Good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are. Happy that we have you here for today's DHL Capital Market briefing. That is how we call the concept. It is a 90-minute or so session, so the aim is to be done by the full hour at 4:00 P.M. Therefore, we are looking forward to hear from our host, John Pearson, CEO of DHL Express. You heard him speak often last time around on our Capital Markets Day last year. Some may have seen him on one of the hub tours. We also have with us today our head of network operations and global aviation, Travis Cobb. Thanks for making it. You will notice that we do not have a single CFO here in the room, from our side at least.
This is very clearly targeted to be an educative session for you to get a better understanding of what we are doing in our Express network on the strategy and on the network side of the game. This is not about putting out any new targets or numbers, but your understanding of the business should be growing. On the web, like for our usual formats with the quarterly reportings, any question that you have, punch it in. I will get it up here, and we will make sure that the topic is going to be covered. As it is part of our safety culture in DHL Group, I am not going to start this session without me giving you a very clear briefing. There is no planned fire alarm this afternoon.
In the case of an emergency, the nearest fire exit is right out of this door and then straight ahead. Should not forget to thank our friends at BNP for organizing and providing this venue. With that, John, may I hand over to you?
Martin, thank you for doing that safety briefing. That is something that every single meeting in Express and pretty much the Group starts off with. Thank you for your interest in our company and being here again with Express. The slides are not too heavy, but I walk through them slowly because I think there are some points that Travis and I really want to get across here at this particular time of year, where we have reported the numbers we have reported, and we are now well into the third quarter. From a sort of state of the nation point of view, you know our formula, people, quality, and cost excellence are the drivers for all the drivers for our growth going forward. You will see the formula in a minute. There is little point in expanding upon that more.
Smart Industrial Growth, really why we are here today, if you will, in Heavy Weight Express, combines the targeted Express levers with the Group growth initiatives. It is a big focus for our division, Heavy Weight Express. It is a big personal focus for me. I spend a lot of time on it and how we can make it more sophisticated. Global connectedness, proxy for global trade, is at an all-time high. I heard the phrase the other day, global trade is stronger than ever. It is just the destination address that has changed. I like to use the phrase water finds a way. It is just finding a way to different places, and that is absolutely the case.
Trade grew faster in the first half of this year than any other first half since 2011. A lot of the things we are talking about are riding on the back of that.
For those of you that are interested in Warsaw, in a couple of weeks' time, we will be sharing our update of our global connectedness tracker, which is very interesting and more hotly anticipated than ever before. That links to our 22 high-potential markets, GT20, Geographic Tailwinds 20. We have added two to the family, and that program I personally sponsor from a board of management point of view, and that is also very much on track. The formula, much more than just words on the wall. I think I would like to make that point. I was in South Korea, in Seoul last week, and I had it pointed out to me of how much depth there is below each of these letters. I have been in the business 40 years. I am quite long in the tooth.
I know when people are telling me the truth, and what I saw in Seoul was just outstanding in terms of how that business has taken this formula, which is pretty much the same since 2010, a little bit of cosmetic change, but pretty much the same for the last 16 years, and are building it into the business. That is also a country that their weight per day growth is in the 20s last three months, and their Heavy Weight Express growth, which is over 50 kg, are in the 30s. If you want as a real-life time example of just one country, meaningful to a point. We continue to build and manage and measure our countries on the things that we know are under these letters. Safety, as Martin just pointed out, is one of the big ones under people.
You cannot be a great place to work unless you are a safe place to work. We have been number one, two, or three great place to work in the world for the last five years. You cannot do that unless your safety KPIs are getting better. What we are here to talk about is the C and the G. You can see the things that it says under those letters. I think the point I would really like to make here, quite convincingly, if I can, is that the strength of the discussion is in the combination of the two. I, for my part, talking about Smart Industrial Growth, selling heavyweight business, and controlling and managing RPK.
Travis saying, "Right, that incremental volume is going on a fitter and leaner network than we've ever had before." The two sides of this story, more volume, good quality volume, good yield volume, lands on a network that Travis manages and is far fitter and far leaner than ever before. I think that's the key thing there. The other way I would say that is the network is there. The network is the jewel in our crown. It's the most important thing we have. Been there since 1969. The network is there. Utilization, let's monetize it. Utilization of that network will monetize. Operational leverage, call it what you will, but that's the moment we've been in for a while, and that's the moment that's bearing fruit now. Let's start with Smart Industrial Growth and kind of say, what is it?
It's definitionally a simple term, but definitionally something that inquires you to say, what do you mean by that? I guess it's got two dimensions. On a customer level, on an Express level, it's great profile TDI business fitting into a network that's got capacity at service center, gateway, hub, and in aviation. Great profile business that's palletized, stackable, and full of aeronautical, aviation, robotic parts. Not welding rods, not potatoes, high-value parts that are going in those packages. You may remember we had a program in 2018 where we pulled out some heavyweights from our network. Uglies, ruglies, and all sorts of things. Oil drums, too many Samsung badly packaged maybe, plasma screens, and other things. Fully assembled trampolines, not quite that far, but there were things in our network that weren't accretive to producing more EBIT. We cleaned all that out. That's what P300 was about.
Now we relaunched, in earnest, the whole organization into finding these type of things. From a customer point of view, it's quite different. We're doing this at a time where supply chain resilience and reliability and speed and economic value are more important than ever. Customers' growth plans are getting hit every single day by global trade interruptions. The fragmentation of global trade is impacting customers' growth plans every single day. The combination of the two of sort of going to a customer with something that is creating a situation where growth comes and business outcomes come from speed and the outcomes that speed and reliability enable is a very powerful proposition to our customers. This is not just saying, "Do you sell Heavy Weight Express?" This is, "Have you switched your trade lane focus from somewhere, U.S., to somewhere else because of what's happening in the world of trade?
Has that brought you any supply chain difficulties? Has supply chain disruptions," which there have been many every single month for the last five years, really, "meant that you're slower to market and your customer's customer ensuring high customer satisfaction?" That's not our customer satisfaction, that's their customer satisfaction. The aggregation of a rather difficult trading world and a rather nicely controlled asset base that Travis has, and a very accessible Heavy Weight Express product that we're offering on this foundation of Smart Industrial Growth is what precipitates the line there at the bottom. That the business outcomes that speed and reliability enable. That their forwarder for certain goods that they have, they can't get that from their forwarder. Some of this will become even clearer as we walk through how things changed from COVID. Smart Industrial Growth is a sort of banner of this phrase.
It actually started with smart growth because it was smart lane growth, it was smart product growth. Tobias himself wrapped that up under the umbrella of Smart Industrial Growth. There are two sort of prongs that we are talking about today. Heavy Weight Express, which I have already sort of started on, and Geographic Tailwinds. Allied to those two diamonds are the other growth diamonds of the group growth initiatives, new energy, life science and healthcare, digital selling, e-commerce. The new growth diamond is data center logistics right on time.
I think before quarter four 2025, the number of people that knew what a hyperscaler was not very many. Now it is on every email, it is in every day. We are running fast on that. It is the sixth growth diamond. The little four that are sort of opaqued out, also important to comment on, that is intra-AP, a highly profitable intra-Asian lane.
Big part of our business. Intra-Europe, a staggeringly large part of our business that is coming back with DDI and with TDI. One of the little diamonds there is blue lanes. Growing volumes with more attractive pricing on systemically unbalanced, underutilized aircraft sectors. The U.S. to the world is one of them. MENA back to Asia, et cetera. There are a number of blue lanes, and the other one might be sustainable selling GoGreen and our sustainable aviation product. You see the sort of the growth architecture of our business. The focus is on communicating what this is and really drilling down into, from my organization and even my own time Heavy Weight Express and GT20. I think it is worth just having a look at this slide, which really illustrates the evolution of DHL Express.
I would like to go through it in decades of 10 years. The first bucket, and this should be the right amount of people there, but the 1970s was all about documents. If there were any parcels in our business, they were lightweight parcels going to aircraft on ground in Riyadh, in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. Vehicle off-road in probably Saudi Arabia as well, Bentley, that was owned by some sheik and the little 2-kg part was shot over there, no expense spared. That was the type of parcels. Think about this in the context of this type of parcels we are moving. The 1980s was all about more small packages sitting on top of that document network. The documents did not go away, so I am layering on here different things as our business evolved over 60 years. The 1780s.
The 1990s was all about Import Express, a product that kind of saved DHL. It was billing at destination rather than billing at origin. The customer paid when he received it rather than origin. 80% of freight anecdotally is consignee routed. I will take it from there, the factory, bring it to me, please. Our offering 219, 220 at the time, because Afghanistan was included, to your desk.
Pay everything here on one account number. It kept DHL in the black at that time for quite a long time. 1993, and was still a big product. It is probably 40% of our revenue. We are not quite an inbound company yet because outbound is slightly more, but a significant part of our evolution. The year 2000, so I would like to say when I was in Asia, I launched Fast Forward. Fast Forward was kind of the forerunner to Heavy Weight Express.
It was launching a 0 to 250 kg. We are faster and cheaper than a forwarder product. You should never use the word cheaper in marketing, but I use that advisedly in the sense that we were cheaper. It was less money. I think you need to say it in that way, and customers didn't realize that. The year 2000 was when we launched Fast Forward, which really made me reconsider bringing it back into the business now, which I've done. 20 10s were all about e-commerce, the 21st century spice trade. The work we did with McKinsey. I realized that when I went to the U.K., seven of the top 10 customers were brands I'd never heard of, and they were brands that hadn't been in our top 10, not even the year before. So absolute zero to hero. Farfetch, Matches Fashion, JD.com. Big customers.
We need to know how to manage those well. So the 2010 to 2020 was really, and through to COVID, was really about e-commerce. Then 2020 onwards was really the machine you're looking at on the right. It started because apples fell onto our cart. Big weights fell into our bucket during COVID. Everyone said they'll all disappear. All of them will disappear. We went from a weight per shipment of something much lower to much higher. I'll show you that later. We talked to our customers and said, "How much will you leave with us?" This is another important point. Because of speed, shipment visibility, reliability, and customer's customer, they said, "We'll probably leave 60% with you." Some of them said more because actually I found out that you're cheaper because I'd never used you before, and I had to use you.
I found out that you're cheaper than our forwarder. In the end, we kept about 88%. So post-COVID normalization, something I said on the night our dear Queen passed away at the Capital Markets Day on September 8, 2022, wasn't really a big deal because we kept the business. So as we get into this period now, we've got a lot of learnings from COVID and a lot of those customer satisfaction stories. So let's just have a look at this and relax for two and a half minutes of tries to portray what we're saying to our customers and what we're doing in the marketplace, and how we're educating a little bit our sales force. So if you could push the video button.
Uncertainty and trade interruptions are happening more frequently than ever, bringing daily challenges for our customers. By partnering with them, we improve their supply chain resilience through speed, reliability, and economic value. We call it Smart Industrial Growth. It's how we grow our business. And how we help our customers grow theirs. Today, keeping trade moving swiftly and shipments flowing smoothly have never been so important because our customers' growth comes from the business outcomes that speed and reliability enable. But as always, there are challenges, and our role is to overcome them. We work side by side with industries that are driving the next wave of global growth, delivering sector-specific expertise for the goods that keep customers' operations running and their ambitions growing. By introducing Heavyweight Express, we're responding to key urgency drivers. Our story began in 1969 with a simple idea, moving documents across the world by air.
As global trade grew, so did we. From paper to parcels to something much larger, and those volumes move through our flexible network and a hub-and-spoke system built to cater to the needs of industrial growth. This is how we have adjusted and been able to adapt to the ever-changing nature of global trade. Speed alone isn't enough. Our customers need certainty as well as flexibility and the ability to move heavyweight shipments as fast and reliably as lightweight ones. It's all backed up by a priority desk underpinned by proactive monitoring and dedicated case ownership. A steadily increasing blend of Sustainable Aviation Fuel allows us to achieve this with lower emissions. Whilst global trade continues to grow and constantly adapt, the responsiveness of our network is able to change in time and in line. DHL Express, delivering Smart Industrial Growth.
The speed of light and the speed of heavy. The aspiration absolutely is to get our shipments through to destination at the same time as our documents arrive, and that absolutely is what Travis is working on. What is it really? Well, it's the big boxes and pallets and crates that you saw in that video. It's not this. This is a thing called a Jumbo Box. I launched in Australia in 1997. It's 25 kg, and our average weight per shipment for B2B is kind of here, about 12 kg. You know that from the stat books. In COVID, it was kind of 8 kg. We're putting on weight as a business. We're putting on weight kilo by kilo by kilo over the last four years. Nearly a kilo a year or half a kilo a year.
We're sort of up here now, but we're a long, long way from what's already in our warehouses, what's already moving with us, and what Siemens and Robert Bosch and EQUATE, an oil company in Kuwait, are moving with us. Whilst that is kind of the business that we grew up on, and whilst it took us 56 years to get here and sort of only two or three years to get here, the business has so much more potential with the speed, the quality, the use cases, the urgency drivers, and the fact that we are more economically viable up to a weight that most customers don't realize. Most customers think it's over 50 kg, give it to a forwarder, and then they find that up to 125 kg, we're cheaper, or 130 kg. That's kind of what it is.
The competitive pricing, that goes without saying. The right sales approach is not, "Can I move your heavy weights?" The right sales approach is, "Do you have shipments that will increase in value if you move them via a network with more speed and reliability or ultimate customer satisfaction?" If we look at some of those, they are the obvious ones, and I let you read them for yourself. Those are the urgency drivers that we're communicating to our customers in our sales conversations with logistics managers of all sorts of different skill set and experience, and these resonate well in the customer calls that we have. There's 1,000 more. There's literally no end to the number of things. It's my sheik is arriving back, and we need this there. It's not there. That one's not there. It's number seven.
Number eight is, I used you for one of those, but then I learned that you are actually cheaper until 129 kg, so I will use you a bit more. That is why we kept the 80% +. If you said, "Well, what sectors are they?" They are all the normal sectors. They are our group growth initiatives. They are significantly these ones. The componentry and what is in the box is exactly as you might imagine, robotic parts and life science and healthcare equipment and server racks. Just talking about DCL for a second, no one was talking about hyperscalers two years ago.
No one. Most salespeople had never heard the word. Now it is in every single deck and every single document kind of thing. Our salespeople, we have got dedicated win rooms and war rooms, and we collaborate with DGF, and the whole collaboration story is so much stronger.
We are in the upstream world of the ecosystem of the upstream world. Spare parts for something that is already been set up and established with things that Oscar in DGF moved six months ago. This whole ecosystem world is enormous, and that is why we have added it as our sixth growth diamond. That does not detract from life science and healthcare or anything else in there that we are also focusing on. The result of that is, as you see here, nothing that I did not expect. We maybe had some tailwind from the Iran-U.S. situation and capacity constraints and supply chain pressures. When I was in London in April at the Capital Markets Day, I made this point that interruptions play into our system. We control the aircraft Travis will talk to you about. We have our own facilities. We can find more aircraft quickly.
We can put aircraft on the ground. We can move aircraft tails around. The types of things that are going on in this fragmented world of global trade and very quickly changing global trade, when de minimis suddenly shuts you out of one market are play into those assets. So it is no surprise to me that we are at the 9.4 % weight per day. You see the transition between quarter one and quarter two play back against a comp of 2019. You can read for yourself on the right-hand side why that matters. We are two-thirds of the way, a little bit more than two-thirds of the way through quarter three. I would expect the number, I am sometimes a bit more open than Martin, but high level, I would expect the number to be quite similar. That is how it is playing out.
I say that in the sense that going back to that point I made, this is a decade of commercial strategy. We did not do this for three months of better volumes. We did it for the next decade like we did the documents and the IMP. IMP is still an enormously valuable product today because it has got a higher revenue per kilo and a higher weight per shipment than outbound business. So it has propped up the whole commercial KPIs of our business. So that is how it is performing. We deal with more in Q&A. So where does that take us to? It takes us to GT20. I think the quality code works by all means. There are publications just about every year from us. There is the DHL Global Connectedness Report. It was called "The Index," and there is a DHL Trade Atlas.
The world that you live in and the world definitely that we live in, these are more hotly anticipated and read and understood. 3.5 million data points, they tell you a lot about what is going on. One of the things they tell you is that globalization is not giving way to regionalization. Global trade still moves 5,322 km on average through the Malacca Straits. I used to be on a boat, now it is above. Over from the East to the West. If a lot of onshoring and nearshoring and friendshoring and reshoring was happening, then mathematically that number would come down. Trade, as I said, grew faster in the first half than any year since 2011. There are trade policymakers and businesspeople and CEOs out in markets looking for new customers, looking for new trading routes, almost with "I Love Global Trade" T-shirts.
That is kind of how it is. They lost a major destination market, but most people pivoted very quickly in their marketing efforts, which is why we send the message we can pivot equally quickly in our operational efforts to help customers get their products or samples to new markets, then ultimately get their finished goods. If any of these things that people, these naysayers would tell you about global trade and globalization, nothing is true. After the Iceland eruption in 2011, they said global trade will never be the same again. What changed? Nothing. Nothing. A thin veneer of goods and parts that were highly sensitive and valuable might have been moved closer to end consumption. But by and large, trade is built on economics and efficiency. The denim jean industry is not going to move from Bangladesh to Stuttgart.
Denim jeans are still made in Bangladesh, which is one of our new GT20 countries. A few things changed. I am pretty sure that as global trade emerges and the map of global trade evolves, it will fit our network uncannily well. That is what is proving to be the case with these countries that we put into it. Let me go on to that. I will not really get into any detail. I have already sort of shared that Bangladesh and Morocco are going to be 21 and 22. What to say from this? They are evenly distributed around the world. This is not just something in Asia. They are evenly distributed.
These countries grow fastest on an axis of speed and scale between now and 2030. As defined by NYU Stern, who is our partner, BCG, McKinsey, and some other people that helped us, they are the right countries.
You will not find Papua New Guinea in there because whilst it is going to grow fast with vanilla and all the other products it has, it is not of any scale. The reasons why these countries were the ones selected is any of the right-hand drivers or all three. A good example of inward FDI investment, the country that gets more FDI investment than anywhere other than the U.S.A. is India. India is in for that reason. The countries that are in for the reasons of supply chain diversification beyond China is mainly the Asian countries. The only country that is in for nearshoring is Mexico, where Chinese companies are setting up on the border and shipping into the U.S. Some are in for all three. But the fact of the matter is we identified 20. One or two could be the wrong ones.
We identified 20 two years ago, and we started doing things. What did we start doing? We started driving commercial excellence, means the quality of our people, the quality of our programs, the quality of our pricing, specifically hard in all those 20 markets. More so pushing our sister companies to get to the same level. Some of which would agree they perhaps weren't at the same level as DHL Express. We then made sure that we were collaborating better than we've collaborated before. So in Malaysia, which is one of them, that would be no surprise to you, we collaborate regularly with our sales teams and our general managers and the CEOs of the region to drive through a list of established programs. Lastly, penultimately actually, putting a pot of money aside, Tobias was very keen that this happened, to drive investment.
If we identify a white spot in one of those country sessions and reviews, we need to deliver EUR 50 million or EUR 100 million back to that country and fix their problem. If we can't quickly respond to their reasons why they may not be growing at full tilt, the program is really fractured in my view. Then lastly, like anything in business, P is the first letter of our formula. It relates back to leadership capability of the general manager, of the commercial team, of the entire SMT. In countries that are maybe towards the bottom of the rankings, there'll be some cases where it's a leadership topic that needs to be addressed. So that's the foundation of it. We've evolved things as we've gone through the two years.
Different things have been in place at different times, and one of the aspects that came out of it is our Chinese overseas sales network. There's a little bit of deja vu. When I joined in Bahrain in 1986, there was a Japanese overseas salesperson and a Korean overseas salesperson. The program fizzled out after five years, and here we are 35 years later, populating the GT and other locations with Chinese salespeople, largely from DHL China. Now, what I've learned about doing business with Chinese companies outside of China is it's best to do it with a Chinese person. Metaphorically, figuratively speaking, the concept is to meet them off the plane, to be in their diary, be in their office, be around the dinner table with them, and be their lead logistics partner. They build cultural bridges, and these people are all doing that in these different places.
That gives us real traction on those Chinese companies that have established. A great example of Heywood Heating that set up a plant in Egypt and Thailand. Sure enough, when I wrote to the country manager, they've identified them, they've got capital set up, and they were building their plant to sell heating equipment, little small heaters, to Egypt and North Africa in one case, or to Southeast Asia, and we were first in, best dressed. So the program's going well, and we'll continue to drive that. The final tapestry, if you will, the bed spread of performance on this program is pretty impressive. So we look at it different ways. We look at it by division. We look at it by GT 19, excludes China. You can imagine that had a bit of a headwind for a while, GT 20.
But the roll-up of the entire thing for the DHL Group is that 13 of the 17 are more than 20% growth, and you can see that three of them are more than 40% growth. We will add Bangladesh and Morocco to the program. I visit them within the next three months, and we will kick off the same processes and make sure that we are getting more than our fair market share of the automotive business in northern Morocco and the other aspects of the opportunity in Bangladesh. Lastly, one more slide only. I know I have run over time a bit, but these are all important things to say and share. If anyone was in Leipzig, maybe not, in 2012, I shared the pricing blackboard for the first time. We have had two pricing leaders in 30 years, 25 years.
They have both built the pricing competence and capability in Express, very high level. There is a book called "The Steps to Pricing Excellence." We were a two. We are probably near a four now. This is a demonstration of how we have improved our NPC over the years in a rather tough competitive environment. NPC, you take all the shipments that were billed in November, you run them through the new set of rates you have given to your customer in January, just run the same shipments through the machine, and it comes out 2.8% higher. So we get that stick rate. We get that as a base on our EUR 24 billion, if you will, with some attrition of that as the year goes by, and so on and so forth.
Then the rest of the pricing environment is managed with red cards, where if we bring on, in error, a heavyweight customer that really shouldn't have been with us, probably should have been with forwarding, we will share the lead back with them when we move them out. They will be red carded, and we will put them up to the price they should be. If that is not right for them, then we will move that to a monthly program, not a yearly program, because we are very specific on protecting our RPK. I can get young kids to go and be a freight forwarder salesman and sell heavyweights at lower RPKs. We have to maintain our RPK, so that is the symbol there. You see the NPC. That relates to this. Willingness to pay and deal review is very sophisticated, AI-driven pricing programs.
That willingness to pay is about SMEs, and making sure we do not give discounts too readily to people in the pharmaceutical business that would typically pay a higher rate to us, for example. Deal review is establishing, in a very sophisticated way, the business that comes to us from a certain customer and how accretive it is to our EBIT through the type of network and lanes and packages that they give to us. So you could imagine some people that only ship on a very transactional lane, Asia to U.S., and only give us this type of thing, and it goes to middle of Central America, might be quite low on that. But you can imagine someone that ships daily around Asia, high-value aeronautical parts of 8 kg, very dense, are a different type of network value customer. Quite sophisticated, all AI, on a strong AI platform.
Got it in 20 countries. We should have it in 50 by the end of next year. It just talks to the strength of the pricing unit that has the responsibility for maintaining RPK on heavyweights, keeping this whole SIG and heavyweight strategy in track, but also do everything else on the day-to-day pricing. That's Smart Industrial Growth, that's Heavy Weight Express, that's yield control, that's driving incremental volumes that are coming to us anyway because trade is so disrupted, the customer's customer is wanting better, quicker service in these type of times, and then putting it on a network that's leaner and fitter for a long period of time, and getting the operational leverage from that. If I can, I thank you for listening, and I'll pass over to Travis, and then we'll have maybe questions at the end. Travis, thank you very much.
Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and good morning to our colleagues that are dialing in virtually. My name is Travis Cobb. I'm COO of DHL Express, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today. It's good to see some of you again that I met four years ago when we had our capital markets day in the tower and then toured our Cologne facility. As John said, I'm here to talk about the cost excellence portion of our strategy. You will have heard a lot from Tobias and from Melanie and from John over the last couple of years about Fit for Growth and making sure that we're getting our platforms really optimized and ready to capitalize on the Smart Industrial Growth that John just took us through. When we talk about cost excellence, I'm going to talk about a couple of key elements.
I'm going to talk about our aviation network, and then I'm going to talk about our ground network, which includes all of our hubs and all of our country operations for our pickup and delivery and for our customs operations. I'm also going to give you a preview of some of the things that we're looking at from a digitalization and from an AI standpoint that we see as the next cost optimization levers in our business going forward. Let's get started talking about the aviation network. Internally, we often refer to this as aviation, the perfect network. There's a lot of characteristics that describe why we believe our aviation network is the perfect network. Some of these are extremely important to us. Safety and security, obviously. High quality, obviously.
What's going to be more interesting, I think, for all of you today are the second, the third and the fourth points that you see listed there. The flexibility that we have in this network, how it's designed from a resiliency standpoint, certainly how sustainable our aviation network is, and then lastly, how we've been able to, over the last couple of years and going forward, really cost optimize that aviation network. Let's start there if we can. Here on the left-hand side of the slide, you see a 10-quarter history. So quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, going back through 2024, where we've been able to demonstrate that flexibility that makes up our perfect aviation network. We flexed down our capacity.
We've been able to flex down our cost base overall for those 10 consecutive quarters in line with what we were seeing with our TDI weight development and overall result. I think on the right-hand side, you also see an important element here that is good to understand going forward, is not only have we been able to flex down that cost base, but we've been able to actually structurally change it and we're delivering a unit cost which we measure as our aviation cost per kilo at a material lower level than where we were just two years ago.
If you take Smart Industrial Growth and you take that net price change that John just showed you on his last slide, and you bring that volume on to a more efficient cost aviation network, that's producing a fantastic flow-through into our results that you saw in the second quarter. You can see that's really fit for purpose and set up going forward. Now, what's the size and scale of our aviation network? You see it here. We publish this once a year. This was at the end of 2025. We have over 275 aircraft operating over 2,400 flights a day. But I think the most important part on that slide is we're not one single airline. We don't have one DHL airline, Yellow Tail, and operate that airline around the world like our competition does.
Instead, we are 19 airlines that we own and partner with around the world. And that configuration we call and bring it together to call one big virtual DHL airline. And that virtual airline has some really interesting characteristics to it. One, it gives us a fantastic geographical coverage that we need to operate in 220 countries and territories around the world. But importantly, it gives us operational flexibility. Again, as we need to increase capacity in the short term or decrease capacity in the short term, with one phone call, we can flex up or flex down with our partnerships that we have around the world. This is one of the key principles that we build into that fantastic aviation network. We are not overly fixed and leveraged. We keep a very targeted amount of flexible capacity in our design of our network.
And you can see at the end of last year that flexible amount was 20% of our total capacity. We could flex it down in less than one year short-term contracts. But also importantly, in periods of higher demand, like we've recently seen in the second quarter, we can also make one phone call to our partners around the world and add capacity on in a very variable and quick basis to support our customers' shipping requirements. There are those 19 owned and partner airlines that you see listed there. Geographically, these are the countries that those airlines are domiciled in. You see it's a very healthy spread from the Americas into Europe, across the Middle East and over to Asia Pacific. And that geographical spread is critically important, particularly in the geopolitical times that we operate in today.
I am going to give you an example of how we have leveraged that over the last six months to our benefit. Obviously, the Middle East conflict has been disruptive in the industry. But again, because of our geographical spread of our partnerships that we have, airlines, when they assess security threats and airspace closures in different parts of the world, there is not one universal jurisdiction that says, "This is how we are going to operate." Every airline follows their country and their national regulations and assessments in that particular geopolitical situation. In the Middle East in particular, we were able to leverage five of those partnerships and our own airlines that we have, and we never missed a beat in terms of being able to provide fantastic service into our Middle East part of the world. We already have a healthy business in the Middle East.
To be able to quickly and nimbly set up short-term contingency hubs in Muscat and in Riyadh and then leverage those fantastic aviation partnerships to fly in there, connecting into our ground network, has provided us benefit and a tailwind into our second quarter result that you saw noted in our second quarter result. I will move on to another element of our perfect aviation network, and that is the fact that it is very sustainable. You look over the last seven years on the investment that we have made into our intercontinental fleet. We have the youngest and we have the most fuel-efficient intercontinental network of anyone in the industry. Largely made up of 777-200 freighters.
We completed our Boeing order last year with 28 of those new production freighters, and that gives us a fantastic capability to deal with these additional volumes and leverage that volume that is coming into our network with a high level of utilization of those assets. I think on the right-hand slide, I want to make a critical point here. When we look at the aviation network and that fixed flex ratio of 80%/20% flex, we look at that on a multi-year forward horizon. We do not have a CapEx backlog. This recent volume growth that we have seen, all we are doing is leveraging those investments that we made and the decisions that we made back in 2018, 2019, and bringing that modernization of the fleet on. That is a critical, important point to understand. That is the first element of sustainability.
I do want to talk about sustainability because it is an important part of the perfect aviation network. I want to read this slide kind of your right to left here. Those 777s that we talked about. Why did we make that decision six, seven years ago? A 777 operates with 18% less fuel burn than a 747 operates with. If you look at the annual utilization of a 777 and what that equates out to, that is over 4 million gallons less of fuel that gets burned on a like-for-like basis, a 777 versus a 747. You then multiply that times the 34 additional 777s that we brought into the network over the last seven, eight years, and you can do the math on what that means in terms of the efficiency that is delivered into our business.
But importantly, it's also helped us to decarbonize our aviation network, and it's one of our key pillars and key strategic aspects of the sustainability piece. We combine that with our fuel optimization program. Most all of you will drive a car. Well, the way that you drive a car, you do have a direct impact on the efficiency, the kilometers per gallon that you're able to deliver and drive in that vehicle. It's no different in the aviation network. How we load that aircraft, how we trim the aircraft from a weight and balance perspective, the procedures that our crew and our pilots fly those aircraft with, all make a material difference on the efficiency. So we have a fantastic optimization program to fly those aircraft very efficiently. Then in John's opening, he talked about our GoGreen Plus product that we launched a couple of years ago.
That's been a fantastic offering for our customers, with significant uptake in their usage of our product offering. We take all of that revenue that comes in on our GoGreen Plus product offering, and we just reinvest that back into Sustainable Aviation Fuel. I'm incredibly proud that as we stand here today and what we released at the end of 2025, we are the largest user of Sustainable Aviation Fuel in the industry, with greater than 10% published in 2025. I can confidently say when we publish our results for the full year in 2026, we will have grown higher than that this year. So that's sustainability. The last comment I'll make about our perfect aviation network is with a filler product that we have, which is called ACS or Air Capacity Sales. There's a couple of key points that I want to make with this specific product.
This is a great product for us to deal with the ebbs and flows of the TDI volume on a day-to-day basis. We have allocations on the aircraft. We use predictability to indicate what those allocations are going to be needed for our TDI Express product. Any remaining space that we have available on the aircraft, we monetize by taking that space out and selling it in the open air freight market. That ACS product helps us to drive a great utilization on that aviation network. In the middle slide, I think this is also a really important point to understand. Anytime that there's periods of these geopolitical disruptions and the air freight supply-demand disruption takes place, you see a constraint driving higher charges into the RPKs of the air freight industry. This particular product for us does not drive the express result.
If you look over the last seven years, it ranges between 5%-7% of our total revenues. So certainly there is some tailwind in there, but the size and the scale of it is pretty small in comparison to our overall revenue stream. Then the last point I'll make here is the same pricing discipline that John articulated on net price change on our TDI Express product. We apply those same principles into our ACS product, and we're seeing healthy improvements from our revenue per kilo, as a result. That ACS revenue helps offset the cost of that aviation network. So that's the aviation story. I think next I'll move into the ground structural reset that we're calling it. Again, this is all of our hubs and gateways. This is our country operations with our pickup and delivery and our customs aspects.
I want to give you an example of one of the overall European resets that many of you who would have joined us in November in East Midlands last year, would have heard Mike Parr, our CEO of Europe, articulate on the journey that we were doing to structurally reset our cost base in Europe. We have seen success there. I note John's comment about our aspiration is to deliver a fitter and leaner network. Here is a great example of how we have been able to achieve that over the last couple of years. Again, 10 quarters here that are reflected, 2024, quarter-over-quarter. We have been able to demonstrate a reduced FTE result in our hubs and in our gateways around the world.
As those TDI volumes were slightly coming down over the last couple of years, again, this is a great reflection of our ability to flex down our cost base to make sure that we deliver a healthy EBIT margin into the business and for the group. I think the other point that I will make here is, look at quarter four 2025, quarter one 2026, and quarter two 2026. As we have seen weight growth come in, we have been able to take that leaner platform that we have in our hubs and gateways and deliver some pretty healthy improvements in productivity with that rate growth coming online. Again, that helps us with our operating leverage to really bring value into the financial result of the business. That is the hub and the gateway story.
I did change slide here, although it looks very similar, and this is a reflection of our country view. Again, this is for country operations. This is largely our pickup and delivery or our couriers that are making the first-mile and last-mile deliveries. This is largely our customs clearance, FTEs, that are clearing the shipments in our business when they import into a country. Again, you see the same quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year improvements as we have executed on cost excellence, as we have executed on all these Fit for Growth initiatives across all the countries in the world.
This is how the results of that have been achieved. Same point that I made in the hubs on productivity and efficiency. As we see weight growth now coming into the network for the last three quarters, look at the productivity that we have been able to leverage with that weight growth coming in.
Again, that is helping to flow through into the bottom line of the business. Again, on the European reset. For those of you that know us, you know that we have the world under John's leadership, divided up into six different regions: Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, excluding China. We have China separate as a region, Middle East, and then sub-Sahara Africa. This is a fantastic example of our European Fit for Growth and cost excellence initiatives. You see a variety of work streams that are listed there, from aviation to ground line haul, hub and pickup and delivery operations on the ground, our customs work streams, and just our efficiency and productivity work streams. What I am pleased to say is what Mike articulated that we were going to do, in that East Midlands meeting in 2025. We did achieve that last year.
This Europe reset has been largely successful, delivered over EUR 200 million benefit into our result last year. Again, those other five regions of the world that I mentioned all have very similar, well-orchestrated cost excellence Fit for Growth programs that they are executing on. We are, I would say, well through those last couple of years of exercises. We are not completely done. You will still see benefit flow through in the second half of 2026 and into 2027 from those initiatives. We also do believe that with the additional technology and advancements that are taking place in AI, we are going to see some acceleration in some key areas of cost excellence in that next midterm horizon. Midterm horizon, one to three years out. Some of these are already in place, and some of those are going to continue to accelerate over that timeframe.
I am really proud of our colleagues in customer service. You can see they, from a function perspective, are probably a little further out in front than the other functions in terms of leveraging technology to drive efficiency and quality into their function. Again, similar results from an FTE optimization taking place quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. With the significant advancements on conversational AI and agentic AI, we do see this accelerating and continuing going forward regardless of the volume growth that is taking place because it is just modernizing and coming along so quickly, you cannot tell the difference whether you are talking to a human being when you call into one of our customer service agents or whether you are talking to a conversational AI agent at this point. That is fantastic and a great illustration of using technology to deliver optimization.
I think there are a couple of other areas that I want to highlight here today. I was with our aviation leadership team yesterday in Belgium, and we spent a part of that day talking about some new IT systems and new digitalization programs that we are rolling out right now. This AI, as we apply it into aviation management, is going to deliver much quicker decision-making and much more accurate decision-making, which ultimately leads to higher quality and a lower cost position. I will just give you a couple of examples of that. That first column, aviation forecasting.
We forecast every one of those 2,400 flights that we do a day, and we provide a forecast on how much of that flight is going to be utilized with our TDI Express product and how much allocation on that flight we have available to take out to sell with our ACS product to drive that high level of utilization. We would have a team of analysts and managers that would look at the data, they would look at the historical volumes, and they would manually forecast out and statistically model out what those allocations would be. That would take them weeks, and sometimes even months to do, to really get to a level of accuracy. Now with AI, you can press a button with the models that we are doing, and that computing power that used to take weeks can now be done in minutes and hours.
That information from a management decision standpoint really allows us to drive accuracy on what we provide to our ACS colleagues to sell, which they can drive up their RPK on, which delivers a higher level of optimization into the network. It is just a quick example there. I think the same thing is happening, and is going to continue to happen in the space of customs. Obviously the regulatory environment in the industry has been extremely dynamic over the last six years. Go back, and particularly in this part of the world, Brexit, in 2019, VAT 22 in Europe, Liberation Day in the U.S. last year, and then even up through the removal of de minimis in July in Europe this year. The customs environment from a regulatory standpoint is extremely complex.
If you go back six years, the only way that we had to respond to that was to add people to it. We did that back in 2019, 2020. You can see over 3,000 employees were having to be added to deal with that complexity. We recognized that back then. We have been investing in automation, investing in our IT systems. We have been working with our customers to collect data and to improve the accuracy of that data. Now with the advancements made in AI, we can automate and apply that technology into really streamlining that customs clearance declaration process. We are already seeing significant efficiencies take place, but we see another step change that will take place over the next three to five-year horizon. That is the cost excellence portion of the presentation today. I want to summarize it by saying, we do have a fantastic aviation network.
It is structurally different than some of our competitors. The way that it is set up, we can respond in a very nimble way and a very flexible way to periods of high volume demand, or periods of contraction. That flexibility and that resiliency with the Middle East example that I gave you, perfectly positions us to deal with the next horizon. I think you combine that with the cost excellence and Fit for Growth initiatives that we have taken in the hubs and in the ground country operations, and it just puts us in a fantastic leveraged position going forward. Again, we are not going to stop there. We are going to take the advancements in AI and the advancements in technology over the next one to three years, and come up with a whole other series of optimization programs to execute over the next one to three-year horizon.
You get to the end there, and you think about what John said on Smart Industrial Growth and what we saw in the second quarter continuing now into the third quarter and into the next decade with that Heavy Weight Express program. You leverage that onto a fitter and leaner network that I just talked to you about, that we have been able to achieve and we are going to continue to achieve going forward. That leads to what we see as a continuation of the great 2Q results that you will have seen. Thank you very much for your attention, and I will invite Martin and John back up on stage for the Q&A session. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Travis. Thanks, John. Now come to the third of this session. For the Q&A, we got a couple of questions that we got in from the web, but obviously start here in the room. Jamie, Alexia, and Muneeba, if that's the order, please. Sorry.
Okay.
Arthur Truslove from Citi. Thank you very much for presentation two, if I may. Question one was, what do you think a sort of peak cycle margin looks like in Express now? Clearly, you're talking more about higher weights, better network utilization. If everything's sort of fully stacked up, and utilized fully, what could the margins go to? Obviously, that's not a through cycle margin, that's a peak cycle margin. Second question, more short term, what are you seeing in terms of peak season? I'll stop there. Thank you.
Okay, so I'll take the margin. Travis might want to comment on peak season. I don't know whether the peak season was linked to margin or just peak season.
Yeah, I think we always talk in Express about absolute EBIT generation year on year, we talk about incremental margin improvement that generally comes with that. Sometimes foreign FX and fuel can blow us off course or help us a little bit there. If you remember in April in the Capital Markets Day, I said we'd do, on the first page, do all these things to drive us back to a 15%, mid-teens or 15% I think the slide said. We're obviously tracking it in that area already. With the things, Martin can overlay on what I'm saying, but where I sit as a senior line officer in Express, I'm thinking about our business and with a little bit of hope of global trade and everything else, we can continue to build on that.
In the peak of COVID, we got up to our 18s and I think we all say that was sort of overearning and it was not going to be there. But overearning or not, it did demonstrate what this network can produce if you are pulling the cost and the revenue levers in the right way. Those were excessive because revenue was really excessive and cost was really excessive the other way. We got up to 18% or something. I think we carry on building on where we are now in a rather incremental fashion. There might be some quarters where we slip back a peg. As to peak season.
Yeah, I am optimistic and bullish on a normal peak this year. We are planning for a historical peak. For us, with the focus on Smart Industrial Growth, it is going to be more of a B2B focused peak than it has been in the past, and we are sizing and scaling the capacity to support exactly that. You would have seen us release our peak surcharge table about two weeks ago, three weeks ago or so, because we are having to go out and bring in additional higher cost third-party capacity, and that is how we help maintain that margin that John was just talking about as a cost offset, is passing that along.
Capacity is pretty tight for others.
Capacity is tight in the industry. I think we are in an excellent position going into fourth quarter to be able to capitalize on the growth that we are going to see.
Just two thoughts to add to your comparison to what happened under COVID. I think two elements are different. We have seen volume in the network under COVID that really doesn't belong there. On the other hand, that was produced on a network which was still a long way away from where we are in terms of cost efficiency and effectiveness. Let's see how these two weigh out. Alexia.
Alexia, that's very kind of you. She's a lovely girl. James Hollins from BNP sneaking in with two. My first question is there any particular reason based on your network and what you've sort of evolved the network, talking about it being clearly an evolution over a very long period and your historical global focus, where maybe you think you could outperform or underperform others in any of those sort of key growth engine sub-sectors like the hyperscalers, life sciences? Maybe if that is the case, on any underperformance where you need to invest in this business, in particular geographically or network-wise. While I'm here, the second one would be, clearly you've talked a lot about, I guess taking some of the lunch from the forwarders.
If we had a panel of pure play forwarders, what might they say in response to that and your ability to take some of that business? I guess a sub-question would be, given you have a forwarder within DHL Group, how's the competitive tension with that division? Thank you.
Maybe I'll take the first question and then you can take the competitiveness with DGF question, John. I think the illustration of what I showed in terms of the geographical diversification of our airlines and our owned airlines around the world put us in a very nimble position. As growth takes place, whether that's in Southeast Asia, whether that's in the Middle East, whether that's out of the U.S. or into the U.S., we have that capability to scale each of those partnerships up or down, as we need to, and we've been able to demonstrate that over the last couple of years. Actually with Cargo Facts a couple of days ago, I was quoted there by saying we're adding a couple of 777s into a Chinese partnership that we have exactly around that point.
Yeah, we can size and quickly move where we need to from a capacity standpoint to support growth.
Can you play back the freight one to me?
Well, in a way. You remember as well when the whole idea came up, the initial reflex was, "Hmm, what are the forwarding colleagues going to say about it?" Now I know what they're saying today, but you mentioned the collaboration overall within the groups being key here.
What is it? It was a collaboration within the group.
Yeah.
Question, yeah. I think, yeah, I think that's good that you asked that because when I launched Fast Forward in 2002 in Asia Pacific, and maybe it was in the naming, Fast Forward, but it is how I see it, at the time anyway. There was a fair bit of acrimony, but the group was in a totally different position. We've had leadership changes that have gone through the business. Tobias has brought a level of intensity and collaboration to the organization. If you said, "What two things has Tobias Meyer brought in?" I would say, "Intensity, bite, and collaboration, and getting the best result." Then we started this Heavy Weight Express initiative and change of leadership also at the sales commercial level in DGF. The collaboration has been daily and very positive. In both ways, I would add.
I've always known that in our business, in Australia 1993, I had a friend and foe campaign with forwarders where we identified them as a friend, they would give us their smalls, or where we identified them as a foe, we would sell against them and take business from customers that they were giving to a forwarder a little bit on this Fast Forward model. But there were many forwarders that gave us their less than 50s, their less than 100s. So I've had this mindset, this sort of two hearts in my chest for forwarders. I know there's a forwarder in our group, and we collaborate very well. On the rest of the story, just imagine sometimes a box far bigger than the one on the floor there, but 200 kg, call up Kuehne+Nagel, and you're not a really a repeat shipper.
You're a bit of an ad hoc shipper. You call up Kuehne+Nagel, they turn up and their semi-trailer, the hiss of air brakes, and they jump out the cab, and they say, "Is that it?" Well, a lot of these shipments should be on our dedicated heavyweight routes that are coming to pick up something that is eight times that size. But maybe a forwarder is not really what they want. So there's quite a lot in this, and when you link it to the urgency drivers and the use cases, I'm just very comfortable with how we're selling against the forwarder, how we collaborate with our forwarder, and where we partner with forwarders, for just moving their smalls.
I'll add one thing. You think about the market share that DGF has in air freight. The two of us are working together to go grab market share from our competition, DGF on the air freight side. But w here we're going after Heavy Weight Express as well is not taking volume from our sister division, DGF. It is going out into the air freight industry and taking it from there.
Also, when speaking to Oscar, who has his strategic five-point plan in execution and a very clear focus on growth, I think in terms of timing, it was good to see that coming together with your sales campaign on finding growth in the heavyweight and joint approach of the identified accounts. Where you're not successful, well, he will be. I think that's a lengthy answer. I'm a bit confused now on this side. Alexia, is it you?
Yes. Thank you very much. I will ask three, but I will ask them one by one to make it easier. Firstly, on the net price change, thank you for sharing that information. We now can see more clearly the stick rate that you have historically had. Why would you say the stick rate post-COVID has been double what it was pre-COVID? You know the-
Which stick rate?
The pricing, net price change.
The net-
The 2.8%.
NPC. Why did it double in COVID, or?
No, why has it doubled today versus pre-COVID? I think you showed 1.7.
Oh, yeah. You are right. There was some 2.8, so it was a 4, and there was some 2.8s on that chart. It is very easy. It was only, I might be a year out here, seven or eight or nine years ago that we could properly measure NPC. We managed sort of in a fairly crude fashion, a GPI stick rate. The ability to manage it and have a phrase, and it be on the pricing blackboard means that we have got great commercial reporting every single month, right down to what our NPC is for local decision, what our NPC is for the big global CSI customers.
A country like Netherlands would say, "Well, my NPC is 5 on local decision," my customers. There are these big CSI customers where it is lower, so they will know all these different cuts of it, and all the leader boards that come with that.
I'll just say it's leadership focus from the pricing team, the ability to measure it right down to sales territory level. The ancillary programs that relate to NPC. I'll give you a very good example, Alexia. One of the things we measure is when we give at our TRB, which meets in every region once a week for the last 15 years to talk about large customer pricing requests. Sometimes a salesperson comes in and says they need to give a 10% discount. We say, "What more volume will you get?" One of the aggregated or by customer or by region, by country, by whatever, KPIs that fall out of this NPC reporting is we gave and we've done 62 GPI calls over the last two days.
Every single one of them has presented their net price change down, the 10% that they gave back to the customers, and then we expect a 4:1 ratio. So we expect 40% growth for a 10% type reduction. We had more than that, and we had a few that were less than that. So that type of sophistication, what I call one of these ancillary measures to NPC, and you put that all in the pot of every salesperson knowing it's the most important thing we've got. Had this whole campaign two years ago that four is the floor, and we ended, I think, at 3.8 that year. So it's one of the things to round out the question for everyone's interest that Express does very well. We're in 219 countries.
We can talk to those 219 countries either overnight directly or through six regional sales leaders and say, "This is the big deal, Heavy Weight Express or NPC. This is what we want in a month. This is when we're going to do a webinar with all your customers. This is when we're talking to you, and we're coming down to your region, and we're going to review these things." We can talk to the network in that way, and NPC is a great example of that, even though it's become a little bit harder to hold it as those years have gone by.
All right.
My-
Good. Muneeba?
I had two more, Martin. Can I ask them or no? Quickly, yeah. Weight load factor, can you give us a sense of where we are on the range? Because when you talked about the box, 25 kg, you're now 12 kg, it kind of assumes you can double your weight without adding extra cost. How should we think about utilization? I'll leave it there. Pass to Muneeba.
Yeah. So maybe I'll take the weight load factor. We have been able to achieve a +1% weight load factor year-over-year in our aviation network. A 1% aviation weight load factor improvement equates out to about EUR 80 million-EUR 100 million bottom line flow-through in our business. I think where the Smart Industrial Growth that John spoke about, where we grow also makes a material difference. The blue lanes that he referenced, growing faster out of the Americas, growing faster out of the Middle East back to Asia, were the two examples that he gave. That has a significant flow-through and improvement into our weight load factor.
Okay. Muneeba from Bank of America. So following on from the question Alexia just had on weight load factors, you seem quite comfortable on the capacity side of it. When will you need to add capacity? How much can you keep growing? Help us understand, if I put in 9% growth in weight for the next couple of years, when do you hit that capacity ceiling? Is my first question on capacity. Then on data centers and hyperscalers, what we've heard from the forwarders, and maybe, John, you can talk about that, is that they want to take more long-term capacity. They want to have visibility on the capacity they're taking and want to know that they can actually get their shipments.
Is that something you're seeing in Express as well, and what's the behavior of this customer base, and is that any different from the rest of the shipments you see?
Behavior of the forwarders or-
The hyperscalers. The hyperscaler demand.
Okay. Hyperscalers. Yeah.
You want to go first?
No, do your one first.
Okay. All right. The question was, with growing at 9%, when would we need to add capacity? That is a very simple question, and there is not a very simple answer to that because it really does depend on which lanes and where we are growing. Where we are underutilized in the network, you got three heavy driving lanes globally in the world, Asia to the U.S., Asia to Europe, Europe to the U.S. Every cargo airline in the world has a very high level of utilization on those sectors, and they have a lower level of utilization on the return sectors. That is what we are calling blue lanes. When that growth is happening on a blue lane, we do not need to add capacity. We are able to have a high absorption level and a nice improvement in our overall utilization.
When we grow on those driving lanes, what is critically important, and we have been able to do this, is with that Smart Industrial Growth on those lanes, we have got to be very disciplined in our pricing to make sure that when we do add that capacity, we add it with the margin that we are targeting in our business. Right now, we have been able to demonstrate both of those, in absorption on the blue lanes and adding the capacity when we need to priced the right way.
Just on the blue lanes, before I come to the other question there. When you look at these growth diamonds within DHL, they all represent different percentages of overall revenue. E-commerce is very big for us. Heavy Weight Express is big for us. Intra-Europe is big. Intra-Asia is big. Blue lanes now is getting to the point where it's 16%, 17% of divisional revenue. It's growing at 12% or 14% over the last two months. This is a program that's only been in place a year. We're really quite conscious of driving growth from the growth diamonds where we're going to get the most traction. It doesn't mean we don't pay attention to new energy. Small. It doesn't mean we don't pay attention to life science and healthcare. In fact, in that one, we're developing new products.
But just where our focus is at the minute is where we're getting the biggest return. Now, on hyperscalers, if I heard the question right, it might be a bit more of a question for forwarding, but the hyperscalers are scurrying around looking for capacity and finding it with DGF or finding it with Crane Worldwide or finding it with this guy or finding it with that guy. We are ready more to handle the ecosystem of upstream hyperscale, upstream providers to the big data centers, spare parts, et cetera. It sort of comes a bit later, if you will. I think it's a bit more of a forwarder question as I heard it.
Yeah, and let me chip in a couple of questions on this hyperscaler and how is data center logistics affecting the group overall. I think so far, and to a smaller extent, as a percentage of your network. I think right here, right now, it's indeed an interesting field, a new field for the forwarding guys, but still low single-digit percentage of the overall volume that they're doing. The same goes for supply chain, where the warehousing capabilities are obviously in high demand. That's typical for the group. You've got a very broad, diversified customer base with so many different verticals coming into play. There's always a number of strong drivers who were in periods of less strong growth than other verticals. You do a good job to find the right balance. Good.
Talking about easy questions, European de minimis, any comment you can give on how that plays out so far since 1st of July?
Yeah. Travis, do you want to jump in with the program? I think that is worth two minutes, and then I will jump in with the impact.
Yeah. Well, thanks, John. I think, we did an excellent job preparing with our systems and with the industry in terms of executing the removal of de minimis in July the 1st. I just give a lot of credit to our European colleagues, our IT colleagues for that six months of preparation leading up to that, and it was really a non-issue for us, operationally. We had one little change, the country of France at the last minute, were going to put in a charge, and they pulled that back 24 hours before it went live. We had to go in and reconfigure stuff. But operationally, it was a non-issue for us and executed extremely well.
On the commercial side, it was a bit of a non-issue. There were some volumes that went away that probably shouldn't have been on our network, weren't necessarily at the price we would be happy. A little bit similar to some of the big Chinese merchants, mega merchants into the U.S. We were already refining and profiling our profile with those customers before de minimis happened, and then when de minimis happened, it kind of answered it for itself. A little bit the same. I could not necessarily find the space on the line where it happened and we saw a drop. So non-issue operationally, but fantastic operational planning, and non-issue commercially.
Okay. Before we come to Daniel, that is right in front of you, Sebastian.
In value terms, how important is Heavy Weight Express now? And where would you like it to be in, say, five years' time?
Hmm. That's one of those easy but hard ones. Shipments over 50 kg are a significant part of our business. Not stalling for time, but if I just go back to the e-commerce thing for a second. E-commerce, when I was talking to many people from your industry, got up to one shipment in two. It's now closer to one shipment in three or one shipment in two and a half. The industry has evolved and so on and so forth. I see Heavy Weight Express is quite different because pointing to that box there and looking at the boxes on the video, the runway is significantly longer. When I say Heavy Weight Express, means very much defined, so we can measure it and all our commercial wizardry with it is shipments over 50 kg, is a significant part of our business, and it will only become more.
There will be a limit to how far that can go, obviously, because we don't want to get into that stage where we're impacting our revenue per kilo on the negative. But we're a document business that moved to packages. We're a package business that started moving more packages than documents. We became an IMP business. We started moving heavier weights. It's a significant part of our business. It'll become more. I think there is an end to the journey, but I see this as a decade program. We all think differently. Travis can comment.
Yeah.
He would articulate it differently.
Okay. I think, when you look at greater than 50-kg shipments in our network for 2025, it was around 2% of our shipments, but it was a significantly higher percentage of our total kilos that we carried in the network. If you think about the growth that we are already seeing in the second quarter this year, Heavy Weight Express is growing faster than that published Q2 9.4%. I definitely feel we have got the capacity, both in the air and on the ground, to double that business. I think we will do that over the next five years in the business. To John's point, this is going to be a reflection point over the next decade in terms of-
I think the thing that-
The importance of that.
Yeah. No. Thank you, Travis. That is right. Looking at it as sort of whether it is 20% a year, then you have doubled it up over five years at that sort of CAGR. I think the thing that is really important to restate here is that global shipping has changed, and global trade has changed, and global trade continues to evolve and change. The analogy I use, the water will keep flowing, has keep flowing. It just goes in different rivulets, and it ends up at a different place. Customers are dealing with every single day that that market shut down. How can we find a new one? They send their commercial people to Malaysia, try and find new customers. "DHL, can you go to Malaysia?
Can we pivot those volumes from that distribution center to Malaysia very quickly?" This is the type of point I tried to make in the bottom half of my Smart Industrial Growth side, is customers are demanding different things from us, and they're getting satisfied by different criteria, looking for and getting satisfied by different criteria than they did before, which is economic value, reliability, speed, customers, customer satisfaction. If that happens to cost more than the forwarder, fine. It may be the case that it's actually less than their forwarder pricing. There's no doubt, as I said, that customers' growth plans are being impacted by these types of things that are happening in the world. As I read the newspaper, there's no end to how these things will evolve. That talks to the runway on this product.
All right, we're coming to [Daniel Shashua], over.
Hi. Thanks very much. I just have a general question around, you talked in the past about being quite import-centric but not yet majority import. I suppose to retain share of global trade or your exposure to it, and given that global trade is increasingly, potentially Asian export driven, how do you make yourself fit for the future? Having a high share with European exporters is one thing, but having a high share with Asian exporters is another. How do you move your customer base across?
Well, I don't know whether I've got that one. Import Express, being an import business, is just a billing option. It's just those customers that want to pay at destination and want to take control of the goods from the factory. For finished goods and spare parts, that's how most freight moves, and that's why the product was so successful when we launched it, so we could take it into a customer's ship from the world to your desk, to your warehouse, on your normal account. It was very effective in terms of being able to penetrate a world of freight routing that was typically destination build and then typically going by forwarder as opposed to an express operator. I think your question was about how do we grow out of Asia, or-
Yeah. Is this working? Yeah. I am just trying to say, if the exporters from China are taking market share, is your customer footprint too Western, and how do you become more penetrated into the Chinese exporter market?
Well, just-
We should talk about our market share in Asia, John, on the-
Yeah. How do we maintain it, or?
We are market share leaders in Asia on the export business already. If I understand your question correctly, that is a complement to our business, with Asia and China being the leading exporter.
A BYD or something taking share in the Western markets-
Yeah, but then-
Yes, equivalent to-
Okay, I get it now. BYD, I visited them the other day. No surprise that they are taking share because they can do 100% charge in nine minutes, and when it is -30, in another three minutes, they can do 100% charge. There is no doubt that they will be taking share. We are an established logistics partner with them, all elements of the group. We have Chinese overseas salespeople on that map that are visiting BYD in their different factories. They are propositioning us with trying to get some of their vehicles into our fleet in Europe. I think the commercial setup that we have, an approach called China Market Growth, we are working with these Chinese customers in China, and then we have an overseas network.
If the drift of market share on automotive drifts from Tesla to BYD, we are very well positioned to benefit from that and any other industry in Asia where it is drifting back. That is exactly our CMG, China Market Growth, working with these big Chinese companies that are either setting up in the rest of the world. In Egypt, they meet their Chinese overseas salesperson and do their stuff, or how we represent ourselves to CATL, Envision, BYD, all the Midea, which is the largest producer of white goods in the world now with 30 factories all over the world, how we sell to these people. I think we are in a good position there. Thank you for the question.
I just had a really quick question on if we had to repeat the COVID sort of experience with the massive peak in the B2C volumes that we saw and then the big decline we saw after that, would you do anything differently? Are there any lessons learned from that? Why did the business We were just following demand, I assume, but we pivoted quite a lot to B2C, and now we are talking a lot more about B2B, and I just wanted to understand whether there was sort of a change in the business' thinking over the last five years.
Because of B2C?
Well, you referenced the pandemic period as well. I think the pandemic period did teach us a lot, where all that belly capacity went on the ground, and we did get flooded with that B2C business during that timeframe. As we looked a year later and two years later, what we certainly recognized is that the margin on that business was not great. We started to optimize the customer's volume that was on our network, really as a result of that. The lesson we learned, we would take into the future in the event of something like that happening again, and we would be very guarded on what we let into our network.
Yeah. I think we've got to be quite specific. The e-commerce business was highly accretive to our EBIT. The last mile got better and better because leave on doorstep or leave in safe place. So delivery was even more efficient than B2B kind of thing. Origin, picking up 5,000 pieces. They whiz around our sort. They fit in the corner of a van. They're very light, everything good. What particularly happened in e-commerce of why it's lower than it was two things. Some of them went to a DDI mode or realized that the margins in their particular product weren't able to sustain express transportation. But we've got many of the ones we found in 2015 still trading with us as TDI. Some of them migrated to DDI.
I think the point that's worth clarifying is the mega merchants in China weren't in a position to sustain those volumes. We're talking about 400 tons a night in quarter four 2024. I think it was. I would say this in front of Shane, so I'm not talking. That caused us to reestablish a different footing with some of these customers of what we would do and what we wouldn't do, what lanes we're interested in. Shane, we're going to the world, Malta, Israel, as well as U.S.A. in a big way. So U.S.A., we put a weight limit on it, meaning higher than 10 kg. Everything in Europe, we took it as it was, and we just found a better place with them. So I think we did learn lessons with it.
The lessons with B2B we're much more familiar with because we've had this sort of, sounds a bit vulgar, but this red and yellow card program in place for 20 years, where we find a business that's come onto the network errantly, really, and it doesn't deserve to be on our network. I think the customer, in many cases, should be using e-commerce, Pablo's division, or a slower and less expensive service because the value of their T-shirts or whatever they're sending, they wouldn't even expect an express delivery.
Well, at the very beginning, I told you this is going to be a 90-minute format, and so it is. Thanking you, John, Travis for giving that insight and tons of food for further thought, I am pretty sure, with our audience here. Thank you for you guys out there following. The questions we got from Patrick, José, and Jake Lax, I think we sort of had that all covered in the context of the other questions. With that, I wish you a good rest of the day. Good afternoon. Thank you, and talk to you soon.
Thank you very much.