Also from my side, warm welcome. It's great to have you all here. Last time we did a Capital Market Day was in Stockstadt, near Darmstadt. I think it's much cooler to do that here because that's our main facility. Before really going into the first part of the presentation, I would like to just start here with a lot of pride, actually, because when we look back at the last three years, we can see that we achieved quite some track record. Starting from 2020, where obviously due to the COVID situation, the main top line was down. We produced very few engines, and second half of the year was a big struggle with -6% margin, EUR -75 million EBIT.
So, that was a really, really tough year. But then we dug ourselves out of that dark, so to speak, and particular, from 2021 to 2022, we doubled the margin. We brought the top line up to EUR 2 billion revenue in 2022. And let's also look at the first half year of 2023 now. Well, the top line was more than EUR 1 billion, and margin was more than 6%. So we can proudly say that is actually the best performance DEUTZ has delivered in the last 10-15 years. But obviously, past is one thing, present and future is something else, so we'll talk much more about the present and the future than about the past.
But I think that's a good starting point in today's Capital Market Day. And very important for us as well, we wanted to gain or maybe saying regain confidence on the capital market, and I think we've shown that we did that. We delivered our guidance in 2021. We met, we met the promises, we delivered the guidance we gave in 2022, and we're actually very optimistic that we're also delivering and meeting the guidance we gave for the current fiscal year. So that should be a starting point to give you, but us, all of us together, confidence that we are on the right track.
Where we're here now is the innovation center of DEUTZ, and that's why I think it's a great thing to build sort of the bridge between the present or the past, the present, and the future. Because just next door here, and you see that here on that grayish, white, grayish, large building, that's where our assembly lines are located, where we produce pretty much 80% of our engines on an annual basis, and Petra will talk about operations later. Just next door is the core of our operations, not only in Germany, but worldwide. Here, this is the innovation center. That's a fairly recent addition, and a lot of fresh ideas have been developed here. Our teams, particularly our green teams, are meeting here often discussing, developing ideas to...
And that's why it shows like innovation and, the present is very close to each other, and I think that's great that we'll have this meeting here, this Capital Market Day today in our innovation center. Again, I've said we're not going to talk too much about the past. We're gonna talk more about the future, but one thing we would like to mention at the very beginning, and that's about the outlook for the current year. Because we also sensed that after we informed on the half-year result, there was a little bit of disappointment by, by the investors, a little bit of a level of cautiousness on what is the outlook for the second half of the year, in particular, going into 2024. And that's why we want to give some, some more detail on the order intake development.
It's a very busy page here, and I'm not gonna go through all the details, but one important aspect, I mean, we look at our business in three regions, EMEA, Americas, and Asia, and then we look at across the application fields, agri, construction, material handling, and stationary equipment. And if you look at EMEA, it's a strong growth over the last 12 months. And there was, particularly in construction equipment, in Q4 2022, a bit of a peak in order intake. And that was. And Markus will later talk about that also.
That was particular due to our fixed volume program, where we actually offered our customers to pre-secure business for this year, in particular for sub-4 liter, because in sub-4 liter, the demand was exceeding supply strongly, and that led to construction companies in Europe pre-ordering, and that's where we have that peak in Q4, and then Q1, Q2 is still on a very high level, but obviously not meeting that peak in that peak of Q4. So let's say quarter-over-quarter, we saw some down, but in the general trend, it's actually very healthy. And also the outlook for the second half of 2023 in construction equipment is on the same level, on the same very high level. America is a similar picture. Also, that fixed volume program was a little later secured, a particular material handling.
In the U.S., we have the strongest customers in the material handling, Terex, JLG, and others. So yeah, here you see the strong impact of Q1 2023, and here we see actually the outlook for the second half is extremely healthy as well. Different picture for Asia, very clearly speaking. Yeah, China, I mean, after the country opened, it pretty much went down very quickly to, I wouldn't say a standstill, but a very, very low level. And that's why we are the outlook for China, for Asia, but China is our dominant country in Asia, is fairly negative.
We don't see that negative for the group performance, because also fairly speaking or honestly speaking, profitability level in China is the lowest of all the regions, so it won't hit our P&L negatively. Sometimes it might, it even does hit our P&L positively if we have less business there, but that's obviously something we want to change going forward. But it was important for us to shine some light on the current level of the order intake. Second picture on that. To bring that all into perspective, also with a sort of pre-COVID situation. You know, if you look at 2018 and 2019, we had high level of business to more than 200,000 units sold in 2018, 190,000 in 2019.
You see these numbers represent here the order backlog. The three colors represent, again, the regions, EMEA, Americas, and Asia. And if we then obviously, we took out COVID because the numbers just don't make sense because everything collapsed. But if you then look at 2021, 2022, and 2023, you see how, particularly with the Americas and Asia, the order backlog grew significantly, by a factor of four, five, six. And that was mainly due to the fact that obviously, supply chain chaos was so large that customers also tended to over-order in order to secure that they get some deliveries. And if you look at now, 2022, 2023, well, 2022, we closed with 181,000 units sold. Now, this year, we're going on our guidance, 195.
If you look, the order backlog is not twice as large, but almost twice as large, particularly driven by the much, much bigger bars in Asia and in Americas. Now this is normalizing, so that's a good thing. The whole thing is normalizing. You see EMEA are still on the level we had pre-COVID, but the customer behavior starts to normalize, and obviously that leads to a perceptibly downward trend in order intake. But if you look at the absolute level, we're actually seeing rather stabilization than some negative impact. That was important for us to explain that openly here, because it gives us, and thus it hopefully gives you also the confidence that we are not approaching here a downturn, but rather a stabilization.
Right, but I said, let's rather talk about the future than talk about the past. Our value proposition going forward, we, as a management team, together with our teams, clearly defined that. We defined our ambition. We want to become a top three independent engine producer by 2030, with off-highway competency, as we are today, but also expanding where possible to on-highway. Today, we're number four or five, depending on how you count. We clearly said we wanna become entirely, entirely climate neutral by 2050. We need to transform our portfolio and help also our customers transforming their portfolio. I'll speak a lot about that later. We see this from a financial point of view as a, as a cross-financing play, right?
Because we are very strong, and we have become much stronger over the last years in the whole diesel engine business, including also, the Service business. We'll spend, and Markus also later, some time on that. And with that stronger performance in the Classic business as well as in diesel, we're gonna fund, and finance the transformation. When we grow, we wanna grow profitably, very profitably, particularly on Classic and on Service. And in the end, it's a value play. You know, we don't want to grow without paying dividends. We continue to be a reliable dividend payer throughout that part of the transformation. We ensure the world keeps moving. That is our claim, that's our ambition, and we do that across the fields we're today represented in.
Construction, our largest field. Material handling, particularly in the U.S., our largest field. Agri, stationary equipment, and also others, which includes the Torqeedo business. And we do that in a technology-open approach with diesel engines, with engines powered by e-fuels, HVO, hydrogen, and obviously electrical, but Markus will spend much more time later on the technology approach. For me, it's just important to say we are here to ensure the world keeps moving, and we'll do that in a technology-open approach, but that's nothing new. Important is that, you know, if you wanna have that claim, if you have that claim, that we are doing that, and we're benefiting from important megatrends, that we are in the areas where we not only have a right to play, but where we have a right to win.
And we'll take out some key developments, some megatrends. One megatrend is urbanization and population growth. I think we all have consensus that the world population is continuing to grow. We see numbers of 10 billion human beings by 2080. And obviously, more people in the world means people need food, people need to live, need places to live, and people need to move, and that's just the three trends we are actually very strongly represented in: agricultural equipment, construction equipment, construction demand, and of course, mobility. So that's one important field we're in, and we're gonna stay in. The other big opportunity for DEUTZ is the whole climate protection and energy mix.
We all know that obviously, with different speeds and different regions, we're gonna see 50% renewable energy by 2050, and that's a huge opportunity for us, that we're actually growing in not only new drive system, but also in ecosystems and business models, models where I'll talk about later. Obviously, it also means there's a need for more and different forms of energy generation. Gensets, for example, microgrids, all areas where we are somehow represented in today, but not as big as we could be. Last but not least, the trend of e-commerce and digitalization, material handling, particularly in the U.S., but also in Europe, is a strong field for us, and we expect that we expect that market, that sector, to grow by more than 7% throughout the decade.
There is a higher need for material handling. The value chains become more localized. That, again, will need more equipment, particular equipment powered by DEUTZ engines, and that's another huge also innovation opportunity for the ecosystems around the drivetrain. So what we clearly say, we expect the markets we are represented in to grow above, slightly at least above GDP, throughout the current decade. Moving now to technology... So today, we are focused rather on the lower power range, starting at 19 kW, our smallest engine at 19 kW, up to 250.
We do have some products higher than 250 kW, but the main focus of our portfolio is in that power range, and we're actually mainly in mobile equipment, whether it's gonna be urban or whether it's gonna be remote, but we are not that strongly represented in stationary equipment, which is urban or remote. So that's clearly a field for us to grow, which we're actively approaching with our portfolio exercises in the teams. And if you look at, you know, the technology path, we see that here, obviously, for electrification, we expect that to grow fairly quickly in the lower power ranges. But if you look at medium to higher power ranges, there are different possibilities. There's the possibility, the already available possibility using re-fuels. There's the already available possibility using hydrogen.
We'll hear a lot about our hydrogen engine later, and there's also the possibility using fuel cell. That's a field where we are, where we're not that largely represented in. And for the higher power ranges and, you know, that's clear, that is gonna be a future stronghold of DEUTZ. There's the path is already there, including actually an important role which diesel engine will still play over the next decades, but obviously then also re-fuels and hydrogen. So there is a high potential for us in diversifying the portfolio in into different technologies, particular when it comes to higher power ranges. If you look at how this translates then in our strategy, I think that's a picture which most of you have seen in several interactions on capital market, or events or on one-on-ones.
Where we are today is here on the left-hand side. We produce and sell, give or take, 200,000 engines. On a good, if the demand is strong, it can be 220, 230, but it could also be 180, 190. Today, this is all diesel. This is all diesel, and obviously, the large number, the volume comes from the lower and medium power ranges. In that area and that diesel, well, it's still going. It's still growing, but at some point, probably mid or the end of the decade, we expect here electrification to start cannibalizing a little bit, and that's a chance for us, starting now, not with number one, but with number three.
So that's where we have the need that we are offering here electrical drive systems, and we'll hear later that we'll have a lot of products available, but the demand of the customers is not as strong yet because that's, you know, still very strong with diesel. And then, using this strong demand of diesel, but also the need for electrification, we'll talk about the consolidation game later. There is gonna be a strong area for us and chance to play an active role in consolidation with the combustion engine technology, at least for the next 10-20 years. We've shown that here on that chart with a slight area of gray.
I personally believe that could be a much larger area of gray to grow, but we will go through that throughout the presentation. Then, obviously, the role we have for the combustion engine for decarbonization is also strongly supported by use of refuels and hydrogen, and because that's already today available, at least for refuels, the technology is ready to be used for refuels. And last but not least, we see adjacencies to become more and more relevant for us because when we want to serve our customer needs, they have more and more also the desire to be supported by us in ecosystems around just the engine. There's more than just the engines, whether it's gonna be different technologies, we'll come to that later, or also different business models.
So that's our overall path, how we transform our portfolio over the next years, and probably not only years, but decades. And that's how we translated it into our Dual+ strategy. So first big block, we continue to grow our Classic business by performance and consolidation. Bring up the margin and grow, and grow, also in particular inorganically. Secondly, expand our already very profitable Service business to fund the transformation. And last but not least, build up really a green ecosystem with product and technologies, and that's really focused investment growth and also to ensure the long-term viability of DEUTZ. If you now look at how we translate that into our value play, particularly the Service, because that's the big margin business, and we're already quite strong, but we'll show later that there's more, there's much more to come.
The potential is still huge. The more we expand our Service business, the more we lift up the P&L, and we can do that particular also with a rather quick return on investment M&As. We've shown a few good examples the last years. So if you grow the Service business, it helps us really financing the consolidation in Classic and also investment in green. And with that growing, profitable, consolidated business, we're gonna really contribute to the green investments in the mid and long term. And if I now spend some time on Classic to start with. So the two big blocks, consolidation and growth, as well as performance, and the market in the Classic business is clearly showing tendencies to consolidate.
There are players that are already leaving the market or that are considering leaving the market and that are going to leave the market, and we wanna use these opportunities arising out of that by actively taking over business and really positioning ourselves as an active consolidator. We may call it sunset play, some people call it last man standing. We don't like the word. Sunset play is nicer, 'cause last man standing, at some point, the last man is also falling, right? That's not the nicest idea. 'Cause we don't want to be then at some point falling over. And the other aspect is improving performance. We want to really make more efficient use of what we have, our existing capacities, and Petra will speak a bit about that in her part later.
Again, all with the objective to become one of the top three independent engine producers by 2030. When I talk about consolidation, we see that already quite clearly on the On-Highway market, particularly in the automotive space. I mean, if you look back, the number of engine platforms has decreased significantly over the last 8-10 years, 17% from 15% to 2023, and we expect, or people expect, that number to decrease further. The logic is quite clear. There are more and more OEMs in particular. Obviously, they either outsource or entering into partnerships when it comes to, when it comes to combustion engine platforms, because volume decreases, so you need to focus your R&D, you need to focus other resources, production resources, capabilities, et cetera.
And, Renault, for example, outsourced the ICE production to the joint venture with Geely and, other players considering and doing similar things. Not always on the surface, because obviously, particularly in countries like Germany, it is a critical discussion as well, but it's happening and, it's happening fast. So in our field, in our area of the off-highway, we see that, we see it, and we expect the same tendencies, just, a bit later, slightly delayed. And there are first examples, one we have actively, participated in, the one with Daimler. But there's more to come, and there are lots of discussion happening in the background. We're also, taking part in.
That in the end, that benefits smaller scale, particularly independent companies like DEUTZ, because company like us, we don't run the risk of perceived going into a channel conflict. So if you the more independent you are, the more likely you are, an agreeable partner for, companies, entering into consolidation exit, into consolidation, options. How we approach that? Obviously, we want to do it as structurally as possible. Sometimes you need to take an opportunity when it's around, but in principle, we wanna do it as structurally as possible. So to do it in regions and markets where we already play a role, which we know, and also ideally in industry areas where we already play a role, which we know.
So it needs to fit to our portfolio and to our markets, and not only for cultural reasons, that plays an important role as well, but also to really go and exploit and utilize synergies by output and performance. So that's one important aspect. And of course, it needs to be in alignment with our culture and our values. And when we took over earlier this year, the IP, the licenses from Daimler Truck, that is already a first, I think, very strong proof point that we do not only talk about it, but we take it seriously. Yeah, that was our first point, as said.
So what we did earlier this year, and we closed this in the first quarter, we took over the IP and the licenses of Daimler Truck's medium-duty and heavy-duty engine platforms, and now the closing is completed, as said, and now we're integrating everything, including, in particular, R&D, production, supply chain, procurement. So that's a major project, but it's going really well, and we are already working here in tapping into new customer fields because these engines really bring us new opportunities which we haven't had so far before. So we expect here the production of those Daimler engines under our responsibility by the end of the decade, 2027, potentially 2028.
Initially, we're gonna see a double-digit top-line figure coming into our books, but by the end of the decade, it's gonna be a three-digit million euro figures roughly by 2029. Other aspect of performance, pretty much, I would say, the success story of DEUTZ in the last year, that we really completely redesigned, redeveloped our pricing approach. The go-to-market approach was completely new design. We took the opportunity which the market gave us because the environment in 2022 was obviously very, very challenging for every player in the market. Inflation was high, cost pressure was high.
It was already starting in a challenging situation in 2022, but then when Russia attacked Ukraine, the whole situation got even accelerated, and we reacted extremely early by February, where other companies, I believe, were just evaluating. We immediately reacted, and we said, "We're gonna change our structures. We're gonna change our approach." And we targeted to increase prices across the portfolio by 8%-12%. We announced that in February, and if you look back what we achieved, we can say we clearly much achieved it.
Markus and the sales team have done here a tremendous job in going to the customers completely different fashion and actually using also the self-confidence that we've got something to offer, rather than just feeling, "Okay, we can do only what the customers in the end want from us." So that was successful. It helped us to repair some parts of the portfolio significantly, and it also, that was almost a byproduct of that exercise. We realized that then throughout 2022 into 2023 and potentially even into 2024, for the smallest engine, the sub-4-liter, demand was so much stronger than supply, so that we created and implemented a fixed volume program, where in the end, we secured more than 75% of our engine production capacity by fixed contracts to the customers.
That obviously gives us, at the moment, a lot of certainty in delivering here the engines in that category, including, as Petra will explain later, ramping up a third shift here at the assembly line 5, just next door. So that was a very positive impact on profitability. It helped us doubling the margin from 2020 to 2021 to 2022 and also enabling the next shift here into 2023 and beyond. Operating performance indicators are also showing in the right direction. Supplier performance is now back to above 85%, or okay, the situation is much more stable than before COVID and the start of the Ukraine war. Customer delivery performance increased significantly, but here we have to be honest, it's not on the level we want it to be, so that's certainly still room to improve.
But what I like particularly is that the efficiency in production has grown 12% per year, particularly in the area here for sub-4-liter, where we installed a new line in 2020, and things are moving not only in the right direction, but really strongly ahead. Petra will explain more about that when she's gonna present it. The good news is always, that's not the end of it. There is still a lot of more potential when it comes to operating performance. Let me move on to green. Here, the approach is obviously completely different than when we talk about Classic and later on, Service. First of all, we want to build on what we already have, because we don't start from zero. We've got a lot here developed over the last 5-6 years.
We wanna actively explore the opportunities the market is going to give us, because it's a different market. Let's always remember, when we talk about combustion engines, obviously, there are innovations, but there's a lot of progress that's driven by the regulatory environment. Whenever there are new emission rules coming in, well, then the companies need to see how they comply with that. But with the whole field of green, that's different because there are no one tells you what product, what the product needs to look like. We need to actively develop the needs of the customers with the customers, and sometimes we feel we need to be even faster than the customers to tell them what they really need, and that's obviously a completely different approach.
We'll come to why that is important later, because we will also then, we will be creating a new structure, and very importantly, we'll build ecosystems rather than just one product. Let me start with a short outlook on organization. We have decided as board to create a new dedicated green organization to master and succeed in our transformation, to really give the green transformation a stronger strategic focus. Because otherwise, an organization like DEUTZ is focused very much on the operational day-to-day, sometimes firefighting. In the last two years, no day was like the previous day. There was always something to fix immediately, a production issue, a supply chain issue, a customer issue.
And when this is your environment, you're very good at fighting fires, but you're never good at developing something which is important in five years, because in that case, the urgent beats the important, and that is not a good ingredient or a good basis for transformation. So we said we need to give the green transformation a strategic focus. We need to become more customer-centric. I mean, that's what you always say. Everyone wants to become customer-centric, but we need to really support our customers developing, finding their needs. And that's something, because what is challenging for us, as I said, about the firefighting, it's not that our customers had no fires to be fought. So, here we need to become more customer-centric.
We need to be faster in decision-making and ramp up, and we need to be much more flexible than you are at an organization like DEUTZ, which has next year a history of 160 years. So we will hire an external CEO to lead that green organization, and that CEO and that organization will then report to the management board here. So there's more to come, but there's already very clearly very clear statement, we're gonna now take it very seriously, that green transformation, and not only focusing on the technology, but also particular on the go-to-market and on speed. We have. Well, we built on what we already have, and that's quite a lot.
So let's not undersell what we have, because over the last years, we developed an electrification, a BEV, a toolbox with lots of products which are ready. We'll hear from Markus later about that. We developed the first hydrogen combustion engine, the TCG 7.8, which is ready for the market. And we developed also first products, which we would call as part of the ecosystems, the adjacencies, for example, the PowerTree, which you've heard before, and which, by the way, we also show outside here in our little show area. And the focus right now is really shifting this, these products from pilot into serial production, and there are quite a few promising signals from the market and from the customers.
Let me speak a bit about the hydrogen combustion engine, or I would call it almost a signature project in green, the TCG 7.8. And we can imagine a lot of different areas of application. Obviously, stationary, I will speak a little bit about that in power generation. We have, and we're not gonna repeat that because you've seen that many, many times. We have started this demonstrator project here in Cologne with RheinEnergie, but we've got more to report on that right now. We are exploring opportunities with rail applications on regional trains or special vehicles, pretty much trains which are in use on non-electrified routes.
We can also imagine, and not only imagine, we can use—we can see the hydrogen combustion engine in any other large off-highway applications, like excavators or in the mining area. There is even the potential to go, obviously, on the on-highway business, but that's something which is not at the moment our focus. There's one very interesting area to explore for us, it's in China, for the hydrogen combustion engine. So we are, at the moment, in the process of negotiating a first serial order of 100 H2 engines, which will be run in gensets, in an industrial park in an area of China, in Inner Mongolia. I spent three days there last week, and what I saw was very impressive.
Yeah, we have just shown some pictures here, but what you can imagine there is an area which is more than 40 sq km, where the Chinese government has moved about 60% of the semicoke production over the last two decades into this area to pretty much take pollution away from the coasts. Like, you know, not solving the problem, but moving the problem somewhere else. That's what they've done. But at some point, if you move a problem and don't solve it, the problem does not go away. You just have it somewhere else. And now, with the Chinese governmental strategy to become climate neutral by 2035, they say, "Okay, we're gonna tackle that." And when you walk around there, you see, I think it's about 126 semicoke plants.
A coke plant, I mean, it's a big industrial area, and what happens there in the end? Well, you produce coke, and as a by-product, there's coke oven gas going, well, in that case, in the atmosphere. And they're flaring it off. So you see lots of fires there, and so that's not great for the environment. It's also not great for the economy and for the... because you waste a lot of resources. And what they have in mind there is to purify that gas, which consists about 22%-23% of hydrogen, take out the hydrogen pretty much, and utilize the hydrogen to make, to turn it to electricity. And that's a perfect area of application for our hydrogen combustion engine applied in a genset.
So what we're negotiating with them at the moment to deliver the first 100 gensets, potentially next year, and then enter into a larger serial orders for that. And that is, I think, really a fantastic area of application for our product. And we'll believe, once we show that this is working, we will see much, much more potential and fantasy coming out of that also in other parts of the world. So here again, more to come, but I think, the first 100 products is already quite something to be, to be proud of. And, so it's a big step, at least from one area, from one demonstration with RheinEnergie to now 100 in China. Adding a bit of complexity, but, that's something we are very good at.
Yes, let me move on to the whole questions of ecosystems and digitality. So it's extremely important that we, as DEUTZ, transform here also our, let's say, mindset, understanding. If you enter the company, you see DEUTZ, the engine company, and obviously, that's we wanna keep to be perceived as the engine company, but we want to be more than just the engine company. So, and that's where we need to understand what are really the customer needs in their own green transformation. And yes, there is the electrification competence, particular for those players who do not have an own large-scale electrification competence center, including aspects like functional safety. Well, Markus will also give some insights on later.
There is H2 competence, and H2 is not only an H2 combustion engine, it's all fields around that, fueling, storage. These are all fields where a lot of players do not have expertise, and there's also a lot of concern. And then, obviously, the question, are these new technologies stable in the use phase? It's not only TCO, but it's sometimes really stability and availability, and that's something where we as DEUTZ have capabilities. We have. We're offering a wide range of products. As you see, we have a deep knowledge of the customer needs, purely because we've serving these customers for decades.
Let's not forget, we have a very strong, very large service network all over the world, so that the customers know when they install new products in their applications, we don't let them- we don't leave them alone. So when they have a problem, we are around. And that's, by the way, a big difference from company like DEUTZ to startups who bring, who bring premature products into the markets, and then it's fire and forget for the customers. So that means it's a huge opportunity for us. We can extend here our role in the value chain.
It's not only having a right to play, but it's having the right to win, and we can build and develop this green ecosystem around off-highway applications, using, as I said, our Service footprint, and tap by doing that also into playing fields, into growth fields, which are today not part of our portfolio. And this is just, you know, how that looks like. Obviously, you're used to or typically, you wanna stay very close to what today your core is, and that would just mean taking out a combustion engine and bringing in a battery electric system. But we wanna go away from that as long as it helps us supporting our customers in their own green transformation, going into infrastructure, digitization, and so on and so forth.
Again, Markus will go into more detail in his part of the presentation. Let me move on to Service now, the third field of our Dual+ strategy. Here, this is already quite a success story over the last years. We started with mere EUR 250 million revenue in 2015. We grew that by 9% year-over-year. 2022, we closed with EUR 450 million, and we clearly stated by 2025, we wanna go into- we wanna go on the level of EUR 600 million, and we're well on track this year, probably just falling shy of EUR 500. Let's remember here, the business is highly profitable. We wanna do that with more M&A, 'cause there is still a lot of potential out there.
We wanna broaden our geographical reach with a focus on the Americas and on Europe, and we are also very happy to take over more Service activities in terms of billable hours. We are very much focused on spare parts today, but as you can imagine, with the billable hours, there's a lot of money to be made and a lot of trust to be won with our customers. We also want to obviously ramp up or further grow organically, really also actively targeting third-party business rather than just focusing on existing DEUTZ business.
And, one thing is clear, there is a lot of market potential out there, both in terms of market potential for Deutz itself, but also for actively going into third-party business, and that applies to both spare parts with a EUR 16 billion global market, as well as billable hours with a EUR 10 billion global market. So we are very confident, that with all our measures, we move here, that our share upwards to larger numbers. And the plan is very specific, very clear for the next year in particular. As I said, EUR 600 million, it's a CAGR of 10%, so that's a CAGR higher than what the market is going to grow. But as I said, we're going to do that organically and inorganically. In particular for M&A, we developed very strict investment criteria.
We want to do quite a few, but not too many acquisitions, because an organization like DEUTZ needs to also be able to master those acquisitions, and every acquisition takes effort and time, whether it's going to be a EUR 5 million business or a EUR 500 million business. So it's all taking, it all takes resources. So what we assess at the moment, we're gonna do probably another 4-5 M&As until 2025. And whatever we acquire, it should have a sufficient number of technicians. So it's not just, it's not just for spare parts, because again, we want to improve or increase our billable hours. That we need people for. Obviously, the margin need to be higher than what we currently have as DEUTZ. It should not be margin diluting, it should be margin enhancing.
The growth rate we want to see there is positive over the last three years because that's a good indication that we're going to grow also in the future. Geographically, as said, focus on Europe and the Americas. And typically, and that's not written on the slides, the multiples we pay for this are fairly low. So the whole question of, okay, what is this business doing in 10 or 15 years? Yes, it's relevant. We don't want to just buy something to use for three years, but it's at least almost a no-regret moves because the multiples are between three and five at most, and they help us also in supporting the green transformation going forward. The two recent acquisitions we concluded are perfectly in line with the criteria.
We closed the acquisition of Hochschild in Chile at the end of July. So that's on top revenue of EUR 15 million, 17 technicians in two countries in South America. Margin is well above DEUTZ. Growth rate 16%. And yes, in South America, which is apart from a little set up in Brazil, it's a really new field for us, and we're managing that by our U.S. organization for the time being. Similar, but obviously also completely different in terms of geography, our current acquisition called Diesel Motor Nordic, which strengthens the Nordics in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. We also talk here about on top revenue of EUR 10 million. We have 12 technicians.
Margin also well above DEUTZ, and growth rate over the last three years, 16%. So we show, you know, these acquisitions meet perfect our criteria, so will the next M&As we're doing in Service. But it's not only about growing, like traditionally, organically, or via M&A, it's also tapping into new fields. And we have started a partnership with a company called talpas olutions. It's Essen-based company. It's a telemetric solution called FUSION Hub, which really strengthen our digital business model or really actually entering into digital business model. And the rationale is quite clear. If you look globally at heavy industry production, you can see that 5% of the global heavy industry production is lost due to some unplanned downtime.
When you translate that into money, that results into a problem for the industry of EUR 600 billion. I'm not going to say we're going to solve all that, but it shows there is a lot of potential to be attacked. With FUSIONHub, we create a platform using a telemetric box, which not only focuses on the engine, but also on other parts of the vehicle. For us as DEUTZ, it gives several revenue stream. So first of all, a recurring revenue stream because, well, we're selling these boxes to the customers, and then the customers pay a fee to be part of that platform.
They can even build their own white label app, which gives us some revenue and- but that's all like the participation fee to an extent. But I believe, or we are convinced more relevant is what we see on the right side, the revenue share, because if we and the platform has all the information on problems and data out of that vehicle, obviously, we can- we as DEUTZ, can go much more targeted approach here our Service business to them, and we can also sell access to this platform for other players, like for example, a tire producer, who then knows exactly when to have which product in store. So that's a new product, a new business model for us.
In year one, we can already see an order intake of EUR 6 million, and we'll expect some strong growth over the next year. So it's a little plant which is starting to grow, but it shows we're thinking well beyond the traditional Service business. Let me spend a few words on our regional strategies, our regional footprint. So one thing is clear, our region, EMEA. Well, focus actually Europe, not so much EMEA. But that's our largest region, in 2022, it had a 61% share of revenue. It grew well, 20% CAGR since 2020, and this is our home base, and we wanna leverage this as our home base because we've got here the production footprint, and we've got also good profitability.
We've got a very, very well-established customer base here, and that is clearly our home base, which we want to further strengthen. Construction, agricultural, and material handling. Also the focus on the growth in Service, very strong in Europe, as shown by both the acquisition in the Nordics as well as the telemetric approach with Talpa. But EMEA plays a very important role for our green strategy because here we really want to move now from the prototypes to at least small-scale serial production, and most of the products and the projects we're currently following, as Markus will show in a few minutes, are here with customers in Europe. So the strategic focus for EMEA is on all aspects of Dual+. In Americas, it's also a success story over the last years. With 23%, it's our second-largest region.
It grew tremendously since 2020, 40%. So that's extremely strong and obviously here, as said before, we are particularly strong in the rental business, material handling. Our largest customers are there, and it's very focused on Classic and Service, yeah. Green tech, obviously, yes, plays a role and we'll take every opportunity we see, but the whole mindset in the U.S. and our segments is not so much green-oriented. It's rather, "Hey, well, diesel is quite a good product, and please don't stop providing diesel engines," huh? So whenever we speak to American customers, we come back and say, "Oh, do we really need a green transformation?
Yeah, let's talk to some European customers, and when we get the answer to that..." But it's a perfect example why Dual+ makes so much sense, because you can imagine, you know, the people, particularly in the flyover states, they're very skeptical about green transformation. And that's a good thing for us because it shows that here, the runway of the diesel probably takes at least 5-10 years longer than it is in other countries. So the focus is, yes, as I said, also in Service. I mean, just we opened the, I think, the ninth DEUTZ Power Center in the U.S. this year. We have a lot of technicians in vans there, so it's a strong, strong development in Service, and that's why the focus, I would rather say, is in Classic and Service and green, at least today, rather opportunity-driven.
Asia-Pacific, a little bit the most challenging part of our portfolio. The smallest as well, 16%, grew the lowest over the last years, also driven by China, because it took them a long time, but it's still taking them a long time to get out of that COVID dip. So we want to expand the rather limited presence in China and obviously also APAC, and, we want to continue to ramp up here production, with more localized parts. China for China, but also, where possible, China for the rest of the world, where there is no issue with, import tariffs and duties and logistics.
When I look at green, here we see it rather focused on the hydrogen technology, as said earlier, because battery electric technology, that's, and this not only applies for the car makers, that's where China is well advanced, and there's not so much they can learn from us. But on the hydrogen, we've got not only a right to play, we've got a right to win here. Well, how this translates into numbers, Timo will spend much more time on numbers later, but I can spare you at least with that very high-level bridge here. 2022, we were close to the, well, still small, but for, given where we come from, not bad, 4.6%, and we want to grow with performance and growth, the two blocks, to the midterm target of 6%-7%.
In our Classic business, we are already well above the 6%-7%. I think it was almost 9% first half year 2023. So we see there is potential, and the profitability growth comes mainly from Classic pricing, as I said earlier, and the operational efficiencies. Service growth plays a very important role. Let's remember, quick M&A, that helps a lot, and obviously also will bring in our new engine products into the market, and we'll bring them only profitably in the market. That's a different approach than DEUTZ has done over the last couple of decades. When we think about our midterm guidance, looking at 2025, we are well on track. Sales, we see at or above EUR 2.5 billion.
Service at the EUR 600, as I said, well on track, maybe shy of, just shy of EUR 500 this year. Margin, 6%-7%. Free cash flow margin, 4%-5%. Working capital needs to get down. Petra will talk a bit about that. Also, as a result of the stabilization of order behavior and supply chain situations. Dividend, very important. We want to maintain a stable dividend payout ratio, which translates into increasing dividends in absolute terms, because we're gonna bring the net income gradually further up over the next years. Well, also, in terms of ESG, we're progressing well. The various ratings show a clear upward or improving trend, and, obviously, we do not engage into an ESG strategy to improve the ratings.
That's just a side effect on our achieving our goal to become climate neutral by no later than 2050. And if you look at our technology mix, and that here is the chart we've shown earlier on the technology distribution, on the development of the technology, and here we translated that into the use phase emissions of our products. And we can see we can say very clearly, I mean, we did our homework already. All new combustion engines we bring into the market are already refuel-ready. And when I say refuel, I mean biofuels as well as HVO. So obviously, the higher these refuels get into the use of our engines, the lower the CO2 emissions.
In a theoretical, hopefully it turns into real-life scenario, where 100% refuels were possible, we could already reduce 90% of our emissions. When I say our emissions, that's use-phase emission. Use-phase emissions for our products account for more than 97%, of the overall emissions. So in production, the emissions are almost negligible on our side. So there is a lot of potential, and it's, as I said, we're well on track. Obviously, we need to continue to invest into alternative drive systems, but already by simply increasing the share of refuels, we can move very successfully and quickly towards CO2 neutrality.
Summarizing our strategic approach over the next years, in the short term, in the midterm, and in the long term, on Classic, the short-term consolidation, focus on performance, deals like the one with Daimler Truck, preparing most, and that continues over the next over the midterm as well. Obviously, further consolidation and integrating what we've done, and in 2030 then, at the latest, obviously, playing that strength out. In terms of green, now creating really the strategy and the operating model, including organization, organic, inorganic ramp-up from prototype into serial. That is also throughout 2026 - 2030, and obviously scale that business up significantly beyond 2030. That seems like a long shot, but we need to be honest, and show you the truth.
This is, in our industry, not something where we need to be completed in two years. Service, for the next two years, really continue to reach EUR 600 million, further increase third-party business. That's where really huge opportunities are around. In the second half of the decade, we will launch a second wave of M&A, moving to the next large number of Service revenue, which one can imagine. Obviously, also entering into new digital business models, like, the telemetric example I gave earlier. And in 2030, at the latest, obviously, it's important to shift also the Service focus from more from Classic to green. And that's great because then we're gonna be around with a strong network, and that helps us really in entering all this potential. So...
And obviously, in parallel, really strengthening our footprint in the various regions, but don't wanna go through that in more detail. So, I hope that gave you a first insight run through our view on the strategy. Later, after a short coffee break, Petra will then spend some more time on Classics, particularly with a focus on operations efficiency. Then we'll hear from Markus more about Service and green. And, last but not least, Timo will wrap it up and translate that all into numbers. And, then I'll give a short summary, and then we'll have some time to go outside and see actually real stuff rather than PowerPoint slides. So for the time being, thanks for the attention. Let's enjoy some coffee, and we'll be back in five minutes, right? 10 minutes.
Yes, just, just very quickly, 15 minutes coffee break.
All right.
It could be a little bit shorter than initially planned.
Yeah, dear ladies and gentlemen, also from my side, a warm welcome. My name is Markus Müller, and I'm the CTO and CSO here at DEUTZ. So welcome to the Capital Market Day. We are happy to have you here. In the next 15-20 minutes, I would like to introduce you in the latest developments along the Dual+ strategy, focusing on DEUTZ Green and, DEUTZ Service. Let's start with the, we call it our solution pack. And again, having you here, you will see in the afternoon, session that we will present you the, the products that you get a look and feel about that. So it's more than the presentation here in the room. You will experience, all the products you or most of the products you will see here.
In the past, and as Sebastian mentioned earlier, in the past, we were pretty much focused on: here's the engine, here's the gearbox or hydraulics, and maybe an upcoming emission stage, and that was pretty much the past where we were in, in this, in this system and in the dialogue with the customers. And, that is what we have to change. We call it we need to think in an ecosystem. We not just want to provide products with hydrogen or based on electric drives, we also want to ensure that our customers can use the product on the construction site. Means that we ensure that somewhere on the landscape, we have electricity available, that the customer can refuel or recharge the application. And, that is the message we want to give you on this, on this slide.
You see on the left, the orange ring, that is the area of the combustion engines, and you see that we will launch also new products, the 3.9-liter engine, in the cooperation we do with John Deere. This will be a brand-new future-proofed engine, with a lot of improvements we made also on the TCO side. Also, in the power category, from 65-130 kW, where we believe strongly that this power category will also remain as a combustion engine technology, the next decades and beyond. So therefore, we bring here a new product. You heard about the medium-duty and heavy-duty engine segment in the cooperation with Daimler Truck.
Here, we will have also, a very competitive, lineup in the future, also targeting higher power categories. And then let's talk about the hydrogen engine. So a lot of interest, product. We believe hydrogen will play a major role, in the energy transition, and I'm a bit proud that we, as DEUTZ, were at least one of the first, I do not want to say the first, but one of the first engine manufacturers which were committed, which will not just present a demonstrator. We launched, all the investments, and we have all activities started that these engines will be industrialized. I'll show you later also where we are in the process. Therefore, look to the top in this middle ring.
We showed last year at our DEUTZ Days that we integrated in a 20-foot container the hydrogen engine, the generator, and also the hydrogen tanks, 700-bar hydrogen tanks. So a first product where you see somewhere on the landscape, we can generate electricity if no energy supply is available at all. You see at the bottom, that is also a question we get usually: "So what about the fuel cell? You talk a lot about the hydrogen engine." For sure, we are close to that technology. We invested. That is the reason that we invested in Blue World. So the special fuel cell technology, where we believe that fits pretty good for the off-road segment.
I have later a slide with me, where we see also some pros and cons right now, so we are close to both technologies. The PowerTree is then the bridge to the electrification segment, where you see on the slide, first customer products and pre-series, like mini excavator, 25 units we provided to Hitachi, or we believe pretty much also in the airport support equipment segment. This will also... There's a heavy push that this will dominantly be electrified in future. But also, with the competencies we have, we try to sell our DEUTZ battery where it's possible. But if we have special customer requests, and you see here also at the bottom, a product here, that is a product you integrate on an on-road truck trailer, cooling trailer with recuperation.
So it means we have the competencies also to customize special batteries as long as it fits not to our, when it does not fit to our standard product kit. Let me give you also one word to the world of refuels. We have fuels which are based on electricity, green electricity. We will have fuels based on biomass. And one important message is, even today, if our customers must have a climate neutral solution on a construction site, we can offer HVO biomass-based fuels, which will reduce significantly the CO2 footprint, as we show here, by 92%, and also have a positive impact on other pollution components like NOx or particulates. That is something which in some areas of Europe, take Sweden, is much more popular.
You can go there to a gas station and already tank these biofuels, HVO. We, in Germany, started now to adjust the legislation, so and we are pretty sure this will give also now a push. The last comment to that, because that is also usually an argument we hear, it's not a tank or plate discussion. HVO are fuels based on biomass waste. It's not that it's something where you steal or you're in competition with our food chain. So it's a fuel which is based on biomass. So here we have already today an option to reduce significantly CO2. Let's talk about hydrogen now. And why do we believe in this hydrogen engine? Well, first of all, both technologies, as I said, is common.
If you talk about fuel cell and combustion engine, both need hydrogen as a fuel, so the infrastructure must be there. Secondly, both technologies need a storage. We can call it the challenge to store also hydrogen on board a machine, is they have both the same challenges. If you then see right now the pros and cons for each technology, we see a clear benefit for the combustion engines, and we will again look to both technologies, but right now, the combustion engine offers plenty of advantages. First of all, that was also a journey. Hydrogen combustion engine is accepted as zero-emission technology in the EU, in Brussels. So it was not clear the last years that we were always confronted that we can measure CO2 emissions downstream the exhaust pipe, but now there's an agreement.
If the hydrogen or if the fuel carries no carbon molecule with it, so then you can also have no CO2 emissions. So that is done. So we have the same basis like the fuel cell. It's CO2-free technology. It's accepted. Secondly, well, we show it in our next door, we will show it to you. It's pretty much a combustion engine like we produce it today. For sure, there are some changes dominantly on the software control, it's on the combustion technology we have to optimize and to develop. It's about modifications on turbocharger, and you have to modify the cylinder head to bring in the ignition system. But at the end, it's our core competence, combustion engines.
If you look then to our supplier base, the installed capacity, it's a robust technology, and we know in the Service how to deal with a combustion engine fired with hydrogen. So that are clear arguments, and the most important argument, our customers need to earn money with their machines. And if you look to TCO, and also the investments you have to do, so we talk about factors. Today, we talk about factor 5-6 if you compare a combustion engine with hydrogen and a fuel cell. So these are already, I could mention some more, but you see, with just a rational argument, this technology has a, has, has the right to win. And you see on the timeline, our journey. So we released all the capacities, as I said.
Our test center, we have five test cells already running. Until end of the year, 10 test cells are able to operate with hydrogen. We made the investments for the production side, so that is released. We had our first demonstrator. I do not want to stress that more. That was with the RheinEnergie, the first genset. We launched a few field testing machines. We signed the letter of intent, as Sebastian showed, with the genset project in China, where we use, call it, waste hydrogen as fuel, and can hopefully sell the first 100 units soon. We are prepared for that, and we are back in some applications I will show on the next slide. What I can say today is we keep our word.
Next year, you will get the hydrogen engine out of the production, so we are on track on the timeline. Sebastian showed already the potential areas of applications, and that is the reason why we also choose the 7.8. So the 7.8 gives us plenty of options today. We start with genset. Why gensets? It's also a bit obvious that here we have less challenges if it comes to hydrogen supply, hydrogen storage, that is much easier to manage, and also it's a first step in the development, which we have to pass. After that, we go into mobile applications. We will find next year at the InnoTrans, our engine integrated in a regional express train in German. You will find that next year.
We won a public funded project where we are back in the on-road business. We will set up 18-tonne delivery trucks. One will operate at BMW in the logistics between Nürnberg and Leipzig, and one truck will operate in our facility. So we are looking pretty much forward to have this truck running next year. And last but not least, no surprise, for sure, off-road, our core competence, big excavators, big harvesters, big tractors in future. We are pretty confident that this area will take hydrogen also as a fuel. That was a lot about hydrogen, and you see, we are, and the teams are fascinated, to go ahead with these product lines. So, but electrification is also a journey.
It's now five to six years, and when we started the electrification journey, and I want to give you today an update. What I can say, today, we have all core competencies on board, so it's not a question. So we have done there a lot the last years. So dealing with battery electric vehicles, that is a core competence we have achieved. In 2021, we started the first field tests, also here, first demonstrator, first pre-series. That is where we are. But Sebastian showed already, we will have a next, do a next step when we change the organization. The reasons, I think Sebastian already explained, that that is where we think with a, with a better go-to-market strategy, with their new push, we will be there more successful.
But today, I'm also a bit proud to say that we reached a very important milestone recently, and that is that we have now a high voltage system, which is ready for serious production. It was a journey, and it was also... We faced many challenges. Here, you see an overview, what it means when I talk about a high voltage system. I do not want to talk about each component, but that is what you need to, let's say, have a drivetrain with high voltage systems. I want to focus on the battery, because that is core. Yes, we will buy battery modules, but all the rest is engineered and designed by us. So it's in our industry right now, where we try to electrify a Golf 8 instead of talking about an ID.4.
So that is where our industry is in. So therefore, try to use the same design space you have for the Classic drive and integrate a full electric drive. That is what the, our customers are looking for right now, and that was also our design target when we set up our product kit. So battery, including the battery management system, that is all in our hand. For sure, software. Software is our core competence, so software is developed here at DEUTZ, so we have all degree of freedoms to modify and optimize here, special functions for our customers. And the system is able to operate with two e-motors, one for the drive, one for the working load, each engine 40 kW and 80 kW peak. That gives us a broad range where we can serve customer applications.
In the last two years, we faced also challenges when it came to our existing customer base and about a first serious project. So some of them we lost. That was disappointing for us, and we struggled with that and because one thing which was always important for us in the development was that we meet the highest functional safety requirements. It's based on the ISO 26262, that is the highest automotive standard, but that was also the area where we had the challenges to fulfill all these requirements. And customers where we lost business in the past, fortunately, come now back and we are back at the table, and I have also an example with me today. They also learned painfully that it's more than setting up a demonstrator.
That's a different case that if you talk about quality processes, ensure robustness, in a serious production, including safety measures, that this is something, where they now come back and count on us. And here's the example I want to present today. The latest achievement, the customer, Kärcher, where, Kärcher will launch its first electrified sweeper. So I think, it makes a lot of sense where these machines operate, in the city, good access to electricity. And, we won the first application, which will be launched next year, where we will provide the battery system, in full swing. We talk about beyond 200 batteries per year, and with that, we also back to the table to discuss further applications, where we also get the chance to extend our scope of supply.
So a very great project, good collaboration here with Kärcher, and we are happy also to announce this project today. One word to this slide, where Sebastian also showed earlier. So we need to... We are on a journey and ask ourselves, where's our right to win, our right to play based on our core competencies. I would like to make you a bit more familiar with that, what that means. So on the left side, that is our core competence combustion engines, more or less. And it's obvious that when we talk about climate neutral fuels or any kind of fuels, that this is something which we have in our DNA and the team is able to try to find solutions and new products.
That is the left, the left area here, where we are pretty much in our comfort zone. If you go a bit more right in the adjacencies, then I have here an example, our PowerTree, our e-drive business. From the past, we know how to manage thermal management, so cooling batteries. Today, we cool engines, so we know also cooling batteries, software development, how to industrialize products. That is core competence we had. But with the acquisition of Futavis, as example, that was necessary also to gain competence on battery management systems, just as an example. And if you go further right in the exploration area, Sebastian explained already the example of Talpa, where we also step into business models, digital business models, to ensure uptime for our customers.
But there's for sure, as you can imagine, much more in the pipeline, where we are doing our homework. This slide should just give you a little bit more insight, what it means in this journey where we are working on. Let's talk about Service. In our Dual+ strategy, I would say the plus, because Service is the lever for profitability and Service gives us then the opportunities also for the necessary investments we have ahead of us. Therefore, we are on a strong track with Service and want to target EUR 600 million in 2025. Here's some KPIs from the field out of service. Last year, we did a revenue of EUR 450 million. We have globally 925 Service dealers.
I think that is one of the big strength of us, that we can ensure our customers that we are in a short period of time at their machine. So even in the U.S., where we are today are pretty happy that we can ensure within three hours to reach each customer all over North America. So we have a global presence. We send more than 20 million parts per year, exchange engines. So that is a very important area also, if it comes to sustainability, where we take engines out of the field, refurbish, and give them a second life. It's also an important puzzle piece in our strategy. And yeah, more than 165,000 deliveries every year. So some impressive numbers in a nutshell.
If you look to the revenue and where it comes from and the distribution, if you cut the cake, then 68% of our revenue is parts, 20% is exchange, and 12% is out of the billable hours. These numbers, we doubled already the last five years, and we will continue to work on that. We'll see. You will see also later some examples. We have today an installed basis of 2.3 million engines out into the field, and each engine gives us a potential of EUR 750 revenue. I come to the market outlook soon. So there's a field where we can gain even more, even more Service revenue than we have today. One example, honestly, a very pragmatic example, so it's not always so complicated that you need great strategies.
You see here in the middle of the U.S., one of our technician in a van, somewhere in the landscape, and that is also part of our strategy. So we have today 37 vans of this, so we have a quite small investment. We have a quite fast return of invest. And the most important thing is, this gives us the opportunity to be fast at the customer. And one important thing is, simplify the service for our customers. So once we are at the machines, we do not want to serve just in bracket our engine or maybe a competitor engine. We also, if we identify a leakage on the hydraulic system, we want to fix it. We want to help the customer to be one face to him, and we hope also there, that is part of the strategy to gain their revenue.
And here you see some numbers Sebastian already mentioned. I want to give you here also a deeper insight. So the total market, already said, is EUR 60 billion in spare parts and about EUR 10 billion for the billable service. If you look down then to the DEUTZ attainable market, where DEUTZ products in, that is EUR 1.1 billion and 0.7, so about 1.8. And out of that, we do today the EUR 450 million. So that means if we go to the first in this area, so there are competitors which do Service for our engines, here we want to attack. So here we want to get more of this cake. Because we have all competencies, here we will push that we get Service revenue.
This portion here, the bigger part, EUR 14.9 billion and EUR 9.9 billion, that is where we also believe that if we just take 1 percentage point here, we talk about EUR 250 million. So it's, it's a huge lever on our journey to 2025. And, that should give you also... let you feel a bit more comfortable that if we talk about these steps in the Service revenue, that's achievable. So and we are confident with the teams, with the path, and that is my last slide. That with organic and inorganic growth, we will meet the EUR 600 million in 2025. And for sure, once we are in 2025, it will not stop, then we will set the next targets. But, you see, we are strong in Service.
We want to get even stronger in Service, and we have the potential to get stronger in Service. So thank you very much, and now I will hand over to Timo for the CFO perspective. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to my part of the presentation here at our Capital Market Day. Since not all of you know me, let me also take the chance to say a few words about my own background. Before I took over the position as CFO here at DEUTZ at the end of last year, I spent the last 18 years in the automotive supply industry. Started out in the strategy department of a steering manufacturer, then moved on to the financial area, was a plant manager for some time, and then for 11 years, I was the CFO, first of the world market leader in assembled camshafts, and then of Bilstein, the shock absorber company. So let me start now with my presentation.
We've heard a lot about our Dual+ strategy and what we want to achieve in the future, but before I wanna also go, of course, a little into the future numbers, I want us to again, focus on today. For us, this message is really important. Sebastian said it, we want to regain trust. That's very important for us. And regain trust means we keep our promises. And so even though the economic environment right now is getting a little more difficult, at least, we're very happy that we can say yes again, we can confirm our guidance for this year. So 195,000 engines for this year, roughly EUR 2.1 billion in sales, an EBIT margin of around 5%, and even more important, a double-digit million euro positive free cash flow before M&A.
So we are, and this is also something Sebastian said, we are proud of this. Yeah, I think, it's already pretty good numbers. So if we look a little bit back into the last years, yes, we had a growth of first 23%, in sales growth over from 2020 - 2022. If we also integrate this year, we're at 17% growth rate, so another 8% this year in sales growth. So pretty good numbers. But even more important, of course, is the development of, the EBIT margin, 10.4 percentage points higher than in 2020. Okay, now, you might say 2020 was a different animal, a very difficult year, so let's take that out. But if we look at 2021- 2022, we doubled our margin.
That already is a pretty good thing. Let's now look into the first year of this year and look at the absolute numbers: EUR 63 million in EBIT after six months. That's significantly more EBIT than we made in 2021 in the whole year, almost twice as much. So yes, I think we are well on track in what we are doing. So how did we do it? Well, we need to look at our Classic business. The Classic business still is 97% of our total sales. So if you look at the growth rate here in our Classic business from the year 2020 - 2022, it's exactly the same as we saw for the whole company, right? 23%.
But if you then look into the year-on-year rate, it's even a little higher from last year to this year, if we look at Classic, because we overgrew on the Classic side. So, so that's good, and it speaks for our products that we are well-positioned in the market. But the thing we really want to focus on is here. Yeah, we are at an EBIT margin in the first half of year, this year at 8.7%. And that's of course, also something, if you look at benchmarks, not a bad number anymore. How did we do it? We did learn quite a bit about that already today. Sebastian talked a bit, a lot about pricing. That was one of the absolute key figures, and by pricing, I want to stress that point again.
It was not just passing through the price increases we saw on the market, but it was really cleaning up the portfolio, looking at each product, looking at each customer, and see which of the prices we could change significantly, especially the ones where we had loss makers, which we did have quite a few of. So that is important, and that's also important for the few, for, the next years to come. On top of that, of course, scale effects helped. Yeah, the bigger we are, the more scale effects we have. That's not surprising. So but if we look at our business, then we also need to look not just at the Classic segment, but also at the green segment, and that's really a different animal. Here I need to explain some of the numbers.
The sales we see here is mainly driven by Torqeedo. So Torqeedo is in a rough situation right now. That's, we can say. Their products are really not state-of-the-art anymore, especially some of the high runners. So what, like we see is not a sales growth, but a sales decline. Luckily, this is just for this year because the new products are already in the pipeline, and they're coming by the end of the year, so we're expecting a small dip in this year. The market already knows the new products are coming, so that's not a thing that stresses us for the long term, but for this year, it's in the numbers. That's one thing. If we look here down at the EBIT numbers, then that number would look scary if it would just be the normal green segment or just Torqeedo.
It's very important for you to understand that everything we do in the R&D department that is related to green, we don't capitalize. Yeah. You might, at some point, be able to capitalize these things, but everything we do for anything in green, we is hitting the bottom line. So it's in the expenses right away and therefore absorbed, of course, but it is a main investment in our future, and this is what we see here. So having looked enough probably on looking backwards, let's look a little bit more into the future. We saw that before. EUR 2.5 billion is our sales number, where we want to be in 2025. How are we going to achieve that? Well, first of all, we want to sell 30,000 engines more.
Petra already presented some of what we're doing here to optimize our productions to get the parts out of our production plan. So that should give us roughly EUR 250 million. Then, of course, the pricing part is not over yet, so we are still increasing also this year's the prices towards our customers. That helps, and that, that was also part of the presentation earlier. We are changing a little bit more into bigger engines in the future. That's one of our growth areas, so that also, so should have an effect on the mix. And then the last part, yes, we have also talked about the Service growth. EUR 150 million in total is what we need to get out of this area.
That in today's economic environment, it might look a little ambitious, but I want to stress where we stand today again, because you remember our guidance. EUR 2.1 billion is already a step in the right direction. On the production side, we are going to sell 15,000 engines more, so we need 30,000 for this. Already this year, we are going to sell 15,000, so half of that is already done. Then on the Service business, yes, we are going to grow EUR 40 million this year compared to last year, so a significant step.
Then Sebastian also showed the two acquisitions we did this year in the Service segment, which of course, since one was the summer and the other one is going to be hopefully closing at the end of the year, they are not completely or the biggest portion of that are not into the numbers of this. So they are coming automatically on top by the next year. So I think in general, we are pretty confident that we are going to reach this sales volume. But sales, of course, is not everything. It's going to support the profitability of our company, and we do have a clear target of 6%-7% EBIT margin. So here we do see two areas. Growth is simple. Scale effects, if we grow to the EUR 2.5 million, that should easily get us here.
If we remember that Service is a big portion of or a bigger portion of that, profitability will come, I would say, almost automatically. Yeah, of course, not quite, but in that area. But the other part is performance, and there we are going to. We need to look into a little bit in a more, in a different direction from what we've did in the last two years. So we said it was a lot about pricing. Yeah. Now, I think in the future, we are going to look the other direction, so we need to look more at the supply side. Now, we did have disrupted supply chains the last years. That is on a normal basis anymore. We are tracking roughly 40 indices that look into raw material, energy prices, and so on. Of those 40, 39 have declined over the last months.
So one of our big targets is now, and we set clear targets on our EUR 1.2 billion of purchasing volume. We set clear targets of how much we're going to reduce our cost base here to help support the bottom line. And the last thing, yes, Petra talked a little bit about already about automation in production. That, of course, is also going to be a lever for the future. But on top of that is not the production-related topic, but our SG&A costs. So if we look at SG&A costs, we do need to do a lot more on the digitalization part, and then we also have on top of that a shared Service center in Zafra, Spain, where we can also...
Well, we are now hiring more people to grow this area and to have more of our people in best-cost countries and not everyone in the high-cost countries. So all of that should help us for the future to reach the target of 6%-7%. So we've talked about EBIT, but and the sales volume, but of course, there's other parts. And I would now like to focus on the next slides, a little more about operating cash flow, free cash flow, and then also on capital allocation and our M&A firepower. So that is the rough area you're gonna see on the next slides. For cash flow, yes, operating cash flow, of course, is the first thing we are looking at.
If you look at our working capital development here, well, you saw the sales volume grew by 23%, from 2020- 2022, working capital grew by 21%. If you take out the pricing part, well, then it pretty much grew in line with sales. So not a disaster for the disrupted supply chains we have, but Petra said that not ideal. And so the first thing is, yes, and that is the biggest lever here, is to reduce inventories by the target for this year, 15%. That should give us a significant push in this area. And it is, to be quite, frank, the biggest levers of the three normal levers you have here.
The other two, of course, we also need to do, since the supply chains are now much more back to normal. Yeah, there was a lot of discussions in the last year. I think it's also the time to not just talk to about pricing, but also to talk to payment terms. That really wasn't part of it the last year. So there is some room to optimize. Same is true, but we're already using it on the factoring side, as well as on the supply chain financing side, where we have set up a system which we can now use even more. So where do we want to get to if we look at free cash flow? 4%-5% margin, that's the rough number. How do we get there? Well, we said, first of all, we want to pay a dividend.
Yeah. So, dividend of 30% of EPS is our normal goal. So that's clear. We've pretty much been in line with that. And that's, of course, a goal for the future. But we also wanna have enough power for the future for our M&A projects. So 4%-5% is a realistic number. If we look into this year, we are already well on track. We are saying two-digit middle, medium two-digit, free cash flow positive for this year. So a little more should be possible if we look into what we are setting ourselves as a 6%-7% margin on EUR 2.5 billion in sales, which would get us quite a bit of EUR 100 million in free cash flow. So but there is another part of it.
That's the normal net working capital optimization, but we also need to think about where do we allocate our capital? And this is something, to be quite frank, we've spent a lot of time discussing in the last month. Yeah, we've, you've heard so much about our strategy. So now the question is: where do we put the money? Yeah. And so we look into the three different areas. First of all, of course, R&D. R&D right now, we heard the number earlier, we are investing EUR 100 million in R&D for green until 2025. So that's roughly a third of our R&D total budget of EUR 100 million per year. So that, well, sound a lot, might sound a lot or might sound not enough, that's, I think, depends on the perspective.
But I wanna explain that a little more because there are two things I think you really need to remember. First of all, yes, we are making our money with our Classic business, and we want to be the consolidator in the market. So if we wanna be the consolidator, we have to have the most efficient, best on the price side, as well as on the emission side, best engines that are around. So we need to invest into these. So that's one big portion. But the other portion was also part of Markus' presentation. We need a good base engine today to use for future applications that might be green. So we saw that on the 7.8-liter on the hydrogen engine. More than 80% of the engine is still the same engine, even if it's a hydrogen engine.
So even if we invest here in new products, it's also for the green future. And this is even more important if we look at CapEx. Yeah, in CapEx, I really, to be quite honest, I really can't split green to a Classic business, because we heard that the 7.8-liter engine, for example, here, runs on the same line, if it's a hydrogen engine or a diesel engine. It's just the same. So all the optimization we are talking about, and you're also gonna hopefully see, while you walk through the production, are for either option. And if we talk for real refuels, it's clear, right? It's the same engine anyway, so that is also important. Last thing on this slide is the M&A area. So I think our normal M&A part is pretty clear what we want to do.
I call it normal M&A. We talked about the Service segment. Yeah, we heard 4-5 acquisitions over the next years is what we're planning to do. So there's a base load, I would pretty much say, on the M&A side. The rest is really up for the strategy. So of course, there are options we're looking at. We have a funnel process, but we also, and this is important, hired the new CEO for the green segment to fight for this money. Yeah? So we want to look at business cases. We want to see, hey, are we rather going to invest in this option or in that option? I would say from our perspective right now, there are quite a few options open, and so we now need to make the right decision, and that's gonna be the fight for the next years.
But that might not be enough. If we remember, free cash flow is not a huge number. We want to do a lot on the M&A side, so we, of course, also looked into our potential firepower. Now there are different methods to do this. We've talked to banks, for example, but let me make it fairly simple here. We have right now pretty exactly EUR 200 million in EBITDA. So if we look into a multiple of net debt to EBITDA of 3x, which is not extremely high, of course, then that would get us to EUR 600 million of potential debt. Looking at existing debt of EUR 181 million, we have roughly EUR 400 million in firepower, which is very easily accessible. We all know, of course, it depends a lot on the target.
If we would wanna finance something bigger, then we would also need to look at the cash situation of that company. But I think here it's pretty clear that we are well set up to for doing more than just what we do today. So that should help us with our strategic direction, yeah, to actually prove that we are doing what we are saying here. That should also, of course, give us a P&L uplift, depending on what we're investing in. And then, of course, this is also why many of us are here for, we are hoping to see the valuation uplift coming because of all what we are doing here. So let me sum that up. So from my perspective as a CFO, I think we have returned to a solid performance, not benchmark performance yet.
There's still room to improve, but to a very solid performance where I can at least sleep well at night. I think the EBIT margin of the Classic segment is already pretty good. Still room to improve always, but, but good. And then that's, the fun part of it, I'd say, sufficient firepower for the future. So that's all from my side, and I'll hand over to Sebastian for the summary. Thank you.
Welcome also very much from my side. As we have not met before, I'm going to introduce myself. I'm an engineer, and I've been working for the last 20 years in the automotive industry in different companies and positions. I started with quality. I worked in industrial engineering. I was then very fast a plant manager of biggest plant of that organization I worked for at that time. And finally, I was a head of a business unit, being responsible for P&L on a global business unit with around 14,000 people at a, let's say, comparable to turnover to DEUTZ.
Now, I'm at DEUTZ since around one year, and I'm very happy to be here and to bring my experience to the operations organization at DEUTZ, and to work also together with my team to bring operations and our performance to the next level. What I'm doing today is, I'm going to explain you what our plan is in operations to support the Dual+ strategy. Here in particular, we talk about performance improvement, in particular in Classic, and Sebastian showed us before that this is needed, and we have already strong successes. In order to produce more than 200,000 engines per year, we have already started to align our organization, and we have started to work on our internal processes and on our efficiency improvements.
This leads to an optimized inventory management, and for sure, we also work on our supply chain, on the resilience of our supply chain, because I will show you later on, will be a major focus in the future. I made a deep dive together with my team on the operations performance, and we came up with a comprehensive operations roadmap. It's a comprehensive roadmap because we, on one hand, describe here what we do. We align our organization, we improve our processes, and we prepare ourselves for a future set-up in production as well as in supply chain. But we also have a plan because we know how we do it. So it's not just what, it's also how, how, and that's really important, and we have started already. We work on our production efficiency improvement.
For sure, we want to build more than 200,000 engines and prepare ourselves as well for our future products. We focus on supply chain as well as on resilient supply base, and we consider here also make versus buy activities. We work on our internal processes, and here, in particular, on our sales and operational planning, to improve our reaction to the customer on one hand, but also to get our internal processes in order. That's a lot, and I will start now with our production setup. We have a global production setup today. We have nine plants on a global base. Let's start with our plant in North America. In North America, we produce or customize our engines for the North American needs.
We have also set up two plants in China, and these two plants in China would support the local growth once the Chinese economy would pick up again. The majority of our plants are in Europe. In Zafra, this is in Spain, in Ulm, and you are here now at our biggest plant, our plant here in Cologne. We are very proud of that plant on one hand, but on the other hand, this is also a challenge, because this means most of our production locations are in high-cost countries. What is our plan? What do we do to still be profitable and to still be competitive to our competitors? What we are doing very strictly is investing in digitization and automation.
You can see it here on the picture, and I explain you later on what that means. Overall, we invested in the past years around EUR 55 million in automation, and we will do further investments also in the future, in the next two years, more than EUR 25 million. Our target is to increase our productivity by up to 40%, and that's reachable, so we have this potential. During our summer break, we went to our shaft center, and here we have changed our setup, built up our automation processes, and you see it here. We have before this video with 11 x speed. After that, the video is 2.5 x speed, and it's very clearly, it's visual, how huge the improvement is and how good we have improved our productivity up to 40% with a very, very high output.
We will do more. Why do we do that? First of all, we need to have our costs under control. On the other hand, we need to use and utilize our capacity in the best way before our future products. These future products you see here. We have here the 3.9 liter engine. This is an engine that we have developed together with John Deere, and we will start this on the line number five. Later on, you will go into the production line. Please take the opportunity and look at that, and then you will see our line number five, and here we have enough capacity now to install the 3.9 liter engine.
We are very proud that we have produced last week already four hydrogen engines on our line number three, also here in Cologne, and there is more to come. We are on the way to set up a new line here, line number six, for engines 4.1-liter and 6.1-liter, and this is a highly flexible line. So we can produce more than one type of engine here, and this helps us also in our flexibility in the future. At the same time, we are on the way to do make or buy analysis of selected components, and I will explain you later on why we do that. So there is still more to do. We will have the ramp up of our genset H2. We will integrate the new Daimler Truck engines. So Sebastian has shown that.
We integrate the eDoTs, so there's a lot of things to do, and we are happy that we can grow here in Cologne. The next very important priority is to have a significant improvement of our delivery performance to our customers. We from operations, we have a huge influence in on-time deliveries and deliver the engine to our customers when needed. Sebastian already said that we have a good percentage, more than 85%, in the stable supply delivery performance. Is this good enough? I think we have to do something here as well. On the other hand, we have improved already on our customer delivery performance, but here there is still a long way to go. And the good thing is, that we can do that without huge investments. We do that with adjusting of our internal processes.
So we work on our sales and operation planning process. We have started a project already. We are almost finished with that, and we bring it now into our sustainable working through our departments. We have a close connection now to our supply base, because also, our supply base and delivery needs to be stabilized. All that together will help us to have a better and a significant improvement of our customer deliveries in the future. A very big effect of this changing of processes is that we are going to reduce our inventory by 15% until the end of this year. That's the target that we have given ourselves, and that's huge.
But for sure, we come from a quite high level, because over the last 2-3 years, we had the distressed suppliers, the supply chain, and we built up safety stock in components and engines. But that's not needed everywhere anymore. So every part of our organization has prepared an action plan to reduce the inventory level, and we will reach our minus 15% by the end of year. With changing and adjusting of our internal processes, we sustainably reach that also for the following years. A next very successful project, what we have started in 2023, is that we significantly improve our logistics here. We come from a system where we had 4 logistics locations, and there was no separation between inbound and outbound.
Now, with the building up of a third shift, we have to manage more components and more engines. This means we need to have more transparency, more flexibility, and have also reduce our cost in reducing our warehouses. We have started beginning of 2023. This was not totally flawless, but we managed to correct it by mid of this year, and we will finish it end of this year, end of 2023. This helps us in cost control, in transparency, and flexibility. Another highly important topic is our supply base, and to make our supply base more resilient. We have 1,200 direct material suppliers. We have 25,000 active material numbers, and that's a lot. We work in an environment where we share our suppliers with the automotive industry, with the automotive industry that produces combustion engines.
Once the volumes in the automotive industry go down, we would expect that a huge number of our suppliers also are impacted. That's the situation. We also have seen that we have a very high share of single sources, and single sources mainly in Europe, and we have a high number of variants. When you look at our long-tail turbocharger, we have 350 different variants of long-tail turbochargers, and they are somehow equal, but they are not the same. And when we look at our material numbers, what we use for production is. This is just 20% of that. 20% producing is 95% of our production. The rest is low runners, spare parts. And here, we prepare as well a plan to improve. So what is our answer to that?
One thing is that we, we doubling our dual shares within the next two years to 20%. And as we have a lot of suppliers in Europe, we also have an advantage when we look into the best cost countries. We go to China, we go to India, we go to other countries, and screen our supply base. We have done that already with some specific components like camshafts and crankshafts, and these suppliers in China helped us to ramp up our third shift. Otherwise, we would not have enough components. We will do the same also in India and other parts, globally, to increase our double share on one hand, but on the other hand, also to have our costs under control and find potentials for cost-saving activities.
In other actions, what we are doing is we proactively mitigate and develop mitigation strategies for our critical materials. This can be insourcing, this can be as well re-engineering together with our customers. We did this with our ECUs. You know, there was over the last two years a lack of ECUs, and it hit us as well. And we had also some old ECUs, so we worked together with our customers to re-engineer them and change them into the new technologies, and this helps us and our customers to have enough components also in the future. So overall, what we are doing, we have a structured response to our disrupted supplier landscape. We build up a flexible and scalable production with a high profitability and with increasing automation to prepare ourselves for the future.
We focus on improving our customer deliveries to make our customers happy and also to contribute to our growth ambitions. That is what we are doing, so we assure that the world keeps moving. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, all three of you, Petra, Markus, and Timo, for your insights into the different parts of our joint mission here. Well, wrapping up, and it only takes five minutes, looking at our Dual+ strategy, I don't want to repeat it, but I think it became clear that it's not just our, our, our, like a chart with a nice picture on it, but that behind each of that pillars, of that building blocks, there is something very specific. So on the Classic business, the growth potential comes mainly from consolidation. We've shown with Daimler that we can do it and that we are doing it if there's an opportunity out there. There's more to come.
It comes from performance, and we've shown, particularly in 2022 into 2023, that on the pricing side, again, when there's an opportunity, we're gonna tackle it, and we're gonna tackle it with more consequence than others. I think that's what we've clearly shown, and that's why we doubled the margin. And that now, particularly with Petra taking over or not, creating the COO area, which wasn't dedicated there, existing before, showing that there's a clear plan in improving bottom line performance, particularly in the plants. Automation, for example, but also making sure that we keep resilient because that sort of pressure on an ICE producer, everyone has that. So that we cannot negate, and by the way, that's also a reason why valuations are fairly low for our business.
But those win who manage this best, and I'm convinced that we've already started to do the right things, and that's why we're gonna get out of that stronger than others. And that'll tremendously support here our Classic performance path. When we look at Service, if you look at that, it's always. It sounds so easy, right? I mean, there's a huge market, there's already a high profitability, there's even the third-party business available. So sometimes you look at it, and it just needs to be done. But that's also what we've shown. We're just doing it, and for good reason, we do not disclose the Service EBIT margins. They're just very high, and we're going to keep them that high, and that's why we do not like to disclose them.
But here also, we have a very clear path, and the limitation is sometimes just, and I'll come back to that, the ability of an organization to get this all done, because we've got many more ideas than you can actually do, but that's a question of how to mobilize the organization and mobilize the people. Right, so whereas this is almost like, you know, standard stuff, but it needs to be done, and I think we can probably say we're doing it better than we've ever done it before. But when we then look at green, and that's really also very exciting because here the path is not that clear. But also the way we do it now is, I believe, fairly clear for us.
First of all, engaging in the core of what we have already, but also actively pursuing activities beyond the core. And by the way, for Service, I forgot to mention entering new business fields like the digitalized telemetrics. That's also something which comes on top. It means going new ways. But coming back to green, really becoming more close to the customer, knowing what the customer wants, knowing what the customers of the customer wants, and that's also implies creating here a new organization and bringing new thinking into the heads of our people. Because the transformation, and that's what we're doing, I mean, we're doing a transformation on several verticals, if you may say so. Well, first of all, obviously, on the financial performance, we're good on track here, but also on the technology.
Markus talked a lot about hydrogen, BEV, and so on, but also on business models. And that only works with the people. And we made a lot of changes, positive changes, not exchanging people, but really changes in how we deal with the people of the organization. We invested a lot in leadership, and investment doesn't necessarily mean money; it means sometimes just time. And after COVID, we're obviously going; being together physically was fairly difficult. We did a lot- we spent a lot of time in offsites, the highest level of the organization, mid-level of the organization, speaking to people, knowing, trying to find out what knowledge is available within DEUTZ. So a lot of activities that created a new program to develop the talents. Bringing in also new expertise, and not always just from engine companies.
You know, you have to have people who know the core, but you also have to have people coming from other industries and also other countries. Diversity is not only about becoming more female, it's also becoming more colorful in terms of heritage from, again, other, other countries, other cultures. And we made a lot of changes in that, positive changes. And so I'm convinced with that, with that new focus on people, it helps us in managing this transformation on different trajectories: performance, technology, and business models. Our right to win. We talked a lot about right to play and right to win, and yeah, it's always a nice claim to say, "Oh, yeah, we, we got a right to win." But one thing which I have to say I learned in a very positive way, our brand is stronger than I had imagined.
So when you are, particularly outside Germany. Last week, I spent, I was in China and in Asia, but also when you're in the U.S., sometimes you feel like, you're like representing DEUTZ. Wow! This seems, you know, a world's company, and, well, we are a EUR 2 billion company as of now, but sometimes you feel like, okay, when you get the business card out, CEO of DEUTZ, oh, wow, you are like, I wouldn't say a superstar. No, no, don't get me wrong, but it feels like really the brand is stronger than we sometimes are aware of, and I think that helps us a lot in getting, a really, successful transformation forward. And obviously, yes, the global footprint is super helpful, particularly when it comes to sales and service.
It's always good to be where the customers are, and for us, the relevant customers, the relevant markets, is the Americas in particular, and is Europe, and we are growing there. We're rolling in dealers and former external service providers, so we're getting stronger there. That's super important, not only to grow in the short term, profitable Service business, but also to be there when the new green technologies enter the market, because that gives reliability to the customers that we are there when they need us, where they need us. Engineering expertise, innovation capability, and commitment to quality was also a point in Markus' part. There are so many startups out there who can say, "Well, we electrify a product." Yeah, and they probably electrify a product, and if things go well, they electrify also the operator of the product.
That's something, well, with a focus on functional safety, that shows now that a lot of potential or lost customers come back to us. And that is, I think, extremely important, that what we stand for with this commitment to expertise, engine expertise, and quality. And last but not least, sales and operations excellence, and that's a field where we developed a lot over the last years, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. But sometimes, you know, we want to convince the capital market to invest, and obviously, you wouldn't be investing if you feel like, oh, this company is top-notch and there's nothing to improve. So we want to convince you that we have the potential to be top-notch.
There's a lot to improve, and that's much easier when there's a lot to improve to reach the potential when you're already at a 98% performance level. I can tell you, that's not where we are right now, but that's where we're gonna be in the next years, and hopefully, we'll manage to convince you that we have not only a plan, but we have the right team to get there. Value proposition. Yes, we want to establish ourselves as a top three independent engine maker, by 2030, climate neutrality by 2050, with the products, with the ecosystems, and so on. And as Timo explained, the cross-financing game, transformation never is for free. Never is for free. It always costs money, and it's easier to manage a transformation if you have the money, if you earn the money.
We showed it very clearly that with a road to profitability in Classic and with the increased profitability, increased business and Service, we're gonna be there. We're gonna grow, but always with a focus on profitability. And the whole aspect of the value play, I mean, I mentioned it earlier, mainly focus on dividend, but it's not just the dividend. I mean, hopefully, we managed to convince you that we're gonna grow the top line. That's one aspect. Bringing value up, we're gonna grow the bottom line, and you're all financial experts, so you know that much better than me. If you grow, a top line and you grow the relative margin, well, then the basis for valuation goes up. And with that, all stuff into green, we also grow the multiple.
And if that all comes together, you know, this is not a stagnating business, it's a growing business, growing profitability, and growing fantasy. And at the moment, I think today we had an EV/EBITDA multiple of 3.3. That is a lot of potential to grow. So please, hopefully, we'll again, we'll manage to convince you on that, and, we're looking forward for lots of new equity purchases over the next weeks. You know, I will also personally investing in the company whenever we are allowed to, and I think that's the strongest signal we can give. Thanks for your attention.