Welcome to the Drägerwerk full year 2023 earnings call. I'm Moritz, the call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in the listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Stefan Dräger, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our conference call on our financial results for the fiscal year 2023. I have with me today Gert-Hartwig Lescow, CFO, as well as Thomas Fischler and Nikolaus Hammerschmidt, both investor relations. We would like to take you through the results of the fiscal year 2023 with a presentation that we made available on our web page this morning. Following the presentation, we will open the floor to your questions. Let's get started on page 5 with the business highlights. One year ago, we promised to return to growth and profitability in 2023. To achieve this goal, we announced to focus on the following five main topics: leveraging intact market growth, improving our supply capabilities, increasing our prices, optimizing our free cash flow, and last but not least, strengthening our cost awareness.
One year later, we confirmed that we kept our promise and even exceeded our own expectations. With a currency-adjusted increase of more than 2%, our order intake in 2023 was slightly above the high prior year level. This demonstrates that demand for our technology for life remains high and our markets remain intact. After the easing of the supply chain constraints, our net sales developed very well in 2023. In nominal terms, an increase by 11%, net of currency effects by more than 13%. This was particularly due to the improved delivery capability and the continued good demand for our products and services, but also because of the surge in demand for ventilators at the beginning of the year. In addition to this development, we counted rising costs through, on average, a 7% price increase.
Both the good demand and the effective sales price management paved the way for a significant improvement in earnings and a remarkable optimization of our cash flow. Together with the reduction in inventories, the positive result generated a strong improvement of free cash flow. Last but not least, we reduced our functional expenses by almost 3%, thanks also to a consistent cost discipline in all areas. Hence, we delivered on our promise to strengthen cost awareness. Now we move on to page 6. Overall, we saw a strong business performance in 2023 with a successful return to growth and profitability. Net sales totaled at around EUR 3.4 billion, and our EBIT improved significantly by EUR 255 million to EUR 166 million. The EBIT margin consequently rose by around 8 percentage points to almost 5%.
Via the normalization of our delivery capacity, the continued good demand, and our successful expense management were clearly the main drivers for our strong business performance. There were also highlights in other areas, which brings me to some important product approvals and the status of the FDA warning letter. While the warning letter has not yet been lifted, we received FDA clearance for several key products in 2023, such as the new Atlan anesthesia devices, the Babylog ventilators, the Babyroo open care warmer, and the Evita ventilators V600 and V800, as well as VentStar Helix. In October, we also received important clearances in regard to our Infinity CentralStation ICS and our portable M300 devices. These releases come with cybersecurity enhancements and improvements that are directly associated with our warning letter and are a key milestone for us to close out the remaining commitments.
So we remain focused on all related topics in the Warning Letter for which the FDA will conduct a reinspection for final closure at their discretion. Another highlight in 2023 was our share performance. With an increase of more than 20%, both our common and p referred shares developed very well and even outperformed the German SDAX. However, while the share price performance in 2023 was good, we cannot be satisfied with the current valuation of our company. In this regard, it is good that we are becoming more attractive when it comes to our dividend policy. I will come back to this issue later in this presentation. Moving to page 7. Ladies and gentlemen, we have successfully returned to growth and profitability in 2023. I would now like to share with you our three mid-term corporate objectives.
Corporate objective number one is profitability first, which means that we will focus more strongly on earnings growth in the future, even at the expense of net sales growth in selected cases. With corporate objective number two, innovation leadership, we want to revitalize our innovation, deploy this strength successfully to our markets, and become the first choice for our customers. And last but not least, we strive to enhance the level of competence on interoperability and systems business in order to achieve our corporate objective number three. Through working on these objectives, we want to improve our DVA with a positive DVA in 2024 and also in all subsequent years. On page 8, details of the corporate objectives. Let me first go into the objective number one, profitability first. Profitability is the prerequisite for our successful longevity.
Our aim is therefore to increase our profitability, our EBIT margin, by an average of 1 percentage point per year over the coming years. The environment for this is good because the global markets for medical and safety technology offer an excellent growth environment for our Technology for Life. In order to sustainably increase profitability, we will focus on supporting our margins through selling price enforcement and careful cost and expense management, aligning our activities even more closely with our customers and consistently pushing ahead with our own initiatives. This might also mean that we will exit certain markets. Just a few weeks ago, we announced that Dräger will discontinue the business activities of the MSI in Hagen at the end of the current year 2024. Dräger's MSI product portfolio is designed for the analysis of flue gas from fossil fuels. Customers are the HVAC markets and chimney sweepers.
But due to the impending energy transition and the changes in air conditioning technology, this business segment does not offer any prospect of sufficient long-term profitability. Dräger is therefore exiting the fossil fuel flue gas analysis business. Just like in this example, we will continue to restructure or discontinue businesses that are not sufficiently profitable. Moving on to corporate objective number two, innovation leadership. Technology for life is our guiding philosophy. Technology stands for inventiveness, technology push, and engineering excellence, which are deeply ingrained in our DNA. The company history started with a patent, and each year we file about 100 new ones. In 2023, for example, 278 patents were granted for Dräger. We have many products that are considered particularly innovative and markets that we are leading in certain aspects. But there are also areas we still need to improve.
We need strong partners and passionate experts to keep up the pace. This means we have to become more open to working with third parties and no longer develop everything ourselves. We have already taken the first steps in this direction. In areas where we cannot bring our own developments to market maturity quickly enough, we will also enter into targeted development with partners. Already today, we offer OEM products in the areas of patient monitoring and transport ventilations and will continue to do so in the future. Our target portfolio is also about reducing hardware variants and increasing scalability through software functionality. At the same time, we invest in commercial innovations to develop business models that meet the requirement of our existing and future customers. Ultimately, of course, we are interested in how innovative our customers perceive us to be.
In the end, this perception is decisive for how much money customers are willing to pay for our products and services, how much we can sell, and how well we can defend our prices, and not how much money we ourselves have spent on our innovation. However, as this customer perception itself is not easily measurable, we have decided that we will rather be measuring our progress with the innovation share, the share of new products launched in the last three years in proportion of total product sales. To conclude my explanations, let's look at corporate objective number three, competence in interoperability and systems business. Interoperability is the ability of machines, devices, sensors, and people to connect with each other and communicate. This approach supports our customers' decision-making process through greater transparency by linking up data and providing recommendations.
As an example, for our medical business, we are developing a digital ecosystem based on the IEEE SDC communication standard to offer our customers these valuable functionalities. This will allow secure interoperability of medical equipment and clinical information systems at workstations. By combining and analyzing data from different systems, we develop new digital applications to assist clinical decisions, improve workflows, and ultimately automate care wherever feasible. To support this corporate objective, we will be focusing on training large parts of our sales and service employees in interoperability and system topics. So much for this short overview on our objectives from now to the coming years. Before I hand over to Gert-Hartwig Lescow for the review of our financials, I would like to highlight our activities on sustainability on page 9. In 2023, we started to further expand our sustainability organization.
This will ensure that we can track the achievement of our sustainability goals even more effectively. We are also taking account of the increased regulatory and communication requirements on this topic. In addition, we began implementing comprehensive measures as part of our strategic areas of action in 2023. With that, we are taking sustainability at Dräger to the next level. Many of our measures in the three core areas of environment, social, and governance have already been successful. For example, we have so far reduced our CO2 emissions by 31% compared to our base year 2015. We are therefore still on track to reduce our CO2 emissions by a third in the period from 2015 to 2025. Our goal remains climate neutrality by 2045. In 2023, we received good ratings for sustainability again.
For example, the EcoVadis Institute, the world's largest provider of sustainability ratings for companies, awarded us Gold status for the third time in a row. This puts us in the top 5% of companies rated by EcoVadis. In addition, we were rated A by MSCI, and we defended our prime status with the ISS ESG rating. With that, I turn over to Gert-Hartwig for a review of the financials before I will come back with the summary and the outlook later. Gert-Hartwig, please.
Thank you, Stefan. I would also like to welcome everybody to our conference call for our results for 2023. Please turn to page 11 for a view on the Dräger Group. As usual, I will be stating currency-adjusted figures whenever referring to growth rates. Stefan said demand for our technology for life remained high in 2023.
Overall, order intake in 2023 rose by more than 2% to EUR 3.3 billion. After the first three quarters had contributed roughly EUR 800 million order entries each, Q4 contributed another EUR 860 million. When looking at the regional trends, both Europe and the Americas contributed to growth over the full year, while orders in AAA declined. Year-over-year growth and net sales surpassed growth in order entry clearly. EUR 3.4 billion corresponds to a plus of around 13% against the prior year. In the fourth quarter, net sales growth came down considerably since the comparable prior year figure, which was much more challenging. In Q4 2022, our supply chain had already started to improve. Our gross profit margin also improved in Q4, leading to an improvement of 2.6 percentage points and thus to 43.3% for the year as a whole.
The improvement was especially due to a higher production and service utilization as well as more effective price management. Cost control was and remains a top priority throughout the organization. In spite of higher personnel costs for German employees, functional costs fell by around 3% in the fourth quarter and by around 1% for the year. Obviously, a declining cost base cannot be maintained in an inflationary environment, so do expect a rising cost base in the current year. As a result of the significant increase in sales and gross margin and effective price management, earnings improved massively. After three profitable quarters, the fourth quarter was, as is typical, the strongest quarter of the year with an EBIT of EUR 90 million. For the year as a whole, EBIT improved by EUR 255 million and reached EUR 166 million.
Because of the strong earnings development, our Dräger Value Added returned to positive territory in the fiscal year. Let us now take a closer look at the development of the two divisions, starting with the medical division on page 12. In the fourth quarter, order intake in the medical division remained nearly stable compared with the same period in the previous year. In the Africa, Asia, Australia region, demand fell sharply after having risen significantly in the same quarter of the previous year due to the surge in demand for ventilators in China. Hence, this is mainly base effect. In Europe, on the other hand, order intake increased significantly. Looking at the full year, order entry was around 1% lower than in the prior year. This was due to lower demand for ventilators and anesthesia machines as well as patient monitoring.
On the other hand, there was noticeable growth in the service business and in the area of hospital infrastructure. Net sales in Q4 were just under 1% higher than the previous year with an increase in Europe and the Americas regions and a decline in AAA. In the full year, net sales increased by more than 10% driven by significant growth in all regions, which was due in particular to the noticeable improvement in delivery capability. Another reason for the positive development was the significant increase in demand for ventilators in China at the beginning of the year, which resulted in a very significant boost to net sales of AAA during the first quarter. Overall, and in addition to ventilators, hospital infrastructure, thermal regulation, anesthesia devices, as well as consumables were the main growth drivers in 2023. And on top of that, our service business performed well.
The gross margin increased in the full year by 1.7 percentage points due to the improved production and service utilization as well as the effective price management. High net sales, an increased gross margin, and lower expenses led to an improved profitability compared to the prior year period. In the fourth quarter, our EBIT in the medical division came to more than EUR 39 million. Our full year EBIT went from an operational loss of more than EUR 90 million to a clearly positive result of around EUR 37 million. Our EBIT margin in the medical division increased to 1.9% in the full year. Coming to our safety division that recorded a very strong performance in 2023. We're on page 13 now. In the fourth quarter, business development in the safety division continued to be favorable. Order intake increased by roughly 13% thanks to growth in all regions.
Product-wise, demand was mainly driven by gas detection devices and our service business. After 12 months, order entry was up by over 7% due to the same reasons like in Q4, but primarily because of our gas detection business, which had been increasingly affected by supply chain problems during the previous year and therefore benefited in 2023 from pent-up demand. Net sales increased by roughly 12% in the fourth quarter and by around 17% in the full year, with all regions contributing during both reporting periods. In addition to the noticeable improvement in delivery capability, this was also due to the positive order trend. The gross margin went up significantly due to higher production and service utilization as well as effective price enforcement. For the 12th month, the improvement was 3.8 percentage points. Functional expenses remained roughly at the prior year level in 2023.
High net sales, an increased gross margin, and slightly lower expenses supported a strong EBIT improvement in the safety division. In Q4, the EBIT amounted to just over EUR 50 million, coming from around EUR 33 million in the prior year quarter. For the full year, the improvement is even more pronounced. While the EBIT amounted to around EUR 129 million after roughly EUR 2 million in the prior year, the EBIT margin also made a big leap by 9.1 percentage points to 9.2 percentage points. All in all, very good development in our safety division. Let's move on to some key ratios on page 14, starting with cash flow, which was one of our focus topics throughout the year. The improvement in profitability drove a substantially higher cash flow generation, with operating cash flow increasing by more than EUR 334 million to roughly EUR 190 million.
The positive effect on cash flow from the higher earnings was further supported by good working capital development. The reduction in inventory contributed to cash generation. Investments were on the planned level, mainly for replacement investments. At around EUR 122 million, free cash flow was clearly positive for the full year. The key event for our cash flow from financing activities was the cash outflow for the repayment of the remaining profit participation certificates in the amount of around EUR 209 million. This was partially financed by a new loan of EUR 100 million. Both transactions took place in the first quarter. This is the main reason why, in spite of the earnings improvement, our liquidity position at the end of the year was lower.
For the current year, we expect to generate sufficient free cash flow to compensate for the higher dividend payments and be able to increase our cash position. Dräger's balance sheet is in good shape. Net financial debt to EBITDA has improved quarter-over-quarter. With a leverage of 0.6 at the end of the year, the company is back to healthy leverage levels. The significantly improved operating profit and the slight increase in capital employed resulted in a return on capital employed of 10.9%. The equity ratio has improved as well and climbed by roughly 3 percentage points to around 46% in 2023. As Stefan said in his opening remarks, this will trigger a higher payout ratio to shareholders for the past fiscal year. Moving to page 15. 2023 was the year we completed the simplification of our capital structure.
With the cancellation of the participation certificates early 2020 and the redemption of the PCs in the following three years, we have concentrated Dräger's market cap from five to only two listed securities. In total, the payment for the redemption of all participation certificates amounted to approximately EUR 470 million and was partially financed with a capital increase in the amount of some EUR 76 million in 2020. From this year on, the profit goes entirely to our shareholders. This will be directly apparent in higher earnings per share. Moving to page 16. On the next page, on this page, we have illustrated the effect from the earnings concentration on the remaining two listed Dräger securities, the preferred shares and the common shares.
If we calculate the 2023 EPS on a pro forma basis with the legacy capital structure prior to the cancellation of the PCs in 2020, then the EPS today is 27% higher than it would have been, including the former three series of the participation certificates. This also takes into account the dilution effects from the capital increase to partially finance the transaction. The capital structure today is much more favorable to our shareholders. Handing over to you, Stefan.
Yes, thank you, Gert-Hartwig. And to build on your remarks on the capital structure, the concentration of distributed earnings to Dräger shareholders is a journey that started much earlier than 2020. The cancellation of the remaining participation certificates is actually only the last step. When I took office as the chairman in 2005, 35% of Dräger Medical and the respective earnings were owned by Siemens.
At that time, Dräger's shareholders overall were only entitled to some 35% of the earnings next to the JV partner and PCs. At that time, there were more than 1.4 million PCs outstanding. In a first and second step, in 2006 and 2010, we acquired the shares of the JV partner, reducing its portion from 35 to 25 and later from 25% to zero. The untangling of the JV cost around EUR 360 million at that time and required a capital increase in preferred shares and the listing of the common shares to raise the money for that buyback of the Siemens share. Two years later, in 2012, we made a buyback of participation certificates worth roughly EUR 120 million. Again, Dräger's shareholders contributed, this time with a low dividend.
While this buyback lifted the portion of earnings attributable to the shareholders to some 70%, still roughly 30% of earnings belonged to the remaining participation certificate holders. Due to the corona time in spring 2020, we used the boost in their business to cancel all the remaining PCs. That step cost around EUR 470 million and required another small capital increase in preferred shares. Finally, today, with the completed redemption of the last PCs, the entire earnings are attributable to the Dräger shareholders. This was the final step in simplifying the capital structure and concentrating all earnings to Dräger's shareholders. It took almost 20 years to complete, but as I have said many times before, at Dräger, we take a long-term perspective. For a long time, Dräger shareholders have contributed with reduced dividend and with dilution.
However, starting now in the year 2024, Dräger shareholders can enjoy the benefit of this long-term effort and of the contribution they made over the long period. So moving to page 19, the dividend proposal. The finely simplified capital structure and, more importantly, the sound financials and earnings open up the possibility to incorporate an attractive payout policy going forward. Provided an equity ratio greater than 40%, we will be paying out at least 30% of net profit. For 2023, this increases the dividend from the minimum level of EUR 0.13 to EUR 1.74 for the common and from EUR 0.19 to EUR 1.80 for the preferred shares. Now, last but not least, the outlook on page 20. Ladies and gentlemen, 2023 was a successful year. We have successfully returned to growth and profitability in 2023.
Double-digit top-line growth and a major year-over-year swing in earnings of more than EUR 250 million. But to be fair, it is important to recognize that this development has benefited from some tailwind. A strong order backlog from 2022 and some corona-related orders from China at the beginning of the year 2023 had a positive impact on net sales and earnings. These two effects will be absent in the current fiscal year. Despite missing tailwinds, we expect to remain on a growth trajectory. We expect an increase in net sales of 1%-5% net of currency effects. As a result, we are planning on an EBIT margin of 2.5%-5.5%. As I said, when talking about our midterm corporate objectives, we are targeting a further improvement in profitability in the following years.
While due to the normal fluctuations of the business, not every given year will show a steady margin expansion, but over a several-year horizon, we will improve the EBIT margin by 1 percentage point per year on average. With this, I would li ke to end the presentation and hand over to the operator to open the line for your questions, please.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchscreen telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please.
And the first question comes from Oliver Reinberg from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Thanks so much for taking my questions. I have three. The first one will be on the kind of midterm guidance. I guess it's quite encouraging to see that you're putting profitability more in the focus. But I guess what would be even more helpful is to have a kind of specific margin commitment for a specific year. So first question would be just, is it something that you still consider to provide at some stage going forward when certain milestones have been met? Second question also relates to the midterm guidance. Can you just provide any kind of color how you think about the phasing of this 1 percentage point margin improvement? Is it more back-and-loaded? And also, what kind of sales growth assumption have you embedded to reach this kind of profitability improvement goal?
Thirdly, can you just provide an update on China, what you see in general in terms of market environment? What kind of impact do you see from the anti-corruption campaign and also the discussion about changes in the procurement systems? Thanks very much.
Okay. The profitability growth. As I said, Mr. Reinberg, we expect and plan for 1 percentage point per year on average. So that starts in the year 2023. 2023, I mentioned we had a tailwind. So subtracting the tailwind from the particularly high ventilator orders due to corona at the beginning of 2023 in China and the backlog that we had and then the return of our ability to deliver from that backlog, subtracting these two, the adjusted margin on EBIT would be around 3% for 2023.
So then you see from the guidance for 2024, we give the midpoint is in around 4%. And so naturally, then in 2025, it should be 5%. And that I would expect from our planning assumptions should continue for a few years. And it's neither back nor front-loaded. It should be steady, 1 percentage point per year. However, not exactly. That would not be fair and possible to be exact by the point. But on average, 1 percentage point per year for the next, say, up to five years to come, we plan to, say, come out and share a true mid-term guidance at a later point in time. So it's when we have further improved our visibility, in particular in the medical division, there we have been working on some issues. I don't mean the Warning Letter. I mean on the portfolio issues and monitoring.
So looking quite promising quite now from my perspective. But please bear with us a couple more months at least so then we have a better visibility. And then we can tell when we have a midterm, a true midterm plan for you. So then left open a point is for China. As I mentioned, as part of the tailwind from last year, as much of headwind for this year and maybe also next year. As you exactly stated, the anti-corruption, which is, by the way, not only in the medical field but particularly strong in the medical field. And the general, say, I would probably already say crisis of China where several aspects like real estate and other things are, say, putting a burden on the growth and financing.
So there is some suspicion that the government actions are partially have the objective to reduce the spending just because there's no money available. So my expectation is that what stayed for the remainder of this year of China would be quite difficult and more in the red compared to the expectations we had ourselves one year ago. And so in maybe two years, it will come back. So that's not so likely that it will be completely closed or cut off. However, strategically, it's becoming more challenging, in particular for medical technology, seems to be the field where the government focus is the most and even more than electric cars or rail transportation was in the past. The focus has shifted after corona towards becoming independent and self-contained in medical technology. So that makes life for all, say, global players more challenging in China. But there are opportunities.
We continue to invest and to grow, we still hire. We recently received the certificate for a particular innovative company in China that gives us some tax breaks. So it's definitely worthwhile pursuing. However, not going as fast as it used to in the past three to five years.
Perfect. That's helpful. Can you just follow up? What kind of sales growth assumption have you embedded into your midterm guidance to achieve this one percentage point of margin improvement?
That's part of more detailed guidance for the midterm other than taking a look at the last few years. But we'll provide more specificity, as Stefan Dräger had said, once we have more clarity on some of the open issues on the medical side.
Understood. Thanks so much.
The next question comes from Christian Ehmann from Warburg Research. Please go ahead. Hello, everyone.
Thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering how we should look at the phasing of the, let's say, divestments of certain business units you're trying to talk about, especially what should we think about the timelines for these kind of divestments? Thank you very much.
There is, say, compared to the overall size of Dräger and the great diversity that we have in Dräger with the many businesses and markets that we serve, all these are relatively small. The opportunity is in the detail. So on a detailed level of product or country or business for a specific product in a specific country, we will find ways to improve that can mean a divestment. We already have at this point three.
So maybe it has not been so much received attention that already a while ago, we discontinued our own alcohol interlock business in the United States and sold this to a partner. We're still making the devices and the business in some other countries but no longer in the US. So then later, during the course of the recent past, we divested the business of the fire detection systems in the Netherlands, which is a non-typical Dräger business for, say, office and administration and industrial buildings. It has not much to do with the gas detection systems that are for offshore oil rigs and, say, underground mines in a more demanding environment. And the most recent, we closed the business of, as I mentioned in my speech in MSE in Hagen, that's for chimney sweepers to measure flue gas in the exhaust of fossil fuel furnace for oil and gas.
There may other opportunities come in the past, but they need to be discussed in detail with the people that are affected. We do not publish a plan so looking far ahead. From the overall perspective, these are smaller steps that do not affect the nature of Dräger. However, all help together to pursue corporate objective number one, to improve profitability by strengthening our strengths and so eliminating weaknesses that we have identified.
Thank you very much. That's very helpful. Thanks.
And the next question comes from Utkarsh Denda f rom AlphaValue. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Stefan. And thank you for taking my questions. First is regarding your midterm EBIT margin ambition that you just highlighted. So what is your benchmark or ambition, let's say, in the longer term?
The reason why I ask is, who are you benchmarking against to try and understand what kind of a runway we have to expand margins? So that would be the first question. Secondly, on dividend policy, do you intend it to be at least 30% payout ratio, or will it be progressive? By progressive, as in in the future years, do you intend to at least match the previous year's dividend, or will it be just 30% payout every year and it could move up and down over the years? That is on the dividend policy. And thirdly, in terms of your order intake to sales ratio, when do you expect it to be more of a normalized level? And by normalized, I mean greater than one, your order book basic order intake being higher than sales.
Do you have a timeline to that or some sense of when we could be at that level? Because most growth businesses, ideally, would be at more than one book-to-bill ratio. So these will be three. I have one more, which I will probably ask you once we run through these three questions.
Okay. Stefan Dräger speaking. I start with your first question. What are the benchmarks? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Overall, there is no company directly comparable to all of Dräger with that similar diversity. However, we do have benchmarks for medical and for safety for the divisions. For the safety divisions, for instance, you can use Honeywell or MSA as a benchmark or 3M. And for the medical division, there is typically the medical technology companies such as Getinge is publicly listed from Sweden or Philips or Siemens Healthineers.
However, these are a little bit different because medical imaging has a little bit different mechanics than we have. And from that level that these are, there is no particular reason on the longer term why we should not be on the same level. So that's to your question number one, benchmark. On the dividend, you observed that correctly, that the policy is a payout ratio of 30% of the earnings to the shareholders as dividend. So that is the goal. It can go up and down with the earnings, so depending on this develops. And so there is, say so that is the general policy.
The last point, the book-to-bill ratio in 2023, that was the tailwind that I described, was that we came when we started January 1st into 2023, we had a far too large order book because, say, larger definitely than we wanted because we could not deliver because we could not build the product because we were short of components because of supply chain issues that had already started actually in the mid-2021 after the corona times, as you all remember. That was the starting point. As you can see, in 2023, our sales rose by 13% and orders only by 2%, which is good, I think, that it came down because we should go back to normal delivery times to our customers to satisfy their expectation and also to remain competitive to other market competitors who have short delivery times.
There are quite many cases where whether you get rewarded in order or not depends whether you can deliver quickly and on time. So I keep telling my production people, "Don't be too worried if in the afternoon, you have run out of work to do because all orders have been processed." That's actually a desirable condition. So on average, order intake on sales should be on a par. But last year, luckily, we processed more orders than we received new orders. Perhaps in addition, for 2024, it will be around 1. We would expect 2025 to be a year where, again, a net order entry would be slightly ahead of our net sales development.
Okay. Perfect. That's clear. So 2024, around 1, and then in 2025, slightly ahead. That's right?
Yep. Okay.
Just one last question that I have is, so with the increasing focus on climate change and global warming in particular, and given the kind of news that we saw over the last few months or last year or so at least of wildfires and stuff like that, do you see that as necessarily a longer-term tailwind for the safety business?
Yes, in two aspects. First, so improving the traditional energy industries like the oil and gas industry is probably the biggest lever in all. If we can make a contribution to make these more climate-friendly, to control the methane emissions that has become a big topic in the United States, to measure and control methane emissions from oil and gas installations, and there we do have expertise and competence in this, then this is a boost for our safety business.
Plus, the new energies like hydrogen and even a battery factory, we are very positive that it will contribute to our business. So the week before last, I was visiting Northvolt in Skellefteå in Sweden and met with Peter Carlsson to see what we can do together in his plans in other locations. So there is quite some potential in this, rightfully so.
Thank you so much. That's all from my end.
And the next question comes from Alexander Galitsa from Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you for taking the question. The first one, I want to better understand the safety division profitability dynamics. I think during the course of 2023, the margin range of maybe 7%, 8%, 9% was sort of presented as a sustainable development. But now we learned that there were some windfalls related to the pent-up demand.
What would you say is the sort of sustainable margin of this division if you strip out the benefits you received?
The windfall that we mentioned was not so attributable to safety because one part of it was the ventilator surge in demand for the change in corona policy in China at the end of 2022, 2023. That was medical. And so yes, we had some, say, order backlog in particular on the fire and gas detection systems, that safety. So that had a particular nice growth in 2023, probably will continue to grow in the future, maybe not exactly at the same roaring speed anymore. On the other hand, we had some, say, headwind on the safety margin because we had write-offs, one-time expenses for FFP mask production sites that we built in 2020 in corona times. And they earned their money.
That was already worthwhile in the course of 2021 and then part of 2022. However, it's a little bit unfair because the benefit was reaped already fast and then was paid for the investment. And there were some, say, final write-offs for 3 sites that we closed in 2023 were included. So that's a one-time effect downward that will not reoccur in 2024. So there is no reason to believe the margin would go down in the future for safety. So it still has potential to contribute to the overall profitability growth of Dräger.
Understood. Thank you. And then maybe another one. I noticed in the presentation, you talk about positive Dräger Value Added in 2024. I believe by your calculation, to get there, you need at least the EBIT margin of 4% for the group. So can you confirm that?
Are you basically positive that the midpoint, so to speak, of the margin target is sort of your confident base case scenario for 2024?
So firstly, yes, your calculation is accurate. And second is also that we don't have a preference for either side of the guidance. I should also add that for the computation of the DVA, which is an internal non-IFRS metric, we've decided to increase the WACC to reflect the higher interest rate from 7%-9%. So in 2023, we have computed the DVA with the 7%. And for 2024 onwards, we will be using 9%.
So that makes it more, say, challenging to reach that positive DVA.
Okay. But if you're talking about being rather confident, then that should be your preferred or base case scenario.
Yes. And your computation is correct. And that's based on the 9%.
Understood.
Thank you.
And we do have a follow-up question from Oliver Reinberg from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my follow-up. Probably three if I may. I mean, firstly, can you just say a word on current trading? I would assume that given the base effect from China, Q1 will be tough. So just to get it out there, is it reasonable to assume the kind of CA decline in Q1? Secondly, on the Warning Letter, how to think about it? Is basically you're now just waiting for the FDA to come back with a reinspection, or is there still any kind of internal work related to the pending Warning Letter?
And then thirdly, on monitoring, because you mentioned that the progress on monitoring is a requirement for setting this kind of formal midterm guidance, can you just talk to the nature of the missing part you're still having in monitoring and also what gives you the confidence that now more progress is being made given we had quite a few delays in the past?
Thank you. Perhaps I start with current trading. Your observation is quite accurate. Obviously, on the medical side, we will be working with a somewhat lower momentum. At the same time, as I said earlier, we still have a somewhat elevated order book, in particular on the safety side. And within every quarter, the last month typically is the most important one. So it's a bit too early to have a full judgment on the first quarter.
But to your question, we are working against somewhat of a headwind on the medical side when it comes to sales realization. But I'm not saying that we will necessarily be declining against the prior year quarter. It's too early to say that.
Well, your second follow-up question on the warning letter. So to my knowledge, all prerequisites that the FDA demanded should be in place, and all actions that needed to be completed are done. However, it is, of course, at the discretion of the FDA. And I wouldn't want to, say, put out any expectation when they find the time and the resources to act and then do a site inspection again, which is required for the closing of the warning letter. So yes, it is still open. However, it does not have any adverse effect on the business.
It's just a little bit of, yeah, taking up some resources and attention without having actually an adverse effect or a downward effect or limitations on the business. On the monitoring, that you listen to very carefully, that there are some things that we are working on that, when finished, will allow us to have enough visibility to have a midterm guidance and to share it with you. These involve, say, different parts of the company and also external partners. So to not, say, put these at risk, we unfortunately can't share that today with you.
Okay. Understood. Thank you.
And the next question comes from Jean-Marc Müller from JMS Invest. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello. A couple of questions from my side, clarifications mainly. Your EBIT in medical was EUR 37 million. And I understand that this profited from one-off business in China, etc.
I mean, you mentioned that a couple of times. You also said that on group level, if you adjust for this one-off, the margins would have been around 3% instead of the 4.9%. So if I do the computation, we can basically argue that roughly EUR 60 million EBIT or so was something which had to do with the ventilator business in China. Am I correct in my calculation that medical would have been negative EBIT, medical would have been negative again in 2023 without these extra sales in the first half?
Not quite. Not quite. Let me explain. Firstly, there is, of course, a different way on how you look at one-time effect. When we talk about a run rate, we're referring to a starting point for improving profitability. And we are looking at the strong order book with which we started the year 2023.
We could look at it as a one-time attack because it's a consequence of the poor delivery performance in 2022. Without that, that order book would not have moved into 2023. Net sales would have been lower. That affects both divisions, medical and safety, and actually to a stronger degree, to a stronger relative degree at the safety division with the gas detection systems business. If we just focus on the China business, as you did in your question - and I wanted to make clear when we talk about one-time effects, there's more to that than that - the China business is, from an EBIT point of view, contributed less than the EUR 37 million. So even if we were to take that out, profitability would still be positive.
In addition to that, we would not be too granular in looking at the medical per se because I believe we can all agree a 1.9% EBIT margin for the medical division is not sufficient because, from a DVA point of view, it translates by itself already into a negative DVA. Yeah.
It appears that we have one question left, and we are already over time that we promised to keep. I suggest we should take the one left question and then end the call for everybody's time management.
The next question comes from Alexander Galitsa from Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. I'd be happy also to yield back. My question that I had remaining is on the innovations that you announced that there will be a significant number of updates, innovation released into the market.
Just wondering how to think about it, whether this represents a meaningful tailwind for the medical division.
Oh, yes. Of course, that is an important factor. And the improvement that we go for, also in the growth and profitability for the medical division, is the renewal of the portfolio. So that is a very natural point. So with this, I think, as we already have exceeded our time limit, today, a particular great thank you to all of you for your vital interest in Dräger. And so look forward to stay in touch with you and receive more questions and give you more answers also on an individual basis. And for now, I would like to end the call and thank everybody for being with us and your interest. And have a pleasant afternoon and evening. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect.
Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.