A warm welcome to Continental, to the early look presentation of our Automotive business, a business which we are planning to spin off in the second half of 2025, to be more precise, in September of this year. We are targeting to give you an overview, to make you familiar and experience our Automotive equity story more in detail, and this will be performed by the future CEO of that company, Philipp von Hirschheydt. Before we come to that, let me briefly tell you in scope why we are here, where we are coming from, and what the next steps are with regard to this transaction. Overall, this transformation is nothing else but the largest transformation in the history of Continental, which is a long history of 150 years, where we have seen different times, difficult times, and more stressful.
I can tell you, in my more than 25 years with Continental, I clearly see that the last years in particular right now are as dynamic as they have never been. We have to take fast decisions on a day-by-day basis. That is why we are fully convinced that companies being focused and fast have a clear advantage in this tough industrial environment, and that is why we create two dedicated companies with more agility in their industries, in Automotive as well as in Tire and ContiTech industries, which are very different. We know as well, and we see that investors seek more targeted investment opportunities into the industries. That is why we create two independent listed entities which you can invest into, and two strong separate businesses, strong on the one hand, but as well- separated.
That's why we are going for a 100% spin-off of the Automotive group sector. How do the two companies look later on? Like, we basically split the company into half: EUR 20 billion sales on the left side, EUR 20 billion on the other side, 96,000 employees versus 93,000. You see that from those KPIs, the companies are very much the same. From the markets and what makes them strong in their core competences, it's very different. A tech leader with a strong product portfolio in its breadth and depth on the Automotive side, with a strong balance sheet, which is in the current environment clearly a great asset to profit from, and with a, in the meantime, as well, a strong history of applying self-help measures and helping and being adaptive to markets, which we could see, we are convinced that this offers great upwards opportunity in terms of value creation potential.
On the other hand, the Tire and the ContiTech businesses, which are in the meantime very well integrated in themselves, have the opportunity to develop their business further, being steered and supported by a very lean holding on top of that. Where we are now on our delivery of the spin, we are fully on track. The environment I already mentioned, which is asking for it as soon as we can deliver, and we can deliver. We have announced in August that we are going for a detailed analysis. We have decided in December in the Executive Board, and now the Supervisory Board has decided on March 12th to pursue the spin in September this year. Next comes the AGM, the major shareholders we see already are supporting such a transaction, and the decision will take place on April 25th. A positive decision assumed.
There will be two capital markets days: one for Automotive, one for Tire and ContiTech in June of this year, and then all followed by the listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange planned for September 25th. Let me summarize the transaction overview: 100% spin listed at the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in September, headquartered in Frankfurt. This new company qualified for the MDAX, which we assume and expect, with a free float of around 54%, which is based on the free float Continental AG has as it stands. We are expecting transaction one-time cost of low to mid- three-digit million EUR amount, and to be added the tax effects, which we assume to be a low three-digit million amount as said in addition. We are fully convinced this is the right time to do it.
We have the right setup, and the execution of such a transaction will be value accretive for all stakeholders, for both companies going forward. Let us step now in the most important part, as that the equity story presented by Philipp von Hirschheydt. I can tell you, I know Philipp in the meantime since more than 15 years. He joined Continental in 2007, before coming out of the investment base, investment management. He pursued several steps within Conti, and in 10 years, he led three Tire businesses in three continents of the world. He joined Automotive 3.5 years ago, and he took over the helm in May 2023, leading Automotive as member of the Executive Board. In those 3.5 years, he clearly shaped not only the business and its setup, drove it forward, but as well the organization.
He selected his team, which is now fully motivated to get into independency in the second half of the year. I hope you can reconcile and understand why we at Continental, we are fully convinced that Philipp is the right one to perform the job, and he and his team are perfectly prepared to execute it value- accretively. With that, Philipp.
Niko, thank you very much for your kind words and a warm welcome also from my side. I'm here today to explain to you why we think Continental Automotive is a worth investment, and why Continental, as you have seen, is going to be even more successful in the future while being a standalone, self-financing, independent company. It all starts with the first building block of any technology company like ours. It starts with the product portfolio, and we are very much convinced that we have a very comprehensive product portfolio, which helps to turn the software-defined vehicle into reality. We serve our customers with ambitious solutions, with software-defined functions, which help them to differentiate themselves in the market. We have functions in safety and motion. We deliver automated driving and parking functions. We look at cockpit and HMI, as well as we look into body and comfort functions.
Our subsidiary, our engineering subsidiary, Electrobit, is one of the forerunners and front-runners in terms of middleware and offering operating systems. A software-defined vehicle is not only a software-defined vehicle; it needs and is based on hardware. We are also in hardware in a very prominent position to offer many different ideas and solutions towards our customers. We offer server zone architecture, which is the backbone of a car. We have pioneering sensing technologies. We have exciting experience where we have full-featured and personalized opportunities, which we deliver to our customers. We deliver digital solutions. We deliver display solutions. We are delivering heads-up displays into the car. We are basically the new horsepower of the industry, while adding edge compute technologies, which have to come from the past towards the future with an array of different products which we offer.
We are convinced that we are a technology and electronics leader. With our comprehensive product portfolio, we are able to enable our customers within their visions of the software-defined vehicle. Being a leading electronics supplier in the market, we do have a strong purchasing power, specifically on semiconductors. In our organization, we have deeply rooted technology DNA. We do have very competent R&D forces. We have very competent R&D teams around the world across different products, which we complement with an ecosystem of partners. With Ambarella, we have a very unique partnership with a semiconductor supplier. With Aurora, we are pioneering in commercial autonomous mobility, something we want to bring onto the road in the United States very soon.
With Horizon Robotics, we do have a partner where we bring advanced driver assistance systems in China into life, something which is really a unique opportunity we do have with this very special company. You can see we are a global company. We have a production and development footprint around and across the world, but we are also able to serve our customers very locally. We do have a local-for-local setup, and we do business basically with all OEMs in this world, being traditional ones or new entrants. We have a regionally diversified production footprint. We have a supply chain which we build up end-to-end after the semiconductor crisis, where we ensure that all demands of our customers are being shipped through our suppliers and vice versa.
With our R&D footprint, we are capable of addressing all regional and customer needs, and we do know how to move high-cost efforts into best-cost countries, something which we are focusing on over many years and where we are going to accelerate also over the course of the next months and years. More than 80% of our products are among the top three in their respective market. We are focusing on products, on projects where we are top-notch, where we ensure that we do create value with our efforts. We have, with brakes, displays, or even radars, a very prominent market position. We have managed to get close to EUR 20 billion order intake in 2024, and we are winning market share in Asia, being it Chinese OEMs, being it Japanese OEMs, being it Korean OEMs.
We have a growing base in Europe as well, specifically in North America. One thing is very important in such disrupting times: you need to have the right cost structure in place. We have been focusing on making our company resilient for the future. We have managed to get a significant positive cash flow already in 2024, and we do know how to improve our cost position as well as our free cash flow conversion. We are in markets which are growing faster than the rest. We are in markets where production is being outperformed by our products, and we do have a very strong balance sheet. I'm going to explain to you over the course of the next 20 minutes that we do have one of the strongest balance sheets in our industry.
We are going to get EUR 1.5 billion cash position of our mother company in order to ensure that we are going to go with no financial debt into our independency. It is about stability. It is about being well- prepared, and we have a significant upside potential going forward. If we are looking at the future, you can see here that the markets we are in, the product portfolio we have been built up, is significantly growing faster than the overall market, the overall light vehicle production, which is being foreseen to grow at 1.8% between 2024 and 2029 on a compounded average growth rate. We are where the market is growing faster than the rest. That is why we are having a differentiated approach to capture these values from established business as well as from growth areas.
How are we going to develop our organization further? What are our main pillars of success going forward? We said as a team, important is we need to be a leading technology company. We will lead in future-proof technologies. I have shown to you that already 80% of our products are among the top three in their market. We focus on the winners, and we are going to be very distinct on that, and we are going to be, as Niko said, a value-accretive company. Every product needs to show that it's creating value for our organization. We are going to transform our organization into a high-performance organization. We will work on making our organization a winner in that very disrupted industry. One thing you can count on: we deliver to what we commit.
I'm going to show to you what we are going to commit over the course of the next year as a management team. If we talk leading, what do we talk? As said, we have basically, with all relevant OEMs, quite significant business. We are a global player, to not forget, with local-for-local setup. We are organized with four strong business areas, which do have a comprehensive product portfolio enabling the trends of our industry, the mega trends of our industry, and one of it, the software-defined vehicle. We do have a group, EUR 20 billion sales, as Niko showed, which is providing the stability and support for the different business areas for the development of next-generation technology. We do know that a cost-competitive structure is the key priority in such turbulent times.
We have executed a lot of measures already, and we do have and have prepared additional ones in order to ensure that we are going to be one of the cost leaders in the market. We have done a very stringent portfolio management, where we are very much focusing on value creation. Each and every product, each and every project needs to create value for us, as well as it needs to create value for our customers. We are convinced that being a standalone company is a key catalyst for future upside potential. This is our target. This is where we want to be, and we are very much convinced we are going to deliver to our long-term targets, something which we do know we need to show quarter- after- quarter, year- after- year. We have a long-term strategy. We have a short-term focus.
We have a strong, committed, and aligned leadership team in place. We just have been standing together, sitting together two days in a senior executive convention where you could see how much this team is willing to win, how much this team is committed to win. The big advantage we have is we have gotten a very strong balance sheet from our former mother company, from the shareholders, from the supervisory board, which allows us to fully focus on our strategy. We are deeply convinced we are able to manage growth as long as it's value-accretive. We are increasing margin, and we do have a lot of cash flow upside potential.
If you want to look into the concrete examples of what and where our business areas are working on, you can refer to the appendix where we are showing you also in these days what and where we are working on. Being very clear on where we stand today and giving you a perfect picture about the total summary, you can have here a look at how our four business areas are looking like. The biggest one, safety and motion, our efficient safety powerhouse with close to 40% of total sales. Safety and motion is concentrating on highly efficient safety systems which require significant technology know-how. Safety and motion, a company, a business area which is working in a very demanding environment, knows how to focus on and where to focus on, on efficient solutions, creating a significant return on capital employed.
Second biggest business areas, Architecture and Network Solutions, the enabler of software-defined architectures, a business area which we turned around over the last years into a very profitable part, which is enabling the future, the software-defined future of our customers. With Autonomous Mobility, we are pioneering the future with scalable solutions. Basically, 20% of our sales, the future, and the company, the business area where we are focusing on making advanced driver assistance systems scalable, successful, and bringing commercial mobility into life. With User Experience, our smallest business areas, we are targeting the interior design of the future of cars. We're delivering highly efficiently manufactured displays, head-up displays into the market and allow our customers to differentiate their cars towards competition.
All that is being supported by the group, which enables unique access via its global footprint, which ensures that technology is being shared between the four business areas, and which is capable of funding the next generation innovation R&D, something which is very important for us. We want to be also in the forefront of innovation and to organize the entire value chain which we have today best. We have a very dedicated central purchasing team, a competitive supply chain, and a manufacturing organization which is ensuring that knowledge sharing between the business areas in terms of manufacturing technologies is being ensured. Everyone, the group functions and the business area have a clear target to deliver on our ambition. For our management team, it is very clear we need to turn into a high-performance organization.
We need to transform our organization towards the right setup and towards the right cost structure. What have we been doing over the last years? You can see our financial figures, the quarterly results of the last three years. I want to turn your attention specifically to the improvement quarter-after-quarter. You can see that we managed to get more than 6% return on sales in the fourth quarter of 2024. This is a great encouragement for our team. This shows that we are capable of making this company self-financed and successful. We have had more than 900 product ramp-ups since and including 2022. We focus. We do know that value creation is key. That is why we decided to stop basically 10% of our product portfolio and phase them out within 2024, something which we can guarantee also to you for the next years.
We concentrate on value creation. Every product needs to create value. Every project needs to create value. If we're seeing that we are not going to do so, we focus on improving the situation. If we're not able to improve, we're going to sell or we are going to close, as we did with the respective 10%. We have managed to have a very successful repricing over the course of the last years and getting all the costs reimbursed by our customers, which we are needing to incur due to inflation and chip crisis. We have adjusted our contractual setup in order to be prepared for the next years to come because what we have seen is that our contractual setup in the supply chain crisis has not helped us neither on the supply side nor on the customer side.
We managed to get our gross margin up 80 basis points from 2023 to 2024. I was already mentioning that we closed nine plants over the course of the last five years, and more are going to come. In 2024, we are very much focusing on getting our overall cost structure down. More than 10,000 people have left the company in order to make a robust cost structure, a robust organization up and ready for all future endeavors to come. Over the last years, the last five years, we improved our R&D best- cost country share by 10 percentage points and reaching in 2024 more than 60%, showing that we are also able to compete with very competitive R&D costs. As I mentioned, we have started already in 2019 the trajectory of our high-cost footprint into best-cost country.
We have built up new plants in Eastern Europe, in Asia, in Mexico. We have by that ensured that our asset base is well- invested and that we have the chance now to significantly profit and leverage the existing asset base. That is why we were able already in 2024 to reduce our spendings to sales by basically 1 percentage point from 5.4% to 4.5%. We are managing our working capital. Also there, we got better to close by close to 1 percentage point. That is how we managed to significantly boost our free cash flow in 2024. Over EUR 1 billion, we got better. That is a strong work, a strong dedication of our management teams, which made that happen. That is not where we are going to stop. As I already said, we need to adjust our manufacturing footprint towards the necessity and the demands of our customers.
We have already announced that we are going to close five additional plants in high-cost country over the course of the next years. We are focusing on improving our gross margin on specific projects. We ensure that our projects are being rightly priced, and we are looking into material costs and ensuring that our products have the right design- to- cost. All that is being supplemented by our plants. By improving the operational excellence in our plants, we are ensuring that we are delivering according to the cost needs of our customers. In 2023, we announced that we are going to significantly reduce our SG&A costs. We said we are going to reduce the cost in 2024 by EUR 200 million and 2025 by an additional EUR 200 million, which added up to 5,500 headcounts which we wanted to take out only on the SG&A side. We delivered.
We managed to be significantly better already in 2024. That is how we are also able to take out an additional 2,000 employees, which we by far major parts have already agreed upon and which is just a matter of execution. Additionally, in February, we announced that we are of the opinion that based on all our excellence and efficiency measures which we were conducting over the last three years in our R&D teams, we are convinced that we are not going to lose innovation power. We are not going to lose execution power in our R&D projects while still being able to take out 3,000 additional R&D engineers because we know we need to get to a single-digit R&D figure in midterm. I talked about CapEx.
We have a well-invested footprint, and we are convinced that we are able to keep the spending figure below 5% to sales also over the course of the next years. We are going to focus additionally on working capital. We have more ideas of how to improve here, of how to ensure that we deliver to our customers. We have sufficient inventory in there. We have a smart inventory approach, but we are still going to be able to reduce also over the course of the next year the money invested into inventories, overdues, or receivables, or payables. What we know, we have a lot ahead of us. As you have seen, we managed already a significant step forward. We have changed the management team in many directions. We do know that value creation is the name of the game. The markets require strong partners.
The market requires partners which are apt and able and agile. That is something which we are going to give to the market. We are going to conduct within basically a one-year time frame a spin-off of a EUR 20 billion company. We are going to be an agile partner of the OEMs, knowing that we need to cope with the future while delivering the right products, while delivering the right systems, while delivering the right services. We have the team in place which is capable to deliver according to this. If we look into our balance sheet, we do see that we are top-notch. We are ahead of many of our competitors. I am going to come to that. If we are then looking into delivery, you see we have a strong foundation with a clear value creation focus. I talked about that.
We are evaluating and reviewing each and every product, each and every project of whether it creates value to our bottom line. We are one of the world leaders in electronic products. We have multiple technology partners which is distinguishing us from others. That's our foundation. We have a local-for-local approach, and we know how to tackle our former high fixed cost base. We have been working on getting our fixed costs down. We have reduced by 10,000 employees, and we do know we need to do more, and we can do more. I've shown to you what we have already initiated and which projects we already communicated. We have a well-invested asset base. We have a footprint which allows us to consolidate even more on the R&D side, but to profit on it in best-cost country production.
The mega factory approach, where we say we concentrate on some production plants in best-cost countries, is something we are going to look at. In summary, we know how to defend and grow our leading position. We are going to continue value-based pricing, improving our gross margin. We know that with our products, with our portfolio, we are in the industry segments which allow superior growth. We are well- prepared, and our organization knows how to execute. Niko presented who I am. We have been working as a team on the trajectory of Continental Automotive over the last 2.5 years intensively in order to be where we are today and setting the base for strong and significant value creation over the course of the next years.
I'm more than happy that Karin Dohm is going to join April 1, our team with a vast experience in capital markets, and she's helping to steer our organization towards an independent and successful company. I talked about the management team. We have a very diverse team where we know we have all necessary experiences and qualifications in place. We are fully lined up. We have incentives fully aligned with shareholder value creation in the top management team. We do know that it's on us that we are committed to deliver. We have all chances to be successful as we are going to have a very strong balance sheet. I talked about that. EUR 1.5 billion cash and cash equivalents. We have already agreed with banks on a EUR 2.5 billion revolving credit facility. We are basically a net cash position.
The ones we are going to take over is the net pension provisions and lease liabilities of basically EUR 2 billion. With this, as you can see here, our net leverage is expected to be significantly better than any competitor. Once we have restructured our organization, we have shown to the outside world and inside world that we are running at the right level, we will also distribute dividends. We target to have an industry following the industry benchmark, which is between 10%-30% per fiscal year. We are very focused on strategy execution. In summary, we do know, and we promise to you that we are a global leader who knows how to drive business. We have top market positions with over 80% of our products where we are now going to profit on.
We do have a very strong balance sheet, and we made cost competitiveness, value creation a part of our management culture. We have decided to measure our portfolio only via value creation. We have reduced our portfolio towards the most and fastest growing segments. We are going to take the spin-off as a catalyst to become even more successful. We are determined to deliver on our strategy. We have a committed leadership team, and we think, and we are going to show to you we have a very attractive upside potential in terms of share price and specifically in terms of profitability. Thank you very much.