Wow. A warm welcome from my side to our DHL Express Management Update. My name is Martin Ziegenbalg. I'm heading the IR effort. I'm greeting our guests here live from the rooftop floor at the headquarters, but also, the many following us on this live webcast. The guests being here physically today will have the advantage of being able to follow us after this on the nightly hub visit here at the Cologne Airport. So that's your privilege here. This is not the first divisional update that we're doing this year. As you know, we started before summer and hosted a series of divisional management updates, which we started with the supply chain management and also with the site visit.
We then had the Post & Parcel Germany management introducing their strategy and their way forward and an update on the current situation, and no surprise, officially, also our global forwarding divisions had an opportunity to give a management update. Here today, we are sort of progressing with that journey. The express management team around John Pearson, the divisional CEO, is here today to take you through what was and what is and what will be the business for you in the market environment. We will have opportunity after the presentations that we have prepared for Q&A officially here on the floor. For the participants out there on the web, you'll find probably somewhere here below the window, there is a send a question window. You type your question in there, and we will pick it up here.
Before we start with your management update, John, just to put things a little bit into perspective, and I know you here are all hardcore industry experts, but just to avoid any confusion, what are we talking about today? If you imagine the world of global cross-border transport, and you plot pricing going up here and volume going up this way, then the vast majority, and we have been hearing about ocean freight and air freight from Tim's team, is what you would find here. The business model that this express business is dealing with is the very top end of that pyramid, if you like. It's a time-definite international product, as we call it. Just to give you an idea, the forwarding guys, even in air freight, they think in tons, you guys think in kilos.
Very precious and valuable and profitable kilos, that is. Just to set that scene, and with that, John, please, over to you.
Thank you, Martin. Well, hello, everyone. Good to see you all again. Action-packed day in the sense we have a dinner on the terrace. That's nice. We have a hub tour, which gets you into the weeds of our business, and quite honestly and authentically put some color to a lot of things Travis will say, particularly, and some of the things Fazlin and Michiel will say. We have the meat in the sandwich, which is what we're gonna talk you through now. I'm John Pearson. I replaced Ken Allen. If anyone could replace Ken Allen, I worked with him for 36 years, and I took over the division on January 1, 2019. I think I've talked to some of you several times.
The first slide, you know, is pretty much always set aside for a safety moment in our business nowadays. The top half will be capably handled by Christoph Sprenger, who is trained in CPR. The defibrillator, which we're unlikely to need, but it's good to know where it is on the 39th floor, and the bottom half will be capably handled by Fazlin Sopandi, who is here, who can also manage those things. This slide is pretty much the first slide of any slide in any meeting across the network on the basis that, as my kids tell me, danger doesn't take a day off, or as we say a little bit more formally in Express, you can't be a Great Place to Work unless you're a safe place to work.
Safety is our ultimate KPI, to send more people home at the end of their day shift or their night shift than we did the day before, the week before that or the year before that. While Travis would ordinarily talk to that in his presentation, every presentation Travis and the network ops group across our network make in any day of the year has a big safety element to it. Looking at the whole, the industry is healthy. Our credentials within that industry are strong and our leadership team is very focused on driving the profitable core. I think the backdrop to the whole story you see there is very strong. We are the number one ranked Great Place to Work business globally.
We received that a year ago or so after a five-year, very purposeful journey of going from eight to six to four to two and two to one. Just today, Alberto Nobis is in Venice picking up the first place award for Europe. You can put that with a market leadership, which we'll talk about, and the fact that we have the broadest international network of operations. In fact, we are the most international company on the planet. That's very important to us. It's also important that the DHL people in those countries wearing their DHL uniform are company employees rather than agents who have less brand awareness and less focus on quality. So the number of agent operations in our network is relatively small. You can imagine there are some small territories, but the number of those agents is still quite low.
Now, the amalgamation of all that, you put that all together, and it's effectively what's driven our success over the last, well, over the last decades, really. I think DHL Express really came to start delivering on its promise in 2009 and 2010. I'd like to say over the last decade, and I would say it definitely allowed us to take more than our fair share of opportunities during the pandemic, the amalgamation of those strengths. Whilst those of you who have been following us for a long time would know that, Express typically grows faster than GDP, the years where there have been years where we've had to flex down our network, and I think you'll hear the phrase again, maybe, 'cause I can't find a better one.
We've got a demonstrated competence and capability in flexing down our network, be it our air network, our road line network, our PUD or any other aspects, quite frankly, of our network globally. We've had to do that on a number of occasions. Some of the things we talk to will evidence the authenticity of that remark. Now, from a group perspective, three bottom lines is still our map and our compass. Fazlin, after myself, who's our head of HR, and I brought her in to replace Regine. She was previously looking after customer service, and there's no one that has more people other than Travis in customer service. They're very familiar with the front line and what our front line need. Fazlin will talk to our people enablement.
Michiel will follow in terms of talking about, well, specifically relating to the pandemic period in many cases, but how we grow our profitable top line. Travis will talk about how we've been optimizing and flexing our network, but to produce highest levels of transit time and service quality during the pandemic. That manifestation in Express of the three bottom lines is what you see here. A people-led service profit chain, so motivated employees driving service quality, creating customer loyalty and delivering a profitable network. The whole philosophy of our strategy is that it's simple, easy to remember and understood by all. If we travel to Australia or Chile, we might well say four pillars, three letters and a passport. Do you know what we're talking about?
Honestly, if 70% of our division know that slide, they know the beats of the drum that we're walking to and we're marching to. That's quite frankly all they need to know. Those of you that were in Leipzig or London in 2013 may remember we gave a big exposé to CIS. The passport is here. It's one of the originals. Rick Jackson and ourselves took you through a CIS module. That program is alive and well and still as important as it was then, particularly focusing on the supervisory level. The supervisors are the most important people in our company. I say that with all good intent to everyone else in it, but the supervisors are people that manage people that don't manage people.
Supervisors manage our front line, and supervisors manage people that touch our customers every day. The better the supervisory level and strata in our company we have makes me sleep at night 'cause it means that 70,000 of our 110,000 employees have a good boss and know what we're doing as a company. It'll be a few days until maybe October the twelfth. I think we hear whether we have retained the number one spot. There isn't another transport company in the top 10, Great Place to Work, by the way. For the last 7 years, there haven't been one, and we know whether we'll have retained the number one top spot on October the twelfth.
I do want to just show you how we message out to our people this award that is won by all, for all. This is not a senior leadership high-fiving exercise. This is everyone winning the number one place, Great Place to Work globally. This video illustrates a little bit of that to you. Can we play the video? Hello, my name is Michael C. Bush, and I'm the global CEO of Great Place to Work. Now, the moment you've been waiting for, coming in at the number one spot is DHL Express. We consciously made a decision many years ago to put people at the heart and the center of everything we do and at the center of our business strategy. We're incredibly proud and incredibly humbled by this award, and our focus will not change.
We remain wholeheartedly committed to being a great place to work, not for a few, not for many, but for all of our people. This is the leadership team that, you know, manifests and is accountable for role-modeling everything we do with our people. Our people got us through the financial crisis in 2008-9. Our people got us through the ash cloud crisis in Iceland, which was actually a European 30-day no planes flying crisis. It was quite significant. Our people have got us through the biggest thing that's happened in 102 years. They are actually slightly different to Ken Allen, who said the customer was at the center of everything we do. Well, for me, the people is the center of everything we do, and the customer is the next concentric circle, if you will.
I think it's working, and some of the things we talk about now will evidence that. This was an interesting MI, market intelligence, market share study. We do them every few years, probably every three or four years. It's interesting in the sense that it has 3 years of pre-pandemic time and 2 years of the pandemic itself. If you can read the slide there or you saw the pre-read, we took 3 percentage points of market share during that period. Some of the regional increases, Europe, 6%, were much higher than that. Within those numbers, we've secured more than 50% market share in two legs of the three-legged stool that is the mega regions of Asia, Pacific, Europe and the Americas.
Behind that slide, you would see evidence that we've consolidated and strengthened our market position in all of the six continents, Oceania, South America included, that you can actually send a shipment from. It was sort of hotly anticipated in many senses of the word, because it had that pandemic period and pre-pandemic period in it. I think we're very happy that the numbers that we've seen there. If you might say to me in the Q&A, "Well, how did you really achieve that?" I think there are two overarching things. Well, four specific things. The B2C. This first in best-dressed approach we had to B2C. On a number of occasions, either Michiel or myself have talked to you about B2C under the auspices of Power Up Your Potential program.
We got into that in 2015, and we definitely have a very strong commercial advantage in terms of how we go to market on B2C and how we're going to market on the online B2B element. The B2C element of B2B. Secondly, I'll talk to our heavyweight strategy. In the sense you might go, "What's that?" Well, if some of you remember that we shed our network of some uglies and some outsized shipments and badly packed shipments in 2018. We called it P300 at the time. That allowed us to sort of reinitiate nicely containerized stackable pallets and crates and things that were in the heavier category. Quite frankly, the timing of that couldn't have been better. We have our B2C, we have a heavyweight strategy.
We have the fact, you know, wouldn't wish a cyber attack on anyone. We have the fact that the situation in Europe allowed us to perhaps, and whilst the integration was going on, maybe even better said, take share from FedEx and TNT. Lastly, there's two more sort of qualitative or transcending aspects of it all which are absolutely driving the number. One is high levels of quality and customer retention, quality driving retention, and an organization that was singularly focused on driving TDI, not TDD, although it's a portion of our revenue, not DDI globally, and getting distracted with any other aspects. Our competitors did indeed have some distractions. I think three percentage points of market share overall. There were some fascinating reveals in various countries where we had taken much more than that.
I think it is on the back and a nod to the focus strategy now of people driving quality, which drives growth. In terms of quality, I'll just bring you back to a slide you might have seen before, because this is the fabric of our organization. This is not something we do once every 10 years and show to a few people. These are the mechanisms by which we run our business. This is the customer interaction study, set aside the market intelligence study. When we first ran this in 2009, it's been run 6 times in 13 years. It's run across 54 markets. There were 30% of the possible logos, if you will, were DHL logos. That was the beginning of the focus strategy. It was the beginning of customer centricity at a higher level.
We're pretty pleased now that it's got there. As I look at that slide, I think, you know, prices and conditions, I'm not necessarily wanting to be down there at the bottom of the page. I think the situation in Americas is quite fair. As we moved into an international organization only, in and out, we've absolutely taken our position as a credible and even first choice express company in the US against two other great companies, FedEx and UPS. That's our customer interaction study. That sits alongside the sort of broader customer centricity in the division. You know, we've been working hard over the last 10-15 years on driving customer centricity, creating an insanely customer-centric mentality.
If I'm honest, whilst it was very successful, it was a try harder, run faster type focus. It was getting the energy of 110,000 highly motivated, engaged employees to do the right thing by customer. You can see the different stages of the journey. As we get to the stage we are now, as a team, we have come to realize that switching that up to a full-blown formal CX program that sits over basically the entire network is what we would need to move into. I've never used the word CX in front of you in any presentation. I've used ICC.
As we think about how customer experience really needs to play across all the episodes, the nine or 10 episodes of our journey, and all the moments of truth below that, we're deciding to invest heavily in quality. This may not be the slide that you're most interested in. It was suggested to me that it wouldn't be. If you think about growing the business and retaining the business and driving yield through the business, this is absolutely the slide that I'd want anyone to remember. In that sense, I'm just gonna ask Christoph to stand up just for 2 minutes. Christoph is leading the CX program across the network, which is just in one country today, but I'd just like you to share a little bit how you see the rollout of CX.
Thank you, John. I'm not looking after your safety today. I lead those programs for DHL Express, and I'm happy to share that with you, what we are doing there and how we are moving to the next level of customer focus. You saw the results before the logo slides, the MI slides. This is a result of a lot of those programs. The truth is also programs are old school here and there, manually driven. How we are getting to the next level of customer focus is through digitalization. It's about professionalizing, automating the good things that are happening and also benefiting from new capabilities that digitalization has to offer for us. Before we go digital, we needed to take a step back and we looked at from the outside in.
We looked at touch points, interactions, but a lot of it was internally driven. We identified our main customer journeys and the moments of truth. For the first time, a true outside-in perspective on the company. To fully understand how customers experience us. It was the prerequisite to capitalize on the digitalization. On the digitalization, how do we do that? We converge a lot of those elements you see on the left-hand side. We looked at the market and we picked Medallia, one of the top two leaders in this customer experience management space. We went with them. We have started a pilot in Denmark, which is going on for four months now, and it's great what we see.
The benefits we already see after four months is we get more customer feedback, not only from customers but signals as well. Digitalization helps us there. We get it faster, we get it better, and in a much more automated way. We knock off manual work, copying, pasting stuff together. It's all in one system, now integrated and translated. The blueprint we have in Denmark is the global blueprint. The next step we are looking at is to expand it into two other markets, Chile and Singapore, later this year, so that we cover the main regions, Asia, Europe, and Americas, and test for the global deployment. Global deployment is planned to start next year, and by the middle of next year, we'll have our top 50 countries live benefiting from that.
Beyond the initial wins I mentioned, the AI part, the customer sentiment, the text analytics, it's also starting to show. Of course, it needs to build, but this is really the wow factor of us. While our focus today is on fixing customer issues that we identify, the opportunity is in fixing the bigger root causes. There, Medallia, with the tool and the processes we established before and we automate now, we will see much more benefits because it shows us much faster where the opportunities are, where customer issues are, or where customer experience issues are, and help us to guide on driving that quality up so that we get more yellow logos going forward. Pretty excited about that.
That's exactly right. More yellow logos is what it's about. Thank you, Christoph. Now I move from people, growth and quality to, I suppose, the business and the business outlook. If I characterize the sort of period of time we've all been locked away, over the period of the last two and a half years, we've moved as an organization from EUR 2 billion to EUR 4 billion. That's very much on the back of revenue growth, which Michiel will talk to and I'll talk to a bit later. I won't break out, split out that revenue growth, but strong revenue growth. Pricing actions, pricing levers, the utilization of an ever more sophisticated pricing toolkit, which I also shared personally in Leipzig in 2013.
Strong asset utilization throughout and high levels of efficiency. It may have varied quarter by quarter, but I want you to think about high utilization, high levels of efficiency generally, and having the aviation assets in the right place at the right time to enable the growth that was coming on with or at the right price. That's what drove those numbers. During that time, as you can see there, we delivered high levels of cash flow and ROCE and going forward, and we can talk about it again maybe in the Q&A, we would expect that to be in the mid-20s%. That's looking back a little bit at how the pandemic played through, and I'll talk a little bit about the commercial side of that, I suppose.
The pandemic was defined, as most of you know, but it's good to remind ourselves if we get into the twilight of it, strong structural B2C growth. Three years in three months was the catchphrase of that period of time. Almost all of those new merchants that were nascent in their business setup at those times are now still with us. Just about every single one is still with us and shipping with us, but at a lower level than during the pandemic. Their growth was literally zero to hero during that time, and many of them were new merchants. That was coupled with a strong B2B V-shaped recovery that I called almost the square root sign in the sense that the exit was higher than the entry.
B2B was this, you know, sort of workhorse diesel-like engine that was the life support machine, quite honestly, to fractured and fragile global supply chains during that time. That's exactly what they were. We weren't the last chance saloon. That means something slightly different, but we were the last level of optionality for many manufacturing and industrials and global MNCs during that period of time. You put all that together in a pot and, you know, that was the fact that, you know, even the stodgiest parts of our geographical portfolio were growing at 10% or 15% almost during the entire period of time. As I put up the second animation there, I would summarize it more maybe that the outlook is to return to, you know, pre-COVID shipping levels.
As I say that, I think about, you know, why and how, and well, one of it is on the backdrop of a very resilient global trade platform. Not global trade outlook, global trade platform. We work extensively with NYU on the Global Connectedness Index, the Global Trade Barometer. Next week in Brussels, I'm releasing the Global Trade Atlas, and everything amongst those 3.5 million data points talks to trade and export being stronger at the twilight of the pandemic than before, and that is expected to maintain going forward. When I say a strong and resilient global trade platform, that's what I mean. Then within that, you need to rethink about our strong market share, our network connectivity, our network coverage, and an extremely strong, favorable commercial offering on B2C.
That's how I see as we exit from where we are now. A little bit what happens if to stay with the aviation theme, it becomes a little bit more turbulent. I think on the top half, you see. In the 37 years I've been in Express, we've managed through chronic and acute downturns countless times. Some of them shorter 3 or 4 months, and some of them enduring, given that DHL Express never really made the right amount of money until 2010. I've seen it, and we've been there, and we've worked through the things that you see on the top. Just to put a bit of color to the first one, it really talks to our geographical footprint, all things to all people.
All channels, small, medium, large, multinational, all industries right across, and we consider B2C a vertical, all regions, all countries. That geographical footprint was, in some cases, why we grew a bit slower than our competitors during the pandemic, 'cause we might be in some markets where the growth was a little bit slower. Nevertheless, it's a huge advantage in these sort of situations. Right here, right now, there's a number of large economies that are growing at double-digit and even in terms of shipments over the last few months. As trade finds its way and settles and finds trading partners somewhere else other than where they've been, that's how we benefit from that. Cost and CapEx flexibility, we'll talk much more about that.
It goes without saying what it is we're trying to message we're trying to send there and the network flexibility that is both on the ground and in the air that Michiel and Travis will talk to. Again, levers we pulled, levers we're familiar with, and competence we have. These drive the behavior of the P&L as we move forward. Then I suppose we talk about these as additional levers. You know, in terms of inflation, which is something obviously that's gonna come up in Q&A, in terms of fuel price escalation, in terms of catastrophic or dramatic supply chain events. That's what I'm talking to on the bottom half of that page.
Joe and I and a couple of others have just spent the last two days talking individually with our 50 top countries about the GPI process in its seventeenth year now on January one, and we'll publish our GPI on September the twenty-third. Our headline rate last year was 5.9%. You can expect it to be higher than 5.9%. Our process of putting that GPI in is now absolutely underway with a delivery to our customers. Why do we do it now? We do it now because people are planning their next year's budget cycles, and we make sure we're explaining everything to them about that process. As we go here, I thought about a couple of different titles, if I'm honest. What doesn't happen when air freight normalizes.
I won't go there so much because it could prove to be wrong, but I don't think so. While air freight is normalizing, so what is happening? In terms of this air freight that is normalizing and how that impacts our top line and our financial performance, I'd like to leave you with four statements that will be talked about by the guys as we go through. Then by the end of Q&A, I think you'll have pressure tested them for authenticity, likelihood, reasonableness, and fact base. The first is that sort of serendipity of the whole thing, if there is any, silver lining to the cloud of Ukraine and Russia is that I'll just say it in these words, the optionality and the flex of our aviation assets are more than they've ever been before.
You would have heard us talk about a virtual airline. Well, that virtual airline was 3 or 4 or 5 partners for a while. It was 5 or 6 or 7 for a while. It's sort of 10 or 15 now. Some of them aren't as big as some others, but the virtual airline that Travis runs is more virtual than ever before. Our relationship with partners, the things that some of our partners would do with us. As time has gone by, we've been adding to our own owned aviation assets. Travis will talk to it, but you can imagine what's happening with air freight now, air freight rates now.
You can imagine what's happening to commercial air, CAL spend now and how those rates are coming down and how every single month we're pulling this lever already in the results that you're seeing in our quarterly results thus far, and you'll see them again in a few weeks or months' time. The weight profile remains relatively strong for two reasons. One is that reliability as supply chains reset are extremely important. Changing your supply chains is actually quite complicated anyway. The most important reason, and Michiel will talk to us, is that while we spent the last two decades trying to encourage heavier weight shipments onto our network from forwarders, explaining how we are faster and how we are better value for money and how we can bring more to their supply chain efficiency by giving heavier weights for express.
Well, those shipments suddenly fell into our bucket, and most customers have said, "Well, we're gonna leave them there, or we're gonna leave half of them there." They might have given us up to 100 kilos, and now they'll just give us up to 50. But that is a significant event in our commercial plan because these are people that we are ordinarily trying to bring on board. The third is that there is, and you might not think this, but there is a positive yield dynamic still in place. As quality and service and supply chain reliability and customers' customer satisfaction is key, there is a positive yield dynamic, and we're in a position given our leadership and our pricing power, to make sure that we continue to get benefit from that. Structural B2C.
I talked about all those new merchants. The fact that our largest merchants are now positive again. We've got some very large B2C merchants, right through to people that are selling sandals or shoes from a garage. We're in a very good position there. They're one in two of our shipments. As soon as some things change or weather changes a little bit, those people will be shipping heavily. As I say, over a period of time, maybe the last two months or three months maximum, we've already been seeing evidence of these four things. I think we'll talk more about it, but that's how we think about the topic of what happens as air freight normalizes or what won't happen as air freight normalizes. Purpose. I think wearing my group hat, I have to mention connecting people and improving lives.
I'm the sponsor for global trade and the Global Connectedness Index, which is inextricably linked to the left-hand side of this chart, which is what we do. We move shipments. We improve the lives of people that work on the front line because trade drives up the prosperity in countries. We improve lives because we have a life science healthcare division. We improve lives because we moved all the vaccines we moved. That's what we do, and that's what our employees that know they work for a Great Place to Work, feel and understand and see as incredibly important. I believe that that needs amplification because it doesn't float everyone's boat. The right-hand side are our programs of Go Green, Go Teach, Go Help, and Go Trade, and you can imagine what those four things are.
DHL's Got Heart, which is our own internal mechanism to help people all over the world live a better life. Then you might see on that slide, volunteering and matching and how we help our employees that want to do some good out there somewhere tomorrow from a time point of view or a money point of view, match that. I'd just like you to watch the next video, and then we'll close off, and I'll pass over to Fazlin. At DHL Express, our wheel of purpose shows how we do this. The left-hand side shows what we do every single day, building prosperity, moving express shipments through our network of people, planes, vehicles, and facilities, and always striving to be a Great Place to Work for all by listening to our employees and investing in the development of our leaders.
While the right-hand side shows how we can amplify and connect, going above and beyond to make a real difference, such as through our Go programs, which improve the lives of people in the communities in which we operate. We engage in partnerships with many organizations such as SOS Children's Villages and the United Nations. The Go programs and our partnerships offer many opportunities for our people to actively engage and to volunteer. Through matching, we contribute to the volunteering efforts and activities of our colleagues with donations from the company. DHL's Got Heart is our signature program. It rewards the efforts of dedicated volunteers and benefits the lives of thousands of people in all corners of our network. We've seen how our values have played a huge part on the world stage over the past two years, moving PPE and vaccines around the world.
I want to encourage everyone to work together, to connect with each other, to make the world a better place. Each and every one of us needs to say, "Let's go for it." I put that in because I think it's interesting. It's a very important part of the culture of our group, but I put it in for another reason. It's the sum of the parts that make this group great. This is the sum of the parts that make Express what it is, and it's the sum of the parts that drive revenue, drive profitability on the back of people and quality. You can't have an authentic people and quality story, and quality comes from people, unless you have the sum of the parts to demonstrate to them that they're working in the right company.
That, like quality, is very important to me as part of the things that you hear today, 'cause the things don't just all add up like you want unless you're missing nothing. With that, Fazlin.
Thank you. Do you wanna give me the clicker, John? Thank you. Thank you very much, John. Hi, everyone. I am so honored and pleasure to be here with you. As John mentioned, 18 years in frontline customer service and now heading our human resource department in Express. I am supported with a great HR team who are custodian of our people enablement. Today I'd like to talk to you about three of the programs that we have that amplifies our people-focused journey in terms of driving engagement and development. Certified International Specialist, John alluded to, and some of you would remember that. Great Place to Work, how we got there, what is all about. It's important for us to look at our employee journey and continue to transform and be better.
First, I've been told that this is an investor capital market, so therefore it's important for me to to demonstrate that when we look at the impact engaged employees do to our bottom line, and you can actually see the story there, it's important that we look at our employee opinion survey results and see how we stack it up. It is our people belief and our employee opinion survey is our annual survey, which is anonymous, which is by our people. The results are telling us, the people are telling us that they feel appreciated, valued, and belong, and that's where the index is going up. It strongly ties to what John mentioned earlier. Our focus strategy that starts with people first is the motivated people that drive great service quality, keeping our customers loyal, and therefore delivering a profitable network.
Just like me, I started off in customer service and going through the programs and the development. I must say, we have a passport that I handle with pride, and I bring it with me, and I think my board members bring it as well together. We carry it with us. When we travel around the world, as we go around our frontliners, we are like you. We go through this program to support the development journey that we are in. Why is it important? Talking a little bit about CIS. We started off in 2010. It's delivered by our senior leaders like ourselves in this room, as well as our employees. It is to accelerate the DHL Express culture as well as the international focus to grow our business internationally.
Well, over 100,000, 110,000 people have gone through this program. Talking a little bit about more about the program, it all starts with our management. Our Certified International Managers that have gone through the program is to role model and bring management leadership in the 21st century that we're in today and bring it to life and inspire and motivate our teams. John alluded to the supervisory program that we have. This is a journey where our supervisors go through, and it is they go through a two-year program that goes through upskilling, skills and knowledge, and at the end of the program, they graduate.
Now, I've spoken to some of the 2,500 graduates that went through it, and I can tell you, it's not only the skills and knowledge that they learn throughout the program, it is the sense of pride when they're able to give forward to their frontliners, to their team, to be able to coach them and develop. Some of you would remember the first day that we graduate is the pride and the joy that we have when we throw off our hats, just like in our CIS, our supervisory program, the joy and pride that we've completed the journey. But not only that, it's the fulfillment that we have within ourselves to know that we're out in the workforce to create a difference and to be that difference and to be that reason that one feels valued, appreciated, and belong.
That's what our supervisors who are out in the front liners with our customer service advisors, our couriers all around the world are doing. We want to make that difference. John mentioned about purpose. That's what purpose is all about. Standing here to be able to do this for our people and sharing our people's story with you is just amazing. You don't know how I feel, the sense of pride to transmit, and I hope that, you know, people who are listening in to us will understand that when you come and join us, you grow with us. Certified International Specialists do just that. From a management, from supervisors to new hires, we give you the appropriate skills, culture to develop yourself. Moving on to Great Place to Work, we're very proud. What is Great Place to Work?
Great Place to Work is an organization that looks at companies and in terms of how they treat their people, in terms of trust, leadership, culture, innovation, and they go out and survey those employees. Employees. They have millions of employees that have been surveyed around the world and across multiple countries and companies. Now, you would see there that the journey we've been. Now we take it seriously because we want to be the best place to work for all. Not for some, but for all of us. It's important that we ramp up and we understand truly, as any new hires or any of you that walk into our organization to express, not only that you will see the logo, Great Place to Work. As you walk in, we'd like you to feel that this is a great place to work.
You're treated well, you know what to do, you know where your workstation is or whatever the case. Our journey has been throughout, and you would see more and more countries, and I'm super proud that this is an award that is won by all of us, for all of us. It is one that we stand very firm. October twelve is the day that I'll be looking forward, and it's not high-fiving, but to say, "Let's continue the journey and create a better workplace for all of us, for our kids, for our next generation." It's here, the future foundation that we leave and lead for. It's also important that we look at, you know, we continuously look at our employee life journey, life cycle. What does that mean?
With our, you know, digitalization world that we all live in today, it's important that we look, transform, and be conscious about the change that we are all going through. In terms of attraction, using technology to make sure that, you know, we recruit people digitally, whether it's a digital platform, social media platform, whether right through to digital interviews. Now, not forgetting, we still do in-person, but this is to make sure that we leverage on all the channels that are available for us. Equally on onboarding, when they come in, what does the new onboarding look like? In those days, when I first started, I had a whole folder, but in today's world, we leverage our app.
Most of us don't leave home without our smartphones, so we need to make sure that we onboard our new generation and equally upskill to make sure that the onboarding journey, the experience, the retention, and the engagement is intact. Now, in reading the papers, I know that the war of talent is out there. For us, it's important that we focus on retention. The people that we have, we treat them well, we train them well, so that if they want to leave us or should they leave us, we need to understand why they're leaving us. Exit interviews are crucial in this process of retention. Why is it that they're wanting to leave us? We understand what those are in the exit interview dialogues and to take the appropriate action, whatever that may be, and to work on that.
Retention is absolutely key for us. One of the things John mentioned is our InSignature celebrations, which we're very proud of. We deliver a great result, we celebrate the success. Success is one which every one of us strive for. We wanna continue to be there. To be there, to have that success celebration, we continue to deliver. Employee of the Year events, cups, these are our celebrations to continue to engage our people, to remain motivated, to continue the drive. What keeps me at work every day is our focus on our people. It's them who actually deliver and support our growth that we have today. I leave you with the three key things that I'd like you to take away from it. People are at the center of everything we do.
Our Certified International Specialist is a boost to make sure that our culture, skills, and knowledge. Equally, Great Place to Work is a great recognition for us to attract, retain our people, and we are proud of it, and continuously looking at the digitized world to make sure that we have that at the top of our mind. With that, thank you very much for listening, and I pass you to .
Thank you very much, Fazlin. Let's talk about sales. Sell Like Never Before. We've heard John obviously talking about the growth and how we got to the point that we were growing faster than the market, but it's important to keep that going and to keep it in a sustainable way going, and the same is for profitability. We very much focus on our yield actions and pricing, and I will elaborate on that. Thirdly, John was alluding to it, the heavier weight focus has delivered great results in the last, I would say two years, very clearly, as a result of the pandemic, but we feel very comfortable that we can keep it going as well. Let's talk about sales.
We sometimes refer to our team like the big yellow sales machine, but when you talk about a sales team, how do you get a well-functioning sales team? There are three elements, very important. First of all, and Fazlin you were saying it starts with people. It actually starts with motivation. People need to be motivated, and especially this is valid for salespeople. Second point is the efficiency driven by sales tools, and in that you have also the discipline, and the discipline predominantly through pricing. The third point is on skills. If you don't have the right skill set as a sales individual, but also as a sales team, you cannot be successful. It's the combination of the three where we have given and are still giving a lot of attention to.
People motivation, I mean, we are completely aligned with everything that Fazlin was presenting. This is really at the core. It starts with that. We have our sales recognition programs, we have our sales campaigns, always giving a lot of energy. I would say a big tick there. In terms of efficiency, the sales tools that we have, and this is what we hear from the industry, but this is also what we hear from people that occasionally come over from the competition to join us. Our sales tools are really first-class, and we are really proud that we develop them mostly ourselves. The pricing revenue quality, I will elaborate on that. It's really at the core on everything that we do. On the skills side, very much focused on it. We have developed a program which is called Sell Like Never Before.
The Sell Like Never Before is basically a one-year training consisting of six modules where our people supported by, let's say, the newest technology, are trying to change their behavior from, let's say, selling from a DHL's perspective to really sell from a buyer's perspective. What does it actually mean? It means that, you know, maybe in the past when we would go to a customer, we would talk about our vans and our beautiful planes and, you know, things that are mainly maybe not so interesting for the customer, maybe for us, but not for our customer. What the customer's interested in is how can we support our customers to develop and to improve and to grow their business. That is in essence what this sales program is all about.
We actually, you know, our colleagues in the sales team wrote a book about it, Selling Will Never Be the Same Again, and we see great enthusiasm with our salespeople because for them it's something new, it's something exciting, and it's delivering clearly results. We have this beautiful, you know, sales machine, but that's the basis. It's not that we then say, "Okay, that's it, and go out and sell." I think the key to our success is a very focused approach. John was talking about, you know, the e-commerce, B2C, B2B, and also the heavier weight focus. Already since years, we train our people to be prepared for every sales conversation in every industry vertical. It's important to speak the language of our customers.
With this very focused approach, with the machine, we are driving the results. When you look at our results, I mean, we are really proud of that. It starts with the motivational part. These are the results of, you know, the employee opinion survey, specifically on engagement. I can tell you, I wish I could take you to any of the countries when we do like sales reviews, when we meet the sales teams, these people are motivated, they are optimistic, positive, they are eager to learn. I mean, it's really exciting to be around them and it's delivering sustainable growth. Yes, it's growing faster than the market. But I think in this context, it's also important to realize that it needs to be profitable. It is very profitable, and you've seen it in our numbers.
I think talking about pricing and pricing discipline, I think one of the main elements here is that we see pricing as an essential function. It is not something that, you know, a salesperson is doing on the side. Pricing is a very crucial function, and we work side by side, sales and pricing. Pricing, you know, they deliver analysis, deliver diligence. They deliver, you know, good advice on what the right price is for that specific customer. That is really helping us. It's actually helping the salespeople in a great way. Yes, we focus on the base shipment price. We talk about GPI. We implement GPI very diligently. We educate our salespeople with the right narrative, you know, why it is important. The fuel surcharge we have, you know, it's floating.
When the fuel price goes up, you know, the index or the surcharge to customers is going up, and also when it's going down. The emergency situation surcharge was a very important element when the cost went above a certain level beyond our control, and we needed the support of our customers to recuperate the additional cost. That's all well-balanced. I would like to make an example on the list that we have on the. You know, John was talking about this toolbox. For example, the tender review board. Every country, but also every region, have a weekly tender review board where all the new opportunities and offers that we make to a customer are discussed in depth.
Not only by the sales guy, but the sales, the pricing guy, the finance, the operations people, just to make sure that we do the right thing. This has been absolutely a crucial element in getting to the right revenue quality. Growth, profitable growth. What are the, I would say, the three main important elements for the next few years for the sales team? Yes, we have our basis, and it's keeping there. Talk about the people motivation, I think, you know, it's also actually in Fazlin's storyline. It's really about the hiring and the retention of people. Yes, we've heard about the great resignation in the U.S., for example.
You can imagine with our engagement numbers, the attrition of salespeople is very low, and it is still very low, but we have to be careful, you know. We know that people are getting more flexible and maybe want to change their lives. That's why we need to double down our efforts on the hiring part and obviously on the retention part. On the efficiency, let's say the tool, sales tools, I would like to say that, one year ago, we actually defined in a very detailed way our sales roadmap forwards. The focuses therein is, digital sales, digital marketing, a digital account opening, everything related to the fact that sometimes customers do not want to deal with a physical sales rep. They just want to do their stuff online. This is what we are catering for.
This is also our next step in the SME business development, and we see that we can still make a good step there. We will implement a new CRM. The activities are actually starting from now. On the skill side, the Sell Like Never Before program, it's great to do the training modules, it's great to do the coaching, but the most important thing is when people are ready with the program, that they start to apply this new behavior. That's you know, something that needs focus and coaching, and that's what we do. Talking about the different trends and expectations. In terms of B2B, you've seen a very solid revenue growth in the last couple of years, but also related very much so to the weight development, which is helping.
Is it sustainable? Yes, very much so. You know, the expectation, I would say what we have already consistently delivered is a growth, you know, slightly above the GDP. You know, I think that's a fair assumption to make. I think the cherry on the cake is the development in B2B e-commerce. It's actually interesting to see that I was watching the numbers of last month. The biggest up-trader in the B2B arena for us is a customer that is actually very active in B2B e-commerce. That's where the growth will come from. This is for us then something on top and very interesting to see. Talking about B2C, the B2C trends and outlook.
John, I think you mentioned three in three months, three years of development. I think it was maybe even more impressive, but you could see in 2020, in a matter of months, then boom, we went to the next level, and we actually stayed at that level. The graph is representing the shipment volumes. So we are there, and we have been able to stay there. Yes, there is a bit of normalization going on, but we are also able to win new business continuously, which is, you know, very important. The other thing that I would like to highlight is in terms of revenue per shipments. You can see also a big increase there. Why is that so? I would say two elements. First of all, again, the pricing discipline. Secondly, we have seen our B2C portfolio of our customers broadening.
First, maybe it was only fashion, but now it's much more broader. Different products, different articles with mostly higher weights, which is driving a higher revenue per shipment, which is obviously interesting for us. Also there, we are very, you know, confident with our position. We have basically all the premium brands, I will talk about that. That's very positive. Talking about the industry mix, I think, DHL Express is very fortunate to have a very good position in most industries. We see growth in all these industries. If you talk about the thing that we mentioned before, the heavier weights profile, also there, you see solid and good growth in all the verticals.
That is for us, you know, creating the big balance, like when something in an industry might not go so well, then there's another industry that could pick it up. You know, the yellow bars is B2B in the different verticals. The red bar is B2C. Yes, you see a bit of a normalization going on in the B2C side. You know, also there in fashion, we're also able to grow in a market that on the B2B, B2C side is a bit under pressure. That's positive. On the other side, engineering, manufacturing, you know, very heavily focused B2B industry, delivering solid growth also there. We are very happy with that picture. Talking about this heavier weight, and I really would like to talk about a bit of history there.
When the pandemic started, lots of customers came to us with a heavier weight profile, existing customers, but also new customers. What we did is like, you know, not assume things. We said, "Why don't we ask the customers why they are coming to us? What are the reasons behind it, and what are their expectations to the future?" Interestingly enough, maybe we could have expected that a bit, the main reason why they came to us is they said, "You know, the freight forwarders now, they are not so reliable. You know, the transit times are very long. We don't know where the freight is. You know, we cannot work like that. And we cannot work like that specifically for the time-critical part." This is why they came to us.
Then we did a survey with more than 350 customers, bigger customers, smaller customers in all the regions. We also asked them, "What is your expectation? What will happen with the business that you brought to us?" Actually, it was very interesting to see that two-thirds of the customers were saying, "We actually expect that this business will remain with you or will even grow further." Yeah, that is very interesting for us. We started a sales program called Gatekeepers, you know, keeping what you have. We educated our sales guys like, you know, this is the conversation that you should have, and talk about our reliability, our transparency, our fixed price rates. Customers like that, especially when the goods are time-sensitive.
Very important program, very confident that we can move this further because this freight forwarding market is just, you know, massive. You've seen the numbers that Martin was showing, and that's why we feel that in this area we're just scratching the surface. There is still so much more that we can win. Yeah, from that angle, we are very, very positive. The sweet spot basically moved from 70 kilos to, let's say, 200-250 kilos. On the B2C e-commerce side, yes, we're dealing with all the leading luxury brands. We have a very good position in that market. But it's also interesting to see that we are now also gaining ground, let's say, in the middle category, maybe brands that you have not—yeah, of course, LVMH and Farfetch, you know.
You probably have not heard of Malaville Toys or like the a doll producer from Africa. There are these exciting companies, you know, growing their business globally and, you know, we're really in touch with that business. It's interesting to see how we win this business. This is what I say, like selling from a buyer's perspective. When we go to an e-commerce company. As I said, we don't talk about DHL. What we do is we analyze the website of our customers, and we do a, what we call a website health check. Probably some of you have seen this before. We ask them the simple questions, you know, do you ship internationally, and can the customer see that? By giving the customer these tips, they can, you know, quickly change their website, implement it, and they can see their business growing.
We have fantastic examples there. We analyze their web traffic, and we would say, "Are you aware that you have a lot of viewers from Argentina?" The customer would say, "No, I don't. I'm not aware." Maybe you should look into that because every view is potentially a sale. This is how we support our customers. Can you imagine that if you go through this process and you help the customer and he changes his website and the volumes are booming, what will they do with their shipments? They will come to us. Yeah, that is. We operate as a trusted advisor. This is basically the trick. We do the same with the B2B e-commerce, which is, I would say, a newer area. Very exciting, and this is going to be very big.
Every B2B company will switch somehow, you know, in a certain way. They will move into this area. Yes, it will coexist with their traditional channels, but this is for sure what customers and companies are going to do. We will be there, also there to support our customers, basically in the same way, doing this simple and effective, you know, website health checks, and we really support our customers in that. You know, it's exciting. The salespeople, they absolutely love it because, you know, they can make a difference. Quite often these conversations with customers, they start with one person, and they end up with all the, let's say, management team in the room. It's honestly working like that, yeah, very positive for us.
In summary, we are very confident about our growth, and our sales toolbox and our pricing toolbox to keep it profitable at the right price. The heavier shipments is giving us an excellent opportunity to keep the growth even further growing. With that, I would like to thank you, and let's see how we manage it from an operational point of view. Travis.
Thank you, Michiel. All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you. My name is Travis Cobb, and I'm responsible for operations and aviation globally for the DHL Express network. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to wherever you are virtually dialing in today. You heard John talk about, you know, a few key areas in his introductory remarks. You know, what I really wanna do is expand on those and talk specifically about this great network that we've got, the flexibility, which has been extremely important over the last couple of years and will remain important as we navigate on a post-pandemic environment that we have in that network. I also wanna touch on some of our sustainability way forward.
You've heard our corporate objectives, but I'll put a little more meat into the actions that are taking place there. Let's start off with our fantastic network. You saw that shipment growth that Michiel presented just a few minutes ago. We have to have a huge fantastic global platform in order to deliver that great service quality. We have just that. I'm gonna show that at a macro level here in the number of airports that we service, 500. I'll talk specifically about different elements of that. We have a big dedicated network, you know, yellow airplanes flying around the world. We supplement that with commercial air, over 300 partners with 2,300 flights a day.
In some markets, we leverage the capability from a ground line haul perspective. We put all of that together, and you've heard reference to our big virtual airline, big virtual network, and each of those make up a key element of it. Martin, in his introductory comment, talked about we are the time definite international division of Deutsche Post DHL. What does that really mean? I think this is a really good example of what that means. You know, here's a shipment that's being picked up in Vietnam. You know, we pick it up with a courier van from your doorstep or from your book of business. We take it back to our operations. We process that shipment.
We move it to our outbound gateway in Vietnam, and then we fly it intra-regionally over to Hong Kong into one of our big, global hubs, process that shipment again. In this case, the shipment's ultimately going up to Europe. We fly it on one of our brand-new triple sevens up to Leipzig or one of our other regional hubs in Europe. We process that shipment again, move it down to Italy, clear it through the inbound process in Rome, get it over to one of our nearby service centers, and ultimately take it out for delivery to the consignee. We do that exact process, you know, more than 1.2 million times a day. To do that 1.2 million times a day, you need a pretty robust network with unparalleled geographical coverage.
That's what we have. The dedicated network that you see represented here is pretty impressive. 320 aircraft, and we break that down on the aircraft, the big ones that are flying from an intercontinental perspective, more than 65 of those. They connect into some very strong intra-regional networks in order to facilitate that door-to-door shipment chain. Now, what's happened over the last three years has been pretty interesting on that dedicated network. If you look at where we were pre-pandemic, that network operated about 215 aircraft. Fast-forward to today, we've added over 100 dedicated aircraft to that network in order to support that fantastic shipment growth that Michiel shared just a few minutes ago.
One of the key principles that we've been able to maintain, and this is extremely important as we navigate our way forward, is the same percentage of flexibility that we had in that dedicated network pre-pandemic we maintain today and will maintain in the future. That is a key principle of our dedicated network. We know that there will be this period of normalization that's taking place right now. We know that over the next couple of years, people will return to traveling and the commercial air capacity will come back to normal, and we will evolve our network, and we need to have the flexibility to evolve our network as that takes place from a cost perspective. What you see represented in those pie charts there are the the durations that we have our aircraft contracted for.
You see we've got a pretty healthy mix of aircraft contracts that are less than one year, which will allow us to navigate effectively as that commercial air capacity comes back online. I just wanna talk about next that commercial capacity. That is also a key element of our big virtual airline and network. You know, to service 220 countries with those 1.2 million shipments a day, we have to have connectivity to every single part of the world. We do that not only with our dedicated network, but we do that with our commercial air partnerships. Commercial air has two different elements to it. Many of you flew here today on a commercial airline, and we utilize the belly of those aircraft to move shipments around the world.
We also have partnerships with many freight airlines, and we buy a portion of an aircraft or a dedicated block space on those aircraft, and we classify that as commercial air as well. We also maintain a healthy amount of flexibility in that commercial air, so that as these origin and destination volume mixes change, as customers evaluate their supply chains, we're nimble enough to adjust the capacity up or adjust the capacity down on a lane-by-lane basis or on a country-by-country basis as we need to. Now, what's happened through the pandemic, and I think the title of this slide is really the right title, Navigating the Pandemic. In March 2020, all of those commercial airline passengers, you know, effectively came onto the ground.
We had to scale up our dedicated network in order to deal with that tremendous shipment growth that we experienced. I'll just give you one illustrative example that demonstrates what we did before the pandemic, what we're doing through the pandemic and today, and eventually how we'll make the transition back over the next one to two years to an optimized air network. Let's use the UK to Australia in this example. That is a big e-commerce link for us. Before the pandemic, we were not required to fly a lot of our own dedicated aircraft. The reason why we weren't required to do that was because of the abundance of commercial air and the commercial flights that were going down to Australia. Australia is a big inbound market globally.
What we would do before is we would buy belly pack capacity on. There was about 50 commercial airlines a day that flew into various ports into Australia, and we were able to move the vast majority of our shipments from the UK down to Australia in the bellies of those aircraft. That changed March 2020. We had to supplement that, and you look in the current column, we had to supplement that with more dedicated aircraft, which is exactly what we did, and that was part of that scale-up of the 215 going to 320. Now, that dedicated aircraft cost us more money than what that prior solution was on the bellies of those aircraft.
You heard John and you heard Michiel talk about the emergency surcharge that we had to put in to cover that additional aviation cost that we're incurring. That's a great example of that cost that's taking place and the reason why we put in that surcharge to cover that additional cost. What we know is as the world returns to normal in a post-pandemic environment, that commercial air capacity will return. When it returns is debatable. If you look at the IATA forecast, it's 2024. As it does and when it does, we will transition our network back to a more cost-optimized environment, and we'll start utilizing the bellies of this commercial aircraft more effectively and capable than what we do today. That will bring our aviation costs down. That's really a key important fact to understand.
As we bring that cost down, we will remove and reduce that emergency surcharge. That emergency surcharge is not part of our sustainable EBIT level going forward. You know, we use that as a cost offset to that aviation cost through the pandemic period. The other element that I wanna emphasize here is on that dedicated network, those aircraft are sized specifically for our time-definite international volumes. 1.2 million shipments, all the O&D pairs that 320 countries could possibly create, is what we size that dedicated aircraft for. But we also maximize the utilization of those aircraft, and that was one of the key elements that John mentioned in his opening. We have a filler product, called Air Capacity Sales, ACS. It is the general cargo product.
We use that as a supplement and as a cost offset in our aviation network. One of the key elements also to think about is that has nothing to do with our additional flying level from an EBIT perspective. If you look at the percentage of revenue that that product represents, today, it is no different than what it was on a pre-pandemic level, 6%-7%. As we take down that dedicated capacity and flex it down and transition to a lower cost CPK on commercial airlines, you know, this does not have an impact on our level of profitability. Of course, you know, in some geographical areas, particularly over the weekends, we're able to leverage ground line haul transit time capability that has a cheaper cost basis to it.
You see that predominantly across Europe and sections of the Americas, and we do just that. I didn't bring an example in here, but again, we maintain that same level of flexibility with our partnerships and with our ground line haul providers to flex up or down as we need from a capacity standpoint. When you put all that together, you know, it really does, you know, talk about how we, you know, think about our virtual global airline. You know, it certainly has an unparalleled geographical coverage. But I think importantly, it also is just a great asset for us to flex up or flex down in terms of what actually happens from a volume standpoint.
It'll also give us the capability to deal with whatever we need to deal with, quite frankly, from a customer requirement standpoint. That's the network piece. Now you can't fly airplanes around the world, or you can't recover commercial airline movements around the world if you don't have a great infrastructure to process those shipments. We have fantastic hubs and gateways all across the world. This is the backbone of that infrastructure network. We have three global hubs in Hong Kong, in Cincinnati, and our largest one in Leipzig here in Germany. They're supported with 19 regional hubs around the world, where a lot of those dedicated aircraft are transiting on a daily basis.
We do continue to invest not only in those global and regional hubs, but also in our country infrastructure to keep up with that tremendous shipment growth that we saw earlier. One other point that I wanna talk about, and you'll hear John in his wrap up talk about CapEx and what is our CapEx outlook over the next three years. You know, we also have flexibility in our CapEx to deal with not only on the aircraft assets, but on the ground, to either accelerate the investments that we need on the ground if the shipments are growing at a faster pace or to slow those investments down, based on how the trading activity is actually taking place.
A few of those you see there noted in green are just some of the facilities that are coming online next. Atlanta, later this year over in the United States. Quarter one, we'll open up our new Copenhagen facility. Our Bahrain facility, we were there a few months ago. That has really been a tremendous asset for us through this pandemic period as an intermediate point between Asia and Europe. Over in Hong Kong, we're putting a pretty good size extension onto our big global hub there to give us that additional capability in the future. That's some highlights from our ground network. Now I'll transition to the last topic that I've got here today, and that's one on our sustainability journey.
The Deutsche Post DHL is committed to zero net carbon emissions by 2050, and we've also announced an intermediate step along the way by 2030, where we intend to reduce our carbon emissions by 30%. This was our 2021 footprint, the left-hand bar chart being the group in total. I'll talk specifically about the right-hand side, which is the express portion of that, which represents about 45% of the group's total emissions. Obviously, the largest part of that being the aviation network. We've got a very robust decarbonization strategy across each key element, aviation, our pickup and delivery last mile, and then our facilities around the world. A little bit more on each one of those. Our sustainable aviation agenda has three key areas.
Certainly, re-fleeting is a key element of that. As the industry evolves with new modern aircraft, you know, investing in those aircraft, the ones that burn less fuel, will have a positive impact on reducing our carbon emissions. It also matters what type of fuel you put into the aircraft, so we are scaling up significantly on our sustainable aviation fuel, and then out the back of that engine comes less carbon emissions as a result, and I'll show you the details of that next. Certainly how you operate and how our pilots and crews fly those aircraft, you know, also positively contributes to the net carbon reduction. On the fleet outlook, we have made a number of announcements over the last couple of years, and I'll just highlight a couple of those here.
The Boeing 777 announcements that we've made, now 3 of the announcements over the last 6 years or so, is well on track. The Boeing 777-200 is the most fuel-efficient wide-body aircraft manufactured in the world today. We've got a roadmap to bring those in and replace, you know, older Boeing 747s with a much higher fuel burn, again, which will, you know, significantly reduce our carbon footprint. Then I'll go down to the last one, and you'll hear this aircraft called Alice, and we've made a commitment and an investment for 12 of these electric aircraft that I'll expand on in a little bit more detail. We're extremely excited about the Alice aircraft. This aircraft is in partnership with a company called Eviation.
It's been manufactured. Now it will actually take its first test flight next week, September fourteenth, 9 A.M., out on an airport outside of Seattle. What's great about these aircraft is the capability. It fits perfectly within our network. We fly aircraft today carrying 1.2 ton of material that are turboprop aircraft burning jet fuel. Alice will ultimately replace those aircraft and result in a zero net carbon emission on those 12 aircraft that we're gonna replace. That is an example of, you know, where we need to go from an industry standpoint and how committed DHL Express and Deutsche Post DHL is in taking that journey with the industry. You heard me mention sustainable aviation fuel. I'm extremely excited about some of the partnerships and announcements that we've made over the last couple of years.
You see some of our suppliers that agreements have been announced with, Shell, Neste, BP. Those agreements are fantastic because it allows us to each year take a larger scale of sustainable aviation fuel with committed volumes. We've said we wanted to introduce 30% sustainable aviation fuel by 2030 as one of the key levers on reducing our carbon emissions, and we've got a trajectory and a roadmap that enables that and delivers that. You see it stepping up in the back half of this decade, and that's in line with the forecasted supply of sustainable aviation fuel increasing in that period of time. You know, lastly, we've launched a few years ago now, a fuel optimization program.
As I said, you know, how you fly those aircraft, no different than how you drive your car, makes a difference on the amount of carbon that's emitted. We've got fantastic training programs for our pilots, for our crews, for our team members that load the aircraft, you know, to really follow these processes that deliver the most optimal flight plan from a fuel burn perspective, which we're seeing a tremendous flow-through on a reduction of fuel burn and reduction of carbon emissions. That's fantastic. Those are the key elements of our aviation plan. Next, we'll transition to our pickup and delivery network. You can see we've got about 35,000 pickup and delivery vehicles around the world, and we've already started to increase our share of electric vehicles in that fleet.
This year will end around 10%, electric vehicles. The great thing about our ground fleet operations is the lifespan of a vehicle is about five years. In our countries, every year, we're replacing 20% of our vehicles just from an end-of-life perspective. As you've seen these car manufacturers, you know, make further investments in manufacturing e-vehicles, we're able to take advantage of that vehicle replacement with new electric vehicles, and that really starts to accelerate our share of electric vehicles toward the back half of this decade. You know, we've committed to be 60% electric by 2030, and we've got a roadmap that delivers actually a little bit more than that from an express perspective. We've got these big buildings.
You're gonna see one tonight in Cologne, for those of you that are here. We've also made a commitment to create carbon neutral facilities, which our Cologne hub is, that we'll talk about tonight. You know, part of these things are as we build a new facility, we build it in a sustainable way. You know, we put solar panels on. We make sure that there's high-speed doors, so you don't have electricity or heating or cooling air escaping from the facility. We source electricity and renewable energy in these facilities, and all of those contribute to a net zero result from our facility perspective. That's the third element of our sustainability agenda. Yeah, wrapping up for me, you know, we have a fantastic network.
It's got an unparalleled geographical coverage, and that really, along with our people that you heard earlier, is the cornerstone of what enables us to deliver that fantastic service quality for our customers. That network remains highly flexible even through the pandemic period. We needed to significantly scale it up as we were growing at 20%-30%. We were able to demonstrate the capability to do that. If we need to scale it down a little bit as these commercial aircraft come back online, we'll be able to do that because of the short duration of those contracts, as I mentioned. Lastly, you know, hopefully, we've given you a little bit more confidence on, you know, the tangible actions under our decarbonization and its sustainability strategy. With that, thank you very much.
Look forward to your questions later on, and I'll turn it over to John for our wrap-up. Thank you.
Thanks, Travis. It's great to have a great team like I've got.
Two more slides. I'll sort of let you digest and look at that a little bit. It's a format that you're very familiar with, but I'll just step through it. Market growth of 4%-5%, as Michiel said, as B2C starts to normalize. I think we've given you a feeling for our different elements of our B2C, the mega merchants, sort of merchants that nascently sat there and suddenly grew, and how all of those are lying there ready to trade again. Our own expectation that we grow at least in line with market, with the right pricing dynamics from our very established pricing competency that we have in place. That drives an EBIT that you see there that is incrementally bigger one year than the next.
You know how we view margin, that FX and fuel plays into that so much that there's a much lower level of predictability in terms of margin. In normal times, pre-pandemic, I would typically say that we continue to grow EBIT and you'll see incremental margin improvement going forward. Our CapEx is rather more predictable and steady. You might say there's a wide range there, but you know, somewhere between 1.5 and 2. You've heard some of the things that Travis has been spending money on and how we built up that aviation asset base to a level that quite frankly none of us could have ever dreamed of. That gave us lift, and lift gives you quality, and quality gives you customer loyalty.
We had more network change requests in the first 1 month of COVID than we would typically have in 2 years put together. That talks a little bit to the point of how I see this, that we have more optionality in CapEx, which is basically what Travis said anyway than we've ever had before. We have more partners and more friendships and more people that will work with us than we've ever had before. You see the CapEx number there, and I think you know the phrase the song remains the same comes to mind when I look at that. I hope that the way we've stepped through the storyline today gives you some a belief that that's what should happen. The song remains the same.
In ceteris paribus, if all things are equal in the bits we can't control, that's what I, as the line officer of this division, expect to happen. I use the phrase very advisedly and purposefully that it's the sum of the parts that make this company great. In a slightly different way, it's the sum of the parts, different parts, that Travis specifically and Michiel, and in Joe's world, it's the sum of those parts that get us through this normalization. They're different parts to what makes us a great company to work for, but they're the sum of the parts and the different switches on the dashboard that we've been used to pulling together for the last decade or so that get us through that period of normalization. That's how I'd like you to see, you know, the outlook.
Just wrapping up, I think, you know, what I would say there is that Ken Allen took this company from good to great, took this division from good to great between 2009 and 2018. The job of I and my leadership team, half of which aren't here today, is to make a great company better. Everything we do is to push something further than we had before, whether it's eyecare, driving safety, whether it's Medallia, driving customer experience, whether it's more diversity or better sustainability, and the people will make this company better every day that goes by. Thank you for your interest in our company and our organization, and I think it is now Q&A.
Time for Q&A.
I'll hand back to the maestro.
Exactly. You can stay right here because we're gonna have all presenters and also Joe, the CFO, coming on stage for the Q&A. That was quite a comprehensive rundown. While you climb up here, reminder to those following on the web who didn't want to distract themselves from the presentations by putting in questions, you can still do so now in that little window. Before we come to the questions from the web, I think we start right here. Alexia, I see you. The red. Use the mic. Thanks.
All right. Thank you very much. It's Alexia Dogani from Barclays. I have three questions, please. Just firstly, how do you measure network quality in terms of kind of the global network? It's interesting to see that 43% of your capacity is fixed. How much do you think you can adjust your capacity downwards but maintain your network quality should kind of things change? Secondly, just the heavyweight Gatekeeper program, this is still a TDI door-to-door service, right? Can you just expand as to the type of industries that are increasing kind of their need for these heavier shipments? Finally, in terms of the SAF investments you're making, is this now part of the sales pitch or is it something that you are being requested by your customers when they look to address their Scope 3 emissions? Thank you.
Okay. Those are great questions. Let me take the heavyweight one. Travis will talk to the first question you asked about the network.
The service.
The service and little bit of B2C within that. I think one of us will tackle the SAF one 'cause that's really interesting. I think on heavyweights, you know, I've been in express commercial for best part of my career, and I was launching heavier weight programs in Asia as long ago as 2002 under the sort of the brand or the nomenclature of, you know, Fast Forward and so on and so forth. The weight, you know, the sweet spot, as Michiel talked to is sort of, you know, shifted up from 70 to 200. We've always been moving that 0 to 1 ton range.
If you walk through our facilities, you'll see it tonight, not in the DDI products, in the TDI product, it's significantly higher than that. Quite frankly, it's across all industries. It's much more centered around oil and gas, engineering and manufacturing, and automotive. The reason why we have it is exactly for the reasons that Michiel said, is that someone's come to us and said, "We need something there a bit quicker." The price point with the forwarders, because we have no add-ons really. Very few add-ons to our price. As I say, quite oftentimes, a good customer will only hear from us once a year at GPI. Never hear from us again until the next GPI.
Price stability, no add-ons actually mean that the transit time value for money offering of an express shipment can be better from anywhere from 50 to 250 or 300 kilos. It's right across all industries. It is genuinely an express move. Other than ACS, we don't have a freight product as such. We have a road line haul, a date definite domestic in set up in Europe only and yeah heavier weights. You know, there are three ways our companies grow: more shipments, more weight, or more price. Right now and during the pandemic, obviously, the weight was a very big driver into the numbers that we delivered.
That was able to be happen because we took so much out of our network in 2018, things that probably didn't deserve to be in our network, either from a pricing point of view or from the ugliness of the shipments. The sort of dynamic played out rather well.
On the second part of the first question that I'll answer second. You know, how do we measure quality in our network? 220 countries and territories around the world, we have a standard transit time that we offer to our customers. It could be one day, could be two days, you know, typically no more than five days anywhere in the world on those combinations. Then we measure our performance on all of those shipments against that standard that we quote to our customers. Our benchmark is 96%. If we say it takes three days to get a shipment from the UK to Australia, in that example that I gave you, then we measure ourselves, do 96% of those shipments obtain that transit time or not? That's the quality piece.
Just to make that even a bit more relevant. That's raw data. That's not adjusted for bad weather on a given airport.
Yeah. Correct.
Anything coming in between.
Yeah. Thanks, John.
Right.
Yeah. The second part of your question was 43% owned aircraft. You know, is that enough, and are we gonna have the flex to scale down that dedicated network when commercial air comes back? What I'll say is, when we do investment cases for new aircraft, and you saw the number that we have coming on, we do those as replacement cases for assets that are reaching end of life or to replace, you know, a third-party aircraft. If we're in a situation like we've been over the last couple of years, where we needed to significantly step up our capacity, we retain those assets that are otherwise nearing end of life or retain that third party, and it gives us the ability to step up our dedicated capacity.
As those next assets come online, if we are able to leverage the commercial air coming back online and need to scale down our dedicated capacity, we'll go ahead and retire the end-of-life assets or replace the third-party capacity in order to do that.
If I could just add on one thing to what Travis said. I think it's important, the term flexing up and flexing down has been used here a lot. I think also, thinking in terms of flexing across, 'cause that's been a big part of what we've been doing. It's really, not just looking at the capacity and the utilization as a whole, but where it is. That's the key thing about the virtual airline, that ability to flex across as well as up and down.
Michiel, perhaps you could.
Yeah.
Give a little summary of how our go-to-market commercial offering is on the SAF product.
Yeah.
Whether customers, 'cause it's a great question, wanting it or we're in the sort of two-way collaboration dialogue stage.
On the sustainable aviation fuel topic, obviously, we see a lot of discussions and fact-finding and discoveries with our customers because companies make statements they want to reduce. They launch their science-based targets. You know, what needs to happen next? Somehow, I would say we are looking at this same as how we are selling B2C, in a way that, you know, the transportation, DHL, can be an important element in order to reduce their, you know, their Scope 3 reduction. That's how we also approach it. Like we explain what is important. We explain how we can help our customer to reduce their emission by investing with us in SAF.
This is, you know, we feel that this year was really used to discover, like, there's a lot of discussion going on. By early next year, we will have
Our narrative ready, and we will be ready to go to the market and to sit down with our customers and discuss solutions.
Definitely more than marketing. Muneeba, I saw your hand in orange, and then Sam.
Hi, Muneeba Kayani from Bank of America. A couple of questions. If I could dig a little bit deeper on the ACS point you'd made, which is 6%-7% of revenues, but revenues are bigger in that period. If I do some quick math, I think I got to EUR 1 billion to EUR 1.6 billion of ACS revenue. What was the EBIT on it, and how should we think about that kind of unwinding? That's my first question. Secondly, there was a chart, and I forget which number, which showed the B2C volumes in the first half trending lower year-over-year. Did you say how much that was in the first half and kind of how you're thinking about it for the rest of the year? And then labor. Great relations.
How do we think about labor inflation? We're seeing that all over Europe and I guess U.S. as well. How has that impacted the express business, or likely to impact going forward? Lastly, you talked about kind of volumes and moving the heavy shipments from forwarding to express. How does your forwarding colleagues feel about that?
Sure. Maybe we start with the ACS question.
Yeah. I think Joe and I will tag team this one. You know, your numbers are pretty close on your calculations. We use it. We think about ACS internally as a cost offset to our aviation network. We don't think about it in terms of EBIT. We don't have a full P&L margin view of what is the profitability or what is the profitability of ACS. That's not how we look at it at all. We use it as a lever to utilize that dedicated network to fill the space up where we have space, and that contribution of the revenue that's there is an offset to our aviation costs, and that's as far as we go with it.
Yeah. You've got to look at that as part of our ability and the element of fitting in when we're talking about the flex down.
The, uh-
You asked about the B2C.
Was it as a percentage of total, the question?
How much has it declined?
In the first two quarters.
The percentage of total?
Yeah.
Forty, forty-fi-
Here over-
As a percentage of TDI shipments, B2C is sitting at around 40%-45% of total shipments at any one stage of the first half of this year.
And-
The decline year-over-year.
The year-on-year decline in B2C has been in the order of 4%-5%, year to date, in that order. I would point out actually in the last couple of months, it's been lower than that. There is an element in there that, let's just say, was part of our revenue quality and yield management that will, over the next couple of months come out into the normalization. Maybe I can take the forwarder.
The forwarder question.
Customer and the Gatekeepers campaign. I think your question is very logical, like, "Hey, what do you think?" Like, the forward direction of our own forwarder is DGF actually very positive because, you know, this forwarding market is very fragmented. Nine out of ten would not be DGF, would be like a third-party forwarder. That opens up also opportunities for our own DGF. Because if a customer would like to return to a forwarder with some of their business, and maybe they came from a third party, we would say, as Express, "We have actually, you know, our sister company that can help you. And actually, we are in this Gatekeepers program together." We are exchanging leads. We're working together, just to make sure that we provide the most optimal solution for our customers, be it forwarding or express.
Because that's the essence. We need to provide the right solution for our customers in the end.
The last question was labor inflation. Fazlin, do you want to comment on that?
Yeah. I, you know, we look at the market, and we look at what the governments are doing and what the market trends are, and we follow that very, very closely. You know, interestingly for us, because of our focus on retention, that, I must say, has not affected us in a way that, you know, when you read in the paper. Our focus is really, you know, getting their retention, whether is it Americas, and we pluck those levers, and if there isn't during our exit interview what needs to be worked on, and that's where we worked on. We generally follow what's in the market and what's the governmental updates through that.
Maybe just as an add-on to that. I think it's important to. I mean, inflation is out there in the world.
Yeah.
You know, across areas. Not just in labor, but also in the cost of materials, energy, et cetera. I think the key point to get across when John referenced, you know, the pricing process and the annual GPI, we've actually literally this week had the calls with the largest countries. That's absolutely a factor in our pricing, and in the announcement you'll see coming up for 2023.
All right. Let's take one more question from Sam from the floor.
Thank you. Sam Bland from J.P. Morgan. I have three questions please, if I can. The first one is on competitive environment. I think you mentioned that had maybe been quite helpful for the last few years. Have a bit of an update on how you see that now?
Mm-hmm.
Second question is.
B2C share, I think we said it's just about 45% of volume. Is that representative of how important it is to the division, or, you know, I'm thinking, is it particularly, for example, a lower share of revenue than it is of volume, for example?
Mm-hmm.
The last question is, ESG and sustainability. Have you noticed any pockets of customers moving away from TDI to a more, I don't know, sustainable solution to reduce their own emissions? Thank you.
Okay, thank you, Michiel. I think the answer is no, but we'll tackle that last one for you. On the competitive environment, I think there was four. There are now three, and there will never be two. That's one thing. That's how I look at the industry when FedEx picked up TNT. I think we're fundamentally different organizations. You know, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Asia is any other business on their management agenda, but they are monsters in the U.S. of organizations with their domestic business, be that air or ground. We've been in that market. We know the scale of it, the scale of it and the size of it, and the complexity of it.
As you look at the rest of the world, you know, the DHL logo is and flag is planted in every single country. You'll find sort of half the world where UPS aren't there, and the other half of the world where FedEx aren't there. I don't think they have any greater designs right now on Africa and MENA, for example, just to pick those two continents, than in the future than they really do now. We come across them in different ways. The focus of UPS is much more on road in Europe. DDI product is much more important. I like to think it is a reality that, you know, you get these geographies of brands, McDonald's and Burger King and someone else and someone else, Pepsi and Coke.
You know, this is why it's so maniacally focused on P equals GQ. In a lot of markets, it's ours to lose. That's not complacency or arrogance. Say, if we stick to our knitting and work through with high quality and high people, it's ours to lose because we are the only operator in there. The number of market shares we have now over 60% or 70% is significantly higher than it was pre-pandemic. As I think about our geographical landscape, that situation pervades in many parts of the world, and I think the desire to get into them is not necessarily so strong. Their focus on ground in the U.S. and air products in the U.S. is extremely high.
You know, our total focus on one or two M&A activities we've had is in growing our profitable core, TDI. Second question was about B2C. Yeah, I'm not shy to say the revenue share of B2C is less than the shipment share, but it's higher than it was. Why is it higher? It's higher because we've driven a lot of price activity into our B2C merchants, and some of them have gone. You know, the incremental, the average price of B2C has moved quite considerably up over the last three years. But yeah, around 40%-45%, 45% to be exact, is shipment, and it's somewhere better than half of that is revenue.
All right.
Sustainability.
Question on the sustainability, whether we see pattern change in customer demands or requirements. No, we are not seeing that so much. I would say very little. What customers do think is very interesting is how we deal with the sustainability topic. Electrification, SAF, they would like to participate. They would like to understand what we are doing there. In the end, what is driving the choice is the customer of our customers. You know, if you have like a B2C e-tailer, you know, they leave the choice to their customer. It could be like, I want it next day, so it has to be time definite. Or, you know, I'm willing to pay less or I want to pay less and I don't need it so urgently, and then it can go by road.
That is what we see is still, let's say, the main driver of the choice. But yeah. Everyone or most customers very much into the topic and that's, you know, why we provide the sustainable, you know, solutions around SAF and everything we do.
Excellent.
I might just add to that, to Michiel's point. It's where it's geographically possible to do so when you're talking about the road solution. That's why the sustainability program in the air is so key, for example, getting from Asia. It's not traditionally a road network proposition. If you wanna do TDI, certainly. Or obviously going up from Asia to Europe or going across the Pacific. It does depend a lot on the geographic origin-destination mix of the shipment.
Okay. So thank you, Sam. We're approaching the two-hour mark, and that's probably the limit of a reasonable attention span. I've got one last question that came in from the outside, from Cristian Nedelcu from UBS. I don't wanna read it out only, but it probably sort of summarizes the, yeah, shall I call it pre-recession sentiment that you find out there among our guests. Cristian is asking, how should we think about the potential effects of,
Severe economic downturn on a global scale. Chris is talking about all the ugly things, discounts growing, lower weights, worse mix down trading. I think at the end of the day, it's about how prepared do you feel and what do you see? Is there any area where we say, "Okay, well, if that happens, then we're screwed," right?
That's one of those easy but hard ones. I think, you know, I go back to a couple of things I said, you know, that whether it's acute or chronic downturns, we've seen them all. In the financial crisis, the start of the pandemic was seriously acute. Travis in my office saying we can take EUR 56 million out of aviation costs in the next four weeks. Well, four weeks later, it was how much aviation can we put back? We've seen the acute situations. We've managed through the chronic situations, which are longer and are longer in time and more enduring. I think what I would say to that, absolutely genuine, is we know all the switches to flick.
We have a lot of flexibility and optionality in our network, and we watch these lines like a hawk, as you can imagine. We have quite some leading indicators, as you also might imagine, that tell us exactly sort of where to point our gun and where to point our shotgun if it's a more broad perspective. We have our own people. This is extremely important for driving the top line, but it's extremely important to this question. We have our own people, basically in 220 countries, that can be contacted with a PUD optimization, yield program, or any other program overnight with complete clarity of what the mission is and how to manage it and what the toolkit is.
The ability to do that and touch our people in 220 countries overnight talks to that question because Network Flex and it's not just the aviation story, it's the sum of the parts. We're very capable of doing that. We have been there before in 2008, 2009, and in regions, we've been there many more times, just discrete regions rather than the global downturn.
Okay, good. I think that's a good summary. Thanks, Cristian. That concludes our Q&A round. Thank you very much, John and team.
You're welcome.
Please have a seat.
Thank you.
I can do my outro to the community following us on the webcast. Of course, in not too long time you will find all this also available as replay. With that, it's time for me to say goodbye to you out there. Looking forward to see you over the next couple of weeks on different occasions and see you soon.