For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. Please note that this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on the company's website at deutz.com later today. Your participation in the call implies your consent with this. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mark Schneider. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Valentina, and good morning from Frankfurt. To be more precise, hello from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange this morning. We had already the pleasure to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Deutz as a listed company. A special thank you to you, the analysts and investors who took the time to attend our little event. Our CEO, Sebastian Schulte, and our CFO, Oliver Neu, enjoyed ringing the famous opening bell on the Stock Exchange. Now they are with me in the room for our Full Year 2024 Conference Call. For the first time, we have also journalists participating who had a severing call before. As usual, Sebastian will walk you through the highlights of the performance of the group and the implementation of our strategy and then hand over to Oliver who will provide some more details on our financial figures.
Sebastian will close the presentation with our current market outlook and our guidance. After this introduction, he will be happy to answer your questions. As always, please note our disclaimer, especially regarding forward-looking statements. Having said this, I'm handing over to you, Sebastian. Thank you.
Thank you, Mark, and also good morning from my side here in Frankfurt. Certainly a special moment, special day for us at DEUTZ with our long history behind us. We are not going to talk about a long history. We will talk about the history of 2024, but obviously focus also on the prospectus of 2025 and beyond the presentation. Let me start with highlighting some of the key numbers for the year 2024. The headline on that chart shows it pretty strongly, pretty clearly, except we were affected by an extremely difficult economic environment, in particular in selected markets in Europe, but also in the sectors of construction equipment. We did manage to stay on our strategic operational improvement course. What does it mean in particular? New orders, we closed the year with EUR 1.827 billion order intake. That is a plus 4.5% year-over-year increase.
Let's not put that into the wrong perspective. The fact that order intake increased was mainly driven by, we call it, the consultation effects. What do we mean by that? We took out, as you know, a couple of major and very successful acquisitions: Rolls-Royce Power Systems, Daimler Truck, and the portfolio as well of Blue Star Power Systems. Obviously, why in the moment we took that business on our books, we recorded the order intake in one go. That's why this number is not probably comparable with the year before. Revenue is EUR 1.814 billion. That's down 12%. The reason for that is the aforementioned heavy significance of difficulty in sales, particularly in Europe. We'll see that later in the details, particularly in Europe, particularly with construction and agri.
It was supported by the Service segment, which grew in another year where the Service segment grew, and the acquisitions supported as well. EBIT, we closed the year at 4.2%, that is also down 2.8 percentage points if we compare year-over-year. That is one of the themes, very important. We know we'll see later also a number of engines which were produced and sold. We have closed the year on a very, very low level, particularly in our heritage engine business. In the past, a level like that would have led immediately to negative profitability. We're not happy with the 4.2% in absolute terms. Of course, that's not the issue. We'll talk about future data. Given the circumstances, it was actually quite a successful result.
In the fourth quarter, DEUTZ benefited already substantially from the shifts in the portfolio from the Energy business, but also from the model later on that in the cost reductions. Free cash flow before M&A was positive EUR 30 million, also down 58.8% year-on-year. We also saw a very, very positive development, particularly in the fourth quarter. These were the highlights in terms of KPIs. If I now talk a bit about the revenues by region, that's also what I just said earlier. Coming from 2022, almost EUR 2.9 billion, then had a revenue in 2023 of almost EUR 2.1 billion. Now we're at a level of EUR 1.8 billion. What we see here is particularly the decline in Europe. The red part of the bar shrank significantly.
We also saw the increase in America that is supported by the generally more stable US market in 2024, but also by the acquisition of Blue Star Power Systems. We saw a reduction in China as well as a laid-back without China. On absolute terms, this is still low numbers. What we see and what we box below is that our service business, we managed to grow again. We have surpassed the first time EUR 500 million revenue. When we look ahead, and I will do that later with a bit more flavor, but when we look ahead for 2025, we do see already now positive signals from customers, particularly in agri, construction, but also material handling. We expect incoming orders to pick up force for the first half.
Because as always, when the new orders are down for 12 months and above and longer than that, I mean, then we'll see obviously underinvestment in the end markets and the last two years, whereas we right here also characterized by struggling demand. It's normal that we'll see the positive effects a couple of months into the future as well. Important, all relevant numbers, not relevant numbers, all numbers were in line with the guidance. The guidance we had adjusted in October due to the development in Europe and construction sector. Let me walk you through that briefly. We adjusted the guidance on unit sales on the level of below 150,000 units. We concluded to complete the year with 140,907 units. Revenue, we indicated in our level of EUR 1.8 billion. We closed the year with EUR 1.814 billion. We indicated a margin range between 4% and 5%.
We closed with 4.2%. The free cash flow, we guided that we would end up at least balanced. As I said earlier, we were at EUR 30 million positive. The guidance of October was confirmed, or we are at least confirmed in our results today. There are, as always, when you look back in a year, some important takeaways from 2024. Two things, or two themes, let me call it that. First of all, we are very much on the right track with our Dual+ strategy, a strategy that we developed three years ago and fine-tuned a lot last year. What are the main takeaways from that? Diversification for us is important because it helps us to cushion, to balance the market downturn.
Particularly more stable is the service business, currently the regional business in America, and of course the energy business, where we see a very, very strong demand, not only now, but also in the years to come. Obviously, we did take some important portfolio measures last year. We talked a lot about Blue Star Power Systems, with significant earnings contributions. I will give some details later in the presentation. We also talked a lot about the RRPS transaction. That is the takeover of the Daimler Truck engines for the off-highway business. That supported as well. Almost, I would not say forgotten, but quite a while ago was the rescue of the Torqeedo because that was closed in the first quarter of 2024. That sale really took a lot of burden away from us and released also a significant amount of funds.
That's when we remember we had up to EUR 80 million cash for business, which was over 25% on a tangible basis. I'm very, very happy that we got that deal done in early 2024 because, well, the numbers say that without that, obviously, 2024 would have been significantly more challenging for us both on EBIT as well as the capital side. If we now look at the 4.2%, as I said earlier, this is not our ambition level. Given the circumstance, particularly the top line, sold engines, 142,000, it's fairly solid if you compare to the past. If we look in the long term, the last five, 10, 15 years, 45% was sort of the top that DEUTZ was able to achieve, but only in times when the factories were pretty much fully utilized. With 140,000 units, the factory is far away from utilized.
It is important. That is an important milestone. It also shows that as soon as we get more utilization in the factories, and that is what we expect to the goals of this year, the same effects will continue to be also on the bottom line. The other takeaway is that growth, and that is what we have kicked off quite successfully over the last years, is one thing, but obviously, cost reduction is another thing. We kicked off our so-called Future Fit cost program, where we are targeting sustainable savings of EUR 50 million from 2026 onwards. Oliver will walk you through that a bit more in detail later. Because we want to ensure not only the long-term competitiveness, but also the short-term profitability.
We have also been very clear, and that is nothing which you read in the press releases, when we adjusted the guidance in the autumn of 2024, sometimes you need a bit of momentum also to implement some measures which are not very popular within the company. That is why it is not a coincidence that two days after our guidance adjustment, we said, "Okay, we are going to go introduce one of our platforms in R&D," because this is not very popular. Sometimes we need a bit of a burning platform. Never waste a good crisis. That is also taking away momentum. That is what we did last year as well. As we hear later from Oliver, we are pretty well on track with that. Right. A lot of what I said, it works.
You see here now in indicated numbers, 2023 was a very, very good year for DEUTZ. EUR 144 million just to EBIT, already taking out the torpedo effect because that was already considered at that point as discontinued. You see this huge red block, which is pretty much the volume effect, taking account the reduction in sales from almost 190,000 units to the aforementioned 142,000-143,000 units. Scale effects or lack of that pretty much wiped away the majority of the profit, which is normal in a production-based company. You see the small, but each of them very, very relevant green bars. First of all, optimizing the classic business, pricing, obviously not with the factors that we can use in 2022 and 2023, where we increased prices by 10% on an annual basis. The market was just not prepared for us to do that.
In 2024, we were a lost business otherwise. We still continue doing so. Service, we've managed to grow. And service business, as you know, is extremely profitable. Every year, we get more top line. A significant share of sales remained bottom line. On the portfolio side, Blue Star Power Systems, Daimler Truck portfolio supported significantly. The cost measures, particularly in the fourth quarter, where we kicked that really off. I mean, they supported quite a lot when there were some smaller other effects. Again, that's what brought us to 144% to the 77%. Very, very important. Something that you can influence and something that's difficult to influence. The top line effect was difficult to be possible to influence.
The thing is that how we walk against that and achieve a result which was below 20% by the standards of the years before, actually on the upper end of what we were able to do so. I mentioned earlier that we did realign our dual-cross strategy in autumn 2024. We walked quickly through that. It's nothing new compared to what we presented at the capital markets today. Classic business. We want to grow. We want to get not only top line, but we also want to improve the margins further. On the service side, we want to expand. We are now at about EUR 500 million. The next step is the EUR 600 million that we mentioned already two or three years ago. So far, we were able to also meet sort of every target we set ourselves.
We have to go further from the sort of traditional parts and maintenance business also into taking care of third-party engines. By the way, like the Daimler Truck engine is, I mean, we now market as a DEUTZ engine, but it is not produced by DEUTZ at the moment. It is already sort of third-party business, at least a little bit from the processes of that enablement, also to continue with both parts even further. On the solution side, we used to call the new tech part green. We expand the business, and of course, we formulated a part just to be much wider, including that very, very profitable and growth-oriented energy business. We want to increase our recovery of value chain. Investments, organic, but also inorganic, and the Blue Star Power Systems showed very, very successful first stuff.
Let me now touch a bit on the progress we did with Classic. First of all, the completion of the takeover of the Daimler Truck business. It is very important when you take over a business. Obviously, the assumption is it all works smooth and you do not lose any business. We can say that more than 90% of the customers also stayed with us, particularly the lead ones, the ones you show here. You see on the bottom ones are CLAAS L. These are the three largest customers, extremely big, extremely relevant, extremely profitable customers for us. At least CLAAS L are also providing business for cross-selling for other engines, which are not coming from the Daimler Truck portfolio. The signing of the deal brought to place. About nine months later, we closed the deal.
It was a challenging process, but we have a lot done. We are expecting a revenue of more than EUR 250 million with very attractive margins. The margin of that business is significantly above the margin of the sort of traditional DEUTZ produce engine business. Obviously, from a strategic marketing point of view, we were able to expand our engine portfolio, particularly in the field of medium-duty and heavy-duty engines. That was very, very important for us because, I mean, a lot of the growth of the last 10, 15 years, we achieved with smaller engines sub-4 liter, which is good, particularly in the U.S., obviously, taking into consideration the future of diesel engine even in off-highway, it is very, very important to have offerings in the medium-duty and heavy-duty because that is where most technology will remain around for much longer time.
That's this business had an immediate effect. A bit more midterm is the partnership with TAFE, the Indian company. We already signed a contract of cooperation with TAFE mid-last year. That TAFE will produce DEUTZ engines under license from 2027 onwards. The topic here about sub-4 liter engines, those smaller ones. There's going to be a dedicated production line for those engines in Alwar, India. The concept is, as most of you know, that we'll produce up to 30,000 engines there, which are used in one block by TAFE themselves for their tractors. On the other hand, we will also market these engines in markets which are more price-sensitive, where the cost position of the load is not really compatible.
That is why that is the important sort of structure of that deal because we want to have a structure in place unlike the one that previous management implemented in China, where our partner is not the only customer. It is important that we have both parties have to get benefits of going to the party. That was for us, for me in particular, a basic assumption. Otherwise, we would not have done that. Otherwise, you understand which between the partner and the customer. Here we avoided that before. Very good progress in the classic segment. In service, as I said, we managed to continue our growth path from the 450, 484 last. The year before last, we had 512 last year. It was a 7% aggregate that was growing faster than market rate.
We're growing pretty much in absolute terms in all of our regions. You see the regional split remains more or less unchanged. In America, we just kicked off an additional growth project with our DEUTZ Power Centers. The effects we'll see in 2025, and particularly in 2026 and beyond. Some of the highlights of the service growth was further acquisitions. We integrated DEUTZ Nordic, so our long-term leader, used to be called Diesel Motor Nordic, is now acting under the name DEUTZ Nordic. We also integrated our South American, Peru, and Chile business, Mauricio Hochschild. We did acquire BTH Fast, a long-term DEUTZ dealer in Poland. We started integrating the service activities on the Daimler Truck engines. We expect for this year, a top line of about EUR 30 million. Last year, the top line was only about EUR 5 million.
The reason was that the parts we transferred a little later in the engine business just to reduce complexity in that acquisition. Here we will see quite a significant boost of net 25% in 2024 to 2025. Let me highlight a little bit how and why we are setting up or we have set up this new segment, this new unit called Solutions. Because one thing is very important. I mean, with the engine, particularly in power generation, we are managing or developing, producing, managing probably the most complex product in value chain. But we did analyze that although what is quite managing the most complex product, you do not get the largest share of the profitability in that value chain because that is a share which is then received by others. We said, well, power generation is super important.
As you know, the demand will double in the next 10 years. Obviously, there is no point in doubling the business if you do not get the bottom line for that. We said we need to integrate further forward here. Also, for them, closer to the customers and the energy business, as I said, less difficult to sustainably profitably. Just as a side note, if you look at other sort of engine companies much larger than us, that means probably in the incumbents or also Rolls-Royce Power Systems. If you look where they grew in the last year or years and where they have grown, particularly in terms of profitability, it is in large engines and it is in power generation, right? It does not surprise us at all. We see the same thing in our business.
We just built up a little later than that, but we're picking up quite significantly now. Green, focusing more on what the customer actually wants. We're very positive that throughout the year, we'll be able to announce first significant businesses rather than only the prototypes. Nothing to say today, but certainly very, very positive about the future. We want to continue to expand our energy business, the energy business to receive what we achieved, the revenue of more than EUR 500 million by 2030. We're accounting here for 25% or a little bit more, EUR 200 million. There is growth ahead, including also for that many activities. With that solutions business, obviously, this is the process right now.
We'll always reserve the right of the optionality if we identify other businesses or other lines which fit in what we can, that we then attach that on that part as well. New technology, I mean, a little what happened in 2024. First of all, we focused on the technology point of view. We divested Tokyo, reducing the losses, like I mentioned earlier. We sorted our activities, and we've gotten out a compatible range of new products in particular. That includes retrofits. That's an important thing for the next five, six, seven, maybe ten years. Retrofitting, in particular, of large-scale applications is going to be more than a bridging way to bring climate neutrality to these sort of complex machines. It also includes hybrid systems, range extenders, and so on and so forth. We do have moving out from E to hydrogen.
We do have a market-ready engine, but the market is still very, very reluctant to act. We also said, as long as the market's not picking up, we'll keep what we have, but we do not significantly invest for it. I mean, we keep the engines. We saw it also present here in Frankfurt. It's all the training for our support, a hydrogen engine as a showcase. We're not going to develop a new one unless there's market demand. We could otherwise develop our work independent of what the market wants. We did set up our new tech unit as an independent unit so that the teams have more freedom and don't get slowed down by the long-established, well-functioning processes for our classic business. Our CEO, Bert van Hasselt, who some of you will have met at our capital market day.
Now we're filling up quite a decent sales pipeline. I mean, this year, the sales pipeline is already at EUR 15 million. It's still a low number compared to the physical business. There are a few very, very promising projects with OEMs, also niche applications such as flexible and such as cargo model, where with a bit of fitting to the name of that room here, we'll see a pickup to a larger scale in the future. I have talked already about the expectations for 2025. Very excited about that now, going forward with the new setup. Here we may be now. What we also did last year is setting up the demonstration plant. Actually, we opened it this year, but we set it up last year in Spain. We inaugurated here a hydrogen genset with a new ecosystem.
You see that on that picture on the bottom right. You see the genset with DEUTZ Hydrogen Engines in that. Behind that is an electric reservoir storage. That plant is our component plant in Spain. We have a full photovoltaic facility there. There is a subject of green energy. We produce with that electric reserve, we produce green hydrogen, store it, and put it back to electricity with our genset at night or when on the rare days when Spain has no sun. That is a showcase, as I said, that is a standalone solution, which really shows how hydrogen can be used. It is, at this point in time, nothing for full scalability, but it shows what you can do with that. We receive a lot of interest of customers and partners. Interestingly enough, I was there myself inaugurating that plant.
There are so many companies who do not only want to talk about hydrogen, but then also want to talk about the offering we have for battery electric technology. It is very important to be present in that market as well. Moving on to energy. We entered the energy business with our reacquisition in Blue Star Power Systems. Just to keep in mind, what is the reason for that? The infrastructure is terrible in many countries, particularly the U.S.
The weather events will increase energy transition towards renewables. It will make the supply much, much more unstable. It is important that we benefit as a company from that. We acquired Blue Star Power Systems. Now we are a system provider there. That is only the first step. We are now investigating further growth within and outside the U.S., taking it to a point where we have a Morocco setup, but also production facilities in China.
There is a lot to come in the future. In terms of numbers, and that's obviously very important, Blue Star Power Systems so far has been really a success case. The history here, we only show a top line. Bottom line is pretty impressive. So impressive that we don't want to put the numbers on that track. What we expected initially at this M&A project, we expected the top line in 2024, a little above EUR 100 million company. Those from 2020 with almost EUR 150 million revenue. Only four months of that were in our books. We expect this year to be even more successful than 2024. The growth, which looks incredible and is incredible, is mainly driven by also the microgrids, which are being installed in the United States.
There are a couple of, now a couple of last year was only one, but now a second large supermarket chain has joined the customer portfolio. We stand by power, and that works with supermarket networks, with hospitals, with data centers, and so on and so forth. We do expect 2024 also growth. I mean, we do not expect to double in 2024, but we do expect stable growth. We also, that is probably one of the questions which may come up later when they are carrots, we will also pass this on to the customers as we and most of our competitors are acting here in the same way. With that, the first 25 minutes or so, I would pause and hand over to Oliver, who goes into more details on the numbers.
Thank you, Sebastian.
Also, from the side, all welcome to the Benjamin Ludwig Insights on our 2024 financial performance. Let me start to recap a bit on the capital markets play, which we had in October 2024. We basically present our vision of doubling the size of the group until the end of the decade. I mentioned at that point in time that besides financing our growth, my contribution will also be ensuring execution and performance. That is exactly what we do with our Future Fit cost program, which we see here on the next slide. Just to recap, we launched in October, as Sebastian mentioned, the cost reduction program besides the short-term cost. This event led to a new event last year. We launched a structural cost reduction program. We gave it a name. We called it Future Fit.
We divided the areas of savings in five building blocks, especially on the classic R&D side, where emission regulation changes, where we see a significant potential of reducing headcount. On the index side, Taylor mainly made investments towards future proof areas. On the regional side, supply chain side and organizational setup, basically going to be an organization that reducing structural loss. We are well on track there. We identified even more than EUR 50 million in terms of savings. We want to achieve EUR 20 million fully PM manufactured, at least EUR 20 million this year. We are well on track and having the full EUR 50 million bottom line impact in 2026. Measures are defined. They are in good degree of implementation as a structured program, so running pretty well.
We received a lot of questions about potential one-time costs on that program, especially as a good portion of that is related to the reduction of up to 300 headcounts. From a current perspective, we are seeing somewhere EUR 20 million-EUR 30 million as one-time effect, mainly for severance payments, which we would classify as exceptional item and are likely moving to the Q1 figures. Let's have a look at the 2024 financial figures in a bit more detail. We saw new orders basically increasing by 4.4% to EUR 1.827 billion. This is driven, as you heard initially, by the M&A effects. Roughly EUR 300 million out of that increase is coming due to the acquisitions of Blue Star Power Systems and the former Rolls-Royce Power Systems business. Besides that, adjusted for that, the M&A would be in a range of 15%-70% lower on a comparative basis.
In terms of unit sales, we went down 23.6% to almost 143,000 units. On the revenue side, we've decreased by 12%. The decrease on the revenue side is significantly lower than the decrease in the unit size. That basically also showing that we are well on track in making our business more resilient. Service growth, for example, we've seen the last year. It's not affected, not reflected in the unit sales, but it stabilized and reduced the revenue. Of course, also the new acquisitions, they come into a different pricing structure. That is also one of the reasons why we are not giving specific guidance on the units going forward, but rather focusing on the revenue side that's getting more and more important in our strategic initiatives.
Having a bit more look on the revenue, on the left-hand side, you can see the revenue breakdown by application segment in the normal format. On the right-hand side, the revenue breakdown by region. We see basically on the application segment that service business was growing by 5.7% to almost EUR 512 million. For the first time in the history of DEUTZ, we passed through the border of EUR 500 million . On the pure revenue side, there was a slight decline, 2.3%, mainly due to the fact that our American business is running quite stable. On the machinery, our agricultural machinery and construction equipment saw the biggest declines. That is mainly driven by Europe. On the stationary equipment, it had a shorter decline.
The main idea that Blue Star Power Systems, mainly part of stationary equipment, gensets, of course, is shown here in the stationary equipment, is roughly EUR 60-65 million in terms of revenue. Besides that, the reduction would have been greater. The same as in our construction equipment side and agriculture, that's mainly where the Rolls-Royce Power Systems business is key in. On the revenue side by region, mainly reductions here in Europe and Germany, 13%. There is a stabilizing effect also on new acquisitions we did, especially in the Rolls-Royce business speaking in here. In America, seeing an increase, way more stable market, but of course also the Blue Star Power Systems effects. Coming to the bottom line on the EBIT before exceptional items, we saw a decline. Yes, we saw that earlier to almost EUR 77 million, but I would consider it as a solid margin.
A margin level which in the past we have only seen very, very high sales situations. It is a solid margin and difficulty to come in by nothing. We are happy and so ambition to the future. In that economic environment, it is certainly a proof point that we are well on track with our strategic transformation. On the net income side, we ended up at EUR 41.8 million, including the discontinued operations. On the net income side here, that is a decline from EUR 82 million the year before. In terms of earnings per share for the entire group, including the discontinued operations, we ended up at EUR 0.39 per share, coming from EUR 0.60 per share. Some words on further relevant KPIs. R&D spending in absolute terms slightly decreased, and management terms slightly increased at a ratio of 5.1% of sales.
CapEx went down to EUR 102.4 million, so 12% decline. Main items were still CapEx investment in the new line for 4-8 meter engines in Cologne, which is affecting that, but also some high-tenor assets coming also from acquisitions. On the working capital side, we saw a slight increase. It is EUR 383 million. That is 21.1% of our sales. Here we need to keep in mind that we added working capital with the M&A acquisitions. Basically, operationally, we were able to compensate that fully. The second aspect is that the sales figures, of course, are not reflecting full 12 months of sales of the M&A acquisitions. We expected that ratio to improve, especially as the newly acquired business is less working capital intensive than our original. Talking about cash flow and net debt situation, the capital operating activities reduced to EUR 110 million.
That's mainly direct result of the operational performance of the top line and the implications of the bottom line. On the free cash flow side, we see here the free cash flow on the group level. So including M&A activities and dislocated operations. Also we see that on the free cash flow before M&A for continued operations. That is a relevant figure also for our guidance. We were able to achieve the EUR 30 million. That is our surprising positive figure there. Yeah, bridging the two figures, basically we need to keep in mind that we invested roughly EUR 180 million-EUR 183 million in M&A acquisitions and on the other hand, we got EUR 75 million from the sale of Tokyo. That's how we recall the bridged numbers. In terms of net debt, we saw an increase.
That increase is mainly driven by the cash out for the M&A activities, which I mentioned earlier. The compensating effect was the cash gain from the capital increase that we collected roughly EUR 70 million at the middle of last year. Talking about balance sheet, equity ratio remains very solid. The increase in the total assets is mainly driven by the acquisitions we did. Equity ratio at 50.4%, which gives us room for further debt financing if required. Financial leverage, we find that's net debt divided by EBITDA, also including the leasing, went up slightly to 1.3. I think that is completely in line with what you also mentioned as target levels at the capital markets level, which is increasing operational stability, which is increasing resilience and obviously can afford higher leverage.
Of course, this is also driven by the fact that the EBITDA figure from the acquisition is not in for a 12-month period. That is, of course, also purely technically driving the leverage ratio here. Dividend announced at the capital markets day that our dividend policy is a stable or increasing dividend in absolute terms on a EUR per share basis compared to the year before. That is exactly what we will propose also to the general meeting in May. All the management and Supervisory Board are proposing a dividend payment of EUR 0.17 per share. Considering that we have almost 139 million shares outstanding, that is some rare cash effect of EUR 23.4 million in terms of payout. Let me close with one more technical slide, just to highlight that again, since it is important for the understanding of the figures mainly from Q1 onwards.
As we announced on the capital market day, we are changing our segment reporting. We will, going forward starting with the one figures, have two reporting segments. One is the segment of DEUTZ Engines and Services. This is covering the classic DEUTZ business, as you see in our new class category, and also the service business related to that, which is the vast majority. On the other hand, we are bundling our energy business. Blue Star also bundling DEUTZ, but also our new technology business, the former green business, in a second segment called DEUTZ Solutions. It is also included in the companies and minor amounts of services, which we attribute that business. With that, I like to hand over to Sebastian.
Thank you, Oliver, for the numbers and the details on the structure.
Let me give a bit of an outline on what we see, what we expect in 2025. Let me start with the global market assessment before we then translate it to what it means for us. When we look at the global market trends, or we see the outlook, they all say pretty much the same thing. There is a cautious recovery for the second half year predicted. That is supported by the planned investments and also by this improved market sentiment. That is just the global outlook. Obviously, the things that happen in individual countries, like the implications or potential implications on the German spending program, which are currently negotiated. I believe that is not totally factored into that because they still need to understand better what it actually means and when particularly spending programs translate into spending.
Initiated spending or indicated spending is one thing, but whether it's needed to business has still not factored into that. If you look at the regions, Europe and Germany are currently weak growth, but as said, first signs of recovery from the second half of 2025 and onwards of 2024 here. In the United States, in principle, stable growth. PMIs slightly improved. However, a bit of uncertainty in the country also due to the tariffs. What does it mean to the domestic market in the US? And China, we again expect stable stabilization in 2025. I mean, just before I'll probably go more to the details on our guidance, but particularly on our joint venture, for example, with SANY, I mean, the numbers increase, but still on a low level. But it's getting a little better, frankly, that's what we can say already.
If you look at the segments, you see on the right part of the chart, agricultural, the CEMA Business Climate Index shows now showed the strongest increase since the start of the recession. For the fourth time in a row, it's got slightly more positive. That's an early indicator. Typically, it takes four, five, six months from early indicators improving into what we think. At least it's the fourth time in a row that we see improvement here. Construction equipment are currently, in terms of what I take, and sales stable on previous years level. There are first signs of recovery. Some of our key customers are indicating in the still informal discussions with our sales team that they expect some of the growth, pickup of demand in the second quarter already.
There have been players expressing to us already their concerns of engines potentially becoming a bottleneck component in the second half of the year. Our response is always, when you're concerned, the easiest way is to place an order. That's not happened yet. I believe these are the conversations which start, which begin to indicate that things are happening. Material handling, I mean, we are all talking about obviously particularly in Asia, electrification trend continues strongly. On the other hand, that's particularly relevant for the United States. These are remains extremely relevant. Bear in mind, material handling for us is mainly through customers, tariffs, and JLG, very dominant in the US, where electrification is currently not the overarching trend to say very carefully. Here is also one of the concerns for customers' factor of bottlenecks for the second half of the year.
We see increasing plant orders, also in the United States. We're trying to ship engines a little earlier than needed in order to mitigate potential tariff implications. That's a good thing. Customers pre-order. We don't talk about top tens or thousands of engines, rather large hundreds. Power generation, we heard it, I think from myself earlier, but also from Oliver right now. Regardless, what's the performance now from small to mid to large power generators? The demand is high. This is actually booked out. The large ones, Cummins, Caterpillar, Rolls-Royce, they are booked out for three years. We see that in our Blue Star business as well. The order intake is extremely solid. There's also no sign of selling out in that market across the year for 2025. It's very, very robust. That is for DEUTZ. We do expect the positive development throughout 2025.
Not a huge one, but we do expect the positive development, particularly in the second half of the year. That's the top line. On the bottom line, Oliver talked earlier about the cost program. We expect EUR 20 million from the Future Fit cost program already. P&L effective this year. We said EUR 50 million is for 2026, but EUR 20 million, hopefully a little more. We expect to support the bottom line already this year. There will be a couple of one-off program costs particularly for the layoffs in the R&D department. That piece one we will very transparently classify as exceptional items. We do also expect continuous development of the portfolio, very much focusing on service as well as power generation. What does it mean in numbers? Revenue on the group level, we expect currently a range between EUR 2.1 billion and EUR 2.3 billion.
Therefore, as strongest contributor, the Engines and Services segment, as I said, as you just told earlier, with EUR 2.0 billion-EUR 2.2 billion, and EUR 150 million-EUR 200 million in the DEUTZ Solutions segment, out of which predominantly the engine business is contributing because we think it's just ramping up. EBIT margin on group level, we expect an improvement to around 5.0-6.0%. In DEUTZ Engines and Services, a little above 6-7%. Solutions as a segment at between minus 10% and very even. However, here within solution, the margin quality is very, very different. So the energy business will contribute a margin of between 10%-13% to that range. In free cash flow, before M&A, we expect mid double digit million-euro amount for 2025.
With that guidance of 2025, we do confirm the midterm targets for 2028 and also the ambition levels for 2030, as indicated in the capital market day. We expect particularly strong growth at solutions at 30% CAGR, more than EUR 500 million, as shown earlier, revenue at the very end of that horizon from energy. That will drive those supply for both organically but also via M&As. About EUR 300 million for new tech. Service will grow in line with DEUTZ overall and will contribute or continue to contribute to quarter of the top line. When you look at the bottom line, disproportionately high EBIT contribution. That is very clear. We want to keep the high margin quality of service and grow the top line on that. It is extremely important to be able to grow this growth to happen in order to support profitability.
Classic expect to grow in absolute terms , but overall, the relative contribution will increase. If we look at that altogether in our models, the sales growth, the further development of the business model, we expect that at the end of that horizon, a 10% margin at 2030, and we see on the way to there a substantial development. Now looking into the specific, really the 2028 midterm targets, pretty much halfway on that journey, revenue is only expected to range between EUR 3.2 billion-EUR 3.4 billion. We want to get the profitability level to 8-9%. Dividend per share, while Oliver said earlier, continuing here, sort of the journey we've initiated, upward trajectory in a year like 2024, where we do not exceed the previous year. We want to be able to remain stable.
If we increase top and bottom line, of course, we also want to continue to increase the dividends in order to have our shareholders participate in the success of the business. Briefly summary it up again before then coming to the Q&As. Looking back at 2024, I mean, solid performance. I think we can really say that. It's important for us to say that because if you just look at the numbers, it's all right. Top line reduced, bottom line reduced. Let's bear in mind that the segments, the end of the end market segments, Europe, construction, agriculture was down 30+%. Really was down 30+%. In the past, that would have been, we would have lost money now. This is why I'm saying solid performance, booked a little 1.0, supported by the strategic initiatives.
Unit sales are set down 23%, revenue down 12%. Here we see already, now revenue down, but obviously not as down as the unit sales because we acted against that trend within growth and service and energy in particular. EBIT adjusted just shy of EUR 80 million, margin of 4.2%, free cash flow, supported by a strong final quarter dividend of EUR 0.17. Portfolio development took heed to that loss maker acquisition of profit maker Blue Star Power Systems, smaller acquisitions, BKH, MAS, HJS, which are heavily being talked about right now. Of course, that's not for the numbers, but we celebrate 160 years and that was something to increase the team spirit of company further. That will be our presentation.
I just invite everyone who's keen to see our engines, I wouldn't say in action, but at least exhibited at the Bauma on our investors day on April 8th. Details to be aligned with the communication with the regulation team. That'll be from us for our 2024 results. Thank you.
`Thank you, Sebastian. Thank you, Oliver. Due to the live conditions at the stock exchange, we generate sort of surrounding noise. I'm sorry for that. I hope you got everything important. Now we have 10 minutes left for your questions. Valentina, giving back to you and moderating the question round.
We will now begin the question.
Of course, Corgi is with us in the room, but please, Valentina.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone.
You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume from the webcam while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from Stefan Augustin from Warburg. Please go ahead.
`Yes, hello. I have a couple of questions. The first would be actually, can you hear me quite well?
Yes, we can hear you anyway.
`Thank you. As the line is a little bit bad, I will phrase the questions more or less in yes or no questions so I can get the answer a bit more easy. The first one is a clarification.
You mentioned that the service business from the Rolls-Royce Power Systems acquisition was around EUR 5 million in 2024, and you expect around EUR 30 million for 2025 on the longer consolidation period. Is that correct?
That is correct. The reason why it's only five is that the parts which form an important contribution of that business were transferred early beginning of December and some early beginning of January from the Rolls-Royce Power Systems warehouses to the DEUTZ warehouses because here the implementation took a little longer. Your understanding is correct.
Great. With respect to the outlook, I got that, let's say, effects from the German package, whatever it takes, is more or less not really in the numbers. It is based on a global perspective that there should be a replacement cycle coming in by the second half. Is that correct?
That's also correct.
I mean, the way we forecast our sales, our top line is, I mean, it's a principle bottom up that our sales guys speak to the customers or the purchasing guys of the customers on a regular basis, at least monthly, and assemble all the market data. I aggregate that, and then we've got a view on the next year. What we've implemented in our guidance is pretty much the result of that process. Obviously, there's always a time delay. If there's, like you just mentioned, the program from the German government or in previous years, like the IRA in the U.S., I mean, the first thing is obviously the program is being packaged.
It'll take time until, in this case, let's say in the case of construction equipment, until projects are being kicked off, are being awarded to construction companies, construction companies then need to buy or rent or whatever equipment, and then equipment makers need to get components. I'm just exaggerating a little bit, but that's obviously a chain. It takes time until the effects of that sort of per chain arrive via the normal process, via the purchaser of the OEMs to the sales guys of us. That's why we do not incorporate that into the bottom-up planning. Obviously, we include that into the sentiment. You won't see that yet. With a bit of hope, we can improve our outlook throughout the year, but at the moment, that's what we have.
Okay. Understood. A question here maybe.
When you have a look at, or you probably expect something of your revenue or your installed base to be affected by such a program in Germany. As I think that a lot of the, let's say, installed engines in the construction part are also, let's say, deployed around Central Europe, I would assume this can be a quite significant effect if it kicks in. Is that correct from your point of view?
Yes. If it kicks in, once it kicks in, we expect it to certainly have a significant effect. I mean, that's the thing in this market. When it kicks off, it kicks off really, right? I mean, we went through that last time in 2021, where we came from nothing, and suddenly we were unable to produce because the whole supply chain is broken.
We were suddenly from being completely underutilized to having demand, which is two times as much as what we can do. Yes, it can be. We also, Stefan, want to be sort of serious in what we say. We want to provide numbers which we can currently support with solid information. We do not want to sell pure hope and speculation because that would be not serious.
Okay. Great. When it comes to the forecasts for the solutions part, I understood roughly that Blue Star Power Systems made in 2024 something like EUR 130 million in sales. You expect the solutions part to be able to have something like EUR 15 million in 2025. Then there would be DEUTZ Magi on top to eventually come out with the forecast for the EUR 150 million-EUR 250 million.
Does the upper end include possible acquisitions, or is that a projection of how good the energy business actually could run?
I think it's actually a projection of how good the energy business could run. Blue Star, you mentioned the 2024 figures of pure contribution to the DEUTZ revenue was somewhere mid of EUR 60 million-EUR 65 million, and it was only part of the group from August onwards. We see it's running solid. Growth is intact, as we heard earlier. And Magideutz is somewhere like quadrant EUR 25 million-EUR 30 million in the equation. As I've said, it's a solid growth we expect to continue. On top of that, of course, we are looking into potential M&A activities, screening the market to widen our global footprint. The EUR 200 million at the upper end does not include M&A. Exactly. Exactly.
Okay. Good. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Stefan. And Corgi, you're the first already. Do you have any question being here in the room?
M`y first question is in fact a follow-up on the question of Stefan that I think is quite spot on. You mentioned a couple of times that you are seeing and you are having conversations with your customers that they are worried about this potential bottleneck for the second part of the year. These conversations were happening before the Bazooka was announced. Obviously, this hype of this environment started to boom. I mean, and now they are even getting more common, these conversations. How you can?
The conversations started indeed before the Bazooka.
I don't like the name, but before the Bazooka was announced, what we expect to be quite a very good platform for these conversations will be the Bauma because, I mean, that's in three weeks, two weeks, three weeks. Beginning of April. Beginning of April, we will meet all of the relevant customers in the construction segment in Munich at the Bauma. My calendar there for three days is a really full meeting with pretty much the CEOs and the head purchasing guys of all our customers. Obviously, that will be really important to get more of that sentiment because they will need, I mean, what we hear from conversations now on the Bazooka is, at the moment, we hear about the huge hundreds of billion EUR budgets. First of all, the government needs to be formed.
Details need to be worked out. As I said earlier, it's a chain, right? Currently, I think everyone in that chain is investigating. There are two sort of ways of dealing with that. One way is the one we decided very, very actively to pursue, that we said we'd rather analyze first and indicate to investors when we know what's in for us. There are others who just bluntly say, "Oh yeah, there's going to be this is going to be huge. The effect's going to be." We don't worry about that.
You being here, I would say we continue the conversation in a moment, staying here at the stock exchange. We have another question. That's Lazar Backovic from the Handelsblatt. Valentina, is that right?
Yes. I'm opening the line.
Thank you.
Please go ahead.
Hi. Can you hear me?
This is Lazar.
Yes, we do.
Great. Thank you. I just wanted to ask you on your expansion on the defense sector. You said several times that you plan an expansion of your presence in the business. What are your revenue expectations for this segment when it comes to the end of the decade? Maybe can you also comment on the rumors surrounding the possible acquisition of TK M S?
The rumors, we will not comment. Other than that, also press reports, I think, are very clear and indicate that the support is going to spin off that business as part of a believed minority spin. I think the Handelsblatt did write on that very, very recently. For us, defense is a very important and interesting market. We are currently, we have a project team in place for quite some weeks already now.
We've got a large list of opportunities in all, not all, but in very, very many relevant countries around engines, around power packs, around retrofits, around repowering, particularly in the field of, let's say, smaller and medium-sized military vehicles. Not large battle tanks because for large battle tanks, we do not have an engine or a turbo. For everything below the large battle tanks, I mean, our understanding is very clear that engines we produce for heavy use and construction equipment and under extreme conditions, they work very much on the battlefield as well. Even our new tech, even our new tech products, which were designed to produce CO2-free or to provide CO2-free drive systems, I mean, they are interesting for defense applications, not for the CO2-freeness, but for the avoidance of noise, right? It's almost like a side effect.
That was one of the ideas in defense, is obviously to move silently and quickly to the front. You may want to shy away quite quickly. That is why Hybrid Solutions, which we have in our portfolio, can become quite interesting. Very specifically on the expectations on numbers for this year, we see potential for revenue in a sort of middle double-digit million EUR area. We do expect that potential to grow also significantly in the next years. We do not provide yet a specific outlook on that. The reason for that is that, as I said earlier, when you sell sort of new engines into platforms the way I just mentioned, it always takes a bit of time to qualify and to start production.
Nothing like that, nothing will have an immediate effect because we need to win the business first on the other hand. In terms of repowering and MRO and other sort of going into what's in the field right now, that can have an immediate effect. It is a combination of both. Similar to what I said earlier to Augustin's question, we will announce specifics when we can. When it comes to sort of winning new projects, these projects are also subject to even higher degree of confidentiality than the construction equipment and the agricultural equipment. That is why in all the early leads, all the leads we are currently following, we are subject to quite strict confidentiality.
Thank you. There does not seem to be another question, at least in our virtual round. We still have the opportunity for some conversation here at the stock exchange.
I would like to close the conference call. Thank you once again. Sorry for the conditions due to our special anniversary here. If you have any further questions, be it journalists, please reach out to the PR team, or be it investors or analysts, please do reach out to our investor relations team. With that, I would like to thank everyone here in Frankfurt for joining us, everyone on the Chorus Call. Valentina, for your moderation, and have a successful day. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.