want to be preferred by our customers every day because they decide whether BASF, at the end of the day, is going to be a growth company, whether we're going to be an innovation partner, whether we're going to be a supply partner or not. It's a clear preference of our customers that we are longing for. We want to be and remain a chemical company at our core. This is what we're known for, this is what the world needs us for, and this is also where our heritage lies. We want to enable things. Innovation stays at the, at the core of what we do.
This is our DNA, and we continue to bet on our engineers and scientists to come up with great solutions for our customers. It's at the end of the day, our customers' green transformation that will drive ultimately the growth of BASF. Now, of course, along the way, BASF will become a green company. We stay fully committed to the green transformation of BASF. However, reducing the carbon footprint of BASF by 2050 is a challenge to reduce 17 million tons of CO2, roughly. This is a big mission, and we are staying fully committed to it. The much bigger mission is to allow our scientists, engineers, and all our employees to help our customers succeed in their green transformation because this mission is much bigger.
And this is why we ultimately see our role in enabling our customers' green transformation, and you will see later that we believe that this green transformation will come in very many different flavors and different speeds. Many of our customer industries will move very fast, in certain areas of the globe, even faster. But other industries, other customers in other regions will go at a different speed and maybe even in a different direction. And this is why we have to have an adaptable but successful strategy going forward. Now, of course, this ambition is not the only ambition we have. We have financial ambitions as well. We want to lay a strong foundation with our financial performance for an attractive shareholder distribution strategy.
And we want to achieve an EBITDA before special items by 2028 of EUR 10 billion to EUR 12 billion , generate strong free cash flows of more than EUR 12 billion in the next four years, and we want to reach a ROCE of 10% by the year 2028 at the latest. And this lays the foundation for a continued attractive shareholder distribution strategy, which will come in the form of dividends as well as share buybacks. And this, from our perspective, not only fits well to the business that we have, but also is attractive for our investors and overall, provides us the opportunity with staying with a strong shareholder distribution of EUR 12 billion over this period.
Rebasing the dividend allows us for flexibility for capital allocation for growth initiatives on the one-hand side, and on the other-hand side, share buybacks provide long-term rewards for our committed investors. Now, the winning way strategy, as we call it, is getting BASF back on its winning ways, and its clear target is value creation and profitable growth, and we structured the strategy and the strategy implementation along four strategic levers: focus, accelerate, transform, and win. A nd I will lead you through these four levers now together with Katja, who will join me for the transform section, then Dirk will introduce our financial ambitions and value creation targets. L et's start with focus. I very strongly believe that really great companies have the ability to focus on what really drives value and what are their key strengths that differentiates them.
And on the other hand, also defocus on things that do not provide or that do not contribute to value creation, and also makes companies sometimes slow and unfocused. So we will talk about portfolio, our view on our portfolio. We'll talk about our footprint in high-growth markets, and we'll talk about how we want to allocate capital differently across the group going forward. So let's start with portfolio. Every strategy starts with portfolio. And we're taking a very different look at our portfolio going forward than what we've done in the past. We're moving from a view of a broadly diversified, integrated company, like we've displayed BASF also in the past, to a company focused on core businesses and standalone businesses.
This clear differentiation or clear distinction between core businesses and standalone businesses provides not only strategic clarity, how to steer the company, how to allocate capital, but it also drives performance, and you will see it ultimately will drive value for BASF and our shareholders. Let's look at the core businesses and the standalone businesses going forward. It will not surprise many of you that the core businesses are the four segments, Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, and Nutrition & Care, and the eight corresponding operating divisions in these segments. Now, going forward, there is one small organizational change. We will actually move our Chemical Catalyst and Refinery Catalyst business unit from the Surface Technologies segment to the Industrial Solutions segment, and will be incorporated in the Performance Chemicals division as of January 1st, 2025.
This, on the other hand, allows us to really steer and set up what we call standalone businesses going forward. These are our three operating divisions in the Surface Technologies segment, Environmental Catalyst and Metal Solutions. I will refer to this as ECMS. Chose a bit of a complicated name here, and b attery materials and coatings. This also shows you that in the future, we will have two standalone operating divisions, ECMS and battery materials. It's also a new structure, provides actually, not only internally, but also externally, an additional element of clarity and benchmarking opportunity. Then, of course, our agricultural solutions segment, as you can see on the right-hand side.
Now, we believe strongly that these, different parts of our portfolio, our core businesses and our standalone businesses, have very different value creation levers, and I will go into this now, in both, parts of this portfolio. So let's start with our core businesses. This is, our four segments that I just introduced, roughly EUR 40 billion sales in 2023. And this is the, the core strength of BASF, and we are very confident about, this portfolio, that this is also going to have a very attractive future, for BASF, and it's building on our core strength as a company. First of all, strong market positions. More than 75% of all businesses in our core portfolio have a top three market position in their respective markets.
80% of our businesses in this core portfolio actually serve industries that are growing at or above GDP going forward. The core portfolio also over proportionately contributes not only to innovation, but also to sustainability in our product portfolio. EUR 6 billion sales in 2023 in this core portfolio from the EUR 40 billion actually were coming from products not older than five years, which is an overproportional contribution to this particular KPI. And we have a share of what we call Sustainable Future Solutions, so the products that really drive sustainability attributes for our customers, of 45%, which is also overproportionate. So this core business, these core businesses are really the innovation and sustainability drivers in our portfolio.
Of course, as many of you know, in this core businesses, this is where we play the strength of our Verbund integration at our major sites, but also, this is where we run our long value chains and have integrated value chains along sometimes various different segments. This is providing not only operational efficiencies and operational excellence, and of course, cost advantages, but also, as you will see later, provides an absolutely unique opportunity for BASF to successfully go through the green transformation in a much different way than most other competitors will have to do. I believe in the next ten years, we will see a revival of the Verbund philosophy of BASF in a new context and in a new world when it comes to the green transformation. These core businesses are serving attractive growth markets, attractive growth industries.
Whatever growth sector you're looking at, where you feel this is a high-growth industrial sector, it's a high-growth market, our core businesses are key suppliers and innovation partners to these industries. Here are just four examples. Whether you look at the semiconductor materials industry, the battery value chain, even without our battery materials business, we are still a very significant supplier to everything that evolves around the battery in the future. Whether you look at the wind energy industry or something like health and personal care industry where there's a lot of growth and innovation that would happen over the next ten years. In all of these industries, our core businesses are key suppliers and innovation partners, and you can be sure, as of today, somebody somewhere is having an innovation workshop in these industries with a BASF team to think about the future.
But it's not only, of course, about high-growth industries and innovation. It's also about creating organic growth through extending our core strength, which is, chemical factories that run on a large scale with, leading technologies. And one of the prime examples is, of course, our new Verbund site in China, in Zhanjiang, which will be a major earnings and cash contributor going forward. And I can report, and I don't want to steal Stefan's thunder, because he will certainly go into this tomorrow in the chemicals presentation, but I can already say that we are very happy with the progress of this project.
It's going to be our most sustainable, our most integrated, and our most digital, and with this, also our most competitive Verbund site that we have in BASF, and with this, it will be all of these things also to the chemical industry. We can confirm our expected profitability expectations, and I can report that we are fully on track to starting this site up in 2025 w ith the project, we're currently running slightly below budget and fully on track. An interesting side aspect is that we have fully financed this, this new Verbund site of, it's an investment of overall almost EUR 10 billion. We fully financed this locally in China. So this is a new aspect to our local-for-local strategy.
Typically, we talk about, you know, where we produce products and where we sell them, but now we can also incorporate the financing aspect of such a project into this local-for-local strategy, and you can see we first, for the first time, also tapped into the Chinese capital market for this at very attractive conditions, so going forward, we really believe that strengthening and growing this core business is a key mission for BASF. We can build on our leading cost position. Operational excellence has always been our strength in this portfolio, and we can rely on not only driving the green transformation of our customers, but doing it with strong innovation input. This is where we will bring all our strengths as BASF into play.
But let me also say one thing very clear: We are also going to tap into inorganic growth opportunities in the core. We want to also make value-accretive acquisitions in the core to strengthen our portfolio also for the next decade, to enable our customers to go through their green transformation, and where we can add capabilities, we will do so. We will also look for acquisitions that balance our regional footprint better and that create, of course, high amounts of cost synergies. And I personally consider the upcoming wave of industry consolidation that will for sure happen in the chemical industry, especially in Europe, certainly also here as an opportunity, because we have competitive assets through our Verbund structures, and I see certainly that we will have opportunities here to make our core businesses even stronger.
So overall, we target a range of EUR 7 billion to EUR 9 billion contribution of EBITDA before special items in 2028 from the core businesses. You can see that the assumption we set here is mid to upcycle conditions, and this is not a scientific term. Everybody has a slightly different hunch of what this is, but this basically indicates a slight improvement also in market conditions from the base year of 2023. I think 2024 is already somewhat of an example for this. I think if you look at the performance of our core businesses in 2024, you already saw in the first half that we are significantly improving not only volumes by 5% to 6%, but also EBITDA 15% to 16% up. This is overall already pointing towards a gradual recovery.
However, our entire strategy is not built on a significant change in the economic momentum in the global economy, but it's rather built on a slow and steady and gradual recovery of chemical markets. Now, let's switch sides to the standalone businesses. Here, I already mentioned four divisions who have distinctly different characteristics than our core businesses. Our standalone businesses serve very specific industries. They all compete in their respective markets with companies who are doing nothing else. They are basically competing with pure-play companies in their respective markets, and they all have leading market positions, and with the exception of battery materials, which is still in strong growth mode, so to say, we are still in build-up mode, the other three businesses are also providing strong contributions to earnings and cash for BASF Group.
They are very successful, they are very competitive, and they are also very well invested, so they compete with pure-play peers. That also means they are seen by the capital markets also very differently than our core businesses, and we have defined now for all of these four standalone businesses what we consider directions of travel, and let me go through one by one about the thinking that we have with regards to this direction of travel, so first of all, our ECMS business. The ECMS business is operating in a low-growth market. Some even say it's a sunset market, the automotive catalyst market tied to the internal combustion engine, well, if it's a sunset market, I can tell you this will be a very, very long sunset. The business will still be around for a long time.
It is a high-cash generating business, and through the carve-out that we have completed successfully in 2023, we made the business even more fit for purpose, even more successful than in the past, both through structural measures, but also by allowing the team really to drive their core mission of operating now in a low-growth environment with their own playbook and incentivizing their entrepreneurial freedom and giving them more flexibility. This has really worked out well. So as I said, business is fully carved out. It's a strong cash contributor to BASF today, and we stay open for value-enhancing transaction for this business going forward, but there's also no urgency from our side to address it. Second thing, battery materials. Very different story. We're still very much committed to become a world-leading supplier of cathode active materials in the long term.
However, especially over the last couple of years, the dynamics in this market have dramatically changed. Not only is the business per se, I think, comes with high market and technology risk, because it's a fast-growing market with still technology roadmaps, being developed. But over the last two years, we have seen that, policy changes and also market, changes, can easily, deter the growth rates, in this business, especially outside of China, and this is what we have seen. So everybody in the industry right now is, I think, reassessing and taking a step back and seeing, well, how can we de-risk the path forward in this battery business? We talked about this in the Q2 earnings call already, that we are right now very comfortable with looking at our installed capacities for cathode materials.
We have overall 190,000 tons of capacity installed. We have very competitive assets in Asia and in Europe. We have a small plant in the U.S., and filling those capacities up is right now our core mission, and we do this together with our key customers. However, we have deprioritized now new investments and building new plants because our customers, the cell manufacturers in this industry have done the same. So going forward, we will de-risk this path further. We will look for partnership opportunities, collaboration opportunities along the value chain to see whether through also these collaborations, we can further de-risk the market and technology risk in this particular industry. And this is also not new to us. We have become a major player in this industry due to partnerships and collaborations, t hink about our joint ventures in Japan and in China, for example.
This leads me to Coatings and Agricultural Solutions, and these two businesses are also, in their respective markets, among the top performing and leading businesses on the planet, and they both have one thing in common: they both compare to the values that their peers are being or the value that their peers are being valued at the capital markets. They're both undervalued as part of BASF. So we think they both of these businesses are actually well-positioned to command a premium value when we look at them differently when it comes to ownership. So let's talk about Coatings.
Coatings is a great business that is leading in its respective market positions, very much focused on the coating side, on the automotive markets, and is also a world leader in the surface treatment for all kinds of applications, including aerospace. Now, going forward, we will explore strategic options for our Coatings business because we believe there's a plausible pathway towards generating a premium value by, for example, exploring partnership options or even different ownership structures. We will also immediately start the divestment process of the only sizable, I would say, B2C business that BASF has, which is the decorative coatings business in Brazil with the Suvinil brand. In Agricultural Solutions, it's of course a very different industry. It's a very highly consolidated industry, and here, again, our agricultural business is a powerhouse in this industry.
Also is in the situation to command a clear premium over the value that it can be realizing within BASF. We are in the course of completing the legal and ERP separation of Agricultural Solutions, something that we are in the course of already completing for Coatings. We are now starting the process for Agricultural Solutions, and we plan to have it completed roughly by the year 2027. And in parallel, we will prepare this business to make it IPO-ready, so to say, and prepare a potential listing at the capital market. And one option would be then, of course, a potential listing of a minority share of Agricultural Solutions. So these are the directions of travel for these businesses. But let me also say one thing very clear: This is not about getting rid of something.
This is not about generating cash. This is purely about creating value. And as you can see with the ECMS business, where the business is fully carved out, and we have even announced a few years ago that we are open for strategic options, we keep our clear view on creating value. And where we have options that do not provide value opportunity for BASF and for our shareholders, we're also not forced to do anything, because all of these businesses, as I said, are well-performing businesses also within BASF, and we will focus on making them even stronger by giving them more operational and strategic flexibility through our differentiated steering approach. And this is what you can see here.
On the left-hand side, again, the arguments that are already mentioned and the target range that we are looking at for 2028 is roughly EUR 3.5 billion to EUR 4 billion EBITDA before special items from our standalone businesses. So a considerable contribution to BASF's earnings. Now, if you've paid attention, the EUR 3.5 billion to EUR 4 billion is roughly the same that we had in 2023. 2023 was an all-time record year for Agricultural Solutions, for Coatings, and also was a very good year for our ECMS business. So that is why the number, so to say, is not growing as much as in the core businesses, because 2023 performance was, in some aspects, certainly outstanding. That gets me to the next topic. It's focused on high-growth markets.
As I said, a company that's performing or an excellent company is focusing on the things that drive value and can defocus on things that don't. We've looked at the distribution of our core businesses across the globe, and actually, we make more than 90% of our business in our core portfolio in just 28 countries. Twenty-one countries of those we consider core countries, and these are typically large countries where BASF often has a strong manufacturing presence, but they only have moderate growth. Typical countries would be the U.S., Germany, Brazil, strong markets for us. Then we have a group of countries, seven countries, that we call advanced countries, going forward, and these are where we have a strong market position today, and they will drive the majority of the growth in the chemical industry.
These are our high-growth markets, and here we will further strengthen our footprint, drive our organizational set-up in these countries, and want to establish a higher share of manufacturing also in these markets, following our local-for-local strategy going forward. These advanced countries, these seven countries, are China, India, and five ASEAN countries, so namely, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Then there are smaller markets. BASF is active in another roughly 110 markets. In many of those, I think roughly 70, we have our own legal entity set ups to serve these smaller markets, and we will, going forward, take a hard look at what is the right approach for BASF to serve these smaller markets, because they only represent less than 10% of our overall business.
That doesn't mean that they are not profitable, but it means that we have to take a hard look at reducing complexity and streamlining our organization and what we do in these small markets, and there will be quite a few markets that we will also exit with direct sales going forward, so that all plays into focusing and making the company leaner and more effective, and here you can see the position or the outlook in our core markets in our advanced countries, the seven countries, China, India, ASEAN, and you can see that 80% or more than 80% of the entire chemical market growth of the world is coming from just these seven countries.
We have a clear ambition to grow with the market in China going forward in the next 10 years, and we want to grow above the market in India and ASEAN, while significantly increasing our local manufacturing footprint in these countries to be competitive. The last point on the focus is capital allocation. We will take a new approach how we allocate capital in the group. In the past, coming also from our portfolio view of running BASF as an integrated company, we very much also the board took the, if you want, the role of a, of an operator of BASF Group. We very much had a bottom-up allocation process of capital.
When you look, for example, at investments or CapEx, we ran a process, very much bottom-up, based on 70 different SBU strategies, and every year we had a list of CapEx projects coming to the board based on their individual profitability expectations, and we ranked them, and we gave our best to steer the CapEx allocation on a project-by-project basis as a board. For a company with the size of BASF, the complexity of BASF, and also the different strategic mandates that we now give various different businesses, whether they're in core, whether they're in standalone, whether they have a growth mandate or a cash generation mandate, I think we have to go about this very differently, and in the future, we will allocate capital much more from an owner's perspective.
The board will take much more of an owner's perspective of the portfolio of BASF and allocate capital according to the specific roles that our businesses have in our portfolio. And this will be based on clear midterm value creation plans of all the operating divisions. And over the next two days, you will see the content of these value creation plans for all of our segments. And this is the basis for capital allocation, which will be much more top-down. But then we also, as a board, will stay out of the individual project decisions and empower our divisions much more to execute these projects. And this allows us to also not only hopefully have a better capital efficiency going forward, but also run a much tighter ship when it comes to capital discipline and budgeting our capital going forward.
This leads to an ambition also to bring down our CapEx spending well below the level of depreciation already by the year 2026, once the big wave of our Zhanjiang Verbund site is done. You can see that we're returning to the CapEx level roughly of 2019 already over the next years, despite the fact that, of course, since 2019 we have seen a significant inflation when it comes to CapEx projects. One thing is very clear, and we will come also back to this later when we talk about our financial projections, is that we have ample capacity to grow. We are coming out of a wave where we had strong investments, of course, in Asia, with our Zhanjiang Verbund site and other projects, but also in Europe.
Think about the investments that we did in Antwerp, by the way, or also here in Ludwigshafen, but also in North America, for example, with our MDI expansion in Geismar. So we have invested a lot in new capacities, very competitive capacities, and now is the time to fill these capacities and use them to our advantage. So this is why we are now in a fortunate situation that we can bring down CapEx significantly, but still allow BASF Group to grow over the next years and deliver into our plans. Through this new capital allocation scheme, we can also steer much better what categories are we actually supporting with our CapEx?
We now have a plan to allocate more than 50% of our CapEx budget over the next four years in growth businesses and/or growth regions, as well as for our green transformation. So this is also a very fortunate situation that we can now do this much better than in the past as a group. So this was focus. Now let's accelerate. I personally believe that acceleration is very important because speed is the new superpower in business. And if you ask many people in markets or customers, if you ask our own people, if you ask stakeholders about what are the key strengths of BASF, speed often doesn't come up in the number one, two, or three. I have to say one exception is maybe our investor relations team.
I have to say this to this team because they are always very speedy. But the rest of the company has, I think, catch-up potential. So speed is going to be very important. If you look at what is going on around us, not only in the competitive landscape, but also in the geopolitical space and in society in general, we have to become a much faster company. And t hese are three things that we will do going forward. We will empower our businesses through streamlined and differentiated group steering. I already alluded to this a bit when I talked about capital allocation.
We will simplify our organizational structure as a group, and we will harness the advantages and the breakthrough developments that we will have accessible through artificial intelligence to accelerate innovation and drive productivity in the company. Now, first of all, this chart looks a little bit benign, but the first thing you always have to do when you want to simplify something, yes, you have to create role clarity, and I already mentioned this, that through the last months, we had, let's say, a redefinition of what roles do actually certain parts of the company actually have to play on the playing field, and we also talked about what is the role of the board versus what is the role of the operating division, as one example, and here you can see a high-level description of this.
As I already said, the board will take a much more owner's perspective and stay out of managing a lot of the operational details that in the future will be managed on the operating division level, and this comes with the expectation that the operating divisions in the future can actually assume accountability in a much more holistic way, so more empowerment comes with higher accountability, and we will manage and drive, and also incentivize the divisions much more to take on this holistic accountability and drive, for example, also, their cash generation and selected balance sheet positions in line with their respective peers in their respective markets. W e also will take a much stronger view on peer benchmarks, rather than always comparing the performance of our divisions with the budget that we set in the year prior.
So much stronger performance management that will lead overall to more autonomy, entrepreneurial thinking, and also overall, much faster decision-making closer to our markets and our customers. And one thing that we have already started to implement for our senior executives last year, it's a small group of senior executives, which we will now roll out throughout the company, is a differentiated way how we incentivize actually all our people according to performance. While in the past, your bonus when you worked for BASF was solely based on the ROCE of BASF Group, we will now implement a system where 75% of your variable compensation will be dependent on the performance of your respective division. And that will include specifically also a benchmark KPI, how your division is performing against best-in-class peers in your respective industry.
So this will drive, again, and incentivize performance orientation on a completely different level. It will strengthen ownership, and it will drive accountability throughout the entire organization, especially with the angle on peer benchmarking. We will simplify our organization, and we will run a whole playbook of different measures because I think organizational complicatedness is often at the source of becoming slow and often not efficient in decision-making, so we will, based on the sharpened role clarity that I just described, also look at various organizational measures, and we will certainly also run with our divisions through processes like delayering and also reducing spans of control, but we also will do few more fundamental changes in BASF. One, you can see here.
We've always had a matrix organization in at least two, if not three dimensions in BASF, and we will, going forward, eliminate one entire dimension of this matrix organization, the regional dimension. So in the future, we will or very soon, we will dissolve the regional divisions. We still have five regional divisions, and we will manage the company solely based on the operating divisions, as you can see on the right-hand side. We will in core country or so in the countries where our core businesses are present, we will actually ask the biggest core business, so to say, run the country platform for us, and we will, by this, eliminate the entire regional layer, and this will again streamline decision-making and require less alignment between different organizational dimensions in our matrix.
And this is the part that I'm getting, as I said, increasingly excited about. Artificial Intelligence and all the technologies that come along with it will fundamentally change the way, not only how we work as individuals in a company, but also will change almost all domains in a company like BASF, in how it operates and what it and how it becomes successful. And we will implement Artificial Intelligence now holistically across the whole company, starting with individual, let's say, upskilling programs for individuals and augmenting their daily lives, so to say, with Artificial Intelligence tools, all the way by launching big programs and big technology push programs. For example, in our big cost-intensive domains like manufacturing, to really drive productivity and also accelerate innovation in these areas.
You can see some examples here, and I think Stefan will also talk about this. It's very exciting to me. If you think about how many operating, how many manufacturing sites BASF operates, how many plants we operate, and how easy and how successful it is for us to now implement artificial intelligence into the manufacturing environment, and with this, create immediate productivity gains, is really fascinating, it's inspiring, and we are convinced that even over the next few years, we can already achieve a tangible and very significant earnings improvement by rolling out artificial intelligence. Yesterday, we had a town hall with our global employees, and Dirk actually was running this AI initiative for us.
He gave a super picture, I think, because in the past, a company like BASF, with our size, our scale, and all the different things that we do, w e have a huge amount of data. I n the past, it was a source of frustration, it was a source of sometimes even burden, to sort through all this data to find the right things. So we were struggling in the last ten years how to structure the data so we could actually gain a competitive advantage. When introducing artificial intelligence now, this burden becomes a huge opportunity, because suddenly this data, this complex data pool, this data treasure, becomes available to us, and we are super excited of creating this or making this, exploiting this as a competitive advantage for BASF going forward. So let's talk about transform.
And I will share this section with Katja, because she will talk to the last point, making our European operations more competitive. But let me talk briefly about our overall story when it comes to transformation. First of all, we are already on the move. BASF today already is in a leading spot when it comes to the Green transformation, because already today, most of our operating divisions can offer their customers already products either in a conventional way, so with a normal product carbon footprint, which often is much better than what you get from competitors because of our integrated Verbund structure. But we also have a chance to already offer our customers products with reduced product carbon footprint or even zero product carbon footprint. And already today, we're playing out the strength of our Verbund system.
As you can see, when it comes to utilities and when it comes to raw materials, we can, through our Verbund system, play the whole breadth of different possibilities and really adjust the product carbon footprint of most of our products, actually very flexibly to the needs of our customer, and with this, add significant value already today, and this concept, we will actually take forward and drive our big green transformation in a different way. We've already run this playbook very successfully with green electricity. You've heard us talk many times about our investments into offshore wind parks, into solar capacities, and also, that we have secured large amounts of green electricity via PPA, and we are actually on a great track towards achieving our goal of reaching 60% of green electricity share by 2030 as BASF Group.
This was possible actually, because we had early on in 2022, formed a unit called BASF Renewable Energy, that had the task to source, make and trade renewable energy at scale, and that allows us to get into the market of renewable electricity independent of the actual demand that we have in our own operation short term, and this has become a very successful operation. Now we want to take the same playbook and duplicate this in the world of renewable carbon. We will also set up a new unit, BASF Renewable Carbon, which will actually do the same thing. A little bit black and white. We will make, we will source, and we will trade, bio-based or renewable carbon-containing raw materials and become a market player there and have structural and competitive access to these kinds of raw materials.
And why is that so important? Our Verbund system and our ability to run long and complex value chains provides really a scalable and competitive pathway to gradually transform our product portfolio from gray to blue to green. And by introducing these renewable carbon raw materials, like for example, bio-naphtha, biogas, or other energy vectors like green hydrogen, and similarly, we can do this with recycled materials, of course, like pyrolysis oil or waste streams. We can actually use our Verbund to transfer these green attributes then via our key Verbund products like olefins and syngas, for example, into a large amount of different end products that we can then allocate the green attributes to these products, where our customers are willing to pay the premium that is needed.
And that is the big advantage, because today it's very difficult to foresee which industry, in which region, in which country, is at the end of the day going to pay a premium for any of these green attributes. And I think this is why it is very advantageous for us to have this ability to ramp up and to allocate these green attributes to the different end products, and to this in a gradual way. And why we like this so much, you can see on this slide, because we are shaping this transformation based on increasing customer demand. Latest by 2030, we feel or we think that the demand for green products or products with a green attribute, lower CO₂ footprint or bio-based material, bio-based claims or even recycled claims, t he demand will outpace supply.
So latest by then, we believe that there will be a higher willingness to pay, but how exactly this will shape up and where, still difficult to foresee. So by moving our big irreversible CapEx decisions into the next decade, we already have a great advantage, and we can run the green transformation by introducing higher and increasing amounts of renewable raw materials into the Verbund for quite some time without having to spend a huge amounts of CapEx for new technologies and new plants. And this is what we summarize within BASF also in this phrase, to say: We're going from a target-based transformation, where we largely oriented ourselves and our priorities along the targets that we set ourselves to a market-based transformation.
We have to make sure that we can tailor-make our transformation towards the market needs, and we have to create business cases and increasing amounts of business cases to justify the increased investments that we are going to run. And that this is not only theory, you can see here. Here you can see the investments that we have done over the last four years, and that we're planning in the next four years for the green transformation. And you can see over the last four years, we have spent roughly EUR 260 million a year for the green transformation, for CapEx, but also some equity and supplier financing instruments. And most of it was geared towards renewable energy. So this was the wind parks, this was the PPAs, this was getting access to green electrons.
In the future, the next four years, this will shift now. First of all, the spending will get higher. It's about EUR 600 million spent per year and r oughly 40% will be CapEx. You can see that it's shifting very much to getting access to these renewable raw materials. The share of renewable energy is rather going down because of course, then, by then t he wind parks will be built, so to say. So, this with this implementation of this sourcing strategy, getting access to renewable carbon, we will really drive the green transformation of BASF, and we will shift significantly riskier CapEx out into the next decades, when markets will have formed, when it will be much clearer which bets to take and which bets not to take.
Here's really what I said earlier. Here is where the Verbund really comes in our play. And I can tell you, this playbook, not many other chemical companies can play this, especially not in Europe. One thing is also very important. By changing from a target-based to a market-based transformation, we're not changing our targets. We stay fully committed to our 2030 and to our 2050 targets when it comes to our climate protection targets, like CO₂ footprint, which you can see here. 25% reduction of our Scope 1 and 2 CO₂ reductions by 2030, and a 15% specific Scope 3.1 reduction in our CO₂ emission compared to 2022. And of course, we are staying fully committed to becoming a fully net zero company by 2050. And with this.
No, there's one more, because we are also having some new targets. I just saw Katja coming up. We have some new targets and some adjusted targets, because we're also, of course, translating this into our product portfolio, because the CO₂ footprint is easy to match to manage on a corporate level. But of course, for the actual day-to-day operations, it's also important to have targets when it comes to your product portfolio. And we will actually drive the share of our sustainable future solutions products. These are the products that really drive the green transformation of our customers. We will increase the share from roughly 40% today to more than 50% in 2030. This also is a big profitability driver, by the way.
The sustainable future solutions products actually have, on average, an eight percentage points higher margin than the rest of the portfolio. So already today, where you have a chance to sell green products, you're actually making more money with it. So this is what we will drive up further. And then we are introducing a new target also to support our efforts in the circularity transformation, where we will increase the share of our or the sales with our so-called Loop solutions. And these are products that significantly contribute to the circularity of business models and value chains. We will introduce a new target, and we will grow the sales from EUR 5 billion to EUR 10 billion in 2030. But now with this, I hand it over to Katja, and she will talk to you about Ludwigshafen.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Markus, and warm welcome to you all. I would like to share now our plans for Ludwigshafen, and I would like to start with our goal. Our goal is for Ludwigshafen to be a leading sustainable chemical site for Europe and a strong pillar for BASF success. This includes our strong commitment to sustainable transformation of the site. It shows our focus on the European markets, and it shows our conviction that a successful BASF group needs a strong site in Ludwigshafen. I'd like to show you today why we believe that Ludwigshafen will benefit from this change momentum coming with the green transformation, and why we are confident that we can achieve this goal. I would like to begin with addressing the short-term tasks before moving on to the longer-term plans.
First of all, we have to face some hard facts and reality. It's true that we are still operating in very challenging market environments. This has either led to structural underutilization or lack of competitiveness, and this is why we have put cost-saving programs in place that are targeting a run rate of EUR 2.1 billion total cost savings by the end of 2026. In February 2023, we have been one of the first chemical companies that launched new cost-saving programs, addressing non-production structures in Europe, and production structures in Ludwigshafen. And so far, by June 2024, we have already implemented savings at a run rate of EUR 700 million, and we expect, by end of the year, EUR 800 million out of this program.
To address the specific issues in Ludwigshafen and to make it crisis-proof and profitable in the long term, we have set up in February 2024 an additional cost-saving program, the Ludwigshafen Cost Improvement Program. This is targeting EUR 1 billion savings by the end of 2026, and the identification of measures is almost completed, and the swift implementation is in preparation. All of these programs will come with one-time cost of EUR 1.8 billion, and out of that, EUR 500 million was incurred by June this year. More details for the Ludwigshafen cost improvement program, I'd like to share now. Actually, this program sets a clear pathway with six different projects, how to achieve the savings of EUR 1 billion.
Out of this EUR 1 billion, around 80% will be fixed cost related, and two projects, Operation SLU and Spend Optimization Ludwigshafen, are focusing on the simplification of processes and savings in procurement, and will generate savings of EUR 500 million. The four remaining projects will also generate savings of EUR 500 million, and here, headcount reductions will be a major element. Those four projects are targeting also on the further adjustment of asset structures, and also addressing efficiency in non-operations areas at the Ludwigshafen site. As a result of these programs, Ludwigshafen will become leaner but stronger, and will have a better competitive position in the European markets, and the implementation of this program will be the foundation and will be instrumental for the long-term success of the site.
I've shared with you on the previous slide, one project, which was about the asset adjustments in Ludwigshafen, and here we have taken a very deep look into our asset structures, and we have had basically two main objectives. The first one was to identify further measures to improve profitability, and the second was that we wanted to understand and to assess the ability of our value chains to compete in future markets, and also the impact of the green transformation, and actually, our findings were pretty encouraging, so one outcome was that all major value chains can compete in their markets according to our analysis, and taking account also different macroeconomic scenarios. Another finding was that the majority, 78% of our assets, are competitive in the short or long term in their respective markets.
These findings result on the analysis list of about 900 production units and 160 plants. We have also identified that some of our assets do not any longer deliver sufficient earnings, but do have a competitive risk, either due to structural underutilization or lack of competitiveness. Here, 16% do have a short-term to medium-term risk, and 6% do have a long-term competitive risk. Nevertheless, this just has minor impact on our Verbund because they are rather at the end of our value chains. We have also already implemented concrete measures to address that for such assets that are not competitive. End of August, we had announced the closure of our CDon and CPon plant, and also, adipic acid asset capacities. Further measures are currently being assessed and then will be implemented as required.
Yeah, to adjust our asset structures, it's also to important to understand how future market requirements look like, and we have to answer questions like: How do future market looks like? And how are the chemical markets going to develop, and we have analyzed here different macroeconomic scenarios with different underlying assumptions, and what you find here is the Paris-compatible scenario. While there were differences in the results in the scenarios, they're basically on an aggregated level, they all came to the same conclusion, and that is that there is a moderate growth for chemicals in Europe in the long term. This is varying depending on the industry, and thanks to BASF diverse and broad portfolio of customer industry and products, and our leading position, we see that our Ludwigshafen site is well-placed to serve such markets.
If you take a deeper look into the market development, we foresee that there is a change momentum coming from the green transformation. We see that the demand for products with sustainability attributes, like, renewable or recycled content, or low or zero product carbon footprint, is increasing. This is also varying on the different industry, and certainly also depends on regulatory developments. As Markus already explained, we do see that this is a huge growth opportunity for BASF, and that Ludwigshafen is well-placed to flexibly serve those markets. This is why we are convinced that our Ludwigshafen production Verbund is a powerful, scalable, and de-risked pathway for the transformation. Today, we are already taking measures. We are adjusting our selected assets that do have competitive issues, and this is building a strong foundation for the green transformation.
Then, in the transition phase, we gradually transform our product portfolio by using our existing assets and by using increasingly and flexibly more renewable and recycled feedstock. In future, we can, on our path from gray to blue to green, leverage the inherent energy and resource efficiency of the Verbund, and then also scale up new technologies and apply new technologies that we are currently piloting and developing, also in line with the customer demand. This is basically our journey towards net zero at Ludwigshafen site. In my mind, there's no doubt that Ludwigshafen is well-placed to competitively and flexibly supply the European chemical markets. We do see moderate growth. There is an additional growth momentum from the green transformation.
Our production Verbund is well-placed with a competitive cost position, with offering additional advantages for the transformation, and we have leading positions in many markets. And all this builds a basis for our ambition that we want to outperform the market growth in Europe. And with that, Markus, I will hand back to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Katja. And I'll go to the last strategic lever, but from my perspective, certainly not the least, because I already opened the presentation with our short video on, which was a lot about winning mindset. And from my perspective, having the right culture that fits the strategic ambition is an absolute key enabler for the future success of the company. And as you already heard me say, is that we want to drive the change, the culture change in BASF, and really play on a few themes like accountability, speed, and performance orientation, much stronger than in the past. However, we want to build also on the strong corporate culture that we have, and that's the reason why we all love to work for this incredible company.
If you ask our people, and if you ask even all stakeholders in the market, if you talk to customers, and suppliers and partners, maybe they won't say that speed is one of our core three or top three attributes, but they will for sure, many of them, most of them, would say, "Your people are really great." Every employee survey that we run, we can detect it, and you can feel it when you're in BASF. There's a tremendous sense of pride to work for this company. There's a tremendous loyalty of BASF people to each other, but also to the company.
And there's a tremendous feeling that, in BASF, we run the company based on great core values, we have a high sense of integrity, and we're doing something that is worthwhile doing because we help the rest of the world to become a better place. However, also our employees have clear expectations, to us as leadership and also to the company as a whole. And here's just three quotes, from recent employee surveys, and they have been rather consistent over the last years. 54% of our employees say, only 54%, I have to say, say that we make it easy in BASF to get things done. Complicatedness, often, outrageous, alignment processes before decisions are taken, and so forth, is often mentioned as one element that frustrates, employees quite a bit. So we are addressing this.
65% say we are not rewarding exceptional performance. This is this feeling that in a large company, it's often difficult to be rewarded for something where you really have made a breakthrough, impact to the success of the company, and 24% say that they seek more strategic clarity. So again, we have a great company culture, and I work for this company for 25 years, and I still believe this is an incredible company with probably one of the strongest and most positive cultures that we have. But there is room to improve, and this is what we're trying to distill out, and we want to create and incentivize a stronger performance-oriented, a stronger, a commercially-oriented culture in striving for our success.
We have structured the performance minded culture change, and we've gave it the title of a winning culture. We've structured this along three culture themes: accountability, speed, and improvement mindset. We have developed a concrete winning behaviors based on these culture themes that we are going to now drive through the company and that we also, as a board, will role model. We will also fundamentally change a few things when it comes to incentivation and performance management in the company, and you can see three elements here. We will fundamentally change the way we incentivize our leaders and employees. I already talked about this. More divisional targets being, you know, incentivizing people closer to the performance they can actually contribute to most and getting it closer to home, so to say.
We will change the way we recognize performance. We will overhaul our entire performance management system and making much more easy to on the spot, incentivize people also financially if they have created a large impact for the company, and we will also change the way we deal with low performance, because one of the feedbacks we've also received that in large companies and also in BASF, it is often not our strength to deal with low performance, and we will also introduce a few changes there, so culture is not only a soft topic, and it's not all about behaviors and showing up differently to work, but it's also changing the way we manage performance, and we make it really very tangible with this.
Since we are already at the point of driving performance and driving a more commercially oriented mindset, I would ask Dirk on stage to talk to us about our ambitions going forward. Before and while you're still walking up there, just wanted to share this picture here. Sorry, I forgot that we put this in there. This is actually a live, almost live picture from the last days. We had our top 200 leaders together in Copenhagen, actually, earlier this week. We launched the new strategy, and I have to say, the resonance from our top 200 leaders that we received, the feedback that we have received on playing this angle, on creating a winning culture for BASF, was one of the most inspiring things in my 25 years in BASF.
Because it was really like a sigh of relief to say, "Finally, we are addressing what really matters and what really drives performance in the company, fundamentally, and this is really our attitude, our behaviors, how we show up to work every day." So this was really encouraging to me. That's why I like this picture. So with this, I hand it over to Dirk.
Yeah, thank you, Markus. And, ladies and gentlemen, let me now complement the strategy that we have just heard about from the financial point of view with some financial cornerstones of the new strategy. Ladies and gentlemen, the team, the board team, the entire team is very eager to create the foundation for attractive shareholder distributions going forward. And, doing so, we will focus on two things specifically. One, we set a new set of corporate financial targets. This is for the first time that this company is doing this for a four-year horizon. So not a year-to-year process, but giving you more clarity going forward, what the company wants to achieve in the midterm, and reconfiguring the capital allocation framework.
The corporate financial targets have already been laid out by Markus. I will not repeat them one by one. Let me just say, they are from our standpoint ambitious targets, and at the same time, realistically achievable targets. So this is the set of KPIs from the group perspective that the entire team will work for and get this done. Capital allocation framework needed some reconfiguration, and we are going forward focusing here on two things. First of all, we want to maintain our financial strength. You all know about our very robust balance sheet with a high equity ratio, an excellent single A rating that is unparalleled, also in our industry.
But we also want to create value and unlock value, and that is growing with the high capital in efficiency. I will talk more about it. We are at the end of a high CapEx cycle, and now we are harvesting the yield from the investments that we have done, and we are also taking a look into our portfolio, how to navigate and manage it in the future. All of that together, the team is very confident about and I'm very confident about, we'll create the shareholder distribution amount between 2025 and 2028 of at least EUR 12 billion. Let's look into the EBITDA development that we are seeing for this four years planning period. 2023, we had an EBITDA BSI of EUR 7.7 billion.
By the year 2028, we want to reach an EBITDA before special items of EUR 10 billion to EUR 12 billion. How will this happen? You see this in the bridge. The biggest building block is volume growth. Where is this volume growth coming from? This comes to an extent from our new investment in the Verbund site in Zhanjiang, South China. This is the by far biggest investment that we are currently doing. This investment is going according to plan, and it will be on stream by the end of 2025, beginning of 2026. This is not the only investment that is coming on stream. I just mentioned another one, the MDI production plant in Geismar, U.S., which is currently built, also ramping up within this period.
And then, and this was already mentioned, we want to increase the utilization rate of our already existing capacity. We will do that by constantly looking for productivity gains, for cost savings, in order to become even more competitive and being able to out-compete also the peers in the market, and grow profitably with these installations. We are also seeing a margin improvement. As you see, this is a smaller building block than the one about the growth. We are coming from a low-margin environment. We are currently in a very low-price environment. We see improvement there over time. We see that improvement gradually. It will not come all at once, but we will again come to a mid-cycle upcycle environments over time, and we will definitively participate in that.
And then thirdly, and that is very important also to me, you see two blocks, a positive and a negative one: cost savings versus cost inflation. You heard already from Katja about our cost-saving programs that we are running with an aggregate run rate by the end of 2026 of EUR 2.1 billion. And this is what we will bring home. And at the same time, after the programs ended, we will not stop saving cost, and we'll do that on a recurring, constant basis. And the ambition that we have is to constantly offset the cost inflation that the company has to incur, which is an order of magnitude you can think about as a cost item of EUR 400 million to 500 million.
So the constant offsetting, the constant compensation of that amount, this is the goal. Looking into our cash flow performance, over the four years planning period, we are very confident that we will be generating an operating cash flow of, in the aggregate, EUR 30 billion on the back of, the operating performance. The CapEx, at the same time, will significantly be reduced after the investment peak in the years 2024 and 2025, as you see that, green curve there. And that, by its nature, will lift up the free cash flow significantly in the years as of 2026. So we will be able to generate a free cash flow of EUR 12 billion minimum in that, period between 2025 and 2028. So what does that mean to our shareholder distribution?
Let me say we are, and we remain very committed to attractive shareholder distributions. Also going forward, this board will not be sitting on cash, but we will use cash. In the midterm, and this is again the period of 2025 to 2028, we target an overall distribution to shareholders on the level of the last years, yet through a combination of dividends and share buybacks, and we will at least distribute between 2025 and 2028, EUR 12 billion to our shareholders. We are going to rebase the base dividend and will pay out at least EUR 2.25 per share, which is an amount of EUR 2 billion per year, and we will complement that very actively with the share buybacks, which play and will play an important role in our capital allocation going forward.
At the very latest, we are planning as of 2027 to launch a share buyback program, and the amount we are thinking here from within the period until 2028 is an amount of EUR 4 billion altogether. Ladies and gentlemen, why are we doing that? We believe with the rebasing of the base dividend and the complementation with the share buybacks, we are living up to the financial profile of the company. We believe it fits to the company. It gives a little bit more flexibility over the period, while the commitment, the overall commitment for the shareholder return remains very high and ambitious.
We believe that with that approach, we will create value for the company, we will increase the robustness of the company, and I think, Markus, you already said that also, we are rewarding the long-term investors in our company because we will make that company stronger with this approach, and over time, the total shareholder return, and there we are very confident about, will increase. So that is the approach that we are taking as of now. Talking about our new capital allocation framework, there are maybe three words that I would like you to take away from the capital allocation framework. It's focus, it's discipline, and it's unlocking value.
And I will talk in a minute about the three boxes here, how we want to maintain the financial strengths, grow with high capital efficiency, and sharpen our portfolio. Important for you to take away is we are doing that to really create a foundation for attractive shareholder distributions via dividends and via share buybacks, as we just said. And with that, let me walk you through the building blocks of these three boxes of the capital allocation framework. So first of all, we will maintain our financial strengths, and you know that from BASF since a long time, and I also know from many, many talks with you that this is very appreciated, that we are and maintain a robust company that can afford to define its own destiny.
We will maintain our high equity ratio, which is constantly at or above 45% or higher, and even in crisis years, like 2020, we were able to keep it at a level of 43%. We also want to maintain our single-A rating that we have with all three respective rating agencies, Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch. Want to maintain that in order to be able to leverage on attractive financial conditions and as I said, define our own destiny. In the middle box, you see how our financing is currently composed. For you, maybe important is the average yield, 2.2% overall, very attractive that we have here.
And for the big China project that already was discussed also here, indeed, we took the China for China approach. We secured corporate bank loans in China, but also issued our inaugural first Panda bond with a yield of 2.39%, better to say coupon, which was also very, very superb in that market. The last point maybe as a point of interest, also, our pension obligations don't give us any headache here.
We have a very healthy funding rate of 90%, a net liability of EUR 2.7 billion, a very active portfolio management, I'd say, with an average yield of 5% per year, and a very strong hedging also against interest volatility. We will grow with high capital efficiency. This was now a couple of times discussed. Why this is so important, you can see on the left-hand side of this slide, which gives you a sensitivity. If we take our entire asset park of BASF globally, and we're just adding one percentage point of utilization for this entire asset park, this will give us a positive contribution of EUR 300 million EBITDA for this change.
We believe this is worth fighting for, and this is for us also after this investment peak, now a big leverage, for additional growth. In the middle box, you see the CapEx amounts in the aggregate in the respective four years period, 2023 to 2026, EUR 25 billion, 2024 to 2027, EUR 20 billion, and now the new period coming in at EUR 17 billion. Bear in mind, please, this is still including the last peak investment year of the Zhanjiang Verbund site project. You can already anticipate the normal, let's say, run rate CapEx once the year 2025 is out. Then on the right-hand side, also very dear to my heart, we are looking into capital efficiency from all angles, including the current with the optimization of the net working capital.
What is shown there is our track record of net working capital optimization that we did in the year 2023. We were able, within one year, to release cash in the amount of EUR 2 billion from our net working capital by respective focus on that. Can we repeat that each and every year? Certainly not. That is a matter of how the business develops also seasonally. But it shows you the ambition and also the capability that the team has, I think, to optimize the net working capital. We will sharpen our portfolio. I think also here, we already got quite some explanation from Markus. Also here, I am not going to repeat, but maybe from the capital allocation standpoint just add a couple of words.
First of all, we fully understand the importance of continuous portfolio management in terms of capital allocation, but also value creation and value crystallization. So this is, and will be coming again, a very important task for us to take a hard look into our portfolios. For the core businesses, I think I can say we feel good about the composition now that has been presented with the four segments standing together as the core, not only from a production and value chain steering perspective, but also from the financial perspective, because the businesses that we have in this core portfolio now, also from the valuation standpoint, are very coherent and fit nicely together.
For the standalone businesses, we also feel good about these highly appreciated businesses being standalone because they really command a premium valuation to what we see today, and they will be going forward, also clearly be managed for value. One thing that is already a very recent history, so I cut it short. Also a portfolio management move. We exited our oil and gas business with cash inflow of around about EUR 2 billion for BASF in the year two thousand and twenty-four. The first part of that already flew into our accounts, $1.56 billion from the sale of our non-Russian related E&P business of Wintershall Dea, that we have now sold on to Harbour Energy. So this money is in.
On top of that amount, we already also gotten 39.6% shares within Harbour Energy. This is now for us a very comfortable situation to be in. We are now the biggest single shareholder of Harbour Energy. Harbour Energy is listed at the London Stock Exchange, and we are holding the participation as a financial participation, so we will sell it off over time, and we'll do that for value optimization, so we are not in a hurry. Currently, we are in a six months lockdown period for these shares, but after the six months, we can sell them, and we will do that financially prudently.
Second transaction, which also was closed by the end of August, was the sale of the onshore pipeline net that was 50% held by Wintershall Dea. Fifty percent already belonged to the German government, and now the German government has also acquired the residual 50% from us. And as a result of that, Wintershall Dea received the purchase price, and BASF will get still within this year EUR 700 million as its share of this purchase price. So, two big transactions, which bring us clearly a big step towards this strategic exit from oil and gas. And lastly, Wintershall Dea is still an existing company, and the main purpose now is the pursuance of insurance claims by the Federal Investment Guarantee.
As you know, Wintershall Dea has been expropriated from the Russian business, and we are entitled to get compensation in a quite significant amount. And with that, I would already conclude the financial part, and show you one more time the overview of the planned sources and uses of cash. You see that on the back of EUR 30 billion of compound operating cash flow, we will be able to entertain the CapEx of EUR 17 billion, the dividends of EUR 8 billion at least, and share buybacks of at least EUR 4 billion. A better operational performance, of course, we will not rule out.
And if that is the case and/or if we generate more cash through divestments or portfolio measures, there's then also further potential either for more return to shareholders or also would increase our M&A headroom. And with that, I think we can say we have a clear plan financially, and on this plan, we would like to execute. Thank you.
Thanks, Dirk. And I think there's one more.
Yes
M aybe the most important slide to go.
Yes.
Which is the reason to invest in BASF. We hope we laid out a plausible and ambitious and an inspiring strategy for our investors out today, and I can say that the board is fully committed to executing this strategy. We know already, after the last three days, we have the entire BASF team on board. They're curious, at least, if not fully motivated, to embark on this strategy. We are at a turning point as a company. We are facing a moment of truth. We're facing a lot of changes happening around us, but we feel very strong that we have the levers of the future success of BASF very much in our own hand.
And as you heard also, from Katja, even the site Ludwigshafen, that was, often, seen as maybe a big challenge for BASF, is turning out to become a huge opportunity for us. So we are certainly going to remain a leading player in the chemical industry. The chemical industry will stay fundamentally attractive. We will continue to play our strengths when it comes to innovation and bringing new processes, new technologies into the market. Also, in light of the green transformation in particular, we will play out our strengths because I, I believe firmly that all the solutions to become a net zero society by 2050 are not yet invented. We need companies like BASF to bring new technologies to market, and we will be certainly taking up that challenge.
Our strategy to focus our production assets, competitive production assets, in the markets where our customers are, has never been more valuable than today. Because with all the geopolitical and trade things happening in the world, I feel very comfortable with having competitive assets in the most economically viable regions in the world, and of course, having a strong foundation with having leading market positions in most of the businesses that we're playing in. We have the right team and a winning culture that we will now further improve on over the next years. This is, for me, very important. This creates energy in the company, and we will be at the forefront of shaping the transformation of our customers, of key players in all the manufacturing industries worldwide.
They will all be looking at BASF to partner with them, and I actually want that all big manufacturing companies in the world, at the end of the day, say: "We cannot conclude our sustainability strategy before we at least have called BASF and would see what they have to offer." At the end of the day, that's a very strong commitment, and you heard it from Dirk. This board team is very committed to the long-term value creation and to have attractive distributions to our shareholders. Because, as I said in the very beginning, the whole strategy was developed through the lens of shareholder value creation, and this is what we see as our core mission, and for this, we thank also for your support. Thanks for your attention.
Thank you, Markus, Katja, and Dirk. So, it has been quite a keynote in terms of the time it took us, but now we would like to directly move forward into the Q&A, and I saw one first, more hands raised, and Christian Faitz, Kepler Cheuvreux, was the first, and then we continue with Rob. Please go ahead.
Can I ask two questions?
Yes.
Good. All right. First of all, thanks. Thanks for the presentations. I actually have a question on current business conditions, as usual. Since we are all here today, this is a public meeting, could you give us an update of what's going on in your key end markets, maybe also regionally, specifically in China at this point in time? What do you see in the order books? My second question would be, I mean, I understand corporate portfolio management. You buy an oil and gas business, and sell it on fifty years later. You buy a catalyst business and try to sell it twenty years later, hostile takeover, by the way.
But, what criteria that you mentioned for your core businesses is Agricultural Solutions not meeting, for example, your Nutrition & Care business, is meeting? That will be my question.
Answer right away?
Mm-hmm.
Okay. First of all, current business, current trading, I can say that, right now, we're sitting at the end of September. Maybe I'd go back a little bit, a few months. I mean, we had a quite encouraging summer momentum. I would say June, July, were very good months. Overall, August was a bit of a disappointment, not only for us. I talked to a lot of customers also in Europe, Asia, and North America. Everybody says the same thing, like August was weaker than expected, so we're a little bit looking now what will September bring? So not so sure. What I can say generally is that our core businesses are actually continuing their good trend. I already said that the first half was actually quite good in prior year comparison for our core businesses.
But the market environment, especially for our agricultural business and for our catalyst business, they remain particularly challenging. So overall, we will have to wait how September really comes in. At the early October, we will have then the final numbers, and then we will also have a good feeling of what the, let's say, momentum is that we're taking into Q4. But I would say Q3 overall was mixed between good start, but August gave us some questions. Regionally, no change in momentum, I would say. China is volume-wise actually continuing to do fairly well. It's okay-ish, not as good as we have hoped for in the beginning, but it's still continuing gradual recovery. But market conditions overall in China are such that pricing opportunity is very difficult.
So margins in China are still very much under pressure because, of course, China has invested a lot, or Chinese competitors have invested a lot of capacities for growth, and the growth the last three years has been under expectation. So the market is still dealing with long markets in many value chains. So pricing is an issue, but volumes and industrial activity generally in China are gradually improving. Europe, I would say, is a tough story. I would say, it's walking sideways on a low base. So industrial activity in Europe, there's no clear sign for a strong pickup.
U.S., I would say, overall is also, let's say, no big momentum on the upper side, but it is also. I would say there's some rumors about, you know, the U.S. heading into a slowing down mode when it comes to industrial activity. We don't see this. So it's all, I would say, Western world walking sideways. China improving on volumes, but still tough on pricing. That's how I would summarize the regional picture. Corporate portfolio.
Maybe on the current trading, one remark still. The Isophytol accident t hat we had earlier, which we have now also done the assessment and are going into that prepare mode. That has unfortunately an impact of low triple-digit million . So this is the way to look into it. So this is now weighing also on our results, unfortunately, for the rest of this year. Yeah. Portfolio, you mentioned Ag Solutions, and you mentioned a comparison. So for the Ag Solution business, let me first of all say this is a tremendous business. Record business last year, a tremendous improvement on margins, but also top line, a very good business.
We simply have the feeling that within the structure where it is sitting now, it cannot unfold, unlock the full potential. So how do you change that? To crystallize the value, we have to extend, make it a standalone thing. First of all, this is very much about this differentiated steering that we already informed you about last end of last year. Reason being, an agricultural solutions business standalone can command certainly a multiple, and you know that of a good double- digit, yeah, 12x to 13x , and this we simply cannot realize in the current structure. Now, we are under no hurry because we like the business, so this is also why we are not talking about getting rid of that business.
We really like it, but we want to make it more standalone, and create IPO readiness. An IPO, a minority IPO for this kind of business is probably the way to go, because in that highly consolidated market, any transaction with somebody else would not be feasible and also not what we want. So the minority IPO can be the outcome. First of all, we want to have that business on its own shoulders and feet, and then we can see what the next step will be. The standalone businesses that we currently have and the core business that we currently have are clearly differentiated. Everything that is now standalone is serving a clear industry landscape, and the core businesses, they are connected amongst each other.
They are synergizing, and this also includes the businesses that you have talked about. So we feel very good about this distinction that we have done now, and this is also not something that we want to revise or augment in the next couple of months or years.
I would just add, I mean, you will see when we go through the segment presentations also of our nutrition care segment and of agricultural segment, both will be done by Mike today and tomorrow. I mean, there is a huge gap between what we consider personal care, which is very close to chemicals. Yes, it's a sophisticated chemicals business, but it's about formulations, it's about molecules, it's about application know-how on a skin versus on a car body. But essentially, this is still from a business model and execution of how you run these businesses very similar, plus the value chain integration approach. More in our personal care business, we still source most of the materials that we actually sell in-house. Our agricultural solutions business is developing into a, for many years now, already into a very different direction.
You're talking about an integrated business model between seeds, traits, digital solutions, and the chemistry that originally was the, let's say, founding business in BASF, and that is becoming a systems business that has less and less to do with what actually a chemical company is considering at its core, its, let's say, innovation engine. And Mike will talk about this, and this is why I see a huge difference between those two things from my perspective.
I'll focus now on this area and come back there then. Now, first, Sebastian Bray, then, Tom. Yeah. Sebastian Bray, Berenberg, please.
Thank you for taking my questions in the presentation. My first one would actually be on the insurance claim, Dirk, that you mentioned was part of a German government investment protections related to legacy vintage Ordia. I've never found a figure for how much BASF is actually asking for. Could you provide that, and how long do you expect the process to last? My second question is on the EBITDA ramp-up or the phasing that is assumed between the EUR 7.7 billion now and the EUR 10 billion to EUR 12 billion euro targeted by 2028.
I'd have two questions here. The first is: how back-end loaded is this, given that Zhanjiang is only going to start contributing from 2026? And my second question is: what gas price has been assumed in Europe when generating these assumptions? Because a lot of the issues today stem from the fact that gas is twice as expensive relative to 2019 levels in Europe. Thank you.
You start?
You have to take the first question.
I get started. Okay, good. I get started with the question on the federal investment guarantee. It is an ongoing process. So I can unfortunately not help with the concrete figure that we are looking for. I try to paraphrase it by saying it's substantial. And you know what kind of write-offs we had to do. Certainly, the compensation claim is lower than the write-off amounts, but it is a substantial amount that we are claiming. The process is a, let me say, rather structured, but at the same time, informal process run by the government in a dialogue form, with also some help of an intermediary. Process is very structured.
I can say we are narrowing down the arguments of which proof has to be presented. I think we are coming relatively to the end of that process, where we have provided all the evidence that needs to be provided to substantiate. I think the fact that the expropriation took place, first economically and then legally, I think there is not much doubt, so now is about the exact amount, and once we have reached conclusion there, we will obviously let the market know, so it is. Maybe one more thing to this to say, it is from an investor perspective, certainly an upside for the company because it's not accounted for.
I cannot account for it, so it is when it comes, is a clear upside in terms of cash for the company and for the rest. I still have to beg your pardon that I can't give you more details now.
Okay.
Just on the second question with regards to the EBITDA ramp-up, I would summarize it that it's rather a gradual ramp-up. It's not very back-loaded. You will see this also when you go through the logic of the individual segment presentation. It's not a back-loaded thing. And to your second point, the gas price is not a big influencing factor in our business plan, and I'll tell you why. If you look today into the gas price in Europe and our energy bill here in Ludwigshafen, for example, which is basically very strongly hedged towards natural gas, it's not much higher than it was 2019. The natural gas price is not our biggest issue.
We've always said that once the markets recalibrate through available t hrough sufficient LNG import capacity in Europe, there will be an arbitrage between, for example, an LNG-exporting region like North America and Europe, of a cost factor that we always mention between $5 and $7 per MMBtu, which is necessary to liquefy the gas, transport it, and regasify it here in Europe. Last time I checked, actually, we are getting into that category. We're actually getting closer to a supply-demand balance LNG picture. The European markets for most chemicals are adjusting to this. The gas price in Europe is not a big influencing factor when it comes to the overall profitability in development along our business plan.
What will be challenging is, of course, natural gas price volatility, which is always then going to be a challenge, year over year. But the general gas price level for us is not a big factor in this game.
Okay, so now Tom Wrigglesworth, Morgan Stanley, and then Peter.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to ask questions. So, first question, your ambition is obviously to help customers with the green transformation. So can you give us a sense of what kind of premium you can charge for products? How much of your products touch on this green transformation today, and what you've assumed in your 2028 targets in that regard? That's my first question. And then second question, again, related to the ramp-up of the China Verbund. You know, as that comes on stream next year, will we actually see an EBITDA headwind for ramp-up costs? Could you help us understand, or is it such that it's modular enough that we won't see ramp-up costs, and that's not part of the calculations that you've made? Thank you.
Maybe I start with the green products, and maybe, Katja, you can complement also from your perspective, because you looked at this holistically also for the Ludwigshafen side. I think right now, I would say the ability to generate premia in the marketplace for green products is still all over the place. We have industries where it is accepted, it is clear. Companies have either set ambitious targets for themselves and are absorbing, so to say, the premium because they want to achieve their targets, or in the best case, consumer markets have actually developed already in a space that there's room to pay those premia.
We've also been vocal about a couple of deals that we have made, for example, where we have consumer-branded fast-moving consumer good companies that have premium brands on the shelf that they are able to where their ability is to, to price a premium on this to the consumer,
That is also where we generate premium also with large, in large contracts when we have, for example, bio-based materials that we will use. However, I will tell you also, it is still hit and miss. And that's why our approach to say we cannot anticipate and we cannot ultimately forecast these premia, also even within the four-year period, is the basis of our strategy. That's why we are going towards this gradual and phase transformation. Nobody today can tell you for any chemical in the world, what is the exact demand of a zero PCF, whatever chemical in 2028 ? Nobody knows, because then you're in a chicken and egg situation. It depends on what cost.
This is still emerging, and this is why that's exactly the reason why we are choosing what we're doing today and not going all in, for example, to build EUR 1 billion new machines to make green olefins right now, because we don't know where the market will emerge and who is going to pay at the end of the day, which premium. So to some extent, it is a walking before you run kind of situation, but it is moving. So it is emerging, and you will hear this also a bit along the next couple of days.
Given that, some restrictions also on availability, for example, of, sustainability attributes, coming through, for example, energy vectors, there will be a tightness coming up, eventually, and whether that's exactly 2030 or not, we don't know, but it will be tight. And then at the end of the day, the pricing power will, of course, increase when you have these, capabilities in hand. But right now, case by case, customer by customer, and I will only say even customers that give the greatest sustainability transformations and have great commitments out there in the commercial sense, it often is a real hassle, to still price, biomass balance premium, for example.
Yeah, I think not so much to add, Marcus. There is, as Marcus just explained, so we have looked into different macroeconomic scenarios. That's also what I outlined when we looked into the chemical demand in Europe, for Ludwigshafen, which will be the relevant markets. And these macroeconomic scenarios depend also on the ambition level, how fast the net zero CO₂ reduction should be achieved, basically. And the answer that you just get is basically right: we cannot forecast it. It very much depends on the scenario, it depends on the industries, it depends on individual customers even, and the supply-demand balance.
That is why, as we explained, this gradual transformation that we can do with our Verbund to go with the pace of customers, with the pace they are willing to pay for it, is a huge, huge advantage that we see for ourselves.
We head to.
To your.
Go ahead, Markus.
Yeah, to your question on Zhanjiang. Zhanjiang is also. There's no magic to it. It's like any other chemical plant that we are starting up. It's just a big one. And so yes, there will be start-up costs. There will be, let's say, there is an EBITDA drag when we start the plant up. We have also in the past communicated big start-up related costs for other facilities. I don't have a number now for Zhanjiang in my head, but this is one thing we have to take into account, certainly when the big machines, late 2025, 2026, start up, there will be a cost element to it. There's also a cost associated with pre-marketing.
We have to, of course, bring materials from other locations to China to do the pre-marketing for the ramp up. And then there's one other element that we have taken fully into account when we did our cash planning, for example. Of course, you have to fill the supply chain up. For such a big site, this is a drag also on current assets, of course.
But Dirk and the team have taken this fully into account, of course, in our financial plan b ut this all you will have to. You will see now. So Zhanjiang was in our CapEx plan, a big, let's say, one-time thing, and you will see it now, the next years in the cost and in the current asset development. It is a big factor, but this is all fully accounted for in our, I would say, gradual ramp up towards the targets that we just presented.
Okay, so now short questions, short answers, please. We have Peter Clark, and then we will move on to, I think it was Laurent there, and Chetan, and then, Matthew.
Yes, thank you. So it's on the restructuring. As you flesh out the detail of how you get to the EUR 2.1 billion, I'm actually surprised it's not going up. I'm sure if you're dissolving the regional structure, more delaying simplification, this is something you're gonna find more. So just your comments on that. And then obviously, you gave us the number for Germany being in loss of EUR 600 million on EBIT last year. Just wondering, with all the work going on, your sort of projection for Germany on your targets of 2028, with your EUR 10 billion to EUR 12 billion EBITDA.
So I'll take the first one on further cost improvements. Everything that we're doing in the strategy under Accelerate, simplifying our organization, streamlining cost structures, also applying AI to increase productivities will increase our ability to reduce cost, increase productivities, however you name it. But this is all outside this cost program that we have announced.
I'm not a big fan necessarily always run from one program to the other. We have to. If we want to live a winning culture in BASF, we have to become a company that is on an ongoing basis, addressing continuously cost improvement and makes this part of our daily life. We have to get out of this rhythm that the board announces big programs, and then we do these big operations, big surgeries, and big teams running through after these cost savings with big one-time costs. We have to do it because we were in a exceptional situation also over the last years here in Germany, because of everything that happened, 2021, 2022.
But if it's up to me, t his is the last time we come out and do this one thing package, and that we are tracking, and that you guys asking us all every quarter, "Well, how far of this one, two point one do you already have?" I want this to see the productivity increase on an ongoing basis every quarter in my P&L, and then all the measures that you mentioned, and many more, in the strategy measure list, are going to contribute to this. We have to become a very cost-conscious company, because especially in our course, we are operating in a very competitive environment, and that's the spirit we want to get to with this winning culture, improvement mindset. You have to be always and at any time, as good as your competitors, and not only if the board announces a project.
Yeah?
Anything to add for Germany?
Not that much, maybe, but as you referred to the regions, as Markus already outlined, the idea is that we come into a continuous productivity improvement mood, and not everything is captured here in the cost-saving programs we showed you. The one I introduced for you to Ludwigshafen is basically really targeting focused savings in Ludwigshafen, and if you address regional structures, they won't play into that, but rather from a global perspective.
And let me also say one thing that's also, I think, important when you follow communications now of us, how we report also on progress, how we are moving in the restructuring efforts here in Ludwigshafen, for example. We don't steer the company per se, by profitability of individual sites or individual, let's say, legal entities. We steer the business, and that's how we also showed you, we incentivize our global operating divisions in running their P&Ls and their balance sheets according to best-in-class performance. Ludwigshafen, we have now identified as a special topic, so to say, because the urgency was so high. But we are also not setting, for example, a target profitability for BASF SE, the legal entity or the Ludwigshafen site.
We have embarked on a journey to get the cost out that are necessary out of the site to make this cost competitive. But it's very dangerous to look at this one KPI and think this is something we should optimize for the group, because it's also a very convoluted number. So it's just a word of caution that it's not necessarily always the legal audit result of BASF SE that's at the end of the day driving what we do.
Fair enough.
Okay, so now Laurent Favre, BNP Paribas.
Thank you. Following up on the point on incentivization, Markus, I was wondering if you could talk about since you started this, if there are areas where you think you are the benchmark best in class, and can you talk about the areas where there's the biggest upside? And the second question, if I may, is around M&A. I think the last 12 billion or so of M&A spending have been done in the standalone businesses. What exactly do you have in mind for the core business? Is it upstream, downstream, consolidation? Are we talking about significant or potentially significant deals, or are we more talking about smaller things? Thank you.
Yeah, I'll take the last question first. I mean, I try to be outspoken about that we're looking at acquisition opportunities in the core business, because I fundamentally believe always in this continuous, let's say, evolvement of broad portfolios, the core portfolio, still a very broad portfolio. That there is has to be a continuous evolution of this. I believe that there is opportunities from consolidation, there's opportunities by enhancing our capability spectrum, and I also believe that there's opportunities to rebalance our regional regional footprint, so to say. We're still a very European-centric company. We still have, I think, 40% roughly of our asset base in Europe. So, and we want to move more towards high growth economies in Asia. So all of these things could be drivers.
We're looking at smaller things that are more driven maybe by divisions. So we're encouraging our divisions to say, "Look, look in your markets, how can you win? How can you, you know, complement your strengths?" But we're also looking at some corporate targets, so to say, and we're thinking about this. So we're not, we're not boxed into any of these ideas. I just think this is a little bit also of a rethinking about that we actually want to, again, go into a more active way to manage our portfolio going forward. So nothing really about, nothing other than that to announce at this point in time. You ask a very interesting question on where are we already benchmarked and where we are not. I have to say, we have, we have it all in the company.
We've done also an analysis across all our seventy SBUs, and we have strategic business units that already for quite some time significantly underperform their market performance, and we have also strategic business units that outperform their respective peers significantly and also consistently. There is no pattern. They are necessarily to say upstream with this, downstream with this, Europe, we're here or somewhere else, we're there. It is really not a clear thing.
It's really takes holistic performance management across the portfolio to drive the ones up where we have a right to win, but also take necessary cuts in the portfolio, and that's why we also mentioned pruning, where we are not meeting the benchmark expectations. But I can tell you, we have quite a number of businesses that often from, sometimes from the outside, commented on that we might not be benchmark, that actually look pretty good. So sorry for this little bit vague answer. I don't want to now pinpoint specific businesses or specific areas. I think in general, we have a broad distribution of benchmark performance, and we have a clear ambition to get everybody over the line.
Okay, so now we move on with Chetan Udeshi, J.P. Morgan. We have done Matthew Yates, Andreas Heine, Martin Evans. Now, Chetan.
Short ones, please. Oh, two concise short,
Maybe I'll ask one short and maybe two bigger. But just.
Yeah.
Oops, so sorry. First on, you know, just the Isophytol incident, you mentioned 100 million, 300 million EUR. Is that sales or is it EBITDA impact?
EBITDA.
I mentioned a low triple-digit million EBITDA impact.
Low triple-digit million?
Yes.
That's all in H2 because the plant is starting in Q1.
And that is in H2.
Right.
We have still in July also benefited from the stocks that we had. So it's impacting the aroma business and the vitamins business, but now we feel the impact. Yeah.
Okay, that's easy. The second one was just going back to your, as you call it, standalone businesses. I'm very, very surprised that you're essentially saying that businesses are those that are not going to grow until twenty twenty-eight. I mean, if I go back and remember how much money you've spent on battery materials expansion, I mean, I don't have the numbers, but I, I remember you guys were talking about EUR 4 billion. Maybe some of that is already in your CapEx. And it doesn't seem like twenty twenty-three was, like, spectacular year from a margin perspective. You know, if I look at your reported numbers, 14% margin, if I give benefit of the doubt of removing metals, maybe high- teens. So why is that part of the business not growing?
And if I squeeze last one, I was just quite, I mean, it's fair to say that, you know, we waited for this for a long time, this bonus KPI change from group to regional. We've debated this in the past in the conference calls. I'm just curious, what sort of accountability do you have within the company? Because, again, not to pick any division, but I'm looking at your nutrition and care business performance over a number of years, it just continues to disappoint, at least from what I compare versus your peer group, and just doesn't feel there is enough accountability, at least from outside. So I'm just curious how that is changing, if at all. Sorry if I'm being a bit firm, but.
Yeah, I was just looking at Stefanie a little bit because, of course, we will have a whole session around nutrition and care tomorrow. But I will still not budge the question. So Isophytol, we've answered standalone performance. If you look at the relative size of the businesses in standalone performance, you should not underestimate how, you know, the different size and the different EBITDA contribution is on these businesses. Agricultural Solutions is by far the biggest business, with roughly EUR 10 billion sales, I think, in 2023. Battery material is still comparatively small, and it's also because of the high ramp-up cost, the high R&D cost. It's also a business that not generating a lot of EBITDA as we speak.
And also, just to also mention this, I think Anup mentioned this tomorrow in the battery materials presentation also. So far, we have invested in this business over the last years, roughly EUR 1 billion in this business, and we are in ramp-up mode. So the business will grow over the next four years, and we'll also have increasing contributions to the EBITDA. But it's tough to compensate, let's say, performance, let's say, contributions from our bigger standalone businesses that are not going to be growing from the all-time record year 2023, let me put it this way. So in the mix, this makes sense. All the businesses, the standalone businesses, you will see the EBITDA ambitions for all of them over the next couple of days.
I think they're all ambitious, plausible, and based on clear value creation plans, so that includes battery materials. Last one, nutrition and care, for sure, a challenging story, in particular for the nutrition and health division over the last years, where we had also various one-time effects. The Isophytol incident this year is another one, where we actually will be, we'll be taking a significant hit. We had significant challenges along the vitamin value chain over the last years. Then some of you might still remember some years back, we had an incident in the citral value chain. It's almost difficult to see in the nutrition and health business a clear baseline of what is the real performance.
What we can say is, in this business, we have now changed the approach strategically of running this business as a pure ingredients business. And for the key ingredients that we're in, including vitamins, we are in leading cost position. So if we get this business into a stable, let's say, operations mode and without some of these incidents, and that's of course the plan going forward, this will actually be a significant profitability contributor and will also stack up very well against competitors in this marketplace. And the same holds true for our care chemicals business, where we run, that's basically the key outlet for our C2 value chain and also our personal care franchise. They benchmark actually quite well, and you will also see this tomorrow from Mike.
So we quickly move to Matthew Yates now, Bank of America.
Thank you. Markus, if I recall correctly, I think you ran the coatings business for about five years. So I'm curious, from that experience in the business, why you've come to a different conclusion about the ownership than your predecessor, Mr. Brudermüller, who was fairly outspoken that there was no intention to monetize that business? And then just to Dirk, the new approach to capital allocation and the owner's mindset. So I don't actually know what that means. Can you talk about some of the lessons you've learned from the way things have been done in the past that you wouldn't want to be repeating? Thank you.
All right, so coatings. I wouldn't put coatings on a level. Let's say, coatings is not a special case in that general way of thinking. We've looked at earlier this year when we looked at the overall strategic playing field of BASF, and we said we have to put front and center in our strategic thinking the value creation for BASF and our shareholders. We have, of course, taken a look at the portfolio options and the valuation that we have in the portfolio that we have.
To us, it seemed very obvious that trying to increase BASF's overall market capitalization by adding more and more high-value targets, and we would go on a pathway of acquiring more and more businesses that have multiples of 10 and 15, and making BASF, so to say, a more specialized company, that's not going to be a very value-accretive strategy. Of course, you'll turn this around and say, "Okay, then maybe focusing on what BASF is actually good at, our strength, our core, is maybe the opposite strategy." You see, okay, we have these standalone businesses that actually are very valuable businesses. If you then look at the sum of the parts valuations, the value-creating opportunity is obvious. Of course, you go through an exercise, say: how actionable is this, is this really?
What is the most plausible way to unlock this value? And I think for Coatings, it's also very plausible to find either partnerships or people who are interested in unlocking this value. And this was our pathway to coming to the conclusions that, yes, we will engage in this. And then, as you know, Matthew, the Brazilian Deco business is always a bit of a special case because it's this, it's this B2C business that we only have in one country. And of course, here, the value creation opportunity is also strikingly obvious. So once you have embarked on this strategy to say, "Look, our value creation strategy is about growing, strengthening and growing the core and unlocking the value of our standalones," you're automatically at this question: Is Coatings actionable?
And we believe it might be, but we first have to get to a point where we actually have a value-accretive, a deal or construct, so to say, in front of us. That's why I also said that if that's not the case, we are perfectly fine of running the Coatings business, and I think we are a good owner. We have, over the last years, developed this business very nicely. In our biggest business, in the automotive Coatings business, we have achieved the number one market position over the last years. We have actually overtaken some of the big players in this market, and this shows we have a right to win in this market. And this is a very good business, and that's why we came to this conclusion.
Capital allocation.
Second question, capital allocation. Yeah, maybe this, I don't know whether it didn't resonate obviously well with you, my little picture of this owner's mindset, so let me put it this way. You can, as a board of BASF, you run a very, very broad portfolio. I always say this from TDI to tomato seeds. That's basically the portfolio you run.
If you have the ambition to be the best decider as the CEO of BASF, to say, "Is it better to spend EUR 50 million now on a new vegetable seeds development station somewhere in Europe or debottlenecking an acrylic acid plant in Brazil?" You quickly get into an area where you say, "I cannot really decide this, because these are two very different things." And you either have a super sophisticated and robust strategic framework process that you run across seventy SBUs, and then from this, you have a capital opportunity list every year that is also highly administered, and you always do the budgets. Or you turn this around and say: You know what? I'm not going to make these individual CapEx decisions anymore as a board of BASF.
I'm going to empower my divisions to say, "You run a P&L. You run a balance sheet. From your value creation plan that you have over the next four years, I will adapt, so to say, based on the needs that I have as a company and the value creation plan I have for the group. I will then deduct a capital budget, so to say, over the next four years that I assign to you, and with this capital budget, now you run and you deliver your value creation plan. And as long as you are delivering, don't ask me what exact project you're running, whether you're debottlenecking somewhere or investing it somewhere else." That's the general idea. So not having a centralized decision on a too operational level, because from my perspective, this leads to certain inefficiencies in capital allocations.
I'd rather empower my divisions to do this, but then I want to hold them accountable for it, and I want to say: First of all, if you're successful, you really feel it in your pocket. And second of all, if you're not successful, the consequences of not being successful are also going to be different than in the past. That's a little bit the logic of an owner's mindset.
Can I just add one sentence to that? Importantly, you will see in the afternoon by Mike and tomorrow by Anup and Stephan, you will see the equity stories of the segments, the value creation plans, the strategies. And yeah, there you will feel that, where the decision on prioritization of the best projects is then going to happen. So it's, if you will, a more strategic approach on the board side, and then delegating that decision on the concrete investments where they belong. So you will also see a stronger competition of projects within the businesses.
And we see already now, having just started, the first tangible effect, because what we see already right now is that more project plans are geared towards growth and profitable growth, rather than just kicking the can further down the road. So tangible effect that comes from this approach.
Being mindful of the time, I'm afraid, and we have some more I mentioned already, so Andreas Heine, then Martin Evans, and Oliver Schwarz, and then I think there will be plenty of other opportunities also, but now, Andreas Heine, Stifel.
Yeah. I'd like to ask about Ludwigshafen. When I look on what was closed and what was basically in the chemicals and the monomer segment, so in the upstream part, is what you analyze now also going into that? And that brings me to the question: One of the strengths was to have long value chains if you now cut the first part, now you have quite some assets being pretty old, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years. Is that then still relevant? That's the first question.
The second, if I think of that you sell coatings, and just an example, or automotive catalyst, how do I have to think then about the use of the proceeds? Is that then immediately paid as share buybacks? Because then you lose a free cash flow contributor, it makes it more difficult to pay a dividend. But if you reduce, of course, the number of shares, then the dividend can be the same. So is that kind of thinking behind that? And the last question is on the China Verbund site. There was always talking about a phase I and a phase II in the investment. Phase I is done basically because you cannot change anything anymore, but maybe you can elaborate about phase II and the outline of the CapEx program in the second half of this decade.
Should I take the first one, Markus?
Yeah, sure.
Okay. So you asked for basically which businesses are affected by potential asset closures. And when we did the analysis, we identified 22% of our assets that have either a long, medium, or short-term competitive risk. Nevertheless, we have also done a value chain analysis, and here, our analysis findings were really that all value chains, all major value chains are competitive. And all those assets that do have a risk, either short, medium, or long-term, they're rather at the end of our value chain. So it's not representing the upstream and the starting points of our value chains, but rather the end of our value chains, and therefore, this has no or little impact on our Verbund structures.
Dirk?
Yeah, Andreas, on the use of the proceeds, here, I think this is one of the moments where the word of the journey is the right one. Because you need, by definition, leave a little bit open when actually this is happening. So with the positioning now of the standalone businesses, we're clearly saying there is a case for value crystallization when this actually happens, and what then to do with the proceeds, I think has to be decided then. What I can say definitively, we will play on this triangle. We want to grow profitably, we want to protect our balance sheet also going forward, and we also want to distribute at least EUR 12 billion to our shareholders.
So there will always be this balanced view on this, and then it's a matter of timing when the proceeds are coming in the future.
Okay, so now.
No, no, no. Zhanjiang question.
Oh, sorry.
I would make it short. We will not be talking about a phase II in Zhanjiang anymore. I think this idea to package future projects into a phase has always, w e have abandoned this a little bit. We will continue to invest individual projects in Zhanjiang, where either a value chain extension or a new capacity for the respective Chinese market makes sense. And this would be rather a case-by-case decision of which projects will then, after the phase I is completed, go to Zhanjiang. The original phase was the original concept of doing this in phases was still a very technical approach to package it, to also have a discussion with, for example, the authorities in China.
This we have abandoned in the meantime, so after phase I is done, we already have ideas for further expansions in Zhanjiang, and we will execute them one by one.
So now Martin Evans, HSBC, please.
Thanks. Yeah, just getting back to these EUR 1 billion of new cost savings in Ludwigshafen. Some of the sort of things you've discovered are pretty basic: procurement, process efficiency, Verbund adjustments. And Markus, you referred to challenges or perceived challenges in the past with restructuring here, or the perception of that. So what are these real savings, given that you would have done this, one assumes, many times before, particularly things like procurement and process? Or is it the case that you didn't feel confident enough in the past to aggressively cut costs here, but now you appear to have found the strength to do that? So what's basically gone wrong at Ludwigshafen?
Would you like to?
I mean, these are always tough questions because these are rearview mirror questions. What- why haven't you done this earlier? What has gone wrong in the past? I actually don't like to, you know, dig so much in the past. But let me also say one thing. First of all, I'm a firm believer that things like going through your entire spectrum of activities and looking for cost savings opportunity, this is like cutting your hair. You have to eventually always do this, and there's never an endpoint to it. You will always detect things where you say, "Oh, my God, we can do this much better." Sometimes it's technology, sometimes it is just, you know, lack of attention, sometimes it's bad management. It can be all those things, but you constantly have to do it.
Let me just say also, when it comes to procurement, here also, we have found that, by the way, we have managed procurement spend, and we have sometimes complicated also the responsibilities between who is actually making decisions, buying what. We have detected that, in our procurement, we call it the tail end spend. We didn't pay a lot of attention to tail end spend over many years, here in Ludwigshafen. And now, Dirk has embarked, for example, on a project that we use Artificial Intelligence, actually, to use in helping us to manage our tail end spend and start negotiating again on tail end spend. And when you run a big machine like Ludwigshafen, even the tail end is a pretty big thing, so big numbers can come out.
So it's not necessarily that we haven't had the guts or so to do it, but sometimes it's also lack of attention, and the sense of urgency over the last year certainly has helped, for sure, that we are turning every stone. And when we announced EUR 1 billion, a lot of people thought, "How is that even possible?" And now we know it's possible, but you have to go into the nuts and bolts, and that's unfortunately an exercise that will never stop. But let me also say something, i f you look at the headcount in Ludwigshafen over the last 20 years, it hasn't really changed a lot. We have roughly the same headcount in Ludwigshafen that we had than we had in 2005.
And so, of course, the aspiration now is also to change and to. Katja mentioned it also in this phrase, we want to make Ludwigshafen leaner and stronger. And we have to now start bringing also our personnel costs down in Ludwigshafen, because it is not foreseeable that the European chemical industry will now grow over and above the bubbles you have shown, which is moderate growth, which is good news in Europe, but we have to start adapting this. And this is also maybe, I don't know, I don't want to comment on it, why, but we haven't certainly done a lot with when it comes to headcount in Ludwigshafen.
And maybe I might add also that we are highly confident that we bring those savings home. I shared with you today that 80% of such savings will be fixed cost related. I also shared with you that for half of it, the headcount reductions will be a major element. We have set up dedicated projects, dedicated teams, and also, as Markus explained, for the procurement processes end to end, there are also potentials in this cross-unit collaboration. And therefore, by involving the teams, it's not an easy exercise. We have to turn every stone, but we are very confident that we get there.
I'm very sorry, but we really have to close the Q&A because we have a short media Q&A upcoming, and I get red flags here that we have to conclude, but there will be plenty of opportunity also tonight during the dinner. I hope that the ones that now couldn't ask their question get their answers still today. So this is also the end of today's live webcast. We thank you very much for joining us online. Replay of the further presentations, as I mentioned at the beginning, will be available after the event on our IR website. Any journalists that have followed this keynote presentation are now welcome to join the virtual media Q&A in German, organized by our corporate communications team. It will start at 3:00 P.M.
And we will here have at 3:00 P.M., then the presentation on agricultural solutions. Thank you very much.
Thank you.