Ready for more? Exactly. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day 2025 here in London. I welcome you here. It's a pretty packed floor. I also welcome all the participants out there who follow us via Open Exchange. We'll come to that in a little moment later on. Those of you who attended our site visit yesterday are already used to it. At the beginning of everything we do, there's a little safety moment. Let me take the opportunity for the participants here in the room to remind you that the emergency exits are to the left-hand side of you. You back home there, you may watch out where your individual exit may be. We have an agenda for you today that basically picks up where we left it in September 2024 last year when we introduced Strategy 2030 in Frankfurt.
We had Tobias, we had Melanie setting the overall framework. What we did not do at that point in time was the divisional deep dives. What does that Strategy 2030 framework actually mean for the divisions? Guess what? That's what we're going to do today. As for agenda, we will start off in a second with Tobias sort of setting the stage, and that will then be followed by a sequence of fairly condensed divisional presentations starting in the usual order that you know from the reporting. We start with John on Express, Tim on Forwarding. That will then have taken us one and a half hours into the morning. Great opportunity for a first Q&A round with the two divisional colleagues, Melanie and Tobias. A short coffee break later, we continue with Oscar, Pablo, and Nikola on their divisions.
Before we then hear from Melanie, the financial wrap-up and what all that means in the context of ROIC for the Q&A. We have you here in the room, of course, for the participants online via Open Exchange. If you follow now, the right-hand side window on your screen will be your opportunity to place your questions. I think with that, we're pretty much ready to go. Tobias, may I ask you on stage, please?
Thank you, Martin. Very warm welcome. Good morning from my side. I think we couldn't have picked a better day, a sunny spring day in London. Thank you for your interest in our company and our review, Martin said it, on where we left it off in September. What can you expect today? What we're going to talk about is that we see ample opportunities in the global logistics market, and that very much remains valid after what we heard yesterday evening. The trade patterns are changing, but that also brings opportunities for us, and we remain confident that we can leverage our position as DHL Group to deliver GDP plus growth. We have a strong and experienced team, not only in the room, but also out there, a proven track record of dealing with volatility over many decades.
I think especially in the COVID pandemic, we have demonstrated that, and we have clear plans to improve the business further to drive profitability next to growth and a strong commitment to deliver increasing returns on capital and attractive shareholder returns. That is what we want to talk about in great detail today. We do that against the backdrop of five trends that are particularly relevant for our business, starting with global trade, which I will deep dive in a minute on. E-commerce obviously remains very important for our portfolio as well. It is a structural growth driver that had increasing importance for our business over the years. Nearly 30% of group revenue is now connected to e-commerce. Climate change is also something that remains very high on our agenda.
We talked about that in September with the introduction of the fourth bottom line being green logistics of choice, and our ambition remains to be a front runner in the decarbonization of logistics. Digitalization is something that is part of our quality drive, but it's also part of our efficiency drive. It helps us in many ways, and we're going to show some examples of that. Lastly, evolving workforce. We are and will remain, even with the use of technology, a labor-intensive business and industry, and this is why having the best talent in the industry, being able to attract and retain that talent, remains very important to us.
Now, talking about global trade, we have obviously seen two waves, two booms of global trade in recent decades, one driven by the decrease of transportation costs relative to the value of goods, the introduction of the container, significant improvements in aviation. That was in the 1970s, and then the long stretch of globalization. For many of us, I think the ascension of China to the WTO is one of those moments in 2001. We obviously do not expect that trade continues to outgrow GDP, but we expect it to grow in line with GDP. Now, with what we heard yesterday, a lot of that is still to be digested. There are some important details: what tariffs stack, what tariffs are substitutive of each other is one of those examples.
We, more importantly, also have to see how our customers react to this, whether this will really lead to investments in manufacturing capacity in the U.S., for instance. This will depend on whether our customers see these things as temporary or permanent. A lot to be seen. I think what is clear is those tariffs would stay in. It has a detrimental effect on the volume of U.S.-related trade. About a quarter of global trade is related to the U.S., a bit more on the importation side of the U.S. than the export. We have to see how this unfolds. Some of that will shift, and that's not necessarily bad for DHL. Our exposure, our market share in U.S.-related trade is significantly lower than our market share in the rest of the world. We have seen clear commitment of other nations to further trade.
It is not easy to see how, from a volume perspective, this will play out for us. As it relates to the second effect this has, which is the increase of complexity of trade, we have one very practical example, which is Brexit, probably a very appropriate example to mention here in London. It clearly reduced volume, particularly the trading of SMEs with continental Europe came under massive pressure. I think this was also felt in the broader economy, that not being a very positive impact. Also, the volume, you see this here on the left side, the weight that we transported decreased. However, from a profitability point of view, it was basically a wash given that more volume came into the types of trade that we accommodate, which especially has the element of customs clearance. That is something that we are traditionally very strong.
It's an integral part of our express offering. We offer it as a standalone service through Global Forwarding Freight as well. Overall, this was a balance. This is only one example, and the analogy is obviously not ideal as it relates to the U.S., but just to highlight, we clearly see the potential adverse effects on volume, but there is more to it. Trade tends to shift elsewhere, and trade continues also under complex conditions. Looking at our portfolio overall, a portfolio that spans across multiple types of logistics businesses. Some of those are more exposed to the volatility of the economic cycle, particularly in Global Forwarding Freight. That's clearly the case. The air freight market is more volatile, more multiple of the fluctuations in GDP. We obviously recognize that.
On the other hand, we have some businesses that thrive more on structural growth drivers, especially the structural shift to a higher share of online retail. Overall, we think this is a strong portfolio, which is very resilient. We have different business models, and we cater for these business models through the divisional structure. Overall, this structure also allows us to stay sufficiently agile, which we deem important in the environment we live in. Now, looking at each of the divisions, and much of that you obviously know, the strength of each of them, starting with DHL Express, we regard this as a highly attractive business with high returns on invested capital throughout the cycle. We have obviously invested heavily in DHL Express over the last years, upgrading our air fleet, but also our ground infrastructure.
We do so with a backdrop of e-commerce being a structural growth driver, but we see, particularly in this business, a lot of opportunity through what we call geographic tailwinds, which is especially where trade and manufacturing activity is going. If we would not have had that initiative already since September, we would probably have to invent it now, given that we will see an accelerated shift in global trade. Global Forwarding Freight, we particularly like, as many of you do, because of its asset light characteristic and its organically very high return on invested capital. Again, there are similar trends, digitalization probably being even more important than for Express. Supply Chain is a business that has evolved very steadily, and we would expect that to continue. It is a highly domestically centered business in nearly all geographies where we are present.
That includes the United States, which is the largest single country by now that we operate in with supply chain. It contains not only the stationary part, the warehousing part. Some of you were able to visit one of our sites here on the eastern side of London, but it also has distribution and transportation elements. That is what we do in this space, and this provides a great level of resilience. E-commerce, we want to grow into a full division. That is a growth phase and investment value that is self-financed, but it will not contribute in the same way than the other divisions to the free cash flow of the group. I think that is obvious. Also for P&P, we are in a transformation from a letter-centric business to parcel-centric business.
We are basically half through that now, with parcel now being the majority of revenue and with a structural trend of e-commerce and also the German economy still having to make a long way to reach saturation levels. That is what we continue to focus. We do that, and that is common across all business, with a strong focus on our workforce. We are and we want to be the quality provider in logistics, and we can only do that if we have an engaged workforce. Particularly with the aging of nations, it is even more important to remain attractive as an employer. I think we are not only talking about that. The talking is the easy part that many do, but we are really on it. There is external validation from that.
I also had the opportunity when I was in the U.S. two weeks ago to have basically back-to-back a site visit with DHL Supply Chain and then a site that was not managed by DHL. It is really a very remarkable and very visible difference. I encourage you also to do that. You really see that we take good care of our people. The economics of the workplace are much better. Also other elements like canteen. It does pay off. It does pay off through higher productivity and better quality. That is why we are fully committed and will stay on that path. Also, as it relates to the leadership team, I am blessed to lead what I clearly consider the best team in the industry. What I am particularly grateful for, also the last six months were not the easiest when it comes to the day-to-day.
Obviously, these changes that we see have consequences in the setup of our operations, and that needs to be looked after. We had the time and will continue to have the time going forward to work on strategic initiatives. A lot we'll talk about that today. We manage the day-to-day in volatile times, but we have sufficient management capacity to push also our strategic agenda. That is why I'm confident that we'll also deliver against that agenda. That agenda we laid out in September of last year summarized in this chart. On the left-hand side, our strong foundation. We talked about that, talked about our purpose, our values, our commitment to quality in logistics, and also our four bottom lines, starting with employer of choice, provider of choice, investment of choice, and green logistics of choice.
What we very much want to focus on today is the right-hand side, the ready for more, the mindset for quality and growth, but also our doubling down on structural tailwinds that are relevant for our industry and the space we operate in, as well as our setup for success. We want to do that consistently for the group and then for the divisions to first talk about our top-line growth accelerators, what we do there and why we're confident this will deliver above GDP growth for the group, and then our profitability accelerators, both from a return on sales perspective, but also from a capital efficiency perspective, how we structurally set ourselves up for success. Starting with the top-line growth accelerators for the group, and then again, we'll have divisional deep dives on this as well.
We've communicated for the group five group initiatives that drive top-line growth, starting with life science and healthcare. Life science and healthcare is already a substantial business for us, north of EUR 5 billion annual revenue in 2024, with a good trajectory and a good profitability. It is really something where the entire portfolio of the group comes to bear, where we are able to deliver solutions for our customers that really make a difference. You could argue that the logistics industry has neglected what pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies need when you look at temperature-controlled transport, especially the integration of such transport with local warehousing and distribution. That is what we're working on from an organic perspective, building new facilities that help to integrate that supply chain and make repackaging, recooling, and so forth obsolete.
A great proportion of the spend that our customers have, when you look at the distribution cost, is in packaging and the transportation of that packaging. That is why there is a significant opportunity to increase the efficiency of such transport, reduce the amount of packaging that is required through better temperature control, active or passive, and thereby also use the transportation cost for that packaging. That is what we are on. We will, and we have talked about that in September, do that through also acquiring certain capabilities, capabilities that we can scale. That is what we are looking for. We do not want to buy scale. We have that ourselves. If there are specific capabilities that are faster to buy and scale, we will do that. That will start the integration of CRYOPDP, which is an acquisition we announced just a couple of days ago.
On new energy, that's the field that ranges from wind, solar, the whole EV chain, battery grid infrastructure, and then probably at a later stage, relevant alternative fuels and hydrogen. We are focused currently on the six that you see on the bottom, alternative fuels and hydrogen. We expect to come later with volumes that are relevant for our global portfolio. We make really good progress with this. Again, pretty nascent requirements, a lot of inefficiencies, a lot of setups currently that are single project when it comes to wind turbines, for instance. There the opportunity is to create more standardized, more constant delivery of logistic services for our customers and thereby bring also efficiencies into these supply chains that applies across these different product categories and types. They are all very specific, particularly when it comes to batteries. You have a lot of local regulation.
That is where also our value proposition lies, that we can globally deliver and have the local expertise to handle these goods. Structural tailwinds contains geographic tailwinds. This is exactly our response to what we saw and anticipated in terms of changes in global trade flows. This is Chinese companies internationalizing not only their distribution footprint, but also their manufacturing footprint. With the U.S. taking the decision to distance its economy from the rest of the world, we will see shifts from that activity. If you have a global distribution center in the U.S. to distribute spare parts, for instance, some of those goods will be imported. If the rules, the trade policies, the tariffs that were announced yesterday would stay in effect for longer, it would not be viable to have such distribution infrastructure in the U.S. That would relocate to other countries.
This is our response to that. We have selected 20 countries that we think will benefit from these shifts and double down in those countries to proactively contact customers that are likely to, that have already set up shop there or would benefit from operations in these countries. Again, something that has been going on since September. I think we had a very good start to really double down to investments ahead of need when it comes to supply chain, for instance, to do land banking. We have done this successfully in India, Malaysia, and Mexico. We have a good track record with that. We know and have experience on how to do this. This is what we now replicate in 17 more countries. E-commerce, very important already for the group. I mentioned it, 29% of our revenue related to this.
We want to be present in some more countries as it relates to last mile activity, especially, but also fulfillment. Our acquisition of Monta, .a.gain, a capability that we acquired, the capability to serve small businesses, small online business effectively. That's what Monta has figured out in the Netherlands. And we've scaled this now across multiple geographies. Turkey was an acquisition or MNG Cargo in Turkey that gives us another country that we cover through own last mile operations. Again, there are some more countries on our list. It needs to be countries that have a reasonable geographic complexity so that you also have economies of scale and barriers to entry and thereby a healthy industry structure. We don't want to be, as it relates to e-commerce and last mile operations of e-commerce-related shipments. We don't want to be in all countries.
There is a defined list where we want to be. Also, our value chain coverage we want to extend. This is especially on the return side. We did an acquisition in the U.S., Inmar, who is a specialist in returns, the initiation of returns from the platform of the e-commerce retailer, and then the processing of those return shipments either back into the inventory of the seller or into other channels from recycling to resale. That's the specialty we have there. Again, it's a capability that we acquired that we also want to scale globally. What's important when it comes to last mile, we are keenly aware that this is a scale play. We only want to be in last mile as a top three player.
If we can't reach that position organically, we'll reach it through partnerships as we are now pursuing, for instance, in Iberia with CTT Expresso, a subsidiary of the Portuguese Post. Digitalization, a lot going on in that field. It's not only our initiative to digitize sales and provide our customers a better digital access to the group. It's also our ongoing efforts of process automation and the deployment of AI. As it relates to AI, we have three focus areas where we want to deploy agentic AI, not only for efficiency, but also for greater effectiveness. This is in the area of customs, customs clearance, and customer service. I think the most obvious area of application, but also in HR, the hiring process.
We believe that, again, we cannot only achieve efficiency gains here, but also have better outcomes, hire people that are more suitable for the job, and thereby show a higher productivity, but a higher loyalty to our company and thereby reduce administrative cost. These are some focus areas that we're working on. Next to automation and robotics, you will hear a lot in the divisional presentation, especially in Oscar's presentation on this. We obviously continue to focus on areas like simplifying our IT architecture and having a keen eye on cybersecurity. Our portfolio is a portfolio that increasingly shows connectedness also from within. On European parcel, I think that's quite obvious with P&P having a strong position in Europe's largest economy, which also happens to be geographically quite central.
That is obviously an important anchor point for our pan-European parcel network that we continue to build, where we also see a disproportionate growth of the international flows on the back of efficient domestic last mile. This is an area where e-commerce and PNP are increasingly connected. We see this in the air capacity management, where Global Forwarding is now by far the largest customer of Express. We are increasingly working on joint solutions to develop lanes that allow then the deployment of larger, more efficient aircraft co-used by Global Forwarding. We have the integrated approach to our top customers, which we had for many years, but now particularly extending to some customers in Asia, especially Chinese manufacturers internationalizing their footprint. That is an area where we see great opportunity for us. It's also the collaboration on the e-commerce imports from China.
We've been on this for a while, and we are very selective in this, as you know. We have reduced our exposure on the Trans-Pacific, for instance, very targetedly so. There are obviously areas in the world where this is an attractive play that we want to participate in. We're going to continue to have the expertise for some areas in group functions and also increasingly so have good success to leverage best practices across the group, especially or as an example when it comes to pricing and yield management. Now, quickly on the profitability accelerators that we have from a group perspective, these are three. We have the fit for Growth program. We talked about that on March the 6th. We have the alignment of the legal structure to align the legal structure with our management structure.
We also want to allocate all central cost to the divisions. This has been asked from investors for a while to increase comparability with some of our peers, but also to have some healthy dynamics in terms of discussing these costs where we already committed to reduce our group functions cost from EUR 450 million to EUR 400 million, as we mentioned on March the 6th. Fit for Growth, very briefly. Again, the division is going to provide more details on the actual measures. What it is, it is really a drive for structural cost improvements that are sustainable, changing of setups, changing of structures in our aviation setup, for instance, but also very operational things on how we operate last mile, for instance. It has also to do, I mentioned this earlier, with the digitalization and deployment of technology in many areas.
What it is not, it's not the usual flex that we have over the season or the economic cycle, nor is it a compromise on quality. We also will not bring this in any conflict with our ambition to grow. The alignment of the legal structure of the group, which is a process we laid out in September of last year, that's fully on track. It is a bit of work given that we are not only having the carve down of the P&P activities, that is a substantial TUPE, as you would call this in the U.K., to change the employment structure for about 175,000 employees who would transition into the new legal entity that would then carry the name Deutsche Post AG. We also have the untangling of the DHL divisions in the international space.
We have multiple interim holdings that currently cut across, and we want to streamline that so that all, for instance, subsidiaries of DHL Express are under one DHL Express holding. That is a process that continues and is fully in line with plan so that we will get and aim for final approval of these measures in the 2026 annual shareholder meeting. With that, our formula for growth remains the trade environment and economic environment that we currently see. We do not feel this encouraged by the trends we have seen. There had also been positive elements. It was mentioned over dinner yesterday multiple times that Europe seems to develop some form of more positive action, Germany included.
We have our strategic approach, which we'll talk about in more detail today, which would lead to us growing our revenue 50% by 2030 on top of our 2023 baseline, this being paired with an increase of divisional margins and an increase of ROIC as well. What you will hear from my divisional colleagues is how we deal with short-term volatility. I think that's important to set that in context because we need to obviously deliver for our customers every day. That's the basis of the business that we have, and we need to keep our customers loyal to have that as a basis for growth. We'll show how we intend to grow, which measures we have to grow in excess of GDP and do so with structurally higher profitability and thereby deliver strong returns on invested capital in all divisions.
We are very much committed to deliver as a group out of this portfolio, strong free cash flow and attractive shareholder returns. I think we've taken some additional step on this path also with what we communicated on March the 6th. With that, it is my great pleasure to hand over to my dear colleague, John Pearson.
Thank you, Tobias. Good morning, everyone. I hope you enjoyed last evening. In terms of the outlook for Express that Tobias and Melanie has already commented left you with in September, I think you can see what that outlook is. I think if I just go backwards for just one slide and show a little bit where we've come from, I think it adds some credibility to what our outlook is going forward.
It reminds you of the moving parts of our business over the last 10 years, which has had two significant variations in it, pre-pandemic and the pandemic in itself. If you allow me, I'll just go back one page. The 10-year TDI retrospective is as strong as it is stable. You can see that from this slide in the sense that we've grown our business over that decade at over 7%, a little bit of a CAGR over 7%. That in turn has enabled our market leadership to increase to 47%, which is 20 percentage points over our nearest US-based competitor. We'll talk a little bit more about our competitors in a minute.
During that time, and for those reasons and other reasons, we've been able to grow our EBIT, as you can see there, at a 10% CAGR pre-pandemic and an 8% CAGR during the pandemic consistently, which is in line with the forward-looking aspiration that you saw in our outlook, which is to grow EBIT faster than achieved volume growth. In fact, that EBIT growth is just about double. Our volume growth was around 4%-5% at the time. In our outlook, we have 4%-5%. To grow faster than that, you can start to piece that all together. Now, you might well look at that slide and say, the question now is, can you or how can you keep that trajectory going through the next strategy cycle?
I think that relates to one rather unique and not easily copyable point of differentiation, which is our global network ourselves. This is absolutely the global network that global trade requires and depends upon more so now going forward than ever before. It is the network that e-commerce depends upon. 219 countries and territories, the vast majority of which are owned offices run by DHL people that have read the focus brochure. They have the CIS passport and have very little dependence on agents who have much lower brand awareness and much lower alignment with our strategy. That is the first key thing. Practically speaking, as I look at that map, I remind you that there are more differences between us and our competitors at the minute. There really are more differences than similarities.
The international aspirations of our competitors means that on great swathes of that map, we actually operate alone. We operate maybe against an agent that has several other things to deliver and newspapers, milk, but nowhere significantly in Africa and a lot of those continents do we operate against a significant FedEx and UPS business. Going forward, as trade adjusts, as it is adjusting yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and continues to adjust through the next strategy cycle, I think it's fair to say that DHL Express and DHL Group is uniquely positioned to capture the shifting sands of global trade, as Tobias referred to. Coming along with that global coverage, though, is as many challenges as there are opportunities.
The fact that we've grown through those challenges by seizing the opportunities talks to the strength of the network, talks to the strength of our quality, and talks to the strength of the people in the network. Whether it was the ash cloud crisis where for much of that month, there were only two aircraft flying in European airspace, you can see it here, they were both DHL aircraft, whether it was the wrenching changes in trade brought about by Brexit, or whether just one month later, it was the pandemic itself. We've seen it all. We've managed through it all, and we've grown through it all at 7%. The real catalyst for that growth, you see on the bottom of this slide, is the focus strategy itself. The strategy is in its ninth iteration of the brochure.
Great place to work, number one ranking, where we've been first, second, or third in the last five years. I stand here today where number one, great place to work. To the native English speaker, that means the greatest place to work. I say that's an award for all, won by all. It's not a senior executive high-fiving exercise. This is something that all our people get involved in. Coupled with that, the CIS International Passport, the program by which we have every one of our 112,633 people indoctrinated into the school of quality and how to manage an international business. Lastly, you will see a very simple slogan there, P+Q = G, people + quality = growth.
That slogan, that logo, that formula, and all the dependencies underneath it are as much in place in the Philippines and Fiji as they are in the U.K. and the U.S.A. It is really that infrastructure on the bottom of the page that is driving our success going forward. Whilst our focus on TDI is singular, the product portfolio is actually very diversified. It is that diversification that has protected us and safeguarded us against the volatility that we have all come to know, particularly so recently, but has been there for the last 20 years. At the same time, that unique coverage has presented us with opportunities to grow, to grow faster than our competitors.
As you look at this landscape, you'll see it really is a case of all regions, all countries, all sales channels, all industries, all customers, both within B2B and B2C and within account and non-account business. The way in which we grew around that network from 1969 and Fiji and Tahiti and into Australia into the U.K. in 1974 really has put us in this position where we really are covering all the industries, all the channels, all the customers, and we're finding growth in some areas, some years, and in other areas, another years. That talks to our stability and our ability to grow faster than the market. We looked at how the performance was over the last 10 years. We looked at where we've been finding the growth from. I think now we move to how can we accelerate that growth going forward.
The case there is about continuing to strengthen a profitable core. I'll talk to that. Capturing those tailwinds from global trade that Tobias spoke about will give quite some detail because as I read the events of last night, I think we're even in a better position than we might have imagined there and continue to double down on quality. The story on quality in Express is retention is the key to growth, and quality is the key to retention. That underpins all our activities. In terms of B2B and B2C, those of you that know us well know that 80% of our revenue is on this page, 75% on the left-hand side, 25% of lighter weight B2C on the right-hand side. In terms of B2B, we've been growing at a very solid trajectory, nearly 7% CAGR during the pandemic, through the pandemic, and into last year.
I think the question here is how can we secure that level of B2B growth, 75% of our revenue, considerable contribution to our profit margins going forward. I'd say there in terms of the heavyweight volumes that fell into our lap during the pandemic, our weight per shipment went up by 30% or 40% during the pandemic. We expected that to normalize at the end of the pandemic and those weights to go back to the forwarder community. It absolutely was not the case, mainly for reasons of transit time advantage, pricing stability, or customer's customer satisfaction. We are still sitting at an all-time high weight per shipment, which is some 40% higher than we were in 2019. We continue to attract attractive weight profiles into our network. That is very much a focus going forward. You could also imagine that price and yield activities drive into B2B.
Secondly, during the end of the last MI study, we put together a sort of bone-deep review of our go-to-market SME offering that is much more comprehensive and complementary right through from identifying the market dynamics and prospecting, using AI to attract these customers, better ratios of winning these small and medium-sized customers, better understanding of who the attractive small and medium-sized customers are, and better retention of them. I think we have to be good at that because it's 40% of our overall revenue. There's a GP of more than 40%. In some countries, it's up to 50%-60%-70% of our revenue. In any one country in the world, if you list the identified customers with paid-up capital in any one country, 99% of them are SMEs. It pays us to be good at that. That's what we're becoming very good at.
On the right-hand side, the driver there has really been the active customers that have come into B2C, 30,000 more active customers during the pandemic. A strong growth CAGR there of 14%. There again, the prognosis is good. I use this phrase that consumers are maybe browsing, not buying. They're buying one and not 10, or 10, not 100, 100, not 1,000. Those active customers that came into our active customer base are all still sitting there rather nascently, as Tobias suggested, but ready to grow again as the environment suggests when they will. The customer makeup is much more dependent on those customers that really require a TDI service. The merchants require TDI. The consumers require TDI. That's the picture of the handbags you see there.
The Power Up Your Potential program has one singular focus of allowing merchants to expand their overseas market present penetration. We've done a tutorial to some of you in the past explaining that. It's a big part of our e-commerce offering. It's been very successful, and we're taking markets into new markets that they never imagined was even there. We have quite a sophisticated approach in terms of making sure that customers in our network are accretive to our EBIT and shouldn't necessarily be moving to Pablo's division, taking a deferred service, or even going into the postal service, which is the red and yellow cards that you see there. That is the bulk of our portfolio. Here, this talks to our market-leading position in those markets that are projected to grow fastest over the next five years. Tobias alluded to it. It's called Geographic Tailwinds 20.
are 20 markets. You can see by the color coding there that they have quite a broad representation across different regions. They are identified to grow faster on an axis of speed and scale over the next five years through until the end of the strategy cycle. That is on the basis of three reasons: China plus one, six or seven of the countries in Asia, those countries benefiting from inward FDI investment or high GDP, high PMI, India, and other such examples, and those countries benefiting from nearshoring, onshoring, friendshoring. There are, broadly speaking, three groups, three clusters of countries that should grow faster over the next five years. In those countries, we are definitely first in. We have a 3D or a 4D multidivisional presence in those locations.
We are often great place to work, number one, two, or three, and we're absolutely in the best place to capture the opportunity that these allegedly fastest-growing markets present to us. This is over 20% of group revenue. It's over 20% of express revenue. We've been running at it now for six months. We've got good momentum in the start of this year. We've profiled all those countries. We've had cross-BU workshops in all of those markets. In fact, the single biggest opportunity we have here is that it's a classic cross-BU program. We've got a program of commercial excellence in one sense and helping those customers satisfy their own aspirations and requirements of supply chain diversification in the other. There's quite considerable focus. It sits alongside what Tim is doing with new energy and what Oscar is doing with health logistics.
Having identified the growth that we've been enjoying and how we found that through this rather unique nature, through being a competitor that is quite different and more different than most of you would imagine, as I said, I see more dissimilarities than similarities, how we can accelerate that growth, and then how the balance of the discussion should be on how we drive the margin and the profitability going forward. There are three areas around, two of which you're very familiar with, the way in which we continue to manage yield and pricing. The second is the flexibility of our network, which we've talked about a lot over the years. The third is the advent and the commencement of the group-wide Fit for Growth program, active cost management, cost leadership that Express has a significant contribution to and is already running quite fast there.
In terms of yield management, our pricing and yield teams have been busy making the pricing blackboard, the pricing toolkit more sophisticated. I presented this in Leipzig as long as 10 or 12 years ago. Some of you may be there. This array of programs is in Ecuador in the same way it's in Ethiopia, in the same way it's in Estonia. Now, you might say, "How?" Six regional pricing leaders are taking all these programs down into the field in large markets, medium markets, and small markets. That's what's giving the traction and the success of our price and yield function. You'll see DSX there at 5:00. That's the demand surcharge activity, which we put in place for the first time last year with a very high degree of stick rate. We have the system in place to do it again.
We are now in our planning phase to put it in in September or October. We're just watching how things progress towards that period of time. The last thing I would say here is that my colleagues have commentary on yield management in their presentation. We have had for the last three years a yield and price management ex-com steering group, which I chair. The whole group now, I would say, and summarize is on a level and on a path towards pricing excellence at a faster rate than we have been before. My colleagues will talk about that.
We go on to, whilst the commercial folks have been busy winning business and pricing and yield business and making sure that the right volumes are in our network and accretive to that EBIT growing faster than volume growth, the operations guys have been building the perfect network, which I say building the perfect aviation network. The unique thing, and you've heard me use that word a few times, the unique thing about that aviation network is in itself is flexibility. It's high level of flexibility, another dissimilarity with our US-based competitors. You can see at the bottom of the slide, we've hovered between 26%-29% of flexibility. That is still firmly the case. We would expect that to increase. That relates to operating leases less than one year.
Overlaying that, we have the flexibility coming towards us through the increase in air capacity, belly space coming back into the market. That is another level of flexibility. Separate to that, but also building on flexibility, we now have 28 more new triple sevens in our network from 2019 to the end of this year. We have a partner network of organizations we helped through the pandemic that helped us through the pandemic that would quite honestly bend over backwards for us. This is something that our US-based competitors do not have either. The combination of those four things really tells me we are moving towards that perfect aviation network, which all of you know is very important to our outlook going forward. In terms of Fit for Growth and structural optimization in Express, this is more active cost management, being a cost leader in the same way.
We're a growth leader, a quality leader, and a people leader. It really is an example of a no stone unturned approach. All elements of this $22 billion are under scrutiny. I would say two things about how we're getting into that, and we have been getting into that for the last six months. On one level, it's a classic efficiency optimization and leaner overhead program at a much faster clip than we had in place before. Secondly, a lot of these things are underpinned by AI and supported by AI, so our ability to accelerate through these programs is very important. Thirdly, I would share with you that this is including a complete reset of our European operations network, reset in terms of heavy efficiency, reset in terms of heavy optimization, reset in the sense of the network configuration of our intra-European aircraft fleet.
You might say, "Why is that happening now?" That's happening now partly because the volumes have still been subdued, so it's the time to do it, a little bit in the same way as Fit for Growth. It's also happening now because the leadership change has given us the ability, both in terms of the CEO, someone that replaced me, and in terms of the Chief Operations Officers allowed us to get really into that. And that's a big component part of this Fit for Growth program in Express.
As I come to, we talk a little bit about CapEx in a minute, but as I come to sort of the outlook at the beginning, why we think that outlook is reasonable on the basis of past performance, a significant part of the reasonableness of that outlook is the unique position in DHL Express of being in all 219 countries, just about in all cases with owned offices, have all been made aware of the focus strategy and are very much walking down the same path on yield management, the same path on new energy, the same path on life science and healthcare, the same path on cost management, very much in a position to get taking that cost management example as one, a message out to 219 countries tomorrow, if it were tomorrow, to accelerate our efforts in that area.
In terms of our path to 2030, focusing on that profitable core, we have a DDI business in Europe that we're continuing to sophisticate and drive better service levels for. It's the only DDI business we have. Pablo will talk more about DDI and how that relates to e-commerce, capturing those tailwinds from global trade. Water somehow finds a way. Trade will find a way. We shouldn't overlook the resilience of global trade and underestimate the creativity of buyers and sellers who want to do business. Whatever comes of what happened last night, there are as many people thinking that the problem out there, for every problem out there, trade is part of the solution. I'm very close to this whole level of global connectedness, the global trade atlas.
I know that elements of those 20 countries, whether they're trading with a different end destination, will be trading faster than they were. I also know if Mexico has some level of tariff advantage that maybe it was expecting, maybe it wouldn't, the significant opportunity for Mexico, one of our key markets, to also grow fast. In terms of the accelerators, yield is a very proven competence and capability in the division. It's now more in place over the last two to three years in the other divisions than it ever has been before, and we are on that path towards pricing excellence. We have a very flexible network that is becoming more flexible in terms of aviation, and we've overlaid on top of that an accelerated and highly focused group-wide cost program. Those two things drive the two elements that we've talked through.
Now, in terms of our growth and quality-oriented CapEx plan, here we have very prudent, disciplined, but adjustable deployment of a stable and steady pot of CapEx that is in the region of $1 billion and slightly higher than that over the following years to ensure that we continue to make this rather significant contribution to higher free cash flow in the group. That is something we have been doing. It is something we are able to continue doing going forward and a responsibility we know that is on us. In terms of ROIC, I would like to say our ability to drive ROIC forward is firmly there. I would say it is very much a case of right volume at the right price, right CapEx at the right place, right flexibility in the right network.
Those three levers of the quality of the volume on our network, the extent to which we deploy CapEx into places that either drive quality or drive growth, right place, right time. Lastly, that ongoing, literally ongoing flexibility of significantly the aviation network, also the operations network and all other elements of our network is really the guarantor of future ROIC going forward. I would finish with the summary here. I'll just talk through it slowly. Our PQG is really a key element of the focus strategy and the focus brochure. That strategy was first written in 2010. It's been refined and modified somewhat over the next 15 years. That plan we have there is known by all people. Underpinning P is obviously a great place to work, our employee opinion survey, that people are at the center of everything we do.
Underpinning quality is that you do not need to remind people in Express to talk about quality. With our 96% transit time, we have our focus on voice of customer and our partnership with Medallia to get more sophisticated voice of customer. We have our growth programs. We have commercial excellence across growth, including with a nod there to sustainable aviation fuel and selling GoGreen Plus. All elements of that strategy, and I have overseen them for 15 years now, are probably as strong as they have ever been before. We are playing in an attractive segment, and 80% of where we play is a very attractive segment with long-term prognosis for healthy growth. We have all the levers to continue to move our margin through, into, and through the mid-teens and continue to deliver on our ROIC and our free cash flow contribution. That is the Express story.
Thank you very much for your interest and look forward to taking questions later. Now welcome Tim Scharwath.
Thank you, John. Also, good morning from my side here in London. John, I always internally also get to present after John, and my usual comment is it's always difficult for a non-native speaker to speak after a native speaker. That's the one comment. The other comment, you are bang on time. Express style. Thank you very much for that. Now to something a bit different. Now I'd like to take you into the depth, into the woods of DHL Global Forwarding Freight, the freight forwarding arm of the DHL Group.
I think you've seen this slide before when Melanie and Tobias presented our new strategy to 2030, which outlines how we see the market, how we see growth from the market, and what our expectations are towards growth, that we want to grow stronger than the market will grow, and we see the market growing with GDP. Also a bit on the CapEx outlook and then what our EBIT outlook is for the next cycle until 2030, and based on that, how we want to do this. The next four slides will give you a bit of an overview of what we've achieved over the last years, which will also prove in a way the strong foundation that we have, which will help us to really achieve these goals. I'll come then also to profitability levers and growth levers to really make the story around for you.
We have a leading position within the freight forwarding market. These are the numbers from 2024, and they show that our development over the years from 2019 to 2024, the last five years, what has happened. It also shows that we have very good market positions in the different segments being air, ocean, or be it road freight. Now, some of you know, and all of you know, you might ask the question, what will this look like in 2025 when the big merge starts, the integration of DSV and DB Schenker? Whatever the outcome will be on the market position, we are definitely, based on our size, we have critical mass to be able to do and continue working the way that we've worked. There is no big advantage from being larger in the market. These times have changed.
Twenty years ago, you had with size, a better buying. This is different nowadays. It's more about reliability. It's about partnership to your carrier partners, be it in air or ocean freight. We've made great progress over the last decade, and you can see here three of the KPIs that we've chosen, one being higher profitability, one being, which is very important for me, a higher customer satisfaction. If we don't have good quality, we will not be able to generate the returns of the profitability that we expect. That is, of course, based also on a higher employee engagement over the years, which has worked very well and which we are also putting a lot of effort in.
Tobias alluded to this in this presentation, and I can tell you this is, in my view, one of the great advantages of the group that we are able to really attract people now and also nurture people and develop people within our group. Next to these three KPIs, I'd also like to show you a few KPIs that show how we improved our efficiency internally. You remember that we had this bit of a nightmare situation with the IT system that we used in the past and 10 years ago, and we brought our IT systems down significantly to 45% based on comparisons in 2014. This is really supporting us because it simplifies our IT landscape.
It helps us also to work with one data pool, which gives us much better access and gives us much better possibilities to really deep dive into the data and make decisions not only based on our gut, but also on the data that supports it. Of course, it's good when it comes to IT overhead. The costs go down, and the less systems you have, the less people you need to maintain these systems. We've also worked on bringing up our shared service centers, which we have in a few countries around the world. You see that in 2024, roughly 17% of our workforce sat in these low-labor countries. The plan is not to start to increase this by a number maybe above 30%.
The idea now is to use these shared service centers and use technology, which is out there, especially AI, to make sure that certain repetitive tasks can be done by AI, that we keep the number steady or bring the number even down as we grow the business. Last but not least, which is also important for us, the share of customers who are actively using our portal, MyDHLi, has risen over the years. You might argue in 2014 we had a different system, but we had something comparable, which we then brought up to the 27% of usage, which we see now. What we also see, what is not in those numbers, is the way that we are interacting with our customers has become much more digital.
Almost 70% of our bookings are somewhat in a digital form, either that we get an email, which we then read through certain systems that we have, and the data out of the email then gets transferred automatically into our systems. This makes it much easier for the clerks to only check data. They don't have to type data. These kinds of efficiencies are also based and baked in these numbers. That, of course, based on the project IT renewal roadmap, or IRR, as we called it, really supported us in our development when it comes to the divisional conversion rate of DGF over the years. It's not just the transport management system that we always talk about, this famous CargoWise system that we use. We've also deployed a new finance system over the years, which was finalized last year.
We have a unique one finance system for the entire division. We also implemented an HR system and a sales system. Those systems together, if you combine the data, give us much better opportunities to really have enhanced visibility, not only for the operations, but also in the interlink between the operations on the one hand side and the sales on the other hand side. It also helps us to centrally steer better with the data that we have. Of course, with that, we can optimize our outsourcing and our efficiency better by using, as I said before, the shared service centers. The space that we have with the IT system, with IRR, is really second to none.
I would also argue that in the industry, based on our size, we are now the company with the most modern system and the easiest accessibility for our customers also to interact or to use the systems in an easy way. Our APIs that we have are very easily used. I'll come later to a few examples where this really turns out to be a great success story. After going a bit through the base and explaining what we've done on KPIs over the last years, we have four top-line growth accelerators that you see here, which we will work on, have worked on in 2023, 2024 already, and will continue to work on in the strategy for 2030. On the one hand side, we want to start growing or start focusing more on what we call BC customers.
I'll explain a bit later on, but a BC customer, in easy words, is a customer of a certain size, can be very small, can be larger, where the decisions are made locally in a country, in a city, and there are no large purchasing organizations which are globally set up who make decisions on which forwarder gets the business. The second thing I'd like to talk about is a strengthening of our sector approach. For that, we needed the IT systems ready, and we need expertise from people who understand these sectors. I'll talk about profitable trade lane focus, meaning that we are able now to switch our sales activities on high-margin trade lanes as trade lanes develop throughout the year.
We're able to move our sales organization away from a Trans-Pacific trade lane if needed to a Trans-European trade lane if that's the right thing to do, based on the margin development and other developments that we see. We've interlinked them to be more flexible here, and you saw partially that already last year on the growth development in both air and ocean. Last but not least, we will double down on two special products in our portfolio, which are industrial projects and customs, which really, of course, also with the new information that we got since the beginning of the year was also something where we see a strong growth opportunity. BC customers, growth of BC customer segment. Here it's all about the attractiveness of this market.
We come historically from a sales channel which is built on key accounts, global Fortune 500 companies, which normally have panels internally who make decisions. When not a single person makes a decision, but where a group of people, mostly located around the world, make decisions. This is the history where we come from. We are very good at this, and we don't want to stop doing this because our sales organization, especially our key account organizations, also geared up for these large customers. These BC customers who locally decide are for us very attractive because normally they have a higher GP margin possible due to the fact that they have different ways of procuring our services on the market. They do tenders, but they don't do tenders in such large extent as the large Fortune 500 customers do.
It helps us to diversify a bit away from the larger accounts to also be more resilient if we have, for example, in the tech industry, a downturn for whatever reason. With these smaller customers, we can also then work against those trends. What you see here is what we want to achieve over the next years is to grow this segment by 9%. Our annual growth rate over the last years was roughly 7%. We want to grow the GP much stronger in this segment than we've done in the past. How do we want to do this? We've invested in the last year and the year before on local sales specialists who sell either air or ocean freight to the customers in their local markets.
These are connected very closely to product representatives on the trade lanes to really support them, these salespeople, in being effective and also in being able to close business. We hope and we see that the local customer proximity and ownership will foster loyalty. What do I mean with this? If we would ask our country manager here in the U.K. for one or two examples of these kinds of customers, which I did ask him last week, he came back with a few examples. One, for example, is a smaller customer who does spot quotes only, so no RFQ, only spot quotes. We have a system in place called QuoteShop, which we use to really quickly work on these spot quotes.
Once we've won a spot quote, it's very easy for us to just digest the information that we have based on the quote and without adding any more FTEs, any more people, just start working and start serving this customer. Another customer here in the U.K. is a smaller business. They do regular RFQs. We won one of the RFQs. We use our API setup for them to bring us data, give us the data, so it's easier for us to work on these. The data that we get helps us to optimize the customs flow of this customer, and this saved us more or less four people who do this job now compared to who wouldn't use the API.
Because the local colleagues here get a higher share of the profit being made in the network, they are much more innovative in making sure they find solutions which really make a stickiness to these customers. This is something that we saw last year and is also part of our growth that we saw last year, that by focusing on locally controlled business, we are able to get more volume and also a higher GP. That, of course, is with a streamlined onboarding process and a digital lead generation really helps us to be successful in this field. The sector approach. What you see here are five sectors on the left-hand side where we want to invest or have invested into systems and also into people.
Be it life science healthcare, this fits very well to the new life science healthcare setup that we have as a cross-divisional growth initiative. Aerospace and aviation, normally a very high-margin business, because if you move spare parts, if you move engines for airplanes, you have the opportunity to make money on those as much more than if you just move other things. E-commerce, yes, e-commerce, also large e-commerce players, but also small e-commerce players out of China. We understand now how to work with them. We've had our issues in 2023, I would say, to understand how they work, but we've gotten closer to them. We understand them. Also from an understanding of the airframe market, you need to be close to these companies to understand what they do because they are very influential when it comes to buying and selling rates, especially out of Asia.
We are specializing on the semiconductor sector and the sector we call government, which unfortunately in these times has come up and has become more important when it comes to dealing with governments, dealing with defense questions which come around this. These five are just five examples. Of course, we will continue to invest and work on the wines and beer sector, where we've had the acquisition of Hillebrand a few years ago, which is working very well, and to make sure that we start finding more and more of these sectors where the margin opportunities are higher than if we would be in the normal hard cargo environment. Here we also foresee, and we saw already, a CAGR of 10% over the last five years. Again, our average is year seven, so we are growing stronger in this and want to continue growing strong on these sectors.
Next to that, we will concentrate also more and more on profitable trade lanes. Profitable trade lanes, what do we mean with this? It happens throughout the year that trade lanes, based on buying and selling opportunities, being on changes in the market, can become more profitable or less profitable. It is important for us to understand and see these developments and also steer our sales organization in that way that we focus their sales effort on higher margin trade lanes in comparison to just asking them to get business of us. It is being smart on how we let our sales organization work. In order to do that, they have to be very, very closely aligned with our product organization.
We have invested into people to make sure that these roles are clear and that we have an understanding of which trade lanes we want to work on, how we want to win them, what are the winning bids we need, and to make sure that we grow our margin in these lanes. You see here examples for ocean and air freight. The important thing is here that we are very agile in moving around. For example, if for whatever reason, a trade lane loses attractivity, we are able to redeploy the sales organization to work on other trade lanes to make sure we can bring the effort into higher margin trade lanes again. It gives us a flexibility which we did not have before.
Remember, I said before that our systems that we brought into the organization was not only the TMS, but also a sales system. We are linking the data of both of them to make sure that we have the right actions to get to the right kind of results on these trade lanes. Of course, if we know we want to push a trade lane, we can also strategically bid on them in such a way that we have enough mass to be able to then work and work better on our margins from the product side. Next growth initiative is industrial projects. Now, industrial projects and freight forwarding, we always joke around them. These are the cowboys of freight forwarding because they do things outside of the box. They think outside of the box.
They are the ones who move manufacturing sites from one country into the next. With the things happening at the moment in the world, these people, this organization is very valuable for us to move and make sure we have these kinds of things where we can move these large sites from A to B. They work in sectors like new energy. We have done tremendous amounts of movements of blades, large blades for offshore wind parks. We have built solar factories around the world. This is what they are specializing on. They are building semiconductor plants, supporting those customers and bringing all the suppliers, bringing the goods at the right time to the fabrication sites. They are working in the oil and gas industry, of course. This is where this business actually comes from.
This is what the history of this business is in engineering, manufacturing, and also in the government space. What you see here is that they have grown pretty nicely over the last years with 8%, and we at least believe that they will continue in the same 8% until 2030. These are integrated solutions. They are tailor-made for customers. It's something you can't copy-paste easily where you need expertise with people who really understand how these movements work. These are also the nice pictures you sometimes see when large shipments you see on trucks or being loaded on ships. This is where this sits, and this is a very interesting high-margin segment. We also want to double down on customs. Now, why customs? Okay, today's new information, of course, is a good reason for it.
When we go back a bit, we saw already a few years ago that there's a trend in the customs industry with our customers who see customs with a higher priority based on governance and compliance topics that customers have these days. Normally, this is a very, very local business. You have your customs representative in a country who's been doing your job for a long time, and it's also a very specialized, very sticky business. For example, one of our main competitors who is US-based started the business with being a customs clearance agent in the US and then brought forwarding on separately later on. Here, we've invested over the last years and built a solution which we call DHL Trade Connect, which is a database which connects to our TMS system.
Customers can now get their entire customs data globally of all declarations, be it import or export declarations, in one spot and one database. This database can then be used for analytics for the customer where he can oversee his flows. This might sound very trivial, but you can believe me, this is very, very difficult to do, and no one else has a solution like this in the market. We won two large businesses this year. A large customs business is if you have a declaration of maybe 60,000 customs declarations a year. We won two businesses with 40,000 and 35,000 declarations a year this year. The later one was very interesting because the RFQ was ongoing. We knew, we heard through the grapevines, the RFQ was being worked on, and we called and asked if we could still present.
When we presented our solution, the customer could not believe, and this is a medical device customer, he could not believe that we had this kind of a capability. We won the entire business, the 35,000 declarations, and it really makes us proud and also gives us the opportunity to show our expertise based on the subject matter experts in customs, but also based on the IT investments we made over the years to connect the customs data with our normal data. Customers can now really manage their flows and can see what is happening, which is of great value. The more tariffs come in, the more these kinds of solutions will be used and will be needed by the market. We are more than ready and more than hungry to get more of these into our customers. It is a really great thing, great thing that we have.
That brings us from the growth initiatives to the profitability accelerators. Here we have three: our GTOM, our global target operating model. The question is, with what kind of a governance do we want to work in air, ocean, customs, and IP? Yield management, which is really important because our history is being very good in revenue management or volume management, but having the right yield behind it is really important because we do want to make money and we are a low-margin business compared to Express, for example, and of course, fit for growth. Global target operating model, short GTOM. What do we mean with this? This slide describes the way we want to work in air and ocean predominantly. The big foundation you see all the way to the right of the slide is this one file, one operator sentence.
That means we believe that we have a clerk who is supposed to work from A to Z the entire shipment. Why do we believe that's important? There are a lot of reasons. One reason is freight forwarding is not very sexy. It's an industry where you sometimes do have issues in finding the right people who want to work in this, especially on the clerk level. This gives clerks the opportunity to do the entire shipment. They are the ones who take the booking, they speak to the customer, they are the ones who do the documentation, and they are the ones who do the invoicing. This is a way where we believe to centralize all of this. This gives people ownership, and this ownership is something that we foster through our cultural aspects to make sure that they see and sense success.
They see how much money they make, they see how the quality KPIs are. Based on that, we get them motivated in the right way. This is the basics of the entire GTOM model, that we say every operator oversees his files, his activities, and he is the single point of contact for the customer. For that, we support him. We support him through three or more functionalities, but very important functionalities. One is the workflow aspect. The system, CargoWise, shows him the tasks he has to do automatically based on a rule database. He comes in the morning, the system tells him what needs to be worked on, which timestamps are missing, which customer he has to invoice now, so that he does not have to go and search for these things.
That gives him more time that takes or that frees up his time to concentrate then more on working with the customer or working with a supplier. We have implemented this last year, and you see already last year, to be fair, in 2023, and you see already in 2024 that we have made good progress on the productivity. You see that down here on the bottom of the chart that in air freight, we grew the productivity by 8% and in ocean freight by 13%, almost 14%. That is mainly based on the workflow because the workflow engine takes away the thinking, in brackets, of what I need to do and gives that information automatically. He types on the file, goes automatically into the file, does everything, and goes out again.
That, of course, supports also the invoicing because if you've done your files in the right way, if you finish them, the invoicing becomes much easier. We also try to automate the invoicing by using the GSC in the background, which is supporting all of this, and also by being more accurate by using databases where you see the selling rate and the buying rate, and things get matched very easy on a shipment. Last but not least, the shared service center plays an integral part in this. The 17% of our employees who sit in these shared service centers, they work on mandatory tasks, which we will empower in future through AI more and more. These mandatory tasks are in brackets more boring for the clerk to do.
Again, we take time away from him so he has more space, more time to talk to customers and to really be quicker in the way that he interacts with customers, but also in a better way to talking to our suppliers. We believe that we can improve our productivity by 30% until 2030, starting with 2024, and you see already the first steps that we made here. The second profitability accelerator is yield management. Now, John spoke a lot about yield management, and I'm very impressed on how Express does that in their market. As a forwarder, you always think, yeah, pricing is just to find the right price at the right time might be, and then you buy better. It's a bit of a more less of a it's more of a gut thing than anything else.
We have also learned that we can do things differently and better. One of the things that we are working on, which is not yet finished, is what we call the strategic capacity allocation. This is an ocean freight product. This means that once we have this functionality set up, the system will automatically allocate based on margin the shipments to the right carriers. Margin and transit time will be the important criteria. This will be done automatically. There are no more favors, so to say, or no more local decision. This will be done more centralized. This will boost margin tremendously. We are also working on the profit optimization and risk mitigation in the way that in these sectors, we will be ready to really support these high-yield sectors that I talked about.
We can also then optimize gross profit through vendor audits when we work on these special vendors that we need for these sectors that I talked about earlier. We will be able to do dynamic pricing strategies on the yield side, especially on the trade lane development, because sometimes if we think or we believe that something will change in a trade lane, that rates will go down, it is interesting to maybe price more aggressive now when you know that the rates will drop later on. If you get support from systems doing this, this is something which you want to achieve here because we believe it will make us more successful. Of course, the entire RFQ processing, which is still a very manual way of working, we want to optimize by using pricing models and using our data to do this.
We've started implementing this. This is going to gradually continue, sorry, until 2030, but it's really important that we put more emphasis on this. Again, we can do this now based on the systems that we have rolled out. Of course, fit for growth. You see here also the overview of our costs, of our cost base with the purchased air and ocean freight and road freight transportation costs that we have, which we constantly work on. A big thing that we look into all the time is to make sure that we are lean in the way that we are set up as an organization, that we streamline support functions and have always a view on productivity and quality, but not in the way that we overdo productivity. We always see this in line with the quality that we achieve to our customers.
You can easily overdo it with productivity, which is in our case the amount of clerks that we have. We want to make sure we do this in the right way where it makes sense and always keeping the quality in mind. What is our financial path then to 2030? You see the overview here. We have the growth accelerators, growth of the BC segment, so the locally controlled business, strengthening the sector approach, being able to move around profitable trade lanes much quicker than in the past, and really doubling down on IP, so industrial projects, and doubling down even more on our customs capabilities.
From a profitability side, this will be supported by the global target operating model, which will then, based on high quality, increase our productivity, working more and more on the yield management, using systems to really price differently and price more effectively and quicker. Of course, the group-wide Fit for Growth initiative will make sure that our costs are in line and that we try to be as lean and mean as possible. As we say internally, we want to be hungry for more. This should bring our divisional conversion rate, assuming a mid-cycle year, back to 35%. On the ROIC, second last slide on the ROIC, I mean, you see the amount of investments, so CapEx that we have, which is compared to what you saw on the slide from John before, peanuts, so almost nothing. We are an asset-light business.
The only way really for us to work on our ROIC is to just generate much more EBIT. This is where we are very clear what we need to do and also where I think I just showed a very good way of showing growth and showing also how the profitability will come into the profit and loss statement. That brings me to my last slide to summarize. What are the main takeaways? I think we have a clear idea, or more than an idea, we have clear levers how to accelerate growth. We've done our homework. We have a great foundation now where we can start to grow. We saw it already last year with the growth in both of the main products. We understand key efficiency levers to further drive or increase our GP margin. Of course, it's what it's all about.
It's about the people, a nd it's about the systems and the processes that they use that will help us to work and to enable us to get a better divisional conversion rate by 2030. Thank you very much.
Excellent. Thank you, Tim. Good job on timing also for you. We'll come, as promised, to the first Q&A round with the two divisional CEOs you just heard presenting together with Tobias and Melanie come to my side as well. Brief reminder on the many hundreds out there following us on Open Exchange online, make use of that Q&A box to your right. We got some questions there already, but we start off with the questions that you may have on the floor. The friendly IR team will hand you a mic. Example number one.
Thanks very much. Alex Irving from Bernstein. Two for John, please. First one's on B2B volumes.
It's been weak for a couple of years now. Is recovery a matter of when or a matter of if? Your target volume CAGR suggests it's more likely a question of when. A, do you agree with that assessment? B, what gives you the confidence in that? My second question is around pricing. Got several tools to manage price that you discussed. TDI, like-for-like, revenue per kilogram, said it's up 14% over five and three-quarter years. It's below the level of cumulative inflation we've seen since 2019. Can you please explain, A, what like-for-like means in this context? B, why real pricing doesn't appear to have grown? Is it customer willingness to pay? Is there something else going on? Thank you.
The first question was really relating to the ability for when B2B will come back and so on. Yeah, I think we don't know.
I think the point is over the last, we've had that strong CAGR of 6% or 7% over the extended period of time, three positive years of uncertainty, you might say, and two rather slower years of uncertainty where we've been basically flattish. We taught weight in terms of shipments, in terms of B2B. When that's going to come back, it's not entirely clear. I think the main message there is that we've continued to grow our EBIT and the way I suggested at the front end of my presentation through the levers of flexibility and pricing and finding growth, higher margin growth, better job of the work we did within SMEs. A lot of that was around finding SMEs that were less price-sensitive and bringing them into our network.
When quite the turnaround comes, I do believe that we'll find through these GT20 markets growth that we weren't necessarily identifying so successfully before. The concept that water doesn't stop flowing, it just finds a different direction, as one of my colleagues in Asia said this morning. I think that's very true. Countries are more looking at their export orders right now and how they can find new markets. I think that would be my first. The second point was around how have we achieved their pricing.
I think maybe if I could chip in there because I think that was also a bit of a technical question. You had this slide where we showed the like-for-like revenue growth. The question, I think, Alex, was, what does like-for-like mean?
What does like-for-like mean and why does it appear to have been below inflation since 2019?
Yeah, first of all, on the technical side, like-for-like is really what we call the base revenue development. We have stripped out surcharges like fuel components. This is kind of really the raw element. What we have not adjusted, and it is not like-for-like, are trade lane shifts and underlying mix shifts. That explains why the number may look so small. When you look at the core GPI and the stick rate, that is actually a higher number.
Plus, if I may add to that, we should not forget in transportation, we still have real productivity gains through technological advances.
If you would compare over 30 years the development of the rate for the transportation of containers, you would clearly see that it's not in line with inflation, nor should it be, because we had substantial economies of scale in aviation, express. We have such through the deployment of new aircraft, for instance. The fuel efficiency of aircraft has consistently, decade by decade, improved by about 30%. This is one example why I think the comparison with the consumer price index is not very helpful. What I th ink is decisive is that we are competitive in the marketplace and we make a good margin.
That we have a very good stick rate on the underlying GPI. I think that is not entirely visible on that slide.
Thank you for saying that, Melanie. It's the GPI and the NPC that perhaps I'd like to finish off.
Ten or twelve years ago, we started advertising our GPI in September to the market that this was happening, help people with their own planning process. On January the first, regular as clockwork, you could set your watch by it. We communicated our GPI went into effect, headline rates typically between 3.9% and 6.9%. The NPC, the net price change, simply measures the book of business that we had in November run through the GPI achievement, and we take the measurement of how much we've achieved. Over the last three or four years, that NPC has been in the region of 3% to 4%. If you go back a little way, it started off at 1% or 2% and had been whittled away during the course of the year as more discounts had given.
That's a significant rise in our overall margin position as measured by that NPC as a consequence of our GPI stick rate, which we aim to have high. The same reason we did demand surcharge was no point in doing it if we weren't going to be up there at 80% plus.
Okay, that question answered. We continue the floor with Andy Chu.
Thank you, Martin. It's Andy Chu from Deutsche Bank. Good morning. Question on slide 61, and this is directed at Tim, please. In terms of the conversion rate target of 35% compared to 2024, 28%, I guess there's some potential head office cost reallocation into the historical numbers. I just wanted to confirm that the 35% target takes the cost allocation into account.
Maybe I take that question.
As Tobias explained, we will now, once we have completed the legal alignment, also charge out the group cost function bucket, which I know some of you have been struggling with for quite some time. We have not completed that exercise yet. That is something which is not included in the divisional numbers. It is not going to have such a material impact, obviously, on the numbers which you have seen from the divisional colleagues. We still have to work through how that goes into the different divisions.
Sorry to be clear, the 35% target holds or needs, we have to work through the numbers in terms of the target.
Next year, once we are done with the legal alignment, we will give you full transparency of how we are allocating the group functions bucket to the different divisions.
There are very different components in there. We know that we are doing it, and then we will explain that in a very transparent way.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, thank you, Andy. One further from the floor to continue with Muneeba, please.
Muneeba Kayani, Bank of America. Two questions, please. One for John. Just following up on the earlier question around TDI, some of your competitors have suggested that customers are moving towards more deferred product. Do you think there is a structural shift here? Is that something you are worried about? And how do you assess that in your performance in 2024? If you look at global trade, actually it was a good year for global trade in 2024. And forwarding, please. You talked about your IT system. You mentioned CargoWise.
We've heard from one of your competitors who uses CargoWise that they could be considering possibly a shift away from it. They've talked about some of the price increases they've seen on that. What have you seen in terms of price increases from WiseTech? How are you thinking about CargoWise in your IT system?
On the DDI, I think the two things I would say that in DDI, and as you all know, we only have that product in Europe, is in a core supportive manner to grow TDI. We like to go to our TDI customers and sell them DDI. There are some DDI customers that we take the TDI portfolio to and sell them that. We see very little switching. There is a time in the macroeconomic cycle where people think about down-servicing their supply chain requirements and using a slower service.
Most of those that I've seen in Europe have ended up with them going back to TDI because their customers really want a pan-European overnight service for the distribution of their contact lenses through to their dealer network. We see very little switch between TDI and DDI in our European network. FedEx have aspirations to fill their aviation network. To the point about our rather unique aviation network, it is completely different. They are different again, actually, to UPS, but they've been busy trying to fill their aviation network out of Asia with their international economy product. We looked at an international economy product when I was running commercial in 2006 and 2007, and we firmly pushed ourselves back to strengthening our profitable core, which is TDI, but supporting the European core in Europe w ith DDI.
The relationship with CargoWise is good.
We still have a contract which runs eight plus years, I think. There has been no negotiations about this yet. We hear, of course, also that there is from comments made that there are certain pressures there. The system itself is very good. It is a basic system that you can use differently. Some of the, for us, more important functionality, for example, the functionality on how we do consolidation air freight is not based on CargoWise. We did that with these different systems. We also have a very good transport management system which can do an air freight in our acquisition in Hillebrand Gori, which we still use there and will continue to use there because the process flow in the beer wines and spirits world is a bit different.
It's a bit more complex, but we could also theoretically use if we come to a more difficult situation with our supplier.
Excellent. Thank you. We continue one row behind with Alexia, please.
Good morning. It's Alexia Dogani from JPMorgan Chase & Co. I have two questions as well. Just firstly for Tobias on the growth outlook and the multiplier of trade to GDP. In the chart, you helpfully show that you expect the trend to move towards one by kind of 2030. It implies that in the next couple of years, we might be contemplating a scenario below one times GDP. I guess, how can you talk to us a little bit about the growth outlook in the more kind of nearer term, given the announcements yesterday and whether we should expect some more volatility on that multiplier? Secondly for John on the European network redesign.
In the past, we've said that actually flexibility in the European network is a little bit harder to achieve because some of these aircraft movements are more, let's say, fixed to guarantee the service quality. What changes are you making to make it more flexible or more efficient? Thanks.
Yeah, thank you, Alexia, for this question, which is not easy to answer because I think we have to see three things. A, some of the details are still unclear. The stackability of certain things, how this change in de minimis is now going to work. There's postal exceptions. So it's just a bit on clarity that we still need to work through. We have not heard yet what is the response of trading partners. There have been some comments made, obviously, by the EU.
There have been fairly clear comments by China in two different ways, accelerating the opening in general. I think that is something that is not to be ignored because China is the biggest trading partner for many. On the other hand, obviously, some response to the U.S. Thirdly, how our customers are going to respond to this. Is this really going to lead to a significant increase of manufacturing activity in the U.S.? Are people going to have that outlook that these tariffs are there to stay on a solid basis for decision making? There was a long list of announced investments yesterday. Some people seem to have some confidence in this happening.
I think we still have to see in the real numbers whether steel plants are being built in the U.S., whether other manufacturing activity really shifts there because elsewise this is going to be inflationary and provide definitely windfall opportunities for some existing manufacturers in the U.S., but it's not going to change flows much if the capacity doesn't shift. I think this is very unclear how our customers will react to this and whether they believe this is now permanent or temporary. If you invest in a steel plant, you need to have a view beyond four years. That's something we simply don't know.
What is the case that our exposure to U.S. trade is disproportionately low and we have further reduced it over the last 12 months, while, as you have seen, we really doubled down on non-U.S. related trade lanes, those trade lanes that are going to benefit from this. Now, whether with the measures we have seen now, this keeps a balance of growth in the short term to reach a multiple of 1 point I think is doubtful. The measures, if they would come with these amounts, would create somte elasticity in demand and thereby also in trade volumes, even if manufacturing does not shift into the U.S. so quickly. I think that is to be expected that U.S. related trade will see a dent if those volumes would stay.
For us, what it means for the companies is hard to say because our market share is quite disproportionate, disproportionately higher on the non-U.S. related trade lanes. This is something that we have to see.
On just the second part, Alexia, on the network configuration, yeah, on the aviation side to which you referred, I think these are fairly classic network adjustment and configuration programs moving from one stop to two stop. There were times during the pandemic where we had a direct shot into Cluj or Bucharest or whatever, and that can be done now via a two stop setup. There are even locations where we can hub quite satisfactorily into Leipzig. We destressed our Leipzig hub and set up a broader tapestry of hubs across Europe, Madrid, Malpensa, and Copenhagen specifically. That brought some efficiencies.
The last point I'd probably say is that we brought better gauge aircraft on the routes where we have the opportunity to be more efficient. The last comment I'd make here is, and it was very important, as I said to some of you at dinner with demand surcharge, the European service quality at the minute is at an all-time high. We have no parameters whatsoever on our transit time standards, the parameters that were put in during the pandemic. They've all been dialed back to zero. We're in a transit time world that operated before the pandemic. We're up at 96. That was very important to us during the demand surcharge that we delivered quality whilst this surcharge was there.
It is the case with our Fit for Growth and our cost optimization and our active cost management anywhere in the world that none of that comes at the expense of quality.
Okay. In the meantime, we have questions received from the outside, which are either addressed by other questions here already or thematically more related to parts still to come. This is why we still have time for one or two more questions here from the floor. Cedar, please.
Thanks very much. Cedar Ekblom from Morgan Stanley. I've got two questions for you, John. Can you talk a little bit about why you think weight did not correct as much as you'd expected post the pandemic? I think you made an allusion to that.
Just a little bit more around why you think that stayed and why it's not at risk going forward, because I think that weight point has been a big part of Express's profitability over the last couple or defending Express's profitability. Then just another question. It seems that the gap that DHL has relative to your closest competitors is opening up in the express market. We've seen your peers diluting their networks with economy volumes over the last couple of years. Looking a little bit more medium term, how do we think about the margin for your business when the cycle improves? Should we be thinking about much higher margins than in the past? Maybe a bit of a cheeky question. Are you leaving money on the table when it comes to pricing?
Should you not be more aggressive in terms of your pricing going forward, considering the quality of your offering to the customer? Correct. Thank you.
Yeah, we'll come to that. In terms of weight, yeah, that's a rather interesting story. I'll try and make it quick. In 2018, we actually had a weight reduction program called P300, which was really focused on taking weight out of our network, but that was badly packaged weight, non-stackable weight, tires, oil drums, et cetera, things that had just fallen into our network over the years. We had a good cleansing operation in 2018, beginning of 2019. The pandemic, and that was all clean and was accretive to our EBIT, it cleaned up our hubs, made our hubs move much more efficiently doing that. During the pandemic, our weight started moving up.
I don't remind you saying this from sort of nine-ish weight per shipment all the way up to 12. During the pandemic, we had a program trivially called apples on the cart where all these weights were falling into our lap. I saw customer letters saying, "Please use express now for up to 300 kilos to these exotic destinations." It happened to be Africa. We've still got those volumes today. There were many other organizations that just shifted their threshold from 50- 100 or 100- 150, 150- 200. We expected to lose all of that volume as freight normalized, and we expected to go back to our X point XX weight per shipment that we had in 2019. The research that we did suggested we'd keep 60% of it. We kept 80% of it.
The absolute reason why those organizations that were already using us anyway for lower weight shipments stayed with us was transit time improvement, price rationality, and the fact that if a customer is on a certain price, we only talk to them once a year. They get their GPI, and we do not talk to them all year on price, and they appreciated that. As market volatility was coming through, there was no spot rating and all these sorts of things. Thirdly, customers' customer satisfaction. I heard firsthand from customers that they got feedback from their customers almost literally and verbatim saying, "It used to be six days, now two days. What happened? Oh, we switched because of this, because of that. We actually switched to express." Oh, I noticed that. If you can keep that going, that is very much something we would like you to do.
That is the weight story. It is serendipity in a way, but it is the same in B2C. Merchants that were hitherto unwilling to put an express offering on their merchant site during the pandemic had to because commercial airspace was less, post offices were not delivering all around the world. They begrudgingly put an express offering, and they saw when they did put an express offering how many times that was re-clicked for repeat purchase. All those merchants have still got it on there today, which is why those 30,000 merchants that fell into our lap as opposed to the weight that fell into our lap, they are both still there. It was fortuitous in that sense. In terms of pricing and the competitive market position, I think there I would just say that we are very conscious of our price programs. They are sophisticated across all customers.
We're very mindful that we're not overpricing our small and medium-sized customers. We have to be very careful there. There's a lot of focus on customer attractiveness and willingness to pay. Finding those industries where they're willing to pay and customer attractiveness where we should be getting a higher yield from our larger customers by knowing that they're in a certain industry, aerospace, aeronautics, life science, and healthcare. We're not leaving money on the table there. By and large, I think we are not leaving anything on the table, and you can tell that from our KPIs. We're even rather more conscious that because we have a much higher stick rate and compliance rate, one of the reasons we did not do demand surcharge over the years is that we have an all-in pricing philosophy.
There would be some additional surcharges like BOLTA, volumetric weight, and things like that. There are other surcharges, but we resisted doing a demand surcharge for the reason of an all-in pricing. Secondly, we knew our U.S. competitors had had it in for a decade and had a very low stick rate, so why bother doing it if it's low? Thirdly, precipitating us to make the move was the huge volatility of e-commerce out of Asia, which just necessitated, with high inflation running at the time, the ability to serve these customers with high quality, which I spoke about several times is very important. Long answer, but a little bit more context that may be useful to you. Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Cedar, and in the interest of well thought through timetable, we stick to the original plan to now come to a 20-minute coffee break. There is another Q&A session later on and ample time to continue with the questions. Looking forward to have you back 10 past the hour.
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All right. Twenty minutes are gone so far. There were so many good conversations, so many good questions. We got a second round of Q&A and more time later on, but now let's stick to the timetable, and we have the next three divisional presentations before we come to the Melanie part and the Q&A. Oscar, please continue.
Thank you. Good. For those of you that were at the visit, obviously you had yesterday a little warm-up towards this presentation, but now we're going to go a bit deeper.
This is the slide that you've seen before, and I think there are two important elements of that slide: that we project to grow above market, and I'll explain a bit more what that looks like and why that is the case in the presentation. The other element is that we're developing towards a 6-7% EBIT in the coming years. Now about the how and a little bit of the past as well, but it explains also a little bit of the future, which you also saw in earlier presentations. When we look at this slide, it shows clear market leadership, but it's not so much about the size, which is the story. It's about quality, it's about the innovation, but it's also about being the sole 3PL provider that has 97% of our employees working in a great place to work.
A certified great place to work. You tasted a little bit of that during yesterday's visit, and we also discussed yesterday why that is so important, because that does translate into lower staff turnover, higher productivity, higher quality. It has a direct impact on the way we operate and a direct impact on our customer satisfaction. The other point on market leadership, because those are external factors, is that we are already in the fifth year in a row, respected by Gartner as the leader in 3PL in contract logistics. Our employees rate us that way, our customers rate us this way, the market rate us this way. That's, I think, what the real market leadership looks like. The other element which is important is to look a little bit back in history, and that's what this slide shows.
This is about our revenue growth over the past five years and how that translated into our EBIT growth over the past five years. You see that in 2020, obviously year 2020, when we had the COVID part, we continued to stay focused on our strategy and the investments that we needed to make, and that's why we also came out of that really strong to be able to continue that strong top-line growth and translate that in a bottom-line growth. What is more important on this slide is the right side of the slide, because that's where you see how our top-line carrier, by continuously innovating in the way we operate, continuous improvement on how we operate, we've been able to continuously drive our productivity up, hence our gross profit up.
We also have a very strong, strict architecture on how we reinvest into growth in the organization, and we split between what we reinvest in growth and what actually then translates bottom-line in towards our EBIT. That is how you see the translation from the 6 to the 10 to the 17 as an EBIT carrier over that period of time. That is architecture on the way we operate, the way we reinvest, and the way we have part of our improved gross profit going bottom-line towards our EBIT. That is important to understand our future. I'll also show you a few other numbers. I'm not going to talk you through all of these, but I want to pick out a few because those are important to understand why and how we are growing as DHL Supply Chain. You see the 96% service quality.
That's not delivered on time. That is that 96% of our operations deliver 100% of the KPIs that we've agreed with our customers. That translates into a net promoter score of 61, which has increased more than 20 points over the past five years. That's together with, therefore, a renewal rate of 91%, and the way we calculate renewal rate is based on the actual context that we knew that year. That's the 100, and therefore you get to the 91%. That then translates together with $8.8 billion of contract value signed in one single year. That is what we call net growth, because you keep the business you have, you continue to grow with the business you have, and then on top of that, you then establish a new business, a new operations. That's how we've established and we will establish the future growth.
There's another element which might also be relevant with all the discussions that we have today, is how our business is spread around the globe. Because if you look at this slide, you see on the right side, you see the number of people in thousands per region. You see that that's actually pretty equally spread over all the regions around the globe. Size-wise, from, let's say, an operational size-wise, we're pretty similar around the globe. That means that whatever benefits there are on the various continents, we will be able, on the various countries, we'll be able to capture that.
The other element of growth sits on the right side of the slide, because there you see the revenue, and you actually see that a region like, for instance, Latam, you have a lot less revenue compared to the number of people that we have there, and that is simply caused by the lower labor cost, which gradually is increasing. That is another growth engine that we simply have in those regions. We see some of that also in Asia. At the same time, you would wonder why you see the little stripe on the Middle East, which is another growth opportunity.
We signed a year ago a joint venture with Aramco, a company called Asmo that we created together, which has a huge growth potential because it focuses on the energy and the chemical and industrial sector, and it has as the launching base all the divisions of Aramco and their suppliers. It has a huge customer base already right from the start, and it's already profitable from year one. That is also a great start to build further and to further expand our growth in the Middle East. The other point which I think is important to understand from the DHL Supply Chain is how our contract, how are we built up. You have on the left top, you see the services we provide between warehousing, transport, and value-added services. You see how we are spread over the different verticals.
That means that we also fruit from the benefits in certain verticals when other verticals do not cause much, but we also have the more stable verticals like a consumer sector. At the same time, you see by customer size, we clearly see a growth in outsourcing in the middle-sized customers, because the higher complexity, I'll talk about that later on, but the higher complexity of supply chains drives outsourcing. We see that on the middle size. We have traditionally, historically always been large with the large size of customers. You see, which is an interesting one, because this is about complexity. The new wins, where do we win them from?
You see that it's nicely divided, almost a third, a third, a third between winning from competition, so already outsourced business, winning from first-time outsourcing, which is the most complicated, most profitable business, and then new activity, and that's actually the simplest one, because there's new activity with existing customers. You see it's nicely split between those two, and that's important also from a resource perspective and from an exposure perspective to be able to facilitate growth. Speaking of growth, I split them between, like you've seen in the earlier presentations as well, when we talk about the top-line growth accelerators. The first point I was already about to make is about the growth in contract logistics. We see a clear growth in contract logistics, clear growth in outsourcing, and I'll show you in a second why. Accelerated growth solutions.
We have identified specific elements of the supply chain where you will see both an accelerated top and bottom-line growth, specific products that we have developed and that we will accelerate further growth on. The element of which Tobias already mentioned earlier, our clear strategy to make sure that where we need to extend our competency, we can do that through partnership or acquisition. We do not buy size, but we buy specific competency, which we then scale further on the basis of our customer base and our footprint. The first one, the growth in contract logistics. Needless to say that supply chains over the past five, six years have become ever more complex, and today has not changed anything in that.
That drives complexity, and we thrive on complexity, because the more complex supply chains are, the more value that we can actually create for our customers, the more we can benefit, the more we can grow. That is one element. The other element is the fast-growing sectors within our business portfolio. One, e-commerce, I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, and the life science healthcare sector. The point of the more complexity of supply chains has another impact. The other impact is that the barrier of entry into contract logistics has fast risen because you need to have very, you need to be able to manage complex systems, complex processes. You need to be able to cope with having the right level of engineering, which becomes more and more complex. There is the element of cybersecurity.
There's the element of the investments that are needed into robotics and automation and to engineer that properly. That means it's actually more difficult, and therefore the growth of outsourcing leans towards an unfair benefit towards the larger players, and that's why we feel that also on that perspective, we will outgrow the market. I was talking about the specific products we were looking at. If you look at inbound to manufacturing, that's a whole supply chain towards production, which in the automotive sector is very optimized, but in sectors like healthcare and technology are absolutely suboptimal. We can add a lot of value there by optimizing these supply chains. That's one element that we focus on. Omnichannel.
This is having one stock for the traditional channels and the e-commerce channels, which is a very complicated way of operating warehouse operations, which we can absolutely offer, but therefore you only need one stock to cope with various channels. When we talk about return and circularity, the whole returns business is a part of the supply chain, which is fast evolving, highly complex, and also there is a lot of value that still can be created, hence the acquisition that we also did there, because we feel that we can add a lot of value in the overall returns and circularity flow. Service logistics. That's a product that we have, we are unique. We can provide within two hours a part in any tier one, tier city around the globe.
Now, for that, you need a complete network of small stock points, which we centrally manage around the globe, and is a product that we are the only one that has that globally, and which is one of our fastest growing products. A fulfillment network, I'll talk about that a little bit more, has some similarity, but what that is all about is to have completely standardized processes where our customers can switch on, switch off within four weeks to have a fulfillment point for e-commerce, for e-fulfillment, close to either the markets where they want to develop or when they want to launch new products or for small and medium-sized companies that want to start up. We talk about the last two, I'll take those two together.
When you take LOP, so this is about outsourcing a part of the supply chain to us, so where we manage for the customer their supply chain. We don't need to have to physically run their warehousing or physically run their trucks. We optimize their supply chain on the basis of the parameters that the customer says. That is also a growing product with middle-sized customers that do no longer want to face the complexity themselves. That's together with the value creators of real estate. I'll talk about that in a second. Data and robotics as a service. You should see a bit more of that in a second as well, and the green logistics. I'm going to deep dive into omnichannel fulfillment network and pharma specialized network. On e-commerce, we have two elements to look at.
You see here on the right side, e-commerce and omnichannel. That is about the dedicated, larger, long-term contracts that we have with the well-known brands. We have about 20% of our new business every year is around that area. Then we have the fulfillment networks. Earlier, you heard Tobias talk about Monta, which was an acquisition that we did in the Netherlands, which really taught us how to operate with small and medium-sized enterprises, how to fast respond to that market, and we still kept Monta separately because they have a very clear target group of small entrepreneurs that start in that market. We have the DHL fulfillment network right next to that, which has a similar product for slightly larger customers. Again, it is a network operation for fulfillment around the globe.
When we talk about life science and healthcare, we did the acquisition of CRYOPDP. Why is that such an exciting acquisition? This is a company that is specialized in clinical trials to manage clinical trials all the way from A to Z of the multi-temperature solution. It very nicely links to what we can provide them from a forwarding perspective when we talk about Airlift, when we talk about the express network that we have, and when we talk about the supply chain operations from a warehousing perspective. It is nicely the glue between those three services with having a clear specialization, which helps us not only to grow in clinical trials, but in the healthcare sector, you see a clear growth towards the more complex part of the healthcare sector.
That is when we talk about cell and gene therapy, when we talk about biopharma. When you're in with the clinical trials part, you're already in there, and those that then actually do pass the hurdle of clinical trials, we can then actually from there continue to provide the cell and gene type of therapy, the logistic services for that, because it's actually very similar. It's patient-specific, it is multi-temperature, it's high demand on quality, it's global. All things that very nicely link to our cross BU element, but also very nicely link to the supply chain product within healthcare. That's why that acquisition, while not super large, is a competency that actually adds to our product and where we think that we can actually accelerate their growth. I was earlier talking about real estate as a value creator.
What is really important is we do do land banking because we can actually see where are the areas where the requirements will be for new logistics centers. We create campus environments where we operate already for other customers, and then on the basis of the growth that we foresee, we land bank, we make sure that the land is ready, and then we either build on the basis of a contract or we build on the basis of a multi-customer environment that we have and where we say, "Okay, if you take the 70-30 rule, if we have 70% long-term commitment, then we can actually consolidate into a new facility." Based on the risk of the market, we then see how much capacity risk you would take in certain markets.
If you are in India, you take a bit more, and if we are in the U.K., we are a little bit more conservative. On that basis, we've been able to continuously develop real estate. Last year, we developed 500,000 sq m of new real estate owned and developed. What we then do, the moment it's contracted, we then sell it and lease back, we free up the capital, and we go for the next projects. This 40% of the, it says actually 39% of the business wins that we've had are based on a real estate solution because we can actually then already provide the real estate solution at a competitive location with a sharp time frame and at the same time link that to the logistics solution that we should offer to, that we will offer for a customer.
This is an important enabler of growth and an important element for our customer. You see a few examples on the slide around the globe on how we have been managing that. If you then link our M&A strategy towards our overall strategy, we were speaking earlier about Monta. The nice thing of that is that since we bought that company in 2022, we have doubled that company in size and brought them into five new countries. That is where you then actually buy value, buy capabilities, and then we create the size. We spoke about the Inmar part because that gives us the capability in returns, which are also there. It gives us a leading position in the U.S., but that capability we can now bring into Europe and into Asia.
Brandpath is an acquisition, a relatively small acquisition, but where this links us to a platform that can actually provide the front end and the checkout part, which is what the part that we don't do, but we then actually link our fulfillment towards it. We have the exclusivity, in this case with Localized, where we will do the fulfillment globally so that we can actually have the possibility to talk with customers, to bring them into new markets where they're not present, where we can actually then provide a full solution, both front end and back end from that basis. CRYOPDP we spoke about. This was an acquisition in Mexico, which gave us the last mile of healthcare, and O,smo is the joint venture we spoke about.
As you can see, it all nicely links to our 2030 strategy, and it also is all based on competency that we can then actually grow further. When we then talk about profitability accelerators, I'm going to talk a bit about pricing, the point that you've heard before, but then specifically what it means for supply chain. The very important element of modular standardization, because that is our way on which we can scale and grow fast. I'll talk a bit more about that. Innovation and robotics, I talked a little bit about that yesterday, which is obviously a very important differentiator, and not only about physical robotics, but obviously also about AI. The elements of how we continue to balance our size with the right investment, but also the right efficiency and the right sizing to be continuously fit for growth.
Commercial pricing strategy, three important elements there. The first one, when we talk about the pricing, when you see the value that we create for many of our customers in optimizing their supply chain, it's not always balanced between how we price. We've been really helping organizations to do better value-based pricing so that we get a better share of the value that we create for our customers. That's where that element is about. It is also about, for instance, we've improved enormously with how we price on renewals because we've become far more aware of the downside risk for our customers to change. Their risk of change was way higher than ours from their perspective because of the quality that we provide, because of the innovation that we provide.
The risk of change for customers was such that therefore, at our renewals, we now actually improve our margins, while maybe five, six years ago, we might actually have reduced our margins of renewals. The 50-50 part, that is between open and closed book. We have a very clear approach on that one. If we do first-time outsourcing and the data isn't clear, we go open book because it eliminates the risks, but also has slightly lower margin. If we know the market well, we know the product well, we know the customer well, we know the data well, we go closed book because that actually gives us the possibility to capture more value for ourselves on the improductivity improvements that we create. That is how you balance that. There is another element, which is certain markets are more open book markets.
The North American market is more tend towards open book, while the Asian market is more tend towards closed book. We still always apply the principle that I just mentioned. The other point about longer-term contracts. You saw the earlier slide on real estate solutions. Because we provide more of the real estate solutions, we can actually get substantially longer contracts. Also because of the innovation that we bring, because of the automation that we bring, and because customers more and more understand the risk of change, we actually have been able to, by 35%, increase the length of our contracts, which is another stabilizer of our business. Modular standardization. Why is that so crucial? You saw a large operation yesterday. We implement 150 of those a year.
For that to be possible, you need to have modular standards in the way you design, the way you implement your operation to be able to do that with 95% delivering those new businesses on time. By actually having a startup performance, which is more than 100% compared to the business cases that we actually presented. That can only be done because of modular standardization, because we know the systems we work with, and because we have very clear processes, not only the process of how we manage the project, but also very clear processes on how we approve new projects. That actually links then towards the renewal rate and the service quality, as I presented earlier. Innovation and robotics. What is really important with innovation and robotics is that you choose what to implement and what not to implement.
There are great ideas around the corner every single day. What for us is really important is that we choose those solutions that not only are the best, obviously, in the performance from a productivity perspective, but also are scalable, are part of a modular standard. What we've done is that we identified 12 processes, which I explained yesterday, and we then, in each of those blocks of those processes, we identified several providers that we work with. We then embrace a provider, we help them to grow. In some cases, we actually make sure that we also get the benefit from the value creation of the value of those specific companies. We make sure that we then scale them around the globe. The other point, which is important, here you see how they split between the various activities that we have.
The scalability is important, as mentioned. We now have about 7,500 robotic solutions around the globe. What is also important at the same time is that we make sure on how we manage the various robotic solutions together because where the real value sits is not in the robot itself. It's actually what you do with the data of the robot and how you then actually manage the different robotics and people solution together. I always proudly present, and I'll repeat it today again, that we have, for instance, an operation in the U.S. for one of the larger fashion companies where we operate a similar robotic solution as they do, but we get 15% higher productivity out of the same robots.
That is because the way we manage it, the system that we have on top of it, and how we plan between people, robots, and the various robotic solutions. That is a very important element because that is where the value add sits for us today and in the near future. That is the physical robots part. There is obviously the system robotics part. I shared on the table, various tables yesterday, an example of how we are robotizing, for instance, our transport planning. Yesterday, somebody asked a question, and we could not answer that question because obviously there were people sitting there that are actually doing that work, so I did not want to obviously go in that activity. That would be obviously a bit of a problem.
When you look at planning, one of the simple activities and the activities that is not very nice to do and very inspiring to do is to make the phone calls to make the appointments on when we can actually deliver. In our U.S. transport business, we've done a pilot on that. The surprising element of that is that, one, if you see the demo, it's really convincing because it really comes across you talk with the person. The other element is that, yes, you replace the people that otherwise would have made and would have done that work to make all those appointments.
The biggest element is that in one hour, we've made all the calls for the whole week because obviously that robotic solution can do that at the same time, call all the customers, which with people would have been very hard to do. That is an impact on the actual operation and how we can then optimize the operation, which is substantial. I can go on and on with other solutions and other examples and what we do with hiring of people, with interviews and all of that, but happy to do that in a separate setting. It gives you one idea on how important physical robotics is and what you do with it, and also these type of AI solutions on how we optimize our operation. The most important thing is how we combine those solutions and therefore optimize for our customers.
The point I made earlier, fit for growth. We always need to make sure we always make sure that we have an operation and an organization that is nicely balanced between investing where we grow, but being lean where we do not, from a geographical and a product perspective. If we then summarize, I talked through the top line growth accelerators. I spoke through the actual growth in the outsourcing market, in the contract logistics market. I talked through our accelerated growth solutions where we see that we can, because the position that we have and the actual above average top and bottom line growth that we see there, how that grows. I spoke through the acquisitions and our strategy around it and how that translates into growth, then and how that actually then translates into above market revenue growth. We then looked at the profitability accelerators.
We talked about how we contract, how we do pricing, how we continue to improve our yield there, how important modular standardization is for accelerated growth. We spoke about innovation and robotics and how we scale and how we differentiate compared to any of our competitors because of the way we scale around the globe and because of the way we therefore copy best practices, and that actually helps customers to faster innovate. We spoke about Fit for Growth, how we make sure that we stay efficient, effective with the right investments in growth. At the same time, within Supply Chain, we have a very thorough process on return on capital and how we have, depending on the risk of the market, different minimum return on capitals that we have to establish and how we continuously improve our return on capital on that perspective.
A very important driver there as well. While you do see some increase in CapEx because of robotic solutions, we still continue to remain an asset light model. What I wanted to bring across to you is that we have, basically, the best people, a strong team, well-trained, focused on innovation, that we have the best operations, the best processes, that we drive the innovation there, and that that actually translates into winning the better contracts, but also at the same time being able, because of the customer satisfaction that we have, because of the quality that we provide, and because of the innovation we have, we are able to better price and therefore better invest in innovation, better invest in green logistics solutions, and therefore be able to own tomorrow. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Oscar.
With that, I'm done.
You were supposed to introduce me.
Which I do right now.
Good job.
You're introduced.
Well done.
Thank you. I don't know if you realized, but it was very difficult for Oscar to remain standing in the cross. We were instructed to stay here, but you did a good job. Good morning, everyone. Very happy to be here again and good to see you, some of the familiar faces from last night. I'm going to walk you today through the story of DHL eCommerce. In September last year in Frankfurt, Melanie and Tobias walked you through our ambition to grow faster than the market, stabilize our capital consumption to reasonable levels, and also improve our profitability. Today, I'm going to walk you through how we are planning to do that for the next five years. It is important to remind ourselves that we are a very new business unit.
We created DHL eCommerce only six years ago by putting together multiple businesses from different countries around the world, mainly predominantly domestic parcel delivery companies, but also some deferred cross-border solutions included in the portfolio. Since then, we have been able to double the size of the business unit. We grew faster than the market in the majority of those countries. We also improved our profitability significantly from a money-losing portfolio to a stable EBIT year over year. The first few years of that EBIT journey were more about restructuring. We shut down a few countries. We rationalized some of the service offering. We were at that point in time doing all different types of services related to the periphery of parcel delivery, but we decided to focus on what we are really good at doing, which is domestic parcel delivery and deferred cross-border.
Right after we conducted that turnaround, COVID came, and we enjoyed some few years of unprecedented growth that was not sustainable because this was a business and a portfolio that has not invested that much in infrastructure. Yes, we enjoyed unprecedented margins and return on capital, but that was mainly because of extreme sweating of the assets. That is why we decided in 2023 to embark into a phase of two to three years of investment for growth that consisted in investment mainly in middle mile and local deployment for last mile delivery, but also elements of technology, which has been postponed for many, many years. Very important, not mentioned in this slide, but very important also is that in only two years ago, we put together our limitless growth strategy.
All the business units have this type of simple brochure, which is an extremely powerful element for aligning our internal teams to make sure that they understand what is our identity and what we are aiming for and what is our operating model. That led to a phase of consolidation and focusing on the core business in the three main geographies where we operate. We operate in three geographies that are Europe, U.S., and India. In Europe, we have eight countries with our own, what we like to say, full yellow type of asset-heavy operations, but we cover the entire Europe through partners. Some of the partners are, of course, partners of the DHL family, but other partners are third-party partners. I'm going to be talking a little bit more about it.
Both in Europe, we cover our cross-border intra-Europe for all the territory and all the countries in Europe. Also, we do cross-Atlantic, same as in the U.S., with U.S., Canada, Mexico, and cross-Atlantic into Europe as well. In India, we do only domestic for now, but we're going to be soon launching our deferred cross-border solutions there as well. This portfolio has a very interesting mix of mature countries, like for example, the U.K., where we have 29% of e-com penetration as a percentage of retail, which is one of the most mature countries from an e-com as a percentage of retail, but still, of course, with prospect for growing. Also some other countries like India, with a very low e-com penetration as a percentage of retail and significant growth opportunity in terms of parcel delivery.
In all of those countries, of course, we're looking to absolute market share, but we also look into relative market share. Relative market share is measured as the distance that we have and the relative size compared to the main player in the market because that is a very important indicator of our capacity to have economies of scale and ability to compete with those competitors in terms of capillarity, coverage, and cost efficiency. For example, in countries like Turkey, the number one player has 20% market share. Number two has 18%. We have 16%. Therefore, the relative market share, although if you see in absolute terms, 16% market share might not be absolutely dominant, gives us a very good relative market share compared to the competition. That's why we can command profitability in that market that is very healthy.
Similar to other countries, for example, in India, where we look exclusively to the ground B2C operations, we are number three or number four sometimes, but we're number one in profitability. We look at both relative market share and ranking within the profit pool as great measures to understand our competitive position in these markets. Our portfolio is mainly centered around e-commerce, and I have already received a lot of comments. Oh, your name is very confusing. Yes, apologies for that. We're not going to change it for now. All of the business units that you have heard, and you will hear more also from Nicola, we all do e-commerce logistics in each of the different segments where we operate and where we specialize. We, of course, do a lot of our business is e-commerce.
The majority, 95% of our growth is in e-commerce parcel delivery, both again, domestic and cross-border. As you can see, it's a very diversified also customer base. We don't depend in any country of any major customer or marketplace. If you put together all the Chinese marketplace volume that we handle across the 1.7 billion of shipments that we handle every single year, it is in the low single digits that we depend on this group of customers. It's a very healthy customer base. It's a customer base fueled on SMEs. We have been growing our active customers, as you can see, very healthy and steadily. We have almost 200,000 active customers in the group, in the company as we speak. Very, very diversified customer base and very healthy. Our growth will come from mainly four sources.
The first one is the tailwind and structural benefits of our portfolio focusing on e-commerce. E-commerce as a percentage of retail is going to continue growing, and we are going to enjoy that growth, and we are already enjoying that growth. The second accelerator will be out of home and returns. We believe that the out of home preference in customers is going to continue growing. Today, 29% of customers prefer to receive a package if they have the option in an out of home type of locker or parcel shop. That number was half of that 29% five years ago. We see that the adoption and the propensity to use out of home when customers are given the chance is very high, and we see that number growing, and we're going to continue investing in out of home network.
Very closely related to out of home is returns. The first mile of a return e-commerce shipment is ideally done through an out of home. The concept of going to pick up a package for a return shipment is definitely not very efficient. Cross-border, I'm going to talk more about it, and of course, expansion of our footprint. We operate today in the geographical footprint that I share with you, but if we want to grow the business, we need to continue expanding our footprint as well, as we have been doing in the last two years. Beginning with a little bit of overview of the key geographies. In Europe, we operate a fantastic hybrid network.
It is a combination of what we like to say asset heavy and asset light, or dark yellow and light yellow, but we operate in this hybrid network in the most efficient way, giving the most optimized service quality and cost efficiency by picking up the ideal partner and ideal capabilities in each country. We like to say also that this concept of trying to paint every single country dark yellow and having our own heavy assets in every single country, we have already evolved beyond that. We believe that by controlling the middle mile, by choosing in each of the different countries the best and ideal and the most effective last mile delivery partner, gives us a flexibility and a cost position and a coverage that is very, very unique.
That is why we, besides the eight countries that we fully cover end to end with our own assets, have great partnerships with very, very strong partners. Probably the number one partner that we have in Europe is Germany with, of course, Nikola's business, P&P Germany. We inject into Nikola's business almost 500,000 shipments per day. We inject into all 45-plus sorting centers every single day with direct shuttles from Netherlands and Poland and Italy and France. We have the ability to do cut-off times that are much better than the competition. A strong partnership and very, very high, of course, dependency on the P&P Germany capabilities in Germany. It is not the only one. We do similar type of activities, not only in Europe, but in other countries with our other sister business units. Poste Italiane, third party, is another great example of a very strong partnership.
They do all our inbound deliveries into Italy. We use their capillarity and also injecting more and more downstream into their operations. They are also our resellers of our outbound cross-border services, which gives us the amazing opportunity to have a partner like Poste Italiane with, first of all, 40,000 PUDO shops across Italy, but also a very strong selling capacity to sell the deferred services that we offer across Europe and international. We also have with Poste Italiane a joint venture for the deployment of lockers and the expansion of the out-of-home network in Italy. In December last year, we established a cross-shareholding partnership with CTT. As you might have read, we acquired and we had the chance to acquire up to 49% of the CTT Expresso capital.
In exchange, they are going to be acquired, or they have already acquired 49% of our business in Iberia. That gives us what we like to say, the closest that you can get to getting married without getting married and allowing both types of platforms to continue producing what they are good at. In our business, we will continue focusing on B2B and heavier weight. CTT Expresso is a great capability and a great partner for anything that has to do with small parcels that we are not only going to benefit from the upside on the domestic market, but also on the inbound into Iberia as well. Those are some of the examples that we have for Europe. In the U.S., as I was saying, we have a great capability. We have a multi-year agreement with the USPS.
We inject almost 500 million shipments into the USPS last mile network, injecting into approximately 300 sorting centers for the USPS. We have our own middle mile with 19 sorting centers. A lot of the CapEx that I was referring to before was put in the last few years to upgrading and automating capacity in the US as one example, but of course, CapEx was related to some of the other countries in Europe. We have a great offering. We also leverage on the capabilities from the other business units. For example, for expedited services from New York, East Coast to West Coast, New York to Los Angeles, we are using the air network of Express in the ACS capacity or air cargo capacity services that Express is offering to us.
Therefore, it's a perfect combination of a speed type of transportation for line haul while injecting into the USPS, which gives us a very, very unique product offering. It is right now our fastest growing product in the U.S. India is definitely one of our top priorities for growth. The country itself, from a macro perspective, I don't need to tell you how much transformation it's enjoying and how much potential it has. We are seeing every single month more infrastructure being put into the roads and airports in India. There we enjoy a very strong position from an air cargo perspective. We are approximately four times bigger than our second competitor from anything that has to do with air cargo, B2B and B2C. We operate our own air network of eight own aircraft, and we connect all the main cities through our air network.
We are rapidly growing our surface or ground services as well, where we are number two now for B2B with almost 20% market share. We are growing rapidly in the B2C segment for lightweight. In India, it's mind-blowing the coverage that we have. We do 90% of the territory, for example, of India for Express services is covered by our India operations, which, by the way, goes by the brand name in India of Blue Dart. You might have heard about Blue Dart as a leading logistics company in India, and we are majority owners of Blue Dart. Great capability. We are investing heavily in infrastructure in India, mainly in the surface and ground services. We are very confident that we're going to be able to double the size of that business in the next five years.
Moving on to some of the key enablers, I talked a little bit about out of home. Out of home, again, from a convenience and preference perspective, it is growing in acceptance from customers. We believe that is a key competitive advantage. We claim to have one of the largest out-of-home networks combining poodles, parcel shops, and lockers in Europe. The utilization of that out-of-home network is growing very, very fast. It is not only growing for first mile or for last mile delivery and delivery into lockers, but also for returns, as I was saying. A significant portion of the utilization and the volume that we have today in the out-of-home network is related to returns. This is also giving a very unique capability for cross-border.
For example, today, we can produce a shipment and sell a shipment for approximately EUR 6 from Poland to 12 countries in Europe for predominantly locker to locker or parcel shop to parcel shop, so C2C type of deliveries, which is delivered guaranteed in three days. That is a very unique capability from a convenience perspective, from a capillarity perspective with our 169,000 points that we have in Europe, and also from an efficiency and cost perspective. Definitely capability, in particular in Europe, that we're going to continue investing and a big source of growth going forward. Cross-border, and I would like to spend a little bit of time here to explain a little bit what is our position in cross-border compared to what you heard from John.
If you envision that the cross-border market is the pyramid that we have illustrated here, where at the bottom of the pyramid, we have all the flows that are going through the postal networks, but at the top, we have the main carriers, DHL being the leading one. In the middle, we have what we call the deferred networks, which are hybrid networks that utilize the best line hold depending on what is, of course, the commitment to the customer, as well as the best last mile delivery capabilities in their respective countries. This is a very unique capability because, first of all, it is geared towards e-commerce, lightweight, different to what John was saying in the TDI network is mainly predominantly heavier weight. 95% of the volume that we put through this network is below 2 kg.
It is very picky, meaning that it can spike up and down 300%. We need to have the flexibility both from a last mile delivery as well as from a line haul perspective to maximize the utilization of these hybrid networks that I was referring to. That is why we are optimizing for affordability and reliability, meaning that we're not optimizing this network for speed. We're optimizing it for reliability and affordability. That is why today, Manchester to Chicago shipment with this network, we can produce it for approximately GBP 10, 2 kg, GBP 10 setting price, and the transit time will be less than five days. That is why we optimize that network for, again, affordability. Compared to something similar with Express, which will be guaranteed to very likely arrive there in two days and is going to be a little bit more expensive.
Two different types of customer needs, two different types of production platforms, and the perfect formula for failure will be trying to combine these two. We have seen, I think, as Cedar was alluded in the question about some of our competitors trying to combine those two. Definitely, these are apples and oranges, and we are very happy that we're seeing very healthy growth in these two platforms at the same time. Another source of growth, as I said, Accelerator is going to be the expansion of our footprint. That will include and is including new markets. We have acquired MNG in Turkey a year and a half ago, extraordinary platform, great management team. Turkey checks all the boxes of the type of country where we want to grow organically.
First of all, it is a difficult geography to expand because you need to cover a large territory with a lot of big cities. Second, it has high internet penetration, young population, but still a lower e-commerce as a percentage of retail. It checks a lot of the questions. It is becoming part of these geographical tailwind countries, GT20 countries that Tobias was referring to, which we believe are going to have a disproportionate growth compared to some more established countries. A great overall package together with, of course, as I said before, an amazing management team that is doing an amazing job for us there. Saudi Arabia is another good example. It checks also a lot of the similar boxes.
We have acquired 49% of Ajax, a smaller type of newer logistics player there, but also with last mile delivery for B2B, B2C, and also temperature control, which is very complementary to our life science and DHL health logistics capabilities. That is on new countries. Of course, following that criteria, we are going to continue looking into opportunities as they arise. We are also investing organically in some of our existing footprint. A good example of that was that a year ago, we acquired one of the largest locker competitors in Netherlands, Instabox, with 1,000 lockers. We are looking for more opportunities in markets like Netherlands. In Iberia, the CTT example is a great example where we are going to be enjoying the e-commerce growth through the 49% ownership of CTT Expresso. We are going to find synergies to optimize both networks as much as possible.
The growth accelerators are definitely a key component of how we are going to improve margin and continue achieving the aim of growing faster than the market. We are also focusing on how we are going to improve profitability. That is why we have three key elements and accelerators to make that happen. The first one is that we need to elevate the performance of those countries in our portfolio today that are not performing at the level that they need to be doing. The second one is yield management. We are going to talk more about how we are utilizing the pricing center of excellence that John is referring to, and then cost measures as part of the Fit for Growth in the group.
The first layer of improving profitability is going to, and is already in focus for us, is improving those countries that are at the bottom of the range of margin. We know how to do that. We have great success stories in many countries where we're operating at a high relative market share, high profit pool share, and also high margin and high return on employee capital. Benelux, Turkey, India are examples of countries that are in that upper high quadrant of combination of those variables. There are some others that are not there yet.
Our profitability in the existing portfolio is going to improve not only by growth and yield, but also by some of the basic things that we are working on in countries like Poland and the U.K., which is more about network efficiency, out-of-home network, and making sure that we have some of the basics in place. The second layer is maximizing yield practices. The pricing center of excellence that you heard all of us talking about is definitely adding a lot of value in leveraging on the expertise and the journey that business units like Express have already gone through. We have identified, and we were able to see some very good progress now in consistency in the general price increase that we have all the countries applying with the same level of integrity.
The propensity to pay is another type of practice that we are borrowing from Express in terms of making sure that within the 1.7 billion shipments that we manage, there's a huge opportunity to make sure that everyone is paying what they are willing to pay in terms of maximum yield. We are working on that as well. All the other tools that you see in the toolkit are the ones that we are putting into practice. We believe that that is going to have a contribution in the next couple of years of 0.5% of improved margin to the bottom line. The last one is the margin expansion through cost measures. Our largest cost, as you can see here, is the last mile delivery.
We are implementing measures from route optimization to optimization of our networks in order to improve that cost and the unit cost. We are seeing a very nice trend in terms of the unit economics from a last mile delivery perspective. One of the main levers that we are putting in practice in every single country is flexing our resource contracting and labor model. A good example of that, and probably the best one that we have, is in Netherlands, 80% of our couriers are between 18 and 25 years of age, and they work 10 hours per week. That gives us, and we have plenty of capacity to scale up and down that last mile delivery. Of course, we have a fixed network that we maintain almost everywhere.
One of the main characteristics of parcel delivery for e-commerce is the ability to flex up and down within the days, within the weeks, within the peak seasons, the ability to scale up and down in a cost-effective, but also quality-conscious way the resources in order to deliver the increase in packages. We have covered the growth accelerators that gave us a lot of confidence that we're going to continue growing faster than the market. We also talked about profitability accelerators, which also give us confidence that we're going to be improving our margin in the next five years to above 5% margin. What does that mean from a capital allocation perspective? As I said, we are exiting this year and maybe half of next year, the heavy investment phase.
All the investment has been mainly in infrastructure, hubs, automation, of course, a little bit of IT, but mainly has been in the middle-mile heavy infrastructure. All of that has been self-funded because of our operating positive cash flow. We're going to continue, of course, selectively investing in capacity because in the growth business, we definitely need to continue doing so. We'll see that that phase is going to normalize into a little bit of lower levels. That, combined with the improved margin and utilization and yield practices and growth, makes us also feel confident that we're going to have an improvement not only in margins, but also in the return on employed capital. As I said, we're going to continue doing selective M&A as we see, first of all, that the countries meet the criteria for being an attractive country.
Second, we find a target that we are going to not only continue helping grow, but making sure that it is a sustainable investment for the long run. In wrapping it up, we are confident that we are going to continue enjoying the tailwind of e-commerce growth and e-commerce as a percentage of retail. You saw that our footprint is very targeted towards e-commerce parcels, both domestic and deferred cross-border. This hybrid network, where we are utilizing our own assets when we consider that they bring a competitive advantage, but combined with the best partners in the different geographies, has given us a unique balance between cost-effectiveness and asset efficiency and capital requirements. That is why we are confident that the combination of all of these is going to give us the chance to continue growing, but also improve our profitability over the next five years.
Thank you very much for listening. With that, I pass the microphone to my dear colleague, Nikola. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Pablo. I think I'm the first to say now, good afternoon. After the colleagues from the four international DHL divisions have wrapped up, we will now be talking about Post & Parcel Germany. It's my first Capital Markets Day. I had already good conversations yesterday at dinner with many of you. A lot of our conversations circled around, but how are you different? How are you different than the other postals? In the next 30 minutes, my main goal is to give you an answer why we are different, to tell you that we are also part of the growth story. Remember, accelerate sustainable growth. We also have a good or well-growing segment. Even though we talk a lot about accelerate decrease in letter volume, this is not new for us.
This is not something where we now have to panic and think, how do we transform? Because, as Tobias also said in the morning, we are nearly halfway through the transformation. You will see we have made good progress. We have levers that we can pull depending on how the volume actually develops. This is also what we left you with in September. Nothing has changed here. We talked about what are our goals, how do we look at the growth of parcel, the decline of mail, what CapEx do we need? We also already introduced a number of $1 billion that we are going to reach this year in terms of EBIT. That will remain more or less stable throughout the transformation. After that, we will continue or we will move on to growth.
I'm not going to tell you now just what are actually our aspirations, our plans. Today, the focus is really how are we going to achieve that? Before we go into the top line accelerators and the profitability accelerators, let's take a look quickly at who are we in Germany. Here, this is the densest network in Germany, the largest network in Germany. Through this network, where 80% of households are less than a kilometer away from one of our touchpoints, every day we move 42 million letters. On an average day, about 6.7 million parcels. The same network actually scales up during peak season to produce every day 12 million parcels. This was the record we had last year during peak season. This is not just a large network. It's also a network that can breathe.
That is the key, especially in a well-run parcel company. Also, we are participating heavily on e-commerce. Nearly EUR 10 billion of our revenue is e-commerce related. As we will see, this is also where the growth is going to come from. We are also the sustainability front runner in Germany. The reason why I am mentioning it here is also because our customers are demanding it. Our customers are demanding that we invest in sustainability and we will also see how they are going to participate in that. I think something that we are proud of is that we are the number one postal service or postal and parcel service in the world together with Swiss Post. I think that shows you a little bit that we have done quite a bit right in the past and also have a good plan going forward.
We are moving from postal to parcel. Also, we heard already today, in 2024, for the first time, we have more revenue coming from parcel than actually from our mail, from the national side of the mail. We are at the moment at a ratio of about 6: 1 in terms of letters to parcel. We are calculating with about 2: 1 for 2030. We are also doing and running different scenarios because we have to remain flexible in our roadmap going forward. This is what we are currently working with. Before we actually go into what's happening in 2025 and beyond, I just also wanted to highlight the track record we have. The track record we have on innovations, but not just innovating, but really scaling innovations. That's very important. You'll see that big numbers for us do make sense.
If I talk about the parcel share, and we'll do a little deep dive later on that one, we are above 40%. Because we are three times bigger than the next one, this really allows us to leverage economies of scale in Germany in our network. Pablo talked about lockers today. We also have a lot of parcel lockers and now also post stations. We'll talk about why they are so specifically important for us. We have now a network of about 15,000 and growing. We will double that until 2030. Here we also have a certain density already in Germany and still largest network. Joint delivery, we'll do a deep dive.
We are not just a German postal and parcel operator, but we are connected to all the European countries, to all our sister divisions, and obviously also through the postal network to every single country in the world. In terms of top line growth accelerators, being the e-commerce leader in Germany is really our foundation for future growth. Yield management is also something we have been very, very diligently working on. Obviously, cross-border e-commerce is important as well. In 2014, which is the smaller one of the pies on the left side, this is how the market looked like in Germany. We had over 40% market share, and there were four other relevant competitors at that time. If you look at the very left one, we still have about 40% market share. We did not lose market share.
You will see there's a new competitor because ever since Amazon Logistics came in and also provides logistics services or last mile deliveries, middle mile in Germany. It did not come to the detriment of our market share. We kept our market share, but it was taken from competition. Amazon for us is a partner, is a customer, but has not taken market share. This is a fact that we should, or that we are quite proud of. Why is that situation as it is? It comes because we really provide very good and constant quality. We have very engaged people, and we have the network that stretches across Germany to every area in Germany. Even though we are a very big machine, we also kept quite some flexibility, which our customers appreciate.
Speaking of customers, on the right side, you can see we have obviously top accounts like our colleagues too, medium and small. The important thing is no customer has more than 5% revenue share with us. We have no over-dependency on a single customer. We have an incredibly broad customer base, and every year we are adding more customers. The key for us is to bring them in ideally digitally or through the telesales area. By adding more services, by helping them grow also internationally, for example, we grow them from a small to a medium account and to a top account. We have customers that started with us with 2,000 shipments on the first contract. Now they are smack in the top accounts, and we have been with them all the way. This has proven for us very successful.
You also can see all of these customer groups actually grew with us in 2024. This is something that we really, really put focus on, that we do not overexpose ourselves with a certain group or with a certain customer. That will help us also when the consumer behavior in Germany is getting a bit more optimistic again. We are growing from a much, much broader base than some of our competitors. That is not all. I mean, having already a lot of customers obviously helps in a moment of optimism and growth spur. We also have a lot of growth levers through providing very good customer experience, both physically, but also digitally. I really want to highlight our Post and DHL app with 8 million users in Germany. It is also one of the highest rated apps in the German stores, in the German app stores.
This is where customers can interact with us on a postal side and on the parcel side. They can track their packages. They can buy online stamps and just write the code then on the letter. They can book a pickup. They can do a lot. This is for private customers. It's heavily used. It really helps us also as a selling point with our business customers because the convenience for the end consumer is so high that they actually demand in many cases that they want their stuff to be shipped with DHL. That's always a very convincing argument when we go to our business customers and say, look, there is an NPS score of over 65. End consumers in Germany truly appreciate the service and the flexibility we provide. That helps us to further grow our customer base on the business side.
Digital sales is also very important for us. 21,000 customers we won last year through the digital sales channel. That means they contact us digitally, they open an account digitally, and they can ship with us digitally in less than 24 hours in most cases. This really is very, very successful. Obviously helps us, our sales force to be more productive and focused on the larger accounts. 21,000 came in last year. This is something that we are now also sharing with the rest of the divisions. All of us are working towards this digital sales setup. Business customer portal is basically for business customers. What for the private consumers is the DHL app. We have 160,000 customers there. Also a lot of self-service.
As labor costs in Germany are high, the more a customer can do in the interaction with us themselves, and they like doing it, and they get the right information, the better it is for us. We also really fully integrate in the backbone of some of the platforms that makes us often the preferred provider then for these platforms. Also, moving away from us is then much more difficult. The voice bot, also our customer service, is a real partner for e-commerce growth. Through the voice bot that we have, it's a descriptive model. We have saved 32% of our call minutes that come in for certain topics. That helps us to actually grow our parcel business without adding further costs. That was the first step, 32% of the minutes saved. The next step is obviously also what we heard from Oscar.
Now moving to a reasoning model and having a more conversational type of voice bot. That helped us to get costs to a minimum here in customer service and allow us to add the parcel growth that we have been enjoying. Parcel growth is a good lead over to a view of the German market. The sales volumes of the German retail market you see on the left side, on the right side, the bubbles, that's the online e-commerce or the online commerce penetration. In Germany, of all the retail volume, 16% is being sold online. That is a number that does not say much by itself. If we compare it, for example, to the U.K., there nearly every third purchase is done online. China and Korea have even higher rates. For us, this is double positive.
First, the whole retail market will continue to grow. The second one is online penetration is really low still in Germany compared to some of our peers or other countries here in Europe and around the world. There will be an increase in the online penetration. That means on the growth of e-commerce, we will heavily participate given that we are the leader, the market leader in Germany. I hope you agree with me that these are quite promising numbers also for us going forward. We heard from all my colleagues about yield management. We are part of this steering group, this yield management group. We have been since 2018 doing really stringent GPIs and really well-balanced pricing.
When we do price increases, we have a nearly 100% stick rate because we treat all the customers more or less the same in a sense that increases need to come from the broad base, not just from a few select ones as some of our competitors do that. The positive topic here is really every year our revenue grows faster than our volume. We have really good yield management in the parcel area. That is in our hands. We can price there. We really have been doing a good job here. We introduced also a peak surcharge last year. Some of the competitors then tried to do the same, but with much less stick rate than what we have. We are also looking in peak. You know, that is the time shortly before Black Friday, Cyber Monday until the Christmas period.
There we even have peakier weeks than we have in general. We are really looking what stretches our network the most and who are the customers who actually stretch our customers the most during that time. We are also thinking now how can we build this into our yield management so that customers really pay for the costs that they're creating when we have to scale up the network in the peak season so tremendously. As I mentioned before, from 6.7 million parcels to actually 12 million parcels in the same network. Here I also mentioned GoGreen Plus. You will see we are investing in sustainability in our E-fleet, which is significant, around 33,000 vehicles in Germany. We also have our customers participate in that.
We are selling them a GoGreen Plus service where we then prove to them where we invest it, what do we do with the money. That helps them to, first of all, add it to their own accounting or use it in their own accounting and also advertise then to their end customers that they are taking massive steps to make logistics or the value chain greener. We are working with a lot of customers here to actually participate in that and have seen quite an uptake on that also in Germany now. All my four colleagues very nicely already talked about how we work together. We are in the middle of Europe in the largest economy. We have connections to all our sister divisions. If we look at DHL eCommerce, we actually share even facilities. We move where our customers are.
A lot of German customers or customers who ship to Germany actually move to the border between Germany and Poland. We built a hub together there, actually also with our colleagues from Freight. Three divisions sit in that hub. We share the facility for e-commerce volume and for P&P volume. We have the same in the West where we see a lot of the volume coming in from the Chinese shippers. Here we are actually in South Bommel together. That is really a way how we can grow together and not every single one of us has to bear the full cost of that expansion. Pan-European collaborations, we have talked about that. A lot of customers ship across Europe. They come to us from Germany. They normally go to Austria. They go to Holland. They go to the more complex countries.
We are helping them to either bring the goods into Germany or actually export them. We also work with our colleagues from DGF when they bring volume from the Far East in, they clear. We heard about their customs clearance capabilities. We pick up in the international airports surrounding Germany. We bring the goods in them. We do the last mile delivery. Monta is also a very attractive case. Monta is fulfillment for small customers. They can actually get a contract out also in 24 hours. We can open an account in 24 hours. In theory, a customer could really say, this is my online shop that I want to place. They have an account with us in 24 hours. They have an account with Monta for fulfillment in a very short time frame.
They can really get their business up and running in a super reasonable time. That's something where we have enjoyed very good collaboration, but more importantly, also good volume and good profit from it. Those were the growth accelerators. What is really important for us, and this is where this transformation is going to be won, and we will be successful with that, is the optimized network utilization. John talked about the perfect aviation network. I'm going to talk about the optimized network utilization. You'll see it's bringing the mail and the parcel network together, but also looking at indirect functions. Germany has a huge demographic change. We will also utilize that demographic change, the baby boomers that are going to leave in terms of indirect functions. Of course, we are also part of the group-wide Fit for Growth program.
You all probably heard about the postal law because we also talked a lot about the postal law because it was important for us to get a new version last year. We got that in July. It had positives and it also had negatives. If I look at the left side, it allows us to really have a stable foundation for a good EBIT margin. That is the first thing. That was really crucial because we were tied to the other postal operators or to some of the other postal operators before and their profitability. Now we have a stable foundation that is very good for us. Now I am going to focus on what does it bring in terms of productivity. We have, since the 1st of January, extended delivery times in Germany. 80% of our mail volume we previously delivered on the next day.
We are moving now to basically delivering on the third day, 95%, and 99% on the fourth day. We did not use the full time frame that we would have available yet because we also need to adapt our concepts, our operations. That does not happen from one day to the other. We also wanted customers to ease into the transition. That really allows us now to become more productive. I will show you the three main levers here. The post stations, I talked about them before. That is really important for us because in the very rural areas, sometimes it is really hard to find a partner who can actually sell or be our postal and parcel partner. Now we can have our post lockers actually be recognized as one of those physical required outlets.
This is very good for us because that will help us really also bring costs down in our network. I told you the transformation is being won really in our operational processes. I'm opening the door to three of them that are really important for us. AB Steering, which means basically you split the delivery tour in an A part and in a B part, and you steer then the volume that you have. Now that we have longer time with the fully paid letters since the 1st of January, 60% of our mail volume, of our volume, is now steerable. Where is a transformation won with a postal service provider? It's won when you have high density when you deliver. If you really ensure that you steer your volume, the postal man has to go to fewer households per tour.
When he goes to these fewer households, he brings more volume. That is the optimum that you want to achieve. This is what we are achieving now by splitting the tour into steering the volume, keeping non-priority volume back, and making sure that we work on the most productive way out on the delivery tours. This is very unique. You will not see that with many of our competitors. This is really where the productivity game is being won, creating the best and the highest density when you deliver mail and parcels together. Ready to go is the next point. It sounds a bit better in German, but I cannot help. We have the translation here. That means really at the moment our delivery people take 45 minutes in the morning to sort mail.
As you can imagine, a delivery person is most productive when they're actually out on the road delivering. We will use our mail sorting centers to pre-sort now that we have less volume. We have more time to actually sort deeper. We will bring the bundles to the couriers in the morning, and they can then go out on the road and don't have to pre-sort for nearly an hour. Given that we have 115,000 delivery people, every minute that you take out of that agenda is obviously pure cost savings. That is another really key part. It will stretch until 2032 until we can do it fully because whenever we have a decline again in volume, we can then sort deeper again because we have more time on the mac hines. That's what I meant before.
We really observe how does the volume go down, and then we can react, but we have answers. This is how we are going to manage the decline all the way up to 2032. Joint delivery is something that also not all or not many of the postal operators do. We have been delivering mail and parcels in the rural areas for a very long time. In fact, we had 68% at the moment. This year we will go up to 72% of the volume being jointly delivered. Our goal for 2030 is then 90%. With the other concepts I just introduced before, that also allows us to think of reverse joint delivery. Now the mail delivery basically was the anchor, and we added parcels.
On Mondays, one can also think of, because there are traditionally not that many letters on Monday, the parcel courier delivery guy can then take on a few of the letters that are still there. There are a lot of different versions and models that we can think of and all address specific situations that we have been adding to our scenario planning. Out of home, we talked about one thing I wanted to point out besides the post stations is we now have also a white label option. It's called Deinfach. Sorry that I cannot translate. This really allows also for us access to locations where maybe before a city or a company said, no, I don't want to have three or four of these lockers here. I don't want that. I don't give it to anybody.
Now we can say, but we have one box and others can put their parcels in there too. That has opened a full new range of locations, strategic locations for us. We are planning on putting up 1,000 this year, and that will by the end of this year then already be more than what we have on white label options from competition in all of Germany for the last few years. Indirect functions I mentioned before. Of course, we win the game in the transformation of the operational processes, but also here indirect functions are very important for us. Here we have help through the demographic change. 33% of our people in that area will retire until 2030. We will have a peak in 2060, 2027. That means we will have natural fluctuation, which is good because then we only will replace maximum 50%.
The rest we then cover through automation, digitalization, global sourcing. We really are covered also in that area. The labor market will be very different anyway in Germany. There will be much fewer people who want to work or who will be available for work. We are also looking at many options. The ones that we attract, how do we keep them? We have very intense training for our people. We see also roles that we might not need anymore. We do a lot of upskilling also for future proofing some of those roles. As I mentioned before, of course, we are part of the Fit for Growth group program. In fact, we started 2023. We have very stringent cost management.
Because people have this absolute bite and willingness to make this transformation successful, we have already discovered and actually implemented quite significant cost management measures. You also see all the ones that I talked about before. They all pay into one of these cost buckets of our EUR 16.5 billion of costs. We are also well covered for the years to come. We have different measures, different initiatives year by year to actually keep addressing our cost base. I talked a lot about the top line growth, which of course is mostly focused on the parcel growth. Then also the profitability accelerators where we try to intertwine the networks more and more. The more room we get by the mail decline, the more we have then room for parcel. That is also the same in our sorting centers. We have less volume.
We put in sorters for small parcels. We can also use those mail sorting centers that traditionally did the letters before for our parcel network. It is a self-financed transformation. Every year we can only invest what we actually produce in terms of profit. This is a bit how the split is for us. Every year we invest a significant portion in the parcel growth, in the parcel expansion, in parcel sorting centers, in sorting concepts for different formats. Whatever fits best into the roadmap. Sustainability and renewal. We need to every year renew our fleet or a good portion of our fleet. Digitalization I already covered before. Bringing more EBIT then once we have made good progress on the transformation, obviously also will reverse the trajectory that we are on on our ROIC and will also help us to improve in that area again.
In summary, I hope I was able to explain a bit more why we are different than other postal operators on the transition from a postal to a parcel operator, that we are not just starting now with the transformation, but that we have been going on with the transformation for several years and that we have a clear plan what needs to come next depending on how the volume on mail develops. We do anticipate e-commerce growth. We anticipate parcel growth and we are also ready for that. In general, I would think that being an anchor or a part also for our other divisions will really help us on the Pan-European, on the Far East to Europe trade lanes to make significant progress over the next years. I want to highlight again, it's a historic transformation and it's a self-funded transformation. Thank you very much.
With that, I'll hand it over to Melanie.
Great. Thank you very much, Nikola. I think that was a great conclusion to the five divisional presentations. I think a very clear explanation of how Nikola and the team know how to manage the transformation from letters to parcels in Germany and how there is a future vision being the leading parcel player in Europe's largest economy. Also, thank you to the four DHL colleagues. I think we shared a lot of insights with you now on where we want to find growth also in today's environment and how we want to improve profitability. What is left for me to say? I want to talk about two topics which are important from the finance perspective.
I want to pick up on our finance strategy where we shared an update with you already in September with the launch of Strategy 2030. I want to talk about return on invested capital, a KPI which we have been tracking for a while, but where with Strategy 2030 we now put new and increased emphasis on. Starting with the finance strategy, that is actually a slide which you have seen from us for many, many years. The basis construction of our finance strategy has not changed much over the last years. We have a target rating between BBB+ and A-. We have the two pillars, the business growth and the shareholder remuneration. On the business growth, our focus has been and will remain on organic growth.
I think you heard a lot of examples of where we want to grow going forward, but we will supplement it with M&A where you heard clearly from Tobias that we are really looking for targets which give us new skills which allow us to increase our capabilities. On the shareholder return side, the foundation is the regular dividend, but as we have now also shown for many years, we will supplement that this year by VEX. That's the basic structure of our finance strategy. Nothing really new here, but we added some important nuances in September of last year with the launch of Strategy 2030. On the core part with regard to organic growth, we pointed out what are those areas where we think we will find above GDP growth. We talked about that quite a lot today.
We said very clearly that dividend continuity is extremely important for us. On the lower part with regard to inorganic growth and share buyback, many years ago when we launched our finance strategy, we were very much focused on what to do with excess cash which we generate. That was the foundation for inorganic growth and also for the share buyback. We have now included the strengths of our balance sheet here because over the last years we have significantly strengthened our balance sheet thanks to our significantly improved cash generation. That now gives us opportunity to do more both on the inorganic side but also with regard to share buybacks. That is what we said in September. On March 6th, we actually applied the finance strategy to reality.
On the regular dividend, we honored the commitment to dividend continuity, even though that came at the expense of slightly going out of the regular payout corridor. As you know, we have a payout corridor of 40%-60%. We went up to 64% to make sure that we keep dividend at least constant. On the share buyback side, after now having announced a roll forward of our share buyback program with an increase by EUR 1 billion over the last two years, we actually decided to top it up to more than EUR 2 billion, up to EUR 2 billion until the end of 2026, recognizing both the strengths of our balance sheet, but of course also our valuation situation. We have a very clear finance strategy and I think we are also really living up to it and we are applying it.
The foundation which is enabling us to invest into growth on the business side and to create good shareholder returns is our significantly improved free cash regeneration. That is really something which I'm very proud of. Ten years ago when I came into the corporate board, that was the common point of criticism in investor meetings that really our free cash regeneration was definitely not where it was supposed to be. We are very proud that through all the turbulences of the COVID years and the post-COVID normalization, we have actually kept one KPI amazingly stable and that's the red line which you can see here. That's our translation of profit into free cash flow. You can see that we have this very stable level now. That is of course something which we intend to keep going forward.
This better cash regeneration is the foundation for executing on our finance strategy. That takes me to the next evolution step in our financial maturity journey. When I joined the company 20 years ago, we were really focused on revenue growth and the top line was the most important KPI. We then matured more towards, okay, actually profitability is relevant. We have to focus on EBIT. Then we came to free cash flow and we really, yeah, worked it into the organization and systematically over many years improved our free cash flow generation. Now it's time for the next focus topic and that is return on invested capital. I think one important thing to start us off with the discussion on return on invested capital. We have invested quite a lot over the last years.
You can see in the middle here that our invested capital has actually increased by 7% per annum over the last five years. We have also grown EBIT by 7.4%. Through all the turbulences of the pandemic, we have actually seen a very good and solid return on invested capital of around 14%. That is the starting point now. Now I come to the question, how do we actually want to grow return on invested capital going forward? There are two elements logically. One is the numerator EBIT, which by growing EBIT we can also improve return on invested capital. The second one is the invested capital, what we do on the denominator. Let me start quickly with growing EBIT, where you already heard quite a lot from the colleagues.
I just want to briefly take the very long 10-year look back time horizon. In 2014, we were a company which produced an EBIT of just about EUR 3 billion. At that point in time, actually the largest EBIT contributing division was still Post & Parcel Germany. Actually in Post & Parcel Germany, it was the letter business. DHL Express, John had just become a billionaire in 2013, forwarding supply chain were still years and years away from becoming a billionaire EBIT contributor for the family. DHL eCommerce was not even born. That was the family picture back in 2014. We were striving towards the EBIT aspiration of EUR 5 billion by 2020. We all know that during the pandemic it all got a bit crazy and we shot up to more than EUR 8 billion.
Now in 2024, we delivered an EBIT of EUR 5.9 billion. That is roughly twice what we did in 2014. We had a 7.1% EBIT CAGR in this time period during which we significantly transformed the business and where we are now based on a much broader profit pool basis than what we had before. I think we have quite a good track record with some ups and downs, but we have really managed the transformation from the postal business to the most international logistics company in the world in a profitable way. You have heard from the colleagues how strongly we are now positioned in all five of our operating divisions. I'm not going to go through it in a lot of detail, but just as a very quick recap on what for me stands out.
When you listen to John, you clearly heard how DHL Express is different and how we are truly the global market leader in the express industry. What is remarkable for me from the finance perspective, yes, they are the most capital intensive of our divisions, but throughout the whole cycle, they have really delivered a very strong ROIC. When I look at Tim's presentation, what you heard today, you have seen that we have had a step change in performance in Global Forwarding, but there is more to come. Tim and the team have a very clear plan on how to further improve profitability.
The firework from Oscar and what you also saw yesterday in operations, I think makes it very clear that we are the leading player in Supply Chain and that we have the right recipe for future profitable growth in this division, which just became a billionaire with the results in 2024. When I look at Pablo, while this young division is in the right spot to benefit from structural e-commerce growth opportunities, and there are also clear plans on how to improve profitability further. I think we will see faster growth in that division than in the rest of the organization, but we will also see profitable growth coming from DHL eCommerce. Last but not least, from Post & Parcel Germany, yes, we are going through this transformation, but Nikola and the team, they know how to manage that transformation in a profitable way.
There is a clear vision by the end of the decade, this will be a parcel company with a bit of letter business on top, very profitable in Europe's largest economy. That is the foundation, the five strong operating divisions. As you saw, we have on top of that the group elements to our Strategy 2030, the group growth initiatives, we have Fit for Growth, and we have the alignment of the legal structure. I think this together will give us a good opportunity for EBIT growth, for growing the numerator in return on invested capital. Before I come to the denominator, I very briefly want to deviate from the main theme of today.
Today is obviously about the long term and Strategy 2030, but for good order and for completeness, just very briefly reiterating what we showed you for the short term outlook when we launched our guidance on March 6th. I think the first important message here is this slide is totally unchanged. That is what we gave as guidance on March 6th. I hope that the presentations from the colleagues gave you a bit of comfort that there are good growth opportunities also in today's volatile world and that we are working on the cost base with Fit for Growth. There are limitations to how crazy the world can be without this having an impact on our business.
That was a caveat we already made on March 6th, but we feel quite well positioned to now work with our customers on how to deal with what is happening in the world around us. The very, very short term remark is we have now collected the Q1 consensus from you. You can find it on our website as usual. I would say that broadly it reflects well what we said on March 6th with regard to Q1 not being the most dynamic quarter in line with usual seasonality. That was the very short term perspective. Now back to the longer term and the question, what is happening in the denominator and how are we going to manage the denominator so that we see a good development on return on invested capital?
The first thing I want to talk about is actually what is included in invested capital because there is no standard common definition. Competitors use different definitions. You can have a debate, do you include goodwill? Do you include leases? For us, the core focus will be on reported return on invested capital with invested capital, including PPE owned, PPE leased, goodwill, working capital, and a bit of other stuff. That takes us for the average of 2024 to a number of EUR 43 billion. When we now look at the different components, the largest component in here accounting for more than EUR 18 billion is actually the own asset component on the balance sheet. Here we have invested quite a bit over the last years. We now had many years where actually our CapEx was significantly higher than our depreciation.
Over the last two years, we have already managed that down. For 2024, we had a factor of 1.3 between CapEx and depreciation. This whole catch-up investment, which we had to do in some parts of the business, I think that is really behind us now. We will still see a rate where we are investing into growth, but I think we are now in a much more normal territory. With regards to leases, the first important reminder is we do leasing because it really makes sense for us on the operational business side. It is something which we do mostly in Express and Supply Chain. In Express, it's part of the aviation flex for the network, which John already talked about. I will come back to that in a second. In Supply Chain, it's an integral part of the business.
If you do a seven-year outsourcing deal with a customer, it does make sense to also have a seven-year lease for the warehouse so that both things are linked and harmonized in timing. Last comment on this page, goodwill, EUR 13 billion, that is a sizable number. That predominantly dates back to the acquisitions which we did more than 20 years ago before 2006. As you know, accounting-wise, it just sits on your balance sheet unless you come into an impairment situation. It is not depreciated over time. That is just something we have to live with on our balance sheet. It does have a significant impact on some of the divisional return on invested capital numbers, which you will see in a second. This is the group structure for invested capital.
Now, when we look at the different divisions, I think the first very positive matches is the division which is the most capital intense. DHL Express is actually the division with the highest ROIC. We have a 19% ROIC here. Very importantly, also for P&P going through the transformation and e-commerce being in the growth phase, I think we have reasonable starting points with 9% and 11% respectively. The one number which you may find a bit surprising is actually the global forwarding freight number because after all, that's an asset-light business. Why is it only 13% in such an asset-light business? The explanation is actually goodwill. For historic reasons, global forwarding came into the company to a large degree through acquisitions with Danzas, with AEI, with Exel. There is a significant goodwill portion on the global forwarding balance sheet.
If you strip that out, you actually see a 40% return on invested capital. You also see that Express and Supply Chain, the other two divisions where we still have quite a bit of goodwill on the balance sheet, are getting an uplift as well. When we look at leases and we exclude leases in the denominator, you can actually see that this lifts up predominantly Express and Supply Chain. As I said before, those are the two divisions where leasing is part of our business. This is just to give you the transparency. Don't worry, we're not going to talk every quarter now about three different ROIC definitions, but I think it's important today to for once explain how the different divisional invested capital numbers are being made up.
I just want to spend a couple of more minutes first on Express and then on the others collectively. On Express, we have a dedicated slide because that is obviously the largest invested capital base. You can see here nicely this balance between owned and leased assets. You can see that the yellow part, the aviation piece, is the biggest chunk. Here, as you probably also know, we have really completed a large refleeting program over the last years, particularly with regard to the triple seven buying. When you look at the other four divisions on one slide, I think the most important message here is every family member is different. You see, as already mentioned, that in Global Forwarding, the by far biggest chunk of the invested capital is the goodwill.
If we now want to improve return on invested capital in Tim's division, while we can do some working capital optimization and we're working on that, the big driver for Global Forwarding will be improvement in EBIT in the numerator. For Pablo's division, you see that there is actually for this relatively young division quite a bit of yellow. We have invested quite significantly over the last years into the growth of this division. We are now getting more into a phase where, yes, we will still keep investing, but we are also leveraging the assets more. That is a constant adjustment process. There was one small spot, the difference game in the slides Pablo showed earlier. Compared to what we showed in September, for CapEx going forward for e-commerce, we have actually adjusted the number downwards.
We had 300-500 in September. We have now taken that down to 300-400. That gives you a feeling for this is really a living construct where we constantly look for opportunities to better leverage the assets going forward. From a group perspective, we have a clear plan for each of the divisions, how to improve return on invested capital on the EBIT side, but also on optimizing the invested capital. This is not a one-size-fits-all formula. The important thing is that for each of the family members, we have a clear plan, how much capital do they need and what are the expectations, what is the right balance, for example, between top-line growth and optimizing return on invested capital.
That is how we will now, for the group collectively, but also for each of the five divisions, drive return on invested capital going forward. It will be a multi-year journey. It also means that we have to take the organization along. There is a huge educational element in here because like we did with free cash flow, we now have to explain to our country manager in Thailand what is return on invested capital and how can you locally influence this KPI. We are very committed to making this next step in our financial evolution. To show how serious we are about it, we are also including it in the remuneration scheme.
We will propose to the AGM on May 2nd that first of all, for the corporate board, return on invested capital becomes one of the KPIs in the long-term variable management compensation with a weighting of one-third. We will then also roll it out to the wider organization. That was a quick run-through, finance strategy, and return on invested capital. To conclude from my side, not just maybe for my part, but also for what I would take away from what you now heard over the last hours, I think we have a very clear plan how we want to grow EBIT better than GDP, and we will stick focused to a very strong free cash flow generation.
We will strengthen the focus on return on invested capital, and we are focusing not just on getting the group number up, but over time also improving ROIC for each of the divisions. We reaffirm our strong commitment to attractive shareholder returns, both through the regular dividend and through share buybacks. With that, it's time for the final, final wrap-up, and I think to be us.
Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, colleagues. I keep it relatively brief. We've come full circle from what we wanted to achieve today, review our strategy that we have communicated in September. Many of you have asked for some detail on how we want to achieve that.
I hope you feel that we provide that detail, both in terms of how we want to grow the company faster, our growth accelerators, but also how we want to increase profitability, that including EBIT, but also return on invested capital. My wrap-up would be three points. As a citizen, I might find certain developments regrettable, but we have a very good track record as DHL to deal with volatility, and our relative position going into a renewed round of volatility is very strong. We feel confident that we can also deliver in this environment. We have excitement, and we are fired up for more. I think you could get a sense of that with the divisional presentations. We have, I think, really good initiatives that have real traction in the business to accelerate sustainable growth. We are not building pipe dreams.
We have a strong commitment that this makes sense for our shareholders, that we have higher return on invested capital, and that we provide a good return profile to you as our shareholders. With that, I thank you for your attention, and we have another round of Q&A.
Exactly. Thank you too. Yes, thanks, and I ask the three presenters of the second round to join us up here together with Melanie. In the meantime, as I said, we got a couple of questions from the outside, offering a good fit to the topics that we covered in round two. Thank you. First, let's see whether there are any immediate questions right here from the floor. Maybe over there, Johannes Braun.
Sorry. Yes, thank you, Johannes Braun. It's default. I have one question left on Express still, or John, I guess, and then one on the post law.
On express, a couple of years ago, you had a capital markets day on express. I think it was even pre-pandemic, where one of the messages was that B2B e-commerce would be the next big thing for express. Moving forward to today, I haven't seen this moving a lot. Maybe you can comment on whether this has not developed as planned or whether I missed anything on that one. On the post, shall I give you the second one as well? On the post law, you mentioned that the margin that you are allowed to earn now is based on the EURO STOXX 50 average. I think at the end, it's 6.5%, if I remember correctly, which is basically half the margin, the average margin of the EURO STOXX 50. What has been the rationale of the regulator to cut that margin by 50%?
Is there any chance that you can maybe negotiate that away in the future?
John, you want to be first?
Thanks first. Just on the question of B2B e-commerce, you're right on September 7, I think, in the head office before we went out to the Cologne hub. That was quite a feature within our presentation. We'd already made some progress on that. In fact, we realized it's a big opportunity because of all the multinational companies we talked to. 12%-15% had a dedicated bespoke portal where people could come in and buy B2B online, sort of shop now, buy a Rolls-Royce engine. It really was like that. There is a huge potential to go to these MNCs and convince them that selling B2B online is a good model. I think the truth of the matter is we got distracted with some elements of traditional e-commerce.
More recently, our GT20 program and our SME activity, where at about the same time, we received the market sizing study. I'll just summarize it like this. It pointed to a big opportunity to manage our SME customer base better. It was a little bit of an all-hands-on-deck on terms of SME, which I profiled briefly. Like the tutorials we did for some of you on B2C online generally, we're very happy to pick up tutorials on SME or on B2B online as well going forward. Martin might be able to facilitate those to bring you back to speed.
That's still very much alive. Thank you, John. I would take the question on regulation as it relates to the postal law. What's important to see is that the margin that is mentioned there is the regulated margin, which is not identical to the divisional.
The regulated margin includes a central cost that we have. You would have to add a notch to the 6.5% to get to the divisional margin of P&P. Now, to your question, why is that a discount to the EURO STOXX? We're not the regulator here or the legislator, but I think the argument is a risk adjustment that the business is more stable in its regulated form. We obviously see that ambition of the legislator positive to provide a relatively risk-free environment. That is the rationale why such a discount would be applied. I think it's clear, and Nicola mentioned this, that this regulation is much better than what was in the old law in two ways. The old law also had a price cap that went back to the mail price in 1997. That is de facto gone.
We have a base now that is not anchored in the postal industry with all the problems that our listed peers have.
Okay, thank you. Oscar, we got one question from the external audience, actually from Vincent, from Zadik. All the introduction of technology, robotics, and what's the key lever for you? Is it productivity? Is it better attractiveness on the labor market? How do you measure whether the whole exercise you're going through there is successful and what are the KPIs?
I'll make a short answer out of this. One of these is, of course, productivity. The productivity makes us more attractive, more competitive to win new business. At the same time, it also makes us a more attractive employer because the working environment is far more inspiring and attractive. It is those two elements.
Being a better employer also helps you to have longer-term contact with people. That actually drives productivity up as well. That comes back to productivity again.
Excell ent. I think that's helpful enough. Peter, I'm happy to follow up. We continue with Andy here in the meeting.
So Andy Chu from Deutsche Bank. Could I just ask a sort of big picture question? If GDP, if global trade is significantly below one times real global GDP, and we've had the discussion that maybe nobody really knows, but if that were to be a scenario, which is obviously different from the assumption under Strategy 2030, how would you kind of pivot the business to cope with that sort of maybe a downside scenario? Thank you.
I think, Andy, I've seen some of that. First of all, we're shifting the footprint.
I think it would be highly unrealistic to assume that we have a very homogeneous development of trade. China made clear commitments to further opening up. I think there are geopolitical reasons why this is a credible statement. We have seen the trade that Asia has with the rest of the world, excluding the U.S. and to some extent Europe, mushroom. This is really growing very fast. I think there is no indication also what you read in the newspaper the last 72 hours in terms of alignment between countries that on other topics have a rather, let's say, interesting relationship. I think we will see a very heterogeneous pattern with the U.S.-related trade most likely taking a hit if those measures announced yesterday would stay for longer. That is also, I think, to be seen, but that is obviously a scenario.
We have, you've seen this clearly in the three divisions of Supply Chain, e-commerce, and P&P, a strong exposure to domestic activities as well. We see the volatility that is ahead of us, but we're definitely not scared by this scenario.
Okay, we continue with Alex in the front row here.
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. Two please for Nikola. First of all, can you please comment on your competitor's profitability in Germany and the implications of this for market pricing dynamics? You talked about being able to price up. Is it more that you've got no choice but to price up if you want to stay below 50% share and avoid unwanted attention from the competition regulator? Secondly, how's the current relationship with your unions in Germany?
You talk a lot about efficiency savings, pointing to what looks like headcount reductions with the AB deliveries and things like this. Is that running into resistance from your labor partners?
Okay. Let me start with the competitor's profitability. I would say that we own most of the profit pool in Germany, meaning DPD and Hermes. They're not doing financially so well in terms of profitability. When I look at the others, I see more a strive to get cheap volume in rather than optimizing the whole business, if I put it like this. We have pricing power because we have premium quality. We also see that once e-commerce continues to grow, there will be undercapacity in the market in terms of sorting capacity. We don't see competition investing. We still do invest in our parcel growth.
That certainly helps our pricing power then going forward. On a question with the union, given the stage that we are in, in the transformation, I would think we have a reasonable relationship with the union in a sense that over the last few months, they probably get a deeper understanding of what this transformation actually means and where it leads if they are not a partner at the table.
Okay, we continue over there, Sebastian. Emily.
Thank you, Emily from Barclays. I just have a couple of questions on the cost savings program. Could you give some color around the cost savings program and how that's allocated within the divisions and whether that total $1 billion, is this also from the integrations between the divisions or are the initiatives quite division separate focused?
Just tagging on to that, the P&P establish EBIT to $1 billion in 2026, could you speak about what assumptions you have for cost savings within 2026 as well? Thank you.
Maybe I can quickly talk to the cost savings program overall. I think what's important to note is this is not top down and allocated, but this is rather us summing up what we have been working on since September and giving you transparency around it. This is how we also came up with a figure. It's not a top down, this is what we need to, but it was just, let's really take a close look at what we can do on the structural side, deploying technology, changing networks, changing our setup. This is why it comes out of the current business structure. We keep the divisional setup.
We collaborate between the divisions, but there's no element of integration in that sense.
If I could just add, I mean, when you look at the different buckets, we have the aviation bucket, which logically applies to forwarding and express. Then we have the ground operations bucket and the indirect bucket, which applies to everybody. Just the composition with the three buckets shows you that there is obviously a significant contribution also from express and global forwarding. In terms of last but not least, Tobias mentioned it already, of course, there is also a program for corporate center group functions where we have also adjusted the guidance from the past EUR 450 million to EUR 400 million. It is really a group-wide program.
On P&P, because you asked specifically, all the cost measures we have implemented or are in the process of implementing will help us achieve the $1 billion. You saw on the operational levers, the rates that we put there in terms of savings is always for full year when they are running fully, when they are fully deployed. AB Steering, for example, you probably saw $50 million per annum. That is incremental because we have already been doing a lot on the Ready to Go. That will take longer until that really has an impact because we are only deploying it. Everything we have collected structurally will pay into the $1 billion. In addition to that, we also have the constant adjustment of our costs to the actual volume. We have structural cost savings plus the flexible ones.
Okay, before we come to the further questions here from the floor, one question that we got this morning already, and now following your presentation, Nicola, the not very surprising question, the whole new group structure after the carving down of P&P, does that mean a spinoff of any division? And P&P, for many, would be a candidate here. Does that mean that this is still on the table, off the table? Tobias, give us your view.
It is interesting that that question is asked remotely. I think we have commented on this. We are going currently through the process of aligning the legal structure with the management structure. This has operational reasons, but obviously it also gives us certain strategic flexibility. That being said, we think this portfolio makes sense.
I think also through these presentations have shown the positive linkages that we see between the businesses, especially our ambition to be a leading European parcel provider is something that we see as an attractive offer. It is a market that is significant in size and in our view, highly attractive. We need a domestic, national last-mile capability of density to make this successful for a pan-European e-commerce play. That is one of the linkages that is important to keep in mind. This is why we find this portfolio that we have a very attractive portfolio, but we also obviously understand that it is upon us to deliver what we have laid out in September and today that this is an attractive play also for our shareholders.
Thank you. Very clear. And Sebastian, we continue with Cedar and then Alexia, please.
Thanks very much. Two questions.
Can you talk about your perspective on what's going on with USPS as it relates to your e-commerce business in the U.S.? Because they're clearly your last-mile partner and there's a lot of change with their business and UPS's relationship with them. Give us some perspective on how you think that impacts your footprint there and upside risks, downside risks. Another question on e-commerce. With the move to grow the out-of-home network, how do we think about that from a sort of competition and margins perspective over the medium term? I would think that it's probably good for margins, but maybe it lowers cost to serve and maybe that makes it easier for new entrants, but then the new entrant has to actually invest the capital in a big network.
Some perspective on what you think that makes or what that means for your e-commerce position in Europe. Thank you.
Sure. You want me to take the USPS? Yeah. USPS, as it is publicly known, last year, the USPS continued executing on this delivery for America program that was led by the former Postmaster General, who is no longer in place. That program included a change on their operational network to have partners like ourselves injecting volume at a higher level within their network, which we fully executed, we fully complied with. Actually, from a quality perspective and cost perspective, it is working really well. Our customers are super happy also with the move towards that operating model. It is publicly known that the Postmaster General is no longer in place.
There is an interim person now who has continued so far with the existing plan, but it's very likely that a new leader will be appointed and to be determined how that will evolve. We have a multi-year agreement with the USPS. We are a significant revenue and volume generator for the USPS. We have a strong mutual interest in continuing working that out. To be honest with you, we are confident that regardless of new direction from a partnership perspective, we could add significant value to the USPS and continue adding value. Independent of the details of the operating model and whomever will come, it's very likely that any scenario will lead to continue having partners like ourselves because we have a very strong role to play for them and also for customers. That's the extent of the situation.
Again, long-lasting relationship, we are confident that we will continue having such a relationship with the USPS. On the out-of-home, yes, it's important to keep in mind that out-of-home definitely is about lockers and parcel shops, but there is much more behind that. It is not only about having thousands of metal boxes on the street or parcel shops. It's the entire middle mile, it's the entire selling capacity, it's the entire 360 customer experience. That is why while on the surface, the proliferation of out-of-home points could potentially be perceived as overcapacity in the market from a last-mile delivery perspective and utilization of the lockers and parcel shops, the entire profit will be driven by those companies that have the ability to scale the first mile and the middle mile. That is the game that we are playing. We definitely need to have that out-of-home capability.
Yeah, in some pockets, there might be a little bit of overcapacity, but the barriers to entry are much higher upstream into the process. That is where we see that we have the opportunity to differentiate.
Maybe if I may add on the USPS situation, we have a bit of a unique advantage because we have one thing in common. We are the universal service provider for a country. We know how it feels if there is arbitrage against your obligation as a universal service provider. We have always been very respectful to that with the United States Postal Service to make sure that we do not do what we would also not like others to do to us in Germany. I think that has strengthened the relationship that we always had an eye out that this business is also beneficial for the United States Postal Service.
It provides them, we provide them access to volume that they would otherwise not have in the network.
Okay, we continue with Alexia, please. Thank you.
It's Alexia Dogani from JPMorgan Chase & Co. Just two questions as well. Just firstly on e-commerce, can you talk a little bit about your strategy in the U.K. and Poland where you are slightly underweight? You're less than 50% kind of market share delta. How much investment are you willing to put in those markets to get you up to the leaderboard? Could you expand a little bit on why you reduce the range of future CapEx investment today and whether kind of the ROIC elements are something that have come into consideration? For Melanie, just looking at kind of returns to 2030, obviously you've given us the evolution of EBIT over the past 10 years.
We can really see that EBIT revenue and returns kind of peaked in 2022. When you will look at the plan now, because of the cost-saving program you're doing and the CapEx needs having rebased, should we be looking at a better return kind of ROIC capture, assuming we get back to a similar revenue number in several years? Are you basically structurally improving the operational efficiency and cost delivery that should get us to structurally better returns from the peak years we saw during COVID? Thanks.
Do you want me to start with it? Yeah. Regarding U.K. and Poland questions, U.K., we have a great B2B business and we are a niche player on last-mile delivery e-commerce. We are growing our cross-border, deferred cross-border also very nicely. Our investment phase, I would say that most of the investment phase has been completed there.
We have some delivery depots that we need to upgrade, but in general, the significant investment has already or is behind us. We will continue playing in that niche, high-quality next-day delivery segment that we are very good at. In Poland, we have also a full range of services where we are predominantly investing in the out-of-home locker network because there is demand in the market for another player that will have the capillarity that is required to satisfy the customer needs. At the same time, we have very strong positions for B2B, which is existing. We have 25% market share on B2B domestic and also similar or more share for cross-border. We will continue in Poland also with our current strategy plus the out-of-home network investment for lockers.
Yeah, and then on the ROIC part to Pablo's numbers, yeah, I pointed it out because I think that is a nice first example of how we are now having a dialogue with the divisions where we also really factor on capital efficiency and how much CapEx do you really need in an even more stringent way than before. We came to the consensual agreement that EUR 300 million-EUR 400 million is actually good enough. That will, of course, then also help us on improving ROIC for e-com. In terms of general ROIC aspiration, it's a bit for us like with free cash flow where in the beginning we said, yes, we want it to grow, but we did not give a specific target. I think for today, the statement is that yes, we also want to see ROIC now moving forward in the second half of the decade.
I think we're in the terms of majority level, not at a point where we will say, okay, the target number is X for 2030.
Okay, I think that's pretty much bringing us to the end of the allotted time. I mentioned how much I love to stick to timetables. Those in the room still have now a chance to grab a bite and have a further chat. Thank you very much for your time coming here. Thank you very much for your time and effort to bring the presentation. Thanks to you out there, to the whole team putting this together. Last but not least, to Bank of America for providing the space here for us. Thank you very much. I think that would leave the final words to Tobias.
Not much more to be said. I hope you found it informative.
I hope we were able to address your questions. Maybe we should have allotted a little bit more time to questions still, but we will see each other in one or the other format, I guess, over the coming quarters. You know how to find us elsewise. Thank you very much for your attention today, for your interest in our company. Again, I hope you found it helpful. Thank you.
Thank you.