Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and a very warm welcome to our Capital Markets Day. It is a great pleasure to see so many of you here on this very important day. Before coming to the agenda, let me start with a few housekeeping items and refer you to the safe harbor statement, which you will find also at the beginning of the slide deck. Also, today's presentation can be found on our website under the section Investor Relations. After today's event, you will also find a replay of today's Capital Markets Day in the same area. What can you expect from this awesome day today? Today we're going to show you how we're going to continue our successful track record in the years to come and move on to the next level as the global market leader.
Christian Kohlpaintner, our CEO, will start by sharing with you our Horizon 2, our strategy to win, what it looks like, and what we are aiming to achieve. Ewout van Jarwaarde, our CTO, will then show on how Digital and Data will underpin our next strategic phase. After the two presentation sessions, we have a lunch break of 45 minutes, so you're able to refuel your batteries and have enough energy for the afternoon sessions. The afternoon sessions will be kicked off by our two COOs, Henri Nejade and Steven Terwindt, giving divisional deep dives. Kristin Neumann, our CFO, will then show on how all of this comes together into our midterm financial targets. After the presentation sessions, we have allocated plenty of time for a Q&A session.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have anything which you need during the day, please don't hesitate to contact my IR team or myself, and we are more than happy to help. With that, I will now hand over to Christian to kick off the day. Christian, please go ahead.
Well, thanks, and a warm welcome to all of you. I heard on your way here to the Capital Market Days, it was not so easy because there is the strike on the tube. We really really appreciate that despite of that fact, you made it to this, what I would say, very important day for Brenntag, the Capital Market Day. The first one actually, since I'm CEO, which takes place physically. Because two years ago, you know, we did it virtually. We introduced the new operating model. We introduced the new colleagues. This time it's physical. You see the people. You see the team, Thomas has already introduced to you.
We are very much looking forward now to have the interaction with you and describing to you what is an exciting story for Brenntag going forward. Our strategy to win with the various elements it is encompassing of and really showing you what is the future for Brenntag going forward. Before I go into that section and into that in more detail, I want to share with you this one. You might say, "What is this one? What does it really mean?" This is our new brand. This is Brenntag. It stands for the new Brenntag. The new Brenntag resembling what we have accomplished over the last years, that we have basically strengthened our position as the global market leader in chemical ingredients and chemical distribution. It shows that we are a bold market leader which wants to shape the industry.
We, as a world market leader, have to have that responsibility to also shape the industry going forward. A clear way for our people to align behind that this is a new company, this is a modern company, and it has transformed, and it will continue to transform. Why? Because our environment is transforming as well. Our business partners are transforming as well. We also need to transform to attract people and talents and skills into this company, which we, as Brenntag, need to drive the growth for our company going forward. That brand was revealed a week ago internally to our people. Was very well received. A lot of positive attention about the modernity, about the design, about, you know, the touch and feel.
Later on you will hear more about, you know, what is the whole concept behind it with a purpose and with a vision, and how that all comes together with our strategy to win going forward. Shaping the future of sustainable chemical ingredients distribution is what I will talk about it as the introductory note for our Capital Market Day. Why is that? Brenntag is the undisputed and highly resilient market leader in a very attractive market which is growing and offering growth opportunities for us going forward. We have delivered what we have promised to you. The last two years after the last Capital Market Day, you know, we introduced to you the new operating model. We introduced to you what we want to accomplish as EBITDA uplift going forward, and we have delivered accordingly.
The message is this is a company which is highly resilient, which is withstanding the most adverse conditions. Yesterday, we shared with you our Q3 results, and we talked about the macroeconomic and geopolitical topics, but it is a very resistant and resilient company going forward. We want to do more. We want to actually shape the industry going forward. We have found a very good recipe here with my team of how we are going to do that going forward. Now, I talked about Brenntag being the undisputed and, resilient leader in the industry and delivering constant growth. I mean, you see, and I've talked about this many, many times, that we have a very unique position in Brenntag. Our global presence, our global offering is unique. There's no other chemical distributor who has that setup.
You will see also in particular when Steven will talk about the Essentials strategy, how we are actually leveraging this global reach with a strong last mile delivery, which we have on the ground. Also, Henri will talk a lot about, you know, specialties and how important that global setup is and how this global view is changing the way we run and we look at our business. Nobody in the industry has a more diverse product portfolio, more horizontal view across all suppliers in that industry. We are having the largest resources on the ground to drive innovation, to drive application know-how, which we believe is the future in chemical distribution driving growth. Combining that global reach with the last mile delivery, this is a key topic you will hear today more and more.
You know, we have shown and proven to our markets, to our business partners, our suppliers, but also our customers, that we are indeed able, even during the worst conditions, to maintain supply. Reliability of supply was the key to success over the last years. Since our IPO, and I show you here on the graph, you know, how our operating gross profit has developed, it has clearly shown that even in very difficult situations like the financial crisis we had in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and also the COVID impact we had in 2020, Brenntag, this company, was able to constantly grow its operating gross profit. Since IPO, we doubled our EBITDA, so a significant growth rate of 7% CAGR over that period of time. We are an asset-light business model.
Our ROCE currently is 23% of what, you know, we believe and are convinced is a pretty good sign that we have an asset-light business in place. We created EUR 7.2 billion cumulative free cash flow, and we have invested strongly in M&A because we are a consolidator in the industry, and we will continue to play this consolidation role going forward. Of course, we have returned capital to our shareholders through ever-increasing every year our dividend payments going forward. Very resilient, stable platform, constantly growing earnings going forward. This is what Brenntag is all about. Yesterday, we talked about Project Brenntag, and we talked about, you know, our delivery against what we have promised to you two years ago. I'm not reading this slide out to you because this is the slide from two years ago.
This is what we said we are going to do. In particular, those four dimensions you see here on the slide, you know, changing the operating model. This was the first time we introduced Brenntag Essentials, Brenntag Specialties. The go-to-market approach of how we go into the market and what do we need to change as Brenntag to be more successful, more growth-focused, but also more orientated towards the needs our suppliers and our customers have. Also reducing complexity, taking costs out, gaining efficiency by closing down sites, while at the same time also investing into our sites and preparing them for the future.
A substantial change in our people, in our culture, in our management culture, our performance culture, but also bringing substantial number of people into the organization with new skill sets, new views of how this business should be run and operated going forward. These were the four main pillars of Project Brenntag, and I'm very happy and very glad to say today we delivered. We delivered to what we have promised to you in all dimensions. We basically created a new operating model, and you see the value of that new operating model. You see here, for instance, the growth rates in Essentials and in Specialties the first nine months of this year and how they already are showing a different growth profile as predicted. Because we believe Specialties has the capability and does grow faster than, Essentials. Also the go-to-market approach.
Dedicated sales forces for Specialties and for Essentials, really understanding what does a Specialty buyer need versus what does an Essential buyer need, because they're fundamentally different. We have created that dedicated sales forces. We reduced the complexity. 91 sites already closed, while at the same time investing into our new sites. Of course, you see our people change. Headcount reduction, structural reduction in our headcount, accomplished. We promised you 1,300 in that dimension. Also bringing in new capabilities into the top leadership team of Brenntag going forward. At the end, we delivered. We promised EUR 220 million. This quarter, year-end, we already achieved EUR 230 million. There will be also some effects towards the end of the year. We, at this moment of time, can clearly say, you know, Project Brenntag has been delivered.
It has been delivered more than what we have promised, and it has delivered 1 year earlier to what we have projected to you, because all those numbers, all those financial framework was based on the full run rate, 2023. At the same time, we also delivered against the medium-term guidance we gave you at that moment of time two years ago. Creating the operating gross profit we have promised has been materializing. Also the organic operating EBITDA uplift, you see here we have met the target. Also showing the increase in operational efficiency and really, you know, over-proportionately grow EBITDA versus gross profit. That's clearly accomplished. Also the EUR 220 million I have already mentioned we have accomplished 1 year earlier, and we will have more impact going forward.
We also gave you guidance that on our M&A side, we have not changed the guidance at that moment of time. We said we continue with a EUR 200 million-EUR 250 million annual spend on M&A. When you look on the numbers, 2020, 2021, 2022, it's more or less exactly in that frame. 2020 was a year where we had a little less M&A because of the COVID period. Last year, we spent more than EUR 400 million. This year, we are on a good track to also spend EUR 200 million-EUR 250 million on M&A. I will talk about this in a minute later. We believe we can strengthen that approach and be more and stronger integrator or as consolidator in the industry going forward.
What I wanna leave with you is, we have promised to you two years ago a sound framework on financial deliveries, a sound framework about Project Brenntag, and a sound firm framework around the measures we are going to take, and you see the results. We have delivered to what we have promised to you. Now let me start a little bit to characterize the industry we are operating in, 'cause I think there are a couple of fundamental topics, one needs to be aware of to really see where Brenntag can go to and what the company needs to accomplish. First of all, distribution is an indispensable market segment. I've worked now 30 years in the chemical industry.
I've spent 27 years on the supplier side, and since 3 years I'm CEO of Brenntag, sitting, so to speak, on the other side of the table. I have worked with Brenntag basically all my professional life as a distribution partner. What I was looking for is actually a partner, somebody who is able to channel what I cannot do to the small and smallest customer for me instead of doing it direct, because it's way too complex. It's way too difficult to tackle for a manufacturer, you know, the customer segment, which we typically touch. Our average customer buys from us for EUR 4,000 per order. EUR 4,000 per order, where no chemical manufacturer would even pick up the phone to take that order. That is, you know, a huge complexity.
We have about 190,000 customers, and Steven Terwindt will talk about this. This customer base is very fragmented and very small, but very complex too. What I was looking for when I was looking for a distribution partner, I wanted somebody who understood my language, who could replicate or even reinforce the strategy I wanted to accomplish, and I wanted to grow in the markets, I was tackling with. I was always looking for somebody who can really do this. If I had doubts that this is not the case, I was going to another distributor, and I was working with another distribution partner going there. Understanding what is driving you as a supplier is key for a chemical distributor. It's probably more key than what you do on the customer side. I will come to that in a minute.
On the supplier side, being very clear about, you know, what is expected from me, what kind of resources do I need to have as Brenntag to execute the growth plans our suppliers have, this is a fundamental capability one needs to have. On the customer side, it's almost a similar thing, reducing complexity. We have sometimes customers which are indeed ordering those EUR 4,000 per order volume, but they can be even large companies. They are asking us to bundle their procurement and saying, "You know, we are buying hundreds of small volume materials. Brenntag, can you take over that service, and can you sell it to us?" And in many cases, our suppliers are also our customers.
It's very typical for the chemical industry that in the industry always, suppliers and customers are sometimes the same coin, but different angles to it. Entrusting business with a chemical distributor, this is an inherent growth driver. Being a convincing and good discussion partner for the supplier, this is key that the supplier is willing to entrust you with a larger portion of its business. In general, they do, because they have this cost of complexity. This cost of complexity requires them to think about, you know, if I look on my spender or if on my tail end spend or on my tail end products I'm willing to sell into the channel, how much of that do I do directly and how much do I entrust a chemical distributor?
I think this is something which explains why the distribution market is actually growing faster than the chemical manufacturing market because you know that trend, the kind of outsourcing is actually continuing. It has its fluctuations, it has its ups and downs, but in general, this is the reason why the chemical distribution market is indeed growing faster than the chemical manufacturing market. However, one needs also to acknowledge that the chemical manufacturing market is about 14x bigger than the chemical distribution market, just to give you a flavor about the dimensions of those of those markets. The key message of this slide is the world of our suppliers has changed over the last 20-30 years, and this means that we also need to change.
When you look on the chemical industry and ingredients industry globally and how it has emerged over the last 20, 30 years, and I've been in the midst of it is very clear the chemical companies know exactly whether they are a specialty chemical company or if they are industrial chemical player. Even if you take large conglomerates, like, say, the big players like BASF or Dow, the decision to work with a chemical distributor is not taken at the CEO level or at the board level. It's taken at a business unit level, relatively deep into the organization. Those business units know exactly what they are, whether they are specialties or whether they're industrial chemicals. They want to see our organization, our way we discuss with them and how we engage with them.
They want to see this clearly reflected in the language we speak, in the organization we have, in the skills we have in this company. This is the reason why we had already two years ago clearly said, we need to start to create those divisions, Essentials and Specialties, because the supplier base, but also the customer base. More importantly, the supplier base has already shifted over the last 20 years, and we need to adjust our structure towards that as well. When you want to be a leader in those two dimensions, and let's call it specialties and industrial chemicals, there is a set of requirements which are brought to you from the supplier side, but also from the customer side. I have listed them on the left-hand side, and we don't need to go into detail into that.
What becomes very, very obvious is that this is going already tremendously beyond a one-dimensional view of the chemical distribution. The one-dimensional view, meaning we source something from a supplier, then we store it, and then we sell it, as Henri Nejade is always saying. You know, this would be a one-dimensional view of our business model. That has emerged, and I will talk in a minute about this, far beyond that. You see when you look on the left-hand side on the key requirements, this is already on the table. We need to find good answers for that to stay in the game, or actually are able to foster and drive growth going forward. They can be quite different on both angles, on specialties and industrials. Again, you know that.
I mean, you have heard it frequently, how we talked about, you know, what is characteristic for essentials, what is characteristic for specialties. I do not want to waste time now to go through those details because Henri Nejade and Steven Terwindt, they will explain their divisional strategies and how they will basically address that industry requirements and how it is expressed in those two divisions. You see the specialties market is indeed growing faster than the industrial chemical market, even in the chemical distribution market. That has to do with it that, you know, the degree of specialization is continuing to grow, and it is also driven by innovation, by new applications, by new products introduction. It's less GDP-driven. It is more than that.
In particular, in segments which we will strongly emphasize going forward, like life science is just one example, or, you know, food and nutrition, pharma, which is included in this one. Leadership in both markets is required to really replicate what your suppliers want from you going forward. Now, let's switch gears a little bit, and let's look on the customer side. What does customer require from you? Again, I will not read out the chart for you, but the understanding or what you should take away from that slide is actually there are also on the customer side, fundamental differences, what they expect from you. Is it more on the side of, you know, the product and the price only, or is expertise required? Expertise can be many things.
It can be an expertise in safe delivery, which is very, very critical, for instance, in our industrial chemicals business. Safe delivery of chlorine, safe delivery of caustic soda or hydrochloric acid. This is very, very important for our customers. There is a knowledge and expertise required. If you go, for instance, to the specialty side, it becomes much more multifaceted. Multifaceted in the way of saying, "Okay, can you help me in my application? Can you help me to formulate a new product? Can I, as a small customer, because I'm just ordering for EUR 4,000, if I have a problem with one of the products of the large manufacturers, can I call you, Brenntag, and talk to you? Because I need somebody who can solve my problem." I've tried it.
When I was on the other side of the table in my previous company, we have tried to engage with those small and smaller customers because there's a lot of innovation happening, and we know I've never found a good way to work with them because there were two worlds. One was a large chemical manufacturer, and the other one was a small customer ordering EUR 4,000 per ton. It was not possible. We can do it as Brenntag. We have a significant amount of application labs everywhere in the world. 80 labs, Henri Nejade will talk about it. That is where innovation takes place. This is where customers come and say, "Brenntag, help me." Again, Brenntag, you have the broadest product portfolio in the industry.
If a product from Dow doesn't work, maybe one from Evonik works, or maybe one from Solvay works, or maybe one from Clariant works. We have access to those products. We can create solutions which are so unique because we have the toolbox nobody else has. Now, if you then look at this market, first of all, it is indispensable, as I have said. Because chemical manufacturers cannot touch that customer segment because it's too complex and too distributed and too fractured. We are the leader in that market substantially. You have tried to summarize it here in your slide for you and showing you exactly that we have a 5% market share in this chemical distribution market, and the top six are only 12% of that market share. 12%.
That, you know, clearly leads to the discussion, you know, how do we act as consolidators going forward? It also shows you the superior position Brenntag has relative to its next competitor. While I was, you know, educated in my professional life through various master or business courses, I was in St. Gallen once. In St. Gallen, there was this Swiss guy who was telling me, "Christian, the most important thing for a successful business going forward is market share. And ideally, minimum twice the size of your next competitor. Then you are really in a strong position, and then you can really drive the business growth going forward." Look, we are not that far away. We are, as I said, the undisputed market leader with a high resilience in that business.
The important story as well is when we then think about not only Brenntag as a whole, but really incorporate our thinking that this is, you know, specialties in industrial chemicals. The other good news is that actually in both divisions, we are also leading with different profiles. When you see on the specialties side, you know, we have about EUR 6 billion, and these are sales full year 2021. And then you see what part is already life science. Life science being food and nutrition, being pharma, being personal care, being animal nutrition. If you look on the life science business, this is a substantial part already of our specialties business. And you see, you know, what position we have relative to our competitors in that field. Similar thing is on the industrial chemical side.
Here I made a slice of this bar a little bit different. Here I show a regional slice. Because we are the only truly global industrial chemical distributor. All the others which are on that list are one region, very strong, and not so strong in other regions. Also the size, you see what is the difference. Steven will talk a lot about, you know, out of that combination of having this global presence with being a very strong and stable last-mile delivery hero, if I wanna call it that way, that combination is unique. There is not even a model for that besides what we are able to do. That is the story about Essentials we are going to take, and that's a story which I think is today, in many cases, underappreciated. You all know the story about Specialties.
We all know about innovation. We all know about application know-how, and. But this unique integration of a global reach with a strong last-mile delivery is very, very unique. Now, while we were developing this strategy, Horizon 2, Strategy to Win, we were thinking about, you know, what is the true nature of our business model? What is really the true nature of where we're operating in? Then it became very clear that we need to walk away from a one-dimensional understanding of our business model. You know, we source, we store, and we sell to what it is really. Actually, what it is really is a heavily interconnected ecosystem we are operating in. Where we are not talking about just a product flow, but we talk with our partners and customers and suppliers.
We talk about also a flow of ideas, a flow of the innovation we discover in our application labs. Also, more important, the flow of data and the knowledge which is associated with it. I mean, Ewout will talk later on about our DiDEX initiative, our Digital, Data and Excellence self-help program, but also capability-building effort to really draw on this wealth of data which we have, you know, accessible for us, and drawing with artificial intelligence, but also business steering mechanisms to drive our growth going forward. That's a fundamental shift of how we look at our industry. It's not a one-dimensional linear business model. It's highly connected, and it is a highly collaborative environment where we are creating shared success for everybody who is participating in that ecosystem.
That was the fundamental guiding principle, saying we understand the true nature of our business model, and we need to make sure that that true nature is reflected in how we do our business. It's reflected in the skills and capabilities that we need to have in our company, and that it is reflected in our daily interactions with our supplier and with our customers. Based on that idea, and based on that understanding of what is the true nature of our business model, we created with our people collectively. We had thousands of people engaged in Brenntag to build our purpose, to build our vision, to build our cultural pillars, which will guide us along the idea of this ecosystem and our new understanding of what is the true nature of our business model. I think to reflect that, we have a short video to share with you, which I will show you now.
Innovation and quality, passion and sustainability. 150 years of experience and a sense of what's next. We are Brenntag. We care for every aspect of daily life because we share the most comprehensive portfolio of chemical products, ingredients, knowledge, and services with our partners. We purchase our products from all suppliers in the industry, and we set the highest standards for quality and safety worldwide. We offer everything from essential products to individually tailored solutions and always the latest knowledge. Our two divisions, Brenntag Essentials and Brenntag Specialties, are perfectly positioned to fulfill the needs of the various industries in the market. Brenntag Essentials connects our expertise with chemical products, with innovative capabilities, and supply reliability. At Brenntag Specialties, our focus is on application consulting, connecting innovations and ideas that are deeply rooted in our profound industry expertise. Both develop and deliver sustainable solutions.
This ideal combination makes us unique, and this is our DNA. Within our networks, we work with our partners, advancing together day by day and creating value for everybody. We shape the future of our industry, and we are aware of our responsibility to protect all of us and our precious environment, to promote equal rights and empower talents to grow. With understanding and leadership, we bring it all together. We are Brenntag.
That little movie is summarizing of, you know, what is our new thinking about us as a company and where we are, what role we play, and our responsibility which comes with it. We have then, with our people, developed what is our purpose. The purpose is exactly reflecting that thinking. It's connecting not only with products, but connecting with knowledge and with innovation. This will be a strong driver for us going forward. Fostering a sustainable future because we know and we see and feel the responsibility as the market leader to drive the sustainability agenda in our industry. I will talk about this in a minute, but we also do everything what we do because we are addressing human needs. From secure housing to personal protection with the skincare.
With you know, addressing malnutrition in the world with our food ingredients we are delivering to all kind of customers. And also on the pharmaceutical side, when we are producing or supporting with our excipients, pharmaceutical production. I think it is very, very engaging, that purpose, and it shows that we walk away from a single-dimensional view of connecting chemistry. This was what we said before. To now something which is multidimensional, which is modern, and it is directed towards what at the end is important, and this is addressing human needs. Our vision is derived from that. The [Vision 23], you know, what do we want to accomplish in the medium term? This is we shape the future of industry because we are the leader in the industry already.
The responsibility for the leader in that industry with the strong position that I shared with you a minute ago, that is shaping the future. Shaping the future of our industry. This is our responsibility. We do this by empowering our partners in those networks, in those ecosystems I was describing to you, and driving the collaboration, driving excellence, and creating shared benefits, shared success. This is extremely important to understand that we are there to create shared success in the industry. That has resonated very, very well. We have worked with our people on the cultural pillars and saying, "What is so important? What is important for you as an organization? What should the future culture of the new Brenntag be?" It came very, very strongly back. We want to care. We want to trust.
We want to have clarity, and we wanna give clarity. We wanna be excellent and strive for excellence and, of course, safety in everything that we do. That is the framework. This is the foundation of the new strategy to win. This is what has been put in place with a lot of work, as I said, of thousands of people in Brenntag. In saying, "This is the company we want to be. This is the identity we want to create. This is what we want to stand for as Brenntag." Everything is expressed in this brand I shared on my first slide with you. This is the B and the Brenntag. Now let's switch gears and go now to how does the strategy now really look like?
Once that framework is in place, and this is the guiding principle for us and the orientation point, the North Star, if you wanna call it, of how we wanna develop the company, we continue our transformation journey. We have started more than two years ago with our Horizon 1, with Project Brenntag. I mean, this is how it is known. This is nothing else than we make Brenntag fit for future growth. You were asking me, Investors, Analysts were asking me, "Christian, what are you doing so that Brenntag actually can grow at least with the market?" The answer I gave you 2.5 years ago was, it was Project Brenntag. Creating the new operating model, taking out complexity, bringing in new skills and capabilities into the company. This is how we will return Brenntag to basically grow at least with the market.
I think I shared it with you before, clearly, that, you know, we have delivered against this promise. Now the next phase is coming where we actually want to accelerate our growth and where we wanna create new opportunities. That is what the strategy to win is all encompassed of and what we are focusing on today. It's a simple thing. It's not an overcomplicated strategy. It's rather four simple pillars. One pillar is accelerate the growth through a differentiated steering of specialties and essentials going forward. Clear focus on innovation and clear focus on global reach. The second pillar, Ewout will talk in detail about it, is DiDEX, Digital, Data, and Excellence, which has two very, very important aspects. One is our digital journey. You see the guiding principle we have on that slide is the easiest to do business with.
This is what we need to accomplish. This is our North Star, you know, as I just described, purpose and vision. This is the North Star of how the touch and feel should be for our customers and suppliers. The easiest to do business with. We will do everything to make this happen, that's the easiest to do business with. DiDEX, Digital and Data, will be not only the second and third dimension of our multidimensional ecosystem idea, but it also will enable to interact easily with us going forward. DiDEX has also another very important element, and this is the drive for excellence. Brenntag in the past had no programs for continuous improvement in place like you would expect for a company of our size.
We need to have strong operational excellence, commercial excellence, supply chain excellence initiatives in place to constantly address our cost base and fighting inflationary trends. We will now hardwire this excellence approach through this strong combination with the Data and Digital-driven understanding of our business model so that we can actually harvest and really drive up our performance going forward. That is what you should associate with DiDEX. And again, Ewout will talk in detail about this. The third, of course, is sustainability. As I said, with being the market leader, we have a responsibility, and we can actually steer the sustainability in our industry going forward, and it should be, you know, obvious and will be obvious how we're gonna do this. We will continue to be the market consolidator in the industry.
This is what we are deriving from our position. This is what we are deriving from our capability. This is what we are deriving from our firepower we can deploy now going forward to continue that journey on being the market consolidator. Relatively simple. Four elements, the divisional strategies, DiDEX, sustainability and M&A. Nothing more than that. Simple like this. Steven and Henri will talk about, you know, their divisions and what is driving them, what is the strategy they have behind, what are the capabilities they need. I will not go into into detail there. What I want to share with you here is that we expect now in the next phase of our transformation, that we do have shifts in our operating model going forward.
Those kind of shifts I have depicted or described them here a little bit. It is that we need to recognize that both divisions follow a different path, not only how they address suppliers and how they address customers, but they follow a different path of how they should be managed in the future. Two years ago, I told you we are not yet in a position to create global business units in specialties because we are not there. We will in the next strategic horizon clearly create global business units like a global food and nutrition business, like a global pharma business, like a global personal care business, really taking advantage of our global setup and how we believe we can drive the growth in this industry segments. But we will also make sure that more and more supply chain capabilities are coming into specialties.
Being at your dedicated warehouses we already have, for instance, in our portfolio, but also planning capabilities and sourcing capabilities. We will continue that path of, you know, sharpening the profile of both divisions as we go forward more and more. Well, at the other side on Essentials, we will look for very clear regional performance cells because it is in industrial chemicals, still a very strong local regional business which required, as I said, owning the last mile delivery. We're adding now the global sourcing capability for this industrial chemicals which we never had in the past. We were not be able to play it because we were tied up in a regional structure. Now we have a global division and now we can play the optionalities these markets are really offering to us.
I repeat to say there is not a single example in our industry who can do this like Brenntag can do it because the setup is not there. We are present in 78 countries. We have that global presence. We need to build that global capability more and more going forward, so that out of this integration of our global approach with the last mile delivery which we own. This is creating a fundamental shift in how the industrial chemicals, how Essentials business will look like. You will see that this, at the end of the day, is leading to less volatility, it's leading to more growth also in the Essentials business. DiDEX. Again, I will not go into detail. You will hear very convincingly from Ewout.
I mean, he has done a phenomenal job to design our journey on Digital, Data and Excellence. He will talk a lot about this in the next section. I wanna just share a few principles which are extremely important in that. First of all, becoming the easiest to do business with. This will be the guiding star for us going forward. Relatively simple. Secondly, unlocking the value of our data. We have such an enormous amount of data, millions of millions of transactions every day. We need to make this data accessible, we need to structure it in the proper way, and we need to make it mineable, and then we need to extract the value which is in this data. This is what I said before. We move away from a product flow.
We understand that data flow is even more important in the future, and we need to be able to draw on that wealth of information which we have. Creating a scalable technology platform has to do a lot with simplifying our IT backbone so that we can really, really drive M&A going forward. Because we are not integrating into a heterogeneous IT landscape, we are integrating in something which is a scalable technology platform globally. That, at the end of the day, is preparing us for being able to significantly speed up with our spend, what we wanna do in M&A and become an M&A warrior, an M&A machine already. Building capabilities to attract and retain our people is very, very important. Ewout and we as a board collectively, we bring people into this organization. I guarantee you for nowhere else in the chemical distribution industry.
IT architects, end-to-end deployment designers, people who know how a digital platform, how digital needs to work, and not like, you know, some flip-flop wearers who have no relationship to the business. Really people who understand what does it take for Brenntag to be the leader on the digital side. We are coming to that, as I said, with Ewout. At the end, it is driving the value creation and constant change for the organization, constant change for us, operational excellence, the strong focus on excellence, offsetting any negative cost developments which we have and, of course, a strong self-help program. It's another EUR 200 million on EBITDA uplift, which we will hereby also deliver to you. Ewout will describe of how we are going to do it.
It's a fantastic combination out of that digital journey we are encompassing on, the building the digital capabilities and at the same time uplifting our EBITDA going forward by that number I've just shared with you. That's DiDEX. Next section, Ewout, you will go there. The third element, sustainability, I have described it to you. Why do we believe Brenntag can drive the sustainability agenda in our industry? Yes, we can drive it because we are in the middle of it. We are in the middle of supplier and customer and everything what we learn from our customers, what is important for sustainability? What do we need to do to drive our sustainability footprint going forward on the customer side? What do I need to do as a customer to reduce my carbon footprint?
We providing the data for him and saying, "Yeah, if you buy a product basket from Brenntag, I give you the carbon footprint data," because we, interestingly enough, are the only exclusive chemical distributor worldwide who has teamed up with Carbon Minds. Carbon Minds, which is actually creating that process-specific carbon footprint, which allows us to give that data to our customers. Steven will later on share a very nice example where we won a quite interesting tender, almost exclusively based on that we are the only ones who could provide to them a carbon footprint for the product basket they were buying from us. Again, another example that this is not anymore a one-dimensional product flow thing. It is about data. It is about innovation flowing back and forth in that ecosystem, and we need to play that role.
We also will make sure that everything what we learn there, reducing carbon footprints is also feedback to our suppliers, because they're also looking about how can I reduce my Scope 1 emission? How can I reduce my Scope 2? Dear Brenntag, you are my Scope 3 emission. What are you doing so that I can reduce my Scope 3 emissions? It is a very self-propelling system, and this is where we are as the largest player in that field. If we as Brenntag are saying we are exiting a certain product class because we believe this is not sustainable going forward, I guarantee you this will send shock waves into the industry. We are not a nobody. We are the market leader.
If we take a bold stance in saying, "These are products we believe we as Brenntag should not have in our portfolio going forward," then it will have, you know, quite a stimulus also on the innovation efforts on the supplier side and looking for substitution. I don't want to go too much into that detail, but it should show you that it is more than just products. It's also driving sustainability agenda, and we have committed very strongly to strong sustainability targets we have shared with you already in April. We are on a good journey. I mean, when you look on our external ratings, on the rankings we have accomplished in the various dimensions, Brenntag is compared to the industry always in the leading position. The average you see here clearly, and you see various dimensions. I don't wanna go into detail on that.
You can, of course, read it in the presentation later on. You can say, "Hey, Christian, all those nice words, show me. Show me the money. Show me, you know, really what you're doing. Is this just, you know, your Sunday morning preach, or what is it?" I say, "No. Okay, let me show you one example of how we drive that." This is a unique system we have developed, which you find actually nowhere. This is what we call our internal carbon management program. It's a fantastic system to drive down your Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. We have committed very strongly to Net Zero by the year 2045, so we have a very clear plan of how we wanna go to Net Zero going forward.
A good way we found is that we are actually measuring the CO2 output of each legal entity we are operating. It's Thailand, it's Spain, it's Italy, whatever. We know how much CO2 they are emitting. We tell this legal entity, "Based on your carbon footprint emission, you have to pay a certain amount of money into a corporate carbon fund." We as a board, in the beginning of the year, define what is the price per ton of CO2 these legal entities have to pay. They get an incentive to think about, "How can I as a legal entity reduce my CO2 emission, because next year I probably have to pay even more?" We are increasing the carbon footprint, internal carbon footprint price to those legal entities.
On top of it, this fund is fed with money, where we then look and ask the business leaders, but also the legal entities, "Apply for projects of how you can massively reduce your carbon footprint, and you will get funds for that out of that carbon fund." That is, you know, enhancing that effort, because then you have on one side people incentivized to reduce their CO2 emissions in the legal entity. We are relocating that money into what matters most for Brenntag, where we create the most impact on reducing our carbon footprint. You know, we support on the implementation. We track the greenhouse gas emissions as they develop, and then, you know, we go to the next cycle next year. This is not funny money. It's real money.
We found a way of how we can actually do this. It was quite an effort to pull this off, because we have all kind of systems, but not as stringent as this. Sometimes only talking about, you know, what are carbon footprint numbers? What is carbon emissions? This is a very, very strong message that we mean it really seriously, and we take action with a unique model, again, which is unique, not only to this industry, but in general. Now, switching gears a little bit and coming to M&A. I said, you know, before we have been the strongest consolidator in the industry and continue to be.
When you look at how many companies we have acquired in the past and the EUR 225 million we are spending, we are executing this relentlessly, and we do this every year. You see, you know, what we have done in Europe, what we have done in Americas, what we have done in APAC. You know, you see two recently acquired companies, which we just announced last week or two weeks ago, so that you see that we are continuing on that journey. Still clearly maintaining our financial discipline and acquiring assets which are really worth the money we are paying for them and also what they are giving us, like, you know, actually accelerating our growth. Clear growth focus here as well, but also in particular in specialties. Also filling white spots.
Could be a geography. Could be a customer-supplier relationship that we are interested in to get there. Could be and will be even more and more on the tech side and on the data side. I said we need to develop this company to become more data-driven, to become more tech-driven, and that requires also capabilities for us going forward. You will see that M&A also shifting to some extent, but it will, you know, enhance also our tech capabilities going forward. That has led us, you know, to that proposal and to this strong statement in our Horizon 2 strategy that we are doubling up our M&A spend because we know we can do it. We have a proven track record. We are the strongest consolidator in the industry, and this is playing to our strength.
This is where most people cannot follow us anymore. We have 300 targets in our pipeline, very well developed. We are negotiating, discussing with dozens of them all the time. We will execute rigorously this M&A pipeline, but again, staying disciplined. You can always count on us that we are not doing and making crazy things here. I think the M&A aspect of it cannot be underestimated, how important it is for the future development of Brenntag going forward, like it has been important also in the last decade to drive our growth and the strength of our platform. That brings me to the end about Horizon 2 strategy. Relatively simple, 4 pillars. The divisional strategies, a strong DiDEX effort, focus, commitment, drive to drive the ESG and sustainability agenda, and a strong focus and double up on our M&A trajectory going forward.
All of that results in our future financial medium-term targets. They are here. Kristin will then, you know, later on in the CFO section, go in great detail through those numbers and explain it to the, to you. This is the medium-term guidance we give to you today. Showing actually a strong growth for Specialties, showing a growth beyond market growth for Essentials as well, showing operational leverage, translating gross profit growth and over-proportionate EBITDA growth. Having a self-help program in place with EUR 200 million contribution on top of that, and a clear commitment to double up on our M&A spend to continue the driver of the consolidation in our industry. With that, I wanna close and thank you very much for your attention. Then I wanna hand over now to Ewout to lead you now through guidance. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Ewout van Jarwaarde, and in Board of Management, I'm the Chief Transformation Officer. I'm here to talk to you today about how we will deliver this next self-help program, delivering a net EUR 200 million EBITA uplift by 2026. This program is very simple. It's focusing on three things. We're going to optimize our processes for our customers, our supply partners, our employees. We're going to tap into these unrivaled access to data that Christian just talked to you about. Finally, we're going to lay the foundations to realize our future vision. The great thing is, this program is already well underway. The first benefits are already starting to deliver. What's more, we're fully confident that we can deliver, given we're banking on the proven recipe of delivering Project Brenntag well ahead of plan.
Let's get started. We are in a unique position in our industry. We have an unrivaled access to data that puts us in our pole position to digitally connect the industry end to end. Let me illustrate this through a couple of numbers. Every year, we facilitate over 13.5 million transactions. We conduct over 3 million shipments, connecting over 200,000 partners globally. There's simply no one else in the industry that has this amount of transactional data. What's more, we're the only one in the industry across the broad range of Specialties and Essentials portfolios that really understands the sustainability footprint of the products. You can just very easily see how we can lead the sustainability transaction towards more and more sustainable products over time. Given our connectivity, there's even more.
We are the first, typically, to know when new products are being developed with our supply partners, with our customers. By really connecting the both, we can really accelerate industry developments overall. In this next strategic horizon, we'll put our customers and supply partners at the heart of what we do, and the data at the core of how we do it. We set ourselves three very simple goals. For our customers, we want to be the easiest to do business with through seamless omnichannel experiences. We want to seamlessly connect with our supply partners and also all other partners operating in our ecosystems. For our employees, we simply want to be the best place to work for. Underpinning all of this is really tapping into our unrivaled supply chain capabilities.
Getting to the most efficient, agile, and connected supply chain, driving innovation, sustainability, and resilience in our industry, and I'd like to say, and beyond. That's really what this Digital, Data and Excellence program is all about, putting us in pole position of becoming actually the Digital and Data leader in our industry, driving structural operational excellence. Let me actually talk to you through the five pillars that are underpinning our program. First in high level, and then I will deep dive into every one of them one by one. Our first pillar is all about becoming the easiest to do business with. This is about optimizing our processes for our customers, our supply partners, our employees, and driving excellence, continuously improving our position of how we operate.
The second pillar of the program is really unlocking the value from our data, tapping into the unique data source that we have. Unlocking AI-driven insights to make better business decisions on a day-to-day basis. We'll implement a scalable technology platform which is global, modular, cloud first, API first, and has security embedded, putting us pole position to actually with speed to market, but also, as Christian mentioned, to really accelerate M&A integrations as we're doubling down on our spend. When we're underpinning this by making heavy investments into our digital data and process capabilities, we're going to train our people, but we're also going to attract new talents into Brenntag to unlock this next S-curve. Finally, we're building this on a proven recipe of Project Brenntag.
This is all about driving value creation and actually also the returns to our shareholders, and really embedding that change deeply into the organization. Let me actually go into the first pillar. How do we become the easiest to do business with? Let me give you some examples. At this moment, there are still places in the world in Brenntag, where if you are a customer, you call up or you email our customer service department, and our customer service department actually manually goes through an order intake process that typically would take 13 steps, manual steps, and that is only if things are going right the first time. Obviously, that's not very current anymore. We're going to drastically cut back on any of those manual interventions, digitize, automate it, and the benefits are very clear.
By just cutting back 80% of those steps will make our way of doing business with us much faster, less prone to errors, much more pleasurable for our customers, but also internally much more efficient, lowering our cost to serve. I guess all of us by now are ordering with Amazon from time to time, and we've all become very accustomed to this great unique features of Track and Trace. That's not yet an industry standard in chemical and ingredient distribution. Every day, we're receiving thousands of calls with our customers where they're calling us and say, "Well, where is our order?" Because they are waiting, our truck drivers are waiting. What we're going to implement a global Track and Trace, really creating transparency on the end-to-end value chain, knowing exactly when our trucks will arrive.
I don't have to go into the benefits. Huge driver for customer satisfaction, incredibly more efficient for our truck drivers, but also for our transportation planning internally and externally. In BSP, which is all about innovation, time to market is of the essence. Time to market on new products and new innovations is characterized by the way of how the technical teams of our customers are jointly collaborating with the technical people in our labs. By digitally enabling them, we'll speed up those processes to make joint application development much faster, much more direct, much more collaborative, and really putting us in pole position to get those innovations out there to the market as soon as possible. I'm sure that Henri will talk more about it later on. We're underpinning this with an excellence program.
Many industries have implemented lean methodologies over the last 20-25 years. We haven't. We're building up a lean capability. That end-to-end process by end-to-end process, going through all of the different process steps and optimizing that, optimizing collaborations, optimizing the way of how we work, taking out waste, and ultimately really reducing our cost to serve, whether it's in transportation, our warehouses, any of our customer service and sales processes. We're already well underway. Let me give you one other number. Over the last 1.5 years, we've seen the uptick on Brenntag Connect, the active users really tapping into that omnichannel experience by over 90%. This is only accelerating month after month after month. Let me take you to the second pillar of our Digital, Data and Excellence program, which is all about unlocking the value from our data.
We may have shared with you already the how much access to data we have. We actually know more about our customers than our customers know about themselves. We know what products they need for the developments. We know the quantities they need. Actually, we know when they need it. There's more. We also know the lead times to get those products to them on the shelf. You can imagine in a world with continuously disrupted supply chain, this is not only nice to have, this is becoming essential to actually keep our customers running on a day-to-day basis. We said to ourselves, "Well, how can we actually tap into that unique data? How can we actually put this to bear?
How can we leverage to provide those insights to our teams in the field to start to have those conversations one by one?" That's why we introduced our Customer Growth Engine. Our Customer Growth Engine actually predicts really accurately within a period of days when our customers actually need their products, which quantity, and what the lead time will be for that product. This all felt really big, but we started really small less than nine months ago. This solution is now live in more than 70 markets. Every day, more than 600 of our account managers are actively working with these data-driven insights to reach out to our customers and be there just when they need it. You can just imagine the reactions we're getting. We are just there when customers need it. They love it.
The reaction to NPS is going up tremendously. Also for our sales force, it really reduces waste and really makes our sales force significantly more efficient because they are there when they need to be there for our customers. Just to give you a glimpse of the future, this year we started to own this. We reached 60% of our footprint. Next year, we'll reach close to all of our footprints globally, covering all of our account managers and actually tackling more than 1 million AI-driven recommendations, feeding back and really improving our position towards our customers. There's more. You can just imagine if we know exactly what our customers want, when they want it, can also move back in the chain. We're starting to work on digital demand forecasting.
You can just imagine what this does to our sourcing position 'cause we know exactly which products need to be where, when. Obviously, as we're starting to optimize it, this will lower our working capital, this will increase our ability to bundle transportation. I mean, firstly, great sustainability impact, but also huge cost impacts. Also puts us in a much better position to manage actually all of our transportation costs, globally. For next year, we're targeting to improve our digital demand forecasting by 15%. I can only tell you this is just the beginning. There's more. I'm really proud to announce our global collaboration with AWS, because in the end, this really the data backbone that needs to drive all of these improvements.
We're going to create a global data platform where we're going to have a 360-degree view of our customers, of our supply partners, of our supply chain. We're going to unlock all of those insights one by one. Firstly, of course, to improve our position as Brenntag, but to feed more and more back to our partners and to create new value-added business models. Finally, we'll be investing actually setting standards. Firstly, internally, really bringing us to actually global master data management practices within the group. I'd also like to say, and for the industry. Let's move on to the third pillar, which is all about creating a scalable technology backbone.
We're coming from a state where we actually had a lot of local operations, local regional operations that would typically make their own choices when it comes to systems, to processes, and we're shifting that. We're shifting that really to a state-of-the-art technology backbone, which is global, modular, cloud first, API first, and the security embedded. All of our commercial customer and supply partner process will be end-to-end connected in our customer supply partner platform. We'll tap into a range of technology solutions, shaping up our supply chain ecosystem, whether it comes to transportation management, global Track and Trace across multi-modes, but also our global supply chain control tower, which will be critical to also support Steven and the BES strategy globally. Steven will talk more about that later on.
We're going to actually tap into all of the data that we have everywhere in our systems and put that into our global data platform I just talked about. Finally, we're going to optimize our backbone IT with our lean ERPs, but really creating a two-speed world, not limiting it to us and actually achieving the value that we've created overall. Obviously, this allows us to leverage our skill. It allows us to become really the easiest to do business with. It allows us to create a speed we were never able to get to before, but ultimately also driving easier integration of our accelerated M&A. The most important thing is we're not going at this alone. We're not reinventing the wheel. Many other industries have gone through this transformation many, many years before us. We're tapping into those global best practices.
Just recently, we announced a global partnership with Salesforce, really connecting actually our supply partners and our customers end-to-end on our customer supply partner platform. They're helping to build and accelerate building up our capabilities. We're leveraging global best practices from other industries and really bring them firmly into chemical distribution industry. That's how we're accelerating. Similarly, we do something with AWS. Because we firmly believe by learning from others and partnering with others, this will accelerate our journey and put us well ahead of anyone in our industry and beyond. The fourth pillar is all about building our digital data and process capabilities. I mean, coming from actually more of a local company just a few years ago, we need to actually build up new digital and process capabilities as such.
We're hiring digital engineers, data scientists, data engineers, but also people that are highly specialized on driving actually global process harmonization and efficiency throughout the group. People love us, particularly now also with the new brand. People love us because in Brenntag, they get to do what they cannot do anymore in many other industries. They can make a real difference. We're also developing our internal capabilities. We're training over 450 Green and Black Belts everywhere in the group to be optimizing our processes locally and driving bottom-up improvements. I guess from your own experience, you've had many experiences in your own companies of how Black Belts and Lean has come through probably many years ago.
We'll have all those 450 people certified, and they'll be part of a strong global community driving the changes everywhere in the group. Well, firstly, for the horizon till 2026, but then also to drive continuous improvement and marginal gains in the years after 2026. There's more. We'll upskill more than 10,000 of our people, making them accustomed with actually current day Digital and Data-driven ways of working. Incredibly important, and because we need to onboard our people to actually leverage and learn actually the tools that we are going to roll out throughout the group. You may ask, "Well, Ewout, I mean, sounds all great, but how confident are you to really deliver?" I say we're fully confident because we're banking on the proven recipe of Project Brenntag. We've done this before. We know how it works.
We know actually as a board of how to own it, and actually how to drive initiative by initiative really through our line and making sure that every one of those initiatives is really delivering. That's really what Project Brenntag was about. We're going to add agile best practices to this. Like I illustrated with our Customer Growth Engine, we think big, we start really small, and when it works, we scale fast. With that, we take a lot of the risk out of actually the program delivery in every product that we launch. We're not going to go into big bangs. We're going to have continuous deployments of smaller changes, really driving up actually overall benefits. It also means that the financial profile of this program is very different from, for example, a classical IT program. I mean, we all know those programs.
Big upfront investments, and then if you're lucky, perhaps at the end, some benefits. You see that illustrated very clearly on the bottom, on the right-hand side of this chart. Our Digital, Data, and Excellence transformation is structured in a very different way. It's already starting to deliver benefits from day one. It will accelerate on driving benefits while averaging a relatively linear profile of investments throughout the four years of investment. Very different profile, very different moments of value delivering and very different risks. I'm sure you all want to know what is it going to deliver and what is it really going to cost. Christian already talked to you about this. We are committed and fully convinced we'll deliver EUR 200 million Net EBITDA uplift by 2026.
80% of this uplift is going to be driven by the bottom line. You can think about initiatives like I've been talking to you about. This is about actually optimizing our transportation management by actually getting better transportation load plannings, by actually improving our position versus external partners. This is about optimizing our warehouses from a process and automation perspective. This is about reducing our cost to serve and increasing our sales force efficiency and to drive more value-added transactions with our customers. Ultimately, this is also about really driving up bottom-up improvements, end-to-end process by end-to-end process, local by local, driven through our excellence program. 80% bottom line measures. We'll invest EUR 350 million one-off investment.
We'll use that to build up our Digital and Data capabilities and our process capabilities in the group and invest in the IT platforms that are underpinning this. I'm just very simple. Guys, let me make this very simple. I mean, a one-off EUR 350 million, which is less than EUR 100 million a year, to drive or deliver a run rate program of EUR 200 million, that's a phenomenal business case. That investment is actually split 65% OpEx and 35% CapEx, really illustrating the capabilities we're putting in place throughout the group. Let me wrap up. We're fully convinced that we're on track to deliver the EUR 200 million Net EBITDA uplift. This program is all about optimizing our processes for our customers, our supply partners, our employees.
Tapping into that unrivaled data position and laying the foundations toward the future. The program is already delivering. Finally, we've proven we have done it before, really building on the best practices and the proven recipe of Project Brenntag. With that, I would like to thank you.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome from lunch. I hope you enjoy your lunch. I'm Henri Nejade, COO of Brenntag Specialties. Two years ago, we're doing our capital market day, we announced our new organization and new operating model, and by focusing on core segment and core business. This has allowed us to create our BSP, Brenntag Specialties division. Of course, we implement this organization, and we delivered what we promised to you. We demonstrate also this business is resilient business. On the track record of we have the delivering the sustainable growth and also ability that we have in this business to innovate with our customers and for our business partner. Today, what I'm gonna share with you is how Brenntag is well-positioned as having the ability and agility also and expertise in life science to outgrow the market.
Not only outgrow the market, but significantly outgrow the market growth. Let me remind you that Christian mentioned already, we are global leader for innovation and sustainable solution. In 2021, we delivered a strong gross profit of EUR 1.3 billion and EBITDA of EUR 535 million. We are a trusted partner for our stakeholders. With thousands of the supplier and mainly exclusive supplier, we serve 100,000 customer across the world. We are continually developing the new product and innovative solution by using our 81 application labs across the world and having the 400 different site for our facility and our storage and serving our customers. Very strong market leading platform. This platform has very solid foundation based on five pillars. The first pillar, our global network of our application center. Christian highlighted that this is a unique in this industry.
Applications and development is the core part of our service offering. We plan to increase the number of our application labs to deliver our ambition globally by having the global excellence and the local expertise. We have 81 labs, state-of-the-art equipment and knowledgeable experts in strategic locations to deliver our premium solution offering. We opened this year our application center in Germany for our life sciences. We will open the new one in France for our food industry. We are building the new application center in Singapore, dedicated for our pharma business, and we will open the first quarter of next year. Second pillar is a strategic partnership with our suppliers and our capability on supply chain that we have. Our suppliers are for us as important as our customers are. Of course, those are the different pillars that we have.
You have seen this morning what Christian Kohlpaintner says, we need to develop a strategic alliance with our supplier. Why? In their strategy and developing their product, and we are promoting their brand. This is extremely important to understand this mechanism and developing this relationship with our supplier. We are the continuity of their source, their sales force in the market. We use more than 100 locations operationally and serving our customers. We have also dedicated sites. Everywhere, we are doing the blending and mixing operation. We have also some dedicated sites as GMP for dedicated for our pharma business. GMP is Good Manufacturing Practices. What we will do, we will also reinforce our strong supplier relationship and increase supply chain capability to provide consistent and reliable service to our partners. Third pillar is Data and Digital.
It's important pillar for our growth going forward. Data and Digital are the core pillar for our strategy. Ewout van Jarwaarde mentioned that this morning. You have seen where by collecting data globally, we will help our sales force, we will help our innovation center, we will create intimacy with our customer and with our suppliers. In 2021, we generate EUR 200 million sales via digital channel for our BSP business. Fourth pillar is our people. Key enabler. We have a clear commitment to attract, to develop, to retain the talent in our organization. We have 1,500 employee with technical background in our BSP organization today, and we are continuing to invest in our people. We have a lot of PhD and chemical engineer in our organization. Fifth pillar is our brand.
We are very proud of our new brand, Brenntag brand, that we launched last week. This well-positioned to support our reputation and also to tell the story of the new Brenntag Specialties. We will leverage this strength in the highly attractive market. We have a market-leading position in highly attractive market and the end market, and the first one is life science. Christian show you that our position in the life science. Today, life science generate 55% of our gross profit in our specialty business. This is unique, and this is stable, sustainable business, repeatable growth, and not cyclical business. Material science is our second-largest segment, and together with life science, if we combine, we generate 75% of our gross profit in our BSP business.
Over the next step of the strategy in Horizon 2, we will develop leading position in pharma and in personal care, and we will continue our growth in food and nutrition and material science. Life science, the segment that I mentioned, also as end market, have a strong demand for value-added services, which we will deliver with partnership approach that we have with our supplier and customer. Let me just give you a little bit more flavor on value-added services. It is our global network of application and innovation centers that we have. As I mentioned, we have 81 application labs. We operate the largest global network of application labs in the industry with state-of-the-art equipment and expert to deliver our value-added service offering. Our laboratories are well-diversified.
We have 60% focus on life science today, 23% in material science, and 10% in lubes, and the rest is in our waters, water treatment system. Geographically is also well-diversified today. 40% of our labs are located in EMEA region, because today, EMEA is our largest business in terms of the size. If you look at the 37% of our labs are located in Asia, growing market, focus for, are good for us, for our specialty business. Also, our advanced knowledge exchange network and the center of excellence help and facilitate global collaboration and expertise. Our team globally in the innovation center, they are all connected together. We develop the expertise by region.
If tomorrow someone in China wants to make the recipe for food industry ice cream, the gelato for our Italian friend, they can call Italy, and they can get the recipe from Italy and know-how from Italy. The data that we are collecting now, and if we connect all of the team together digitally and having this exchange and network, is give us enormous power to manage our innovation centers and having the expertise and expert center of excellence globally and is split it geographically. As you can see, we are well-positioned to develop the strategic alliance with our business partner and satisfy their need by providing the tailor-made solution. What I will share with you is how our market looks like today. The market that we operate today is very dynamic and evolving market.
The specialty ecosystem require interaction between supplier, customer, and also external player, such as university or different independent labs that we can use and we can elaborate our know-how. We provide value-added services, value creation, and support all of our stakeholders. We have a comprehensive portfolio of over 35,000 product from the leading suppliers. We are the go-to service partner for innovation and sustainable solution. That's exactly what we want to be. We want to be the place that if supplier and customer, they have an issue, they will call Brenntag. They will come to Brenntag, share with Brenntag the problem, and we can find jointly the solution. We enable best-in-class solution, of course, for our customer. Why are we able to do that? Because we are in the center of this ecosystem. This ecosystem.
Ecosystem, meaning the chemical distribution and ingredient distribution, is evolving. Let me share with you the key trend, the challenge that we are facing. Many chemical manufacturers are refocusing their portfolio on the specialty business. By doing that, they are also asking the distributor have the same capability to serve them. From the customer angles, the customers also has a different requirement. They are externalizing some of the needs they may have, having the blending product for them, or more value-added services, or asking for sustainable product. The requirement is changing. There is a two different dimension. It's Sustainability as well as Digital. Sustainability redefined the chemical industry, and by consequence, our industry as well. We have to be agile and adapt our portfolio, and we have to be able to innovate sustainable product for our customers. Digital is another example. We cannot survive without the digital approach.
Digitalization is a such important topic for us, is part of our strategy. Ewout van Jarwaarde illustrated how important is to be connected with our customer, our supplier internally with our innovation centers. As Ewout van Jarwaarde mentioned with Salesforce, we are also developing different approach with our supplier. Salesforce is the customer relationship management. We are developing a supplier relationship management concept. How do we as a company, we can answer to those needs, is coming from supplier and customers. The challenge that we have is, of course, we build our operating model, but even our strategy has to evolve, has to adapt it for the next state, which is the Horizon 2. Let me share with you our strategy for BSP. As I mentioned, two years ago, we implemented our new operating model by focusing our core business. Today, our strategy is evolving.
We want to be the truly global go-to place for our supplier and our customer, to help our customer to develop and produce innovative and sustainable product. How do we achieve that? We have identified 5 key strategic priorities. Number 1, we will increase innovation support and value-added services everywhere which is necessary. Number 2, we will optimize our product and supplier portfolio and focus on supplier relationship management, innovation and sustainability. Number 3, we will expand our global footprint. Number 4, we will develop with high growth customer and sub-industry. I will develop a little bit this one more because there is some of the industry we are operating, there is a sub-segment, and we have to be present there, and we have to develop those sub-segment. Our high growth industry and, I would say, less limited for large supplier today.
We have to be present on this one. Finally, we will acquire, as a number five that we have, in terms of priority, we will continue our M&A activity, and we will acquire strategically in selected markets. Let me take you through each of those one by one. The first one is to increase our value-added services. At Brenntag Specialties today, we have developed a vast offering of value-added services. We mentioned that. Formulation. We are doing the different recipe for our customers. We are doing the different testing. We are doing the different documentation in our innovation center. We are doing the blending. We are doing the mixing of the different ingredient very specifically for our customer and supplier when they are asking us. This includes supporting innovation and creating added value services, of course.
We are ideally placed to drive both customer and supplier needs in this arena. Let me just illustrate how we co-create. I have two examples to share with you. How do we co-create, and what will be the value that we will create by playing in some complex environment? My first example is on food industry, and second is in pharma. This is our application labs innovation center we have in Vietnam. One of our customers in Vietnam asked to develop innovative product which will contribute for health in Vietnam. That's a beverage what I'm talking about. Food and beverage customer. In Vietnam, by having coffee plus calcium plus protein. The idea with customer was great idea. They approach Brenntag.
They say, "Do you have anything that you can help us to develop?" First approach was we went to the market, we collected all the data from the market. What is the mega trend? What is the consumer trend they have in Vietnam? Jointly with customer, we selected few category of product and we make a few prototype, and we test market. The final product was selected, and you see here. It is called Coffee 3-in-1. What is the 3-in-1? As you have probably seen that in the past, there was a shampoo in 3-in-1 concept, but we converted to the drinking and to the beverage. This product today is sold in entire Vietnam. Everywhere you can go in the different supermarket, on the street market. What is the deal for us by doing that?
Of course, we have an agreement with the customers that entire life of this product, we will continue to source the product and serve them. On top of that, if there is any change, any development is required on the new product, we will develop for them. That's what we call co-creation with customer. This kind of information is available in our system, and our people that can read and can exchange globally. The second one is, as you can see this diagram, is in pharma business, is extremely complex. The pharma business is complex and highly regulated market. You may ask the question, what the Brenntag is doing in this industry? What a distributor can do in this industry? If you look at the concept of the pharma, I don't want to go too much in details. The pharma start from chemical process.
You make your API active ingredient. You go to the drug [qualification], registration. You get all the ingredient, you know, excipient, and you make your blending, mixing. You make your production, and you distribute via pharmacy or hospital. You see all the activities in this pharma ecosystem. There is some area we have no value on this one. This is in gray color you see. This is not accessible for distributor. We as Brenntag, we are already present on the blue part, you see, globally, and we are also active on the red color or pink color that you can see here. The pharma market is a global market, and this is a unique opportunity for Brenntag, serving the global customers. Global customers, you all know them. GSK, you know, Sanofi, Pfizer, you name them.
This market is a global market, and they need someone like Brenntag to serve them globally. We have a unique opportunity globally to serve this industry by being focused, of course, being also on the, as regulatory expected in documentation. That's why we were talking about the GMP site before. I wanna just illustrate that because there was a question, what Brenntag can do in the pharma business. You have seen we want to be where our customers or our supplier are asking us to be there. The Brenntag Specialties focus on the selection of the product portfolio for a strategic supplier from the strategic supplier and developing on the specific market. We believe that relationship we will form the basis of the jointly creating value for Brenntag, of course for customer, and building the long-term relationship with them.
In addition, we aim also to provide our strategic supplier with tailored marketing support and data that we are collecting from the market, that we were referring to the data collection, how we will share the data, how we will share with our supplier what is the mega trend in the market, what kind of information can we share with them to proactively develop the new product or to see the trend. Those data we are also collecting from the market is absolutely important. What we are doing with our supplier is really joint development. Christian mentioned a lot of innovation is coming from the small medium-sized customer. That's what we are focusing, capturing the idea of the innovation from the supplier, from the market, and being able to share with our supplier and customer.
We are also by doing that trying to develop the product, sustainable product. Sustainability is not only the climate change for us. What I want to share with you is one of the example that we have here in personal care industry. One of our customer in personal care, when you make the cream or makeup, there is a product is called the microplastic, which use it to give the softness and to give the touch and sensory sense, you know, touchy. It's silky touchy. There is a demand that this product, as a plastic, it shouldn't be used anymore in this application. A lot of customers, they try to replace this product. They have not been able to find a replacement that offers the same sensory test.
In our application labs in Barcelona, we developed a product which is based on the vegetable plant base. We micronize that. We replace the plastic by this product. We make all the tests, all the equipment that we have, and it was fantastically surprising. It was much better than even the sensory test they had before. That's also another level of the how we contribute to introduce sustainable product in the industry for our customers. This product will be used for different application going forward, replacing the microplastic in the different industry, in particular on personal care and home care. The third initiative that we have strategic priority, we will expand our global footprint. Of course, we plan to be everywhere our customer and supplier, they are asking us to be there.
If you look at the footprint that we have, 78 countries, but we still have also some empty countries, empty box like Japan. If we want to be in pharma business in Japan and Korea, we have to expand our position on those countries. We have a very, very well-structured approach, identifying by market, by sub-segment, where we want to focus the growing market and where are the countries that we have to develop. I mentioned Japan, we have Brazil, we have Mexico for food industry. We have Africa, some of the selected country to be in Africa. We have to be in India and in Indonesia to develop the different segment of our life sciences. The agility that, and the flexibility that we have at the Brenntag Specialties organization allows us to play proactively in evolving market dynamics.
What we are talking here is some of the segment or the sub-segment, we will need to develop that. I can use an example of waste water, which we have not been really present in this one. We do have some activity, but in some of the regions, we need to go deep dive on this one and to develop this one. In the life sciences, biopharma is a growing market, and we have a presence in some of the countries, and we have to develop those segment or sub-segment, which is the growing market or nutraceutical pharma business mainly in pharma and partly in nutrition business. Our fifth strategic initiative is our M&A. As you all know, M&A is in our DNA. We have done it successfully for few decades at Brenntag. We are convinced that strategic M&A can unlock our presence in developing and growing market.
We will focus on M&A. Christian highlighted one of the key pillars for our future growth, but we will do it selectively on the market, on the segment, by taking into consideration financial impact of course, and looking to the synergy that we could create by M&A activities. The geographies to be developed in our business are U.S. for some of the activities like pharma business, like personal care business. In Korea, in Japan, I mentioned, we also have to be much more active in our M&A activities. We do have very good pipeline for our M&A. We developed that already during the past few years, and we continue to work on that actively. We also demonstrate JM Swank and Zhongbai that we acquired during the COVID period.
We are continuing to make the integration, and we are capturing a lot of synergy by having those two companies part of the Brenntag Specialties business today. We are really excited by M&A activities. How those all come together? To reiterate our ambition. What is our ambition? I repeat it. We want to be the place that our supplier, customers will come to us and ask us to help them to develop innovative product, sustainable product. How do we do that? We will execute the five different strategic priority that we decided here. By doing that, we will achieve our ambition to be really the global partner for our supplier and our customers, and of course, being the global place that customer and supplier or market, they can go for services.
Resulting from our new strategic priorities, we expect BSP to grow well above the market, delivering organic growth profit CAGR of 6%-8%. The growth of operating EBITDA level will be even higher, expected at 7%-9%, driving by efficiency gain. Our conversion ratio, this is forecast at 40%-42%, which excludes any benefit from DiDEX and self-help program that we mentioned. I feel personally very comfortable with this target. With the change that we did two years ago, we positioned the Brenntag on the growth mode going forward. Our new strategy will allow us to definitively to achieve this target and this ambition that we have. In conclusion, what I would love to share with you is our business is a resilient business, is not cyclical business. Our ability to innovate sustainable product and solution is unquestionable.
We have a track record of delivering the sustainable growth, and we demonstrate that, and we deliver that. We are well-positioned to outgrow the market by over 2 x, and we are extremely confident that we will achieve our ambition. Thank you for your attention.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Steven Terwindt. I manage the Global Essentials Business. Also from my side, a warm welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Brenntag Essentials, we are the unique connector between an unrivaled local distribution network and a global sourcing capability. Not just sourcing capability, but global supply chain capability as well. Christian alluded to this. The local distribution network that reaches more than 150,000 Essentials customers in high demand centers around the world connected to Brenntag's global sourcing and supply chain capabilities. That makes Brenntag Essentials a reliable partner for our customers and suppliers. Especially in uncertain times that we have seen over the last two years, that reputation was held up being a reliable partner to our customers and suppliers.
In this context, I think it's important again that we see that being that unique connector between the last mile delivery and the global security of supply, the global sourcing capabilities, led us in 2021 to achieve EUR 2.1 billion operating gross profits with EUR 620 million EBITDA, which we achieved through selling to more than 150,000 customers out of our more than 600 sites worldwide. We represented in that year, more than 1,000 suppliers, which we serviced in more than 70 countries. This, again, underpins the diversification of this business and as a result, also the resilience of the business. I would like to illustrate this to you through the regional diversification, the industry diversification, as well as the product diversification of the business.
You can see how Brenntag Essentials is having a 50% of our operating gross profits located in the Americas. In North America, I should say. About 40% of the business in EMEA, 7% Latin America, and 5% Asia-Pacific. Yes, we are not happy with only 5% in Asia-Pacific, and I'll talk a bit later about that. Still, it shows how diversified this business is across the globe. There's no other distributor in this market that has that level of diversification between the regions. Reaching the 150,000 customers in the high demand centers in those regions is also unrivaled. No other distributor has that reach, globally diversified that many customers. Secondly, if you look at the industries, there is not a single industry here that represents more than 14% of our operating gross profits. Again, a very diversified business.
Even the energy services. In the past, there was a lot of concern about the overexposure to the energy service business that today is well under control in a much more profitable segment. But again, not a single industry has more than 14% of our business. On the product side, we sell more than 5,000 different products that we have categorized here in five different segments. Again, diversified. This altogether underpins the resilience of the Essentials business. The Brenntag Essentials business is founded on six foundational strength that make us unrivaled but also give us a clear competitive advantage. Number 1 on the left, again, that unrivaled unique local strength, the distribution network that reaches deep into the high demand centers, reaching those 150,000 customers. The superior last mile. The 600 sites that I mentioned before.
In a 200 km radius around each site, we own the last mile. We own the service excellence. That close connection to the customers, that customer proximity, allows us to be indispensable in the local markets. We have an incredible, experienced, and professional team that understands the local market trends, that understands the local customer needs, and it has the expertise not only in fulfilling those needs, but also sell at the maximum price. Sell price management is key to our success locally. Driving that profitability locally, understanding what each customer product combination is worth means that the local team can drive profitability to the max. Fourthly, now I make the connection to the global component. The first three strengths were really related to our local strength. The global component.
We are now able, and we have this strength, this unique strength, to connect the regions with a global sourcing team that understands global sourcing dynamics, product streams, identify competitive product streams in the regions, supported by digital tools, market intel tools in order to be proactively sourcing those products. If you then also connect the regional volumes, and you're able to leverage the relationships with suppliers and leverage your volume when you buy products, combine that with your optionality of supply, you decide who you buy from. You can imagine that in times of scarcity or supply chain disruptions, you're not tied to a single supplier. You decide where, in which region, at what price you buy. Number five, Brenntag has a very strong geographic spread, very strong product spread across industry applications.
That combined with that customer diversification provides breadth, provides diversification, and provides resilience to the business. Last but not least, Brenntag Essentials is rooted on industry-leading safety, regulatory, and sustainability standards. Every Brenntag site globally complies with the Brenntag safety standards. We have the highest asset integrity, process safety management standards in the industry. We make sure that each site leader, each country leader complies with those standards. To underpin the resilience of the business, I would also like to highlight a set of capabilities that support the resilience, reliability, but also creates value to our business. Imagine all the multiple stocking locations that we have around the world with tank farms, with packaging capabilities, with blending, mixing and blending capabilities, with technical people that understand how to make toll blends.
You bring in bulk products from the terminals, package the products in drums, in intermediate bulk containers, which we know as IBCs. Store these products in our multiple warehouses around the world and deliver to the customers when they need the product. We have our own trucking fleets, our own drivers. Worldwide, we have 3,500 trucks and drivers, allowing us to own a large part of our outbound logistics and control the service excellence to our customers. We have the mixing and blending capabilities that I've talked about before, with the technical know-how and the services that come with it. When companies like Ecolab or Diversey need new blends for their bottle wash that they sell to the beer brewers or the bottlers around the world, Brenntag is their partner. Today, those are examples of top 10, top 20 customers of Brenntag Essentials.
We are able to effectively cross-sell in different industries, different industry end markets into different applications. Meaning that the Brenntag Essentials products are not going to a single industry, not into a single application. We are not exposed to an event in a single industry or a single customer. The Essentials products are sold across the industries, across applications. As a result, again, provide that diversification and resilience to the portfolio. Brenntag Essentials also has an organization that's dedicated to managing global key accounts and global suppliers. Now the global key account community wants to have a single source of contact in Brenntag and able to manage their business globally.
To have single contact in Brenntag, make sure that global key accounts, like Procter & Gamble, like Unilever, that they have a single point of contact that understands their business needs globally, helps them with supply chain solutions, helps them with security of supply. That again, during the last two years, has proven to be essential and proven to be a big source of Brenntag's resilience. Where are we going? What is our strategic ambition? You have seen Christian talking about the Brenntag Essentials business growing a bit, 4%-5% in the coming five years, sustainably. We have the ambition to accelerate our growth. We have the ambition to have industry-leading cash conversion, and we have the ambition to shape the market. How do we shape that market?
We go back to the foundation, the local distribution network, the local unrivaled strength to reach deep into the high demand centers, and we are going to connect this with our global sourcing and supply chain capabilities. We have defined a set of strategic priorities, which we have divided in three main focus areas. Number one, we are going to reinforce and strengthen the regional networks, especially in underrepresented areas where Brenntag still is not number one. I mentioned before that I'm personally not happy with only 5% market share or only 5% of my business represented in Asia-Pacific. Actually, the real market share of Brenntag Essentials in Asia-Pacific is probably below 2%. About 5% of my operating gross profits comes from Asia-Pacific. It should be triple, quadruple that.
Obviously, strengthening that regional network in underrepresented areas also means that we are going to make sure that countries or regions like APAC, white spots in North America, white spots in EMEA, are properly addressed. In that same focus area of strengthening the local network, we are also going to continue to streamline the site network. That means we will continue to close down suboptimal sites, consolidate sites, expand existing sites, and invest in new sites. We are also, in that local network, going to invest in improving our service excellence capabilities. That we will do with the Digital, Data and Excellence program that Ewout talked about.
We will digitize our transportation sector, our transportation division, transportation optimization, driving down the cost to serve, driving down the cost for each kilo transported, optimizing our inventories, driving down the working capital that we invest in inventories, improving the service access to our customers, maximizing pricing for each product customer combination, driving up profitability. Those are a few examples of what we are going to do with our Digital, Data and Excellence program. At the same time, we will also invest in our transportation and logistics capabilities. Meaning more control over our logistics and service to the customers. More trucks, better trucks. Also, we are going to decarbonize our logistics, make our logistics system more sustainable. You will see Brenntag delivering products in electric trucks in the coming years already. That is the first bucket. The second focus area is our global sourcing and supply chain expertise.
We are going to bolster our global sourcing and supply chain capabilities. We are going to do that by expanding our global sourcing team, equipping them with better tools to understand what's happening in the markets, to proactively tap into competitive product streams. We are going to expand our terminal capabilities in strategic ports around the world so that we can move those competitive product streams between regions and connect them in an effective way to the local networks. Thirdly, we are going to boost our presence in high-growth markets. We are going to boost our M&A activity in regions like Asia-Pacific. We will continue our M&A activity in the other regions where we see opportunities to fill wide spots, to tap into new products, and to bolster our market position.
Also in the third bucket, we are going to make sure that Brenntag is the leader in providing sustainable solutions and sustainable products to the market. Let me now take you through some examples of the strategic priorities I mentioned before. Under the strengthening of the local network, I mentioned how we will continue to streamline and optimize the local network, closing down sub-optimal sites. At the same time, expand our logistics and operations and infrastructure capabilities. Expand existing facilities where we will consolidate smaller facilities into making them more efficient, but also invest in new facilities. I'm here giving you an example of our Toledo, Ohio, facility. Brenntag, about 3 years ago, only had a 3% market share in the Ohio Valley. We decided to make this investment to bolster our market share, our market position.
This facility became operational six months ago, and already we have seen tremendous success with existing customers, with relations that we had before, with suppliers that wanted to see us grow in that market, giving us support with their product portfolio. We have seen tremendous success in accelerated growth far above double digits in that region as a result of having these new sites. At the same time, we were able to close down four sites and consolidate them into this site, making our inbound logistics as well as our outbound logistics much more efficient, lowering the cost to serve in the process. We have similar sites that we have opened. Actually, this week on Monday, we opened our new site in the Boston area in a place called Upton, a very similar site.
Rail connected, truck connected, close to a barge terminal, allowing us to be far more efficient and grow our market share in the New England Boston market. A market that's worth $3 billion a year in distribution business and where Brenntag was only selling $75 million. Big opportunity. These are just a few examples. At those sites, we will always make sure, and we are making sure that we also have mixing and blending capabilities and automated filling stations. You see here a picture on the right of one of our blending facilities in the new site of Toledo, where we are able to, in an automated way, blend [toll] blends for our customers. Let me take you to another example of how we're going to strengthen the local network and our local service excellence. Ewout talked about Track and Trace.
We talked about the Digital, Data and Excellence program. How are we going to make sure that the service excellence to our customers becomes faster, becomes more efficient, becomes low cost to our customers? Track and Trace allows the customers to really have confirmation when the product is ordered, when the product is selected in the warehouse, when the product is loaded, and when the product is on the way. They can see, like you all take Ubers, they can see on the app the truck is on the way. What's on the truck? What time is the truck arriving, and what is that truck delivering to my plant? Ewout gave the example of customers calling today our customer service reps. That's absolutely how it is today, because they want to know what time is it arriving. Is the order fulfillment complete?
The Track and Trace app allows Brenntag to improve the customer experience, but it also allows Brenntag to better plan ahead, to better plan inventories. We don't need to have these incredible amounts of inventory. We can do with half of it, because now we can better plan the inbound logistics, the inventory levels, the dispatch planning to the customers. At the same time, Brenntag will organize its truck fleet in a better way. Transportation optimization, we've talked about it before. I've also talked about our ability to use the digital tools to drive commercial excellence, which is a huge part of our profits, profitability increase in the coming years. Going to two examples of how we're going to strengthen the global network, our global sourcing and supply chain capabilities.
As I said before, we are going to expand our global terminal capabilities. We are going to make sure that out of those global terminal capabilities, we're able to efficiently connect products with our inland networks. Some of the terminal capabilities we own, most of them we lease through exclusive arrangements with terminal operators. Also, the global sourcing team being expanded, being organized by product groups with global product managers, equipped with digital tools to understand market dynamics, pricing dynamics, availability, where to find competitive product streams in the world, is supporting this effort. You see here a picture of the Rotterdam Brenntag terminal, where we receive ships from around the world, thousands of tons of different products that connect into our tank farm. In that gray box there, that is our packaging facility, where we package 25 different products, solvents, acid and lyes, inorganics.
Out of that warehouse, we feed the regional and local distribution network. You will see Brenntag having more of those facilities in the strategic ports around the world, and I'll give you an example a bit later. Count on Brenntag being very active in ports like Rotterdam, Antwerp, Houston, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, Busan, as examples. I already mentioned how the global sourcing team will be equipped to properly manage the main products in a global way. Now I want to give you the example of how, over the last 12 months, the European chemical sector has had to deal with a lot of challenges. Not just the supply chain disruptions as a result of the COVID pandemic, but also the energy crisis following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That crisis in gas, natural gas, has been an incredible uphill battle for chemical producers.
Increased feedstock prices, increased cost of production, decisions to idle plants temporarily or for the long run, has resulted in product shortages in Europe. Many of our customers have had great concerns about getting their supply, the security of supply in place, having to deal with shortages that they actually had to stop production. Brenntag in that period activated our global sourcing team. It was not yet a expanded, fully equipped sourcing team, but we had a team that was able to source products in Asia-Pacific, in North America, bring them into Antwerp, bring them into Rotterdam, and provide security of supply to our customers. That in itself gave Brenntag wings in EMEA, and is still giving us wings in EMEA. It made Brenntag an even more indispensable connector in EMEA. I foresee that in the coming years, this will not change.
Yes, it might change by type of products, but the EMEA region will see and will become a net importer of chemical products for a long time ahead of us. I'm not saying that the entire chemical production will disappear in EMEA, but the balance between imports and local production will shift to more imported products. That means that maybe in the future, instead of seeing 10%-20% imports and 80%-90% local production, that might shift to 20%-30%, 70%-80%, or even more. But the role for a chemical distributor like Brenntag, there's no other distributor that can handle the global opportunities of sourcing, having that global optionality to source products anywhere in the world and connect that to the largest chemical distribution network in EMEA.
Let me take you now to the third focus area, the focus on high growth markets, the opportunity in high growth markets for the Brenntag Essentials division. Asia-Pacific is an underrepresented area for Brenntag Essentials. We are largely underrepresented in Asia-Pacific and still underrepresented in China. On the one hand, yes, we are driving strong organic growth. We are hiring professionals that understand the market and drive organic growth, but that is not fast enough. We need to bolster, and we will boost our M&A activity in Asia-Pacific. We will also boost targeted investments in our infrastructure. We invested a few years ago in state-of-the-art infrastructure in China, in Zhangjiagang, close to Shanghai, in Guangzhou, close to Beijing.
Those two operations became operational in Q4 of this year, a few weeks ago, with all the licenses in place, complying with the Brenntag asset integrity and process safety standards, and will drive organic growth for Essentials in China. Another example, I want to show you here a picture, is the port of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, where we reached an exclusive arrangement with a high standard local terminal operator. We are now the only chemical distributor that brings in products from around the region. For example, we have vessels like the vessel here, coming from the port of Busan, south of Korea, with products from Japan, Korea, China, and we bring those around the region, Vietnam being one of them. At this site, Brenntag is now packaging products, breaking down bulk to drums, for example.
We are investing ourselves in our own packaging and mixing and blending facility, so we can provide the same service, the same standards that our customers are used from us in the other parts of the world. Obviously, this is just the beginning. Vietnam is just one component in our Asia Pacific strategy. We have chosen five countries as the main focus area. Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Singapore are just a few examples where we see high growth opportunities, and Thailand and Vietnam being the other two. Count on Brenntag announcing acquisitions in that region. Finally, also Brenntag Essentials will take charge, will take a leadership role in driving sustainability in the chemical distribution market. Brenntag Essentials will provide supply chain solutions, making sure that we reduce inbound truck traffic, use more rail and barge traffic. That has an immediate CO2 reduction effect.
We have today the example of various suppliers that have picked Brenntag to work with them to reduce their carbon footprint in their logistics process. In North America, BASF picked Brenntag to handle their volumes in formic acid and THF because we were able to handle these products in rail, bring them to our facilities, package them for BASF, and handle their distribution markets. In that process, we reduced 300 truck trips per year, per product and moved that to rail. We helped BASF to reduce the carbon footprint of these products. We are also going to drive a much greener product portfolio. To give you an example, Brenntag Essentials is actively engaging with companies like Shell to drive bio-based solvents into the market, drive bio-based IPA, acetone, and I can go on, into the market.
At the same time, we are convincing our customers of the benefits of buying the greener portfolio. We are not straightaway phasing out products. We are doing this in a gradual way. We are taking ownership and we are taking leadership in driving that sustainable transition. Last but not least, we are also providing our customers with the ability to calculate the carbon footprint per product from the cradle, the supplier, to the end market, the customer. Ewout explained a little bit how we are doing this. How the Digital, Data, and Excellence team is helping us to develop these tools. To have a digitized tool to calculate the carbon footprint of each product, cradle to grave, and supply that to our customers.
This gives you a bit of an idea where we see a great opportunity for the Brenntag Essentials division when it comes to sustainability. We see it as a high-growth market, and we want to be the leader driving that. Let me take you to a slide here, how the DiDEX program, the DiDEX team, is critical in the execution of the Essentials strategies. We talked a little bit about this before, but the local strength, the local distribution strength. Out of the 150,000 customers that we have around the world, 100,000 we call bronze customers. These are small mid-sized customers. They have a very infrequent order pattern, small orders with a short lead time. In order to manage these customers today, we still have a lot of manual processes involved. A lot of resources are dedicated to these customers.
These 100,000 customers only add 25% of our gross profit. In order to capture an opportunity for growth, if we make this process more efficient, we can boost not only the profitability of those customers, but we can also drive down the cost to serve them. The predictive demand analytics and algorithm, algorithmic pricing tools that Ewout van Jarwaarde talked about will help us to drive profitability at these customers, improve pricing, but also drive down the cost to serve in logistics planning, transportation optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The second example, the global expertise. We have now a global sourcing team with Global Product Managers. Let me take the example. We have a Global Aromatics Product Manager. He manages toluene, xylene. These product managers need market insight. They need to understand what's happening in the market around the world in these products. Where are the products short?
Where are they long? What's the pricing doing? They will now have dashboards. They will have transparency on what's happening in the markets. Now I want to show you here the divergence of the FOB pricing of toluene between regions. The gray line is the difference in the FOB spot price monthly average between the USA and APAC. The blue one between the USA and Europe, and the black one between Europe and Asia Pacific. You can see the divergence is increasing. To take advantage of that arbitrage that exists, that bigger arbitrage opportunity, our global teams are now equipped with digital tools to understand when to act, where to buy, how much to buy, where to bring it to. Then finally, the new markets.
Christian already alluded to the example of a water treatment company in Denmark who came out with a tender, and the tender had some conditions and indicated that 40% of the tender decision would be based on the ability to provide carbon footprint data for all the products they were tendering. Another 40% was based on service excellence requirements, and 20% was pricing. We won that tender, and the main differentiator there was our ability to provide that 40% carbon footprint data. How does all this come together? Many of you have tracked Brenntag for many years. We used to be a company that was organized by region, with regional CEOs that were board members. These regions were P&L, full P&Ls, pretty much region inward-looking. We were regional leaders, but we were disconnected.
We are moving from regional leadership to a global, interconnected Essentials division, where we are able to connect the dots between the regions. Where we are able to leverage our global sourcing and supply chain capabilities and connect those to the unrivaled regional and local distribution networks. We are going to accelerate our growth. We are going to provide sustainable accelerated growth of 4%-5% on the EBITDA. We are going to drive our business with industry-leading cash flow conversion, and we are going to shape this industry. We are going to do that with the three main focus areas for strategic priorities. Strengthening the local network, strengthening our global sourcing and global supply chain capabilities, and strengthening our position in high-growth markets. What does that mean for our numbers?
I've already mentioned it a few times, but obviously we feel very confident that the Essentials division is going to drive an annual CAGR of our operating growth profits 3%-4% a year, driving our EBITDA growth 4%-5% CAGR every year, and achieving an operating EBITDA conversion ratio of between 28% and 30%. Let me conclude. I hope I've shown you today that the Brenntag Essentials business has a foundation of strong resilience through our diversification in the regions, across the industries, across the product portfolio. We have proved that we are a reliable partner to our customers and suppliers, especially in the dire times that we are living in today. We have defined and communicated our strategic ambition of where we are going in the coming years. Accelerated growth, industry-leading cash conversion, shaping the markets.
We have defined very clear strategic priorities, and we are confident that we are going to deliver this. On that note, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to pass the words to Kristin Neumann, our CFO, and I thank you for your attention. Thank you.
Thank you, Steven, and good afternoon, everybody. Also welcome, a warm welcome from my side. As I'm still new to the company, it's a special moment for me to be here and to represent Brenntag as a CFO. In my section, I will point out five key messages. The first one, we have got a resilient business model with broad diversification, a strong track record of profit expansion, and a counter-cyclical cash flow profile. Two, we will grow our EBITA with a CAGR of 6%-8%, 2 percentage points higher than our gross profit growth. Brenntag Specialties will surpass Brenntag Essentials in size by 2026. We've got a strong balance sheet with ample capacity for further investments, which we will use for value-creating M&A activities. Our DiDEX program will add an EBITA uplift of EUR 200 million by 2026.
We have sharpened our capital allocation framework, which foresees dividend payments, a leverage of 2x, organic and inorganic growth, as well as additional shareholder returns if applicable. I said it already, we have got a very resilient business model, and that is especially important in turbulent times as we have them right now. Where does this resilience come from? The major reason for that is diversification. You can see here that we do have a broad diversification in terms of regions, in terms of industries we serve, in terms of customers, in terms of products, and also in terms of our suppliers. We are a truly global chemicals and ingredients distributor with the majority of our business outside EMEA. The major part of our gross profit comes from the Americas.
We service a broad variety of different industries, the biggest one being the food industry, which is per se very resilient. That helps us a lot, especially in volatile times and in times of shortages, if it comes to the suppliers. We are in a strong market position, and we have multiple sources for our products. That brings us in the position to be always able to deliver our customers. We work with close to 200,000 customers and with more than 10,000 products. The top 10 of our customers stand for 7% of our revenues. This resilience of our business model is also reflected in our financial performance. Brenntag proved that in the last couple of years, and especially during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, but also lastly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We haven't seen any significant EBITA decline since 2007, and you can see that here on the chart. That is clearly driven by our diversification and also due to the fact that we are indispensable to our customers and our suppliers, as Christian mentioned that already. We have got a counter-cyclical cash flow profile as working capital is being released with falling revenues. Even in times without top-line growth, we have our M&A activities with strong synergy realization, which help us to increase our profitability. You might have noticed this already, that my colleagues refer to the EBITA rather to EBITDA during their presentations. We will change the key metric of our company to the EBITA going forward for external reporting, but also for the internal reporting. Why do we do that? The major reason for that is better comparability.
Better comparability to the external world, but also internally. We herewith adjust our reporting to our key distributor peers. also internally, it's a better comparison due to our business setup. You might be aware of the fact that our Brenntag Essentials business is hosting the asset base for the entire company, and therefore has got a comparably higher depreciation element. While Brenntag Specialties is paying a service fee for the logistics costs, which is reflected above the EBITDA. only if you take the depreciation into account, both divisions are really comparable. On top, the EBITA also contains the lease costs, which are operational and also really cash relevant. You can see here that there's a difference of around 8% between the EBITDA conversion ratio and the EBITA conversion ratio.
Therefore, I wanted to make sure that you are not concerned if you look for the first time at our guidance numbers. It's also worth mentioning that Brenntag Specialties has got a higher EBITA conversion ratio compared to our Brenntag Essentials division. Coming to the numbers. Christian mentioned it already, we will continue to consistently deliver, and we will even increase our ambition level going forward. On group level, we will grow our gross profit with a CAGR of 4%-6% and our EBITA with a CAGR of 6%-8%. The basis for the calculation of those CAGRs is the full year 2021. If you talk about those growth rates, these are real growth rates and not nominal growth rates. Our DiDEX program will add an annual net EBITA uplift of EUR 200 million by 2026.
All together, that results in an EBITA conversion ratio of 35%-37%. In order to achieve that growth, we will do further investments in our infrastructure with an annual CapEx spend of EUR 300-350 million going forward. We will also continue to consolidate the market, and we will even accelerate our M&A activity by doubling our annual M&A spend to EUR 400-500 million. How does this ambition split to the two divisions? For the first time, we will also give a midterm guidance for our divisions. Henri and Steven mentioned already the differentiated steering of the two divisions and also the dedicated divisional strategies. Brenntag Specialties will grow the gross profit with a CAGR of 6%-8%, and Brenntag Essentials will grow the gross profit with a CAGR of 3%-4%.
The growth rates for the organic operating EBITA is even higher due to efficiency gains. For Brenntag Specialties, it is 7%-9%, and for Brenntag Essentials is 4%-5%. You can see that the major part of our growth on group level comes from our specialty business going forward. As a result, Brenntag Specialties will surpass Brenntag Essentials in size by 2026. Both divisions offer a very attractive EBITA conversion ratio. For Brenntag Specialties, it is 40%-42%, and for Brenntag Essentials it is 28%-30%. The higher conversion ratio for Brenntag Specialties comes from value-added services, especially through innovation and formulation.
Opposite to the guidance on group level, which includes the benefits of our project, of our DiDEX program, the benefit is not included in our divisional guidance. I mentioned it already, our DiDEX program will add an uplift of annually EUR 200 million. Ewout explained very nicely the content of that program, and I will now come up with more details on the numbers. 80% of the benefits come from bottom-line measures and efficiencies. For instance, productivity gains, transport cost optimization, and warehouse cost optimization. The minor comes from top-line measures, mainly monetization of our data, such as the Customer Growth Engine Ewout described earlier. We will invest around EUR 350 million to develop Data and Digital capabilities in our company. 65% of that will be OpEx and around 35% will be CapEx.
It's worth mentioning that those investments are over a period of the upcoming 4 years, 2023 to 2026, and the annual uplift you see is really the run rate in the year 2026 with the EUR 200 million we mentioned. It's important that we will start with small Digital and Data products with a steep learning curve. That tremendously de-risks the program and is a difference to traditional IT programs. We will see immediate benefits coming in, to be more precise, already right now, and we also have a flattened spend curve. The program will also enable us to continuously improve and will provide us with further benefits beyond 2026, because it will be in our DNA that we are able to continuously improve in the future.
We are really confident to deliver the benefits of the program, because the implementation is on our own hand, and we have the recipe of Project Brenntag in the background. I will now come to a further point I would like you to remember out of my presentation, our strong balance sheet. We currently have a leverage of 1.3 x and a very healthy equity ratio of 40%. The leverage is significantly below our targeted leverage of 2 x, and that is due to the very good performance of Brenntag in the past years. Our last 12 months ROCE stands at 23%, which is a strong proof of our capital discipline and also the profit expansion in the past years. Part of that profit expansion is also our M&A track record. Brenntag has been the leading consolidator in the industry.
Since 2017, we have acquired more than 30 companies, and since 2010, even 89 companies. We've acquired EUR 4.7 billion of revenues, and we have created significant value with that. 3% out of the average growth, average EBITA growth since 2010, our EBITA, were generated by the acquired companies. We spent EUR 2.5 billion with an average multiple of around 8x, which is below our average multiple before synergies and even more so after synergies. This strong track record is also the basis for our future M&A strategy. Christian said it already, we will double our M&A spend to an annual amount of EUR 400 million-EUR 500 million. Where do we want to invest in the future?
We want to enhance our capabilities and our market position, especially in the emerging markets, and this is true for Brenntag Essentials and Brenntag Specialties. We will selectively fill white spots and also improve our data capability. The main focus areas in terms of industries are the lifestyle industries, such as pharma, food and nutrition, and personal care. We currently have a list of more than 300 potential targets on our list. With a handful of them, we are already in intense discussions. In these discussions, we always have our sustainability strategy in mind, and it's very important to say that we will stay financially disciplined and that we also will do a proper integration of the acquired companies. It all comes together in our capital allocation framework.
The boundaries of our capital allocation framework are an investment-grade credit rating and a leverage target of 2x. We will distribute 35%-50% of our profit after tax as dividends, as we have done so in the past. We will focus on growth through organic reinvestments and through value creating M&A activities in line with our strategy. Additionally, we consider additional shareholder returns if that maximizes the value for our shareholders. In conclusion. One, we have got a resilient business model with strong diversification, a counter-cyclical cash flow profile, and a strong track record of profit expansion. Two, we will grow our EBITA with a CAGR of 6%-8%, two percentage points higher compared to our gross profit growth. Brenntag Specialties will surpass Brenntag Essentials in size by 2026.
Our DiDEX program will add an uplift of EUR 200 million in EBITA by 2026. We have got a strong balance sheet with ample capacity for further investments, which we will use for value creating M&A activities. We have sharpened our capital allocation framework, which foresees dividend payments, a leverage of 2x , organic and inorganic growth, as well as additional shareholder returns if applicable. After these presentations, after that long time, I think you deserve a break. It will take 15 minutes, and afterwards we will continue with our Q&A session. Thank you.
First of all, I really want to thank you for spending now, how much? 5 hours, 6 hours with us, listening to what the next phase of Brenntag's transformation is. The new Brenntag is here. The new Brenntag has started, actually last week internally. Now, this reveal, this show, of the new Brenntag brand and what it is associated with, this is, you know, giving you an impression of what we believe and what we as a company are, and what is our identity, what is driving us going forward. What I wanna leave with you as key takeaways about Brenntag. We are actually the undisputed and resilient leader in our industry. It's a very attractive market. It's an indispensable market, and we are there to continuously grow our platform and create earnings for you. We deliver to our promise.
We have done it in the last strategic cycle. We will also do it in this strategic cycle. You can count on us that we deliver to our promise. We have strong differentiated steering in those divisions, which we will continue to evolve, which we'll continue to build capabilities in those divisions according to their needs. I think Steven and Henri, they have very nicely shown what the particularities of their businesses are and how we wanna foster and breed growth in those two divisions. What Ewout has shown to you about the data and the digital journey, including the excellence program, is the self-help that you and we are expecting from a company like Brenntag. That we are constantly working on our cost base, that we're constantly working on our productivity increases, but at the same time, have the future very clear in our view.
This distribution industry, this distribution segment of the chemical industry, is changing, dramatically changing, and we want to be the front runner in that change. I think what we try to convey to you today is actually that we are on that journey. That we are convinced that we can be the leader, not only in digital, but also the leader in sustainability, but also in the leader in how quickly we grow the market. Building on our strengths, that is the core theme of our strategy. Really enhancing and double down on what is our strength. This is also resulting in a significantly increased M&A commitment we do as a company to drive forward the growth of our platform. Last but not least, the ambitious financial targets we have shared with you should be a convincing argument for you to say Brenntag is indeed the market leader.
Yes, I can count on Brenntag to deliver a constant increase in growth and profitability going forward, and they will indeed shape the future of the industry. Thank you very much again for joining, and looking forward to see you in individual discussions sooner or later again. Also thanks for the team, thanks for the colleagues presenting, the various aspects of it, and thanks again for listening. Good evening.