Good morning, everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you had a good rest after the evening program of yesterday, the visit at Teamtechnik and the dinner that we had. Since not everybody can be with us today in person, we are also streaming the presentations and the Q&A sessions via Zoom. Also welcome to everybody who is following us today by the Zoom meeting. My name is Andreas Schaller. I'm the head of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at Dürr, and I will guide you through the program of today. Before we start, let me make some organizational announcement. Please be aware of our disclaimer. I assume that you are familiar with the language. In case you're not, please take the time to read through it. You can also find our Capital Market Day presentation on the Internet.
Those of you here in the room, you should have a USB stick received by now or in front of you, and there, the presentation is also available. Now, you also have the chance to ask questions to the management board today, after each presentation slot, actually. To do so here in the room, you have these microphone boxes in front of you. Please press the right button just before and after you ask your questions, and I will call you in order to make this in an organized way. We will also take questions from the Zoom meeting, and my colleague, Mathias Christen, he is here in the back, and looking at the Zoom chat and also at the participants here.
If you want to ask a question via Zoom, please raise your virtual hand and wait until your name is called, then unmute yourself and ask your question. In case you dialed in by phone into this meeting, you can press star nine in order to raise your virtual hand. Then please wait until you are unmuted, and then tell your name, and you can ask your question. Now let's look at today's agenda. We have actually four presentation slots for you. The last one including then a summary. As mentioned, you have the possibility to ask questions after each presentation slot. After the second presentation slot, we will also do a short break. After the presentations, we will then move on to the lunch.
Now, without further ado, it's my pleasure to hand over to our first speaker today, our CEO, Dr. Jochen Weyrauch. Jochen, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Andreas. Good morning. I think, apart from the good red wine, the meeting at Teamtechnik hopefully was quite interesting for you because different from what we have typically done before, but a significant part of our future. Andreas already mentioned a couple of topics today. I'll present the first three ones. Dietmar will cover finance. For all the Q&A sessions, we'll be on stage together. I can only ask you to focus on the Q&A's challenges. We'll tell you what we know rather than making this just a one-directional presentation today. Actually, Andreas put a big challenge on me. It's just too many slides for the time that was allocated to me. I will just touch on a few topics.
I will leave some out on purpose. Again, if there's something that's missing for you, please ask during the Q&A. Let's jump into it. Next steps. Again, the next steps has a couple of subtopics. First of all, introduction. I'm new on stage, at least in my new role. What's the Dürr Group leadership approach? I was asked last night, I think it was Mr. Eichel, "Why are you just a two-tier board, and will you continue like this?" Let's see, but there's many more relevant people on the first leadership level than just Dietmar and myself, and we'll explain how we work together. Then what One Dürr Group means. Why is, as we believe, the sum of the parts not bigger than the total value of the group?
Then how do we intend to build value by growing margins and returns as well as growth, and to some extent, resilience? Because that was another topic we discussed last night. That look, Dürr just made quite an okay profit, but it never lasted too long. What we're telling you today and the margin targets we are confirming today are ones where we say we want to build them in a resilient way. Mid to long-term growth potential. Last but not least, as a summary, Dürr Group strategy for profitable growth. Just on me as a person, almost looks like I'm doing an interview today with a CV here, but again, just the main topics. I'm in the automotive industry for a number of decades. It's always a love and hate relation to be in automotive.
The love is that you are part of a very dynamic development. The hate sometimes is that it is a challenging environment. How we want to cope with it going forward, I'll explain. I had a kind of a sneak into the construction business at the time, Turbo Lufttechnik. My first round with Dürr, if you will, in the early 2000s, which didn't last very long. It was just two years or a bit more than two years, because at the end of 2005, I did a management buyout with half of Carl Schenck AG, those days being directly responsible for Schenck Process.
Ran, as you can see in the next step, that business for the next nine years through various private equity rounds, which was, as an engineer, quite interesting because once you understand the dynamics of private equity, you can apply them yourself. That's what I did thereafter for the next three years. Invested myself a company private equity firms. During my time with Schenck Process, but also thereafter, what I learned is that building value as much as being a technology leader, that in itself doesn't really have a value, but to use this in order to build value through expanding margins, et cetera, et cetera, is really what's relevant.
Since 2017, with Dürr, I'd once mentioned in an interview that I've gone through an extended trainee program with Dürr, which is pretty much true. When I first joined, there was no division head for CTS. I was the division head for CTS. Then in parallel, I took over Schenck, then the division head for PFS left. This is where I got involved into the business on a day-to-day basis too. I made my round through the company, always during the 5.5 years, also being responsible for corporate development, M&A, but also in various operational roles. Then, as I mentioned, from the beginning of this year in my new role as CEO. What's the Dürr Group today?
If you look at it from an end customer point of view, again, we had a lot of discussions also with Teamtechnik yesterday. We are not producing goods. We produce the machines that produce goods. You see a number of those goods here. You automatically ask the question, "Why are you involved in all of those businesses?" A big purpose of this presentation today is that there is good reasons why, with a set of technologies, know-how, processes, we use that knowledge in order to make our avenue into different industries and end markets, but what we provide to the market has a lot of commonalities. The Dürr Group, if you look back 20 years, the Dürr Group was basically automotive. It was 90% automotive, was a EUR 1.2 billion company.
Meanwhile, we will touch at least in terms of order intake the EUR 5 billion, and the business has completely changed or changing it big time, where automotive meanwhile is less than half of our business. You see, through the acquisition of HOMAG six years ago, seven years ago, of course, the furniture and the house building has become relevant, but also through acquisitions, but also organic growth. There's other business like the medical devices business that you've seen yesterday or the battery business that came in through the acquisition of Megtec four years ago. In essence, we've still been growing by 6%. So on average, 'cause that's also a discussion we had. So far, we've had in our strategy presentation kind of boring 2%-3%.
If you look at the past, we've already proven to do the 6% that we also anticipate now going forward. The team, I was touching on this. The only thing I discovered here is we have to work on our diversity, actually. It's a lot of old white men, and so maybe that's a topic we'll have to cover in the next few years, but I'm sure there will be chances. Nevertheless, you see Dietmar and myself as the management board, but from the very beginning of the year, when we had our first strategy meeting with the gentlemen that you see here on this picture, we decided that we want to run this company in what we now call the Dürr Management Board. That doesn't only consist of us.
It also consists of the five division heads. You see here Bruno for PFS, Lars for APT, Ken for CTS, et cetera, Jörg for MPS, and Daniel for HOMAG. Plus the two CFOs of the larger sub holdings, which is Jaro for Dürr Systems and Rainer for HOMAG. This team does the real management meetings. Dietmar and myself, we have weekly, what we call shop floor meetings, where we go through what's actually relevant. All the relevant decisions for the company, especially the strategic decisions, are taken by the management board. We meet once a month. Every quarter, we have at least one, most cases two days of an off-site meeting where we really go through all the strategic topics, and everybody has a say.
I told the team from the very beginning, I'm not ready to take the stretch between the outside markets, the capital market, and what we do inside. We want, or I want, to have consistency from what we communicate and what we do, and what we do and what we communicate. So far, I think we've made quite good progress, and everybody in this team has a say on everything. It's not just Lars talking about APT, and then he has to shut up. He has a good right also to criticize, when necessary, what Bruno does in PFS. In terms of governance, that's very, very important. Now first touch on why is this one group, and again, I'm not touching all the points, but especially if we look at recent days, joint purchasing.
We meanwhile have a momentum on the purchasing side that is relevant these days. I mean, I'm personally involved with calls, say, Siemens or other main suppliers, fighting for the supplies of products and equipment. So far, with all the hiccups that we had this year, compared to many other companies, we've been quite successful in completing our projects, in getting still components right on time, and that's because we meanwhile have, as a group, a certain momentum to negotiate in the market. Software, just to mention one other thing. We have meanwhile, if you go through the company, about 800 software engineers, so we're really a software house.
Those people are coordinating in all their, for example, artificial intelligence models that we apply the same way in a paint shop, that to some extent also in HOMAG and vice versa, with a strong exchange. It's a business when you add all together, that's more than EUR 100 million. There, you can only be successful if you have a critical mass. If we, each of the divisions on a standalone basis could not afford the spending that we make in digitization and definitely could not be so successful. Project management skills. I was asked last night, say, "Look, I mean, of course you have bought HOMAG, and it was a lucky punch because you bought it for an okay price and now it has developed." Fair, well taken. Nevertheless, the margin development that we've seen recently at HOMAG would not have been possible without Dürr.
If you would not have used the project management skills we've been training for decades in the paint shop business, in this rough automotive environment, and not have applied those to HOMAG would not be where HOMAG is today. Just to give you a few teases where it really makes sense to be together as one group and use the momentum that we can generate together. As a consequence, or derived from that's the strategy. You can read it. There's a couple of topics that are very relevant for us. For example, improving processes to have more time for value-adding. I'll show you in the next chart the activities that we have.
We want to automate, improve, standardize processes in the back office as much as we can in order to free up capacities where real value-adding is happening. That all based on a harmonized and standardized IT. We are at the moment running the biggest transformation program in this company in terms of processes and supporting IT this company has ever seen. You see that's the core processes in the company starting with One HR, harmonized modern HR. Today, we are still in the old-fashioned approach, where one HR person covers the complete needs of an employee, from the hiring to the consulting to the contract management, et cetera.
We will do this on the basis of modern processes, where you organize the back office in shared services, where you have the business partners dealing with the internal customers. You have the hiring separately. This is all in transformation based on a complete new system. We are just, as we speak, launching our new system. We've been working on Microsoft Dynamics at Dürr Systems and HOMAG in the past. We will now shift in the next few weeks, in the first step, the whole Dürr Systems group into Salesforce as a new CRM, which will give us a lot of new functions in order to get closer to the market. We are about to select our partner for the one SRM, supplier relationship management, and so forth.
All of this, of course, will go or will be steered via central one ERP. We've been one of the first industrial SAP users, R/3 users, in the industry, and we are now about to shift. That will be the first transition next year to S/4HANA. A lot of programs that we're running right now, which is again, as we speak, the biggest transformation program in history in order to make this group much more efficient. Now looking forward, what's the main areas to drive profitable growth? Maybe not so surprising, of course, in the end, profit is a product of margin and volume. Again, the discussion we had in a number of meetings with analysts, investors is how do we improve the resilience of this company?
In good years, as I mentioned, we've been doing okay returns. We've been doing good cash flows, but we have not delivered in a consistent way. This is what is really relevant for us going forward. That's why we've mentioned this as a separate topic here in our areas for future profitability. What does that mean by division? Most of the picture is known to you. We had already said in APT. On the left side, to make it simple, on the left side is our machinery business. In all of those businesses, we are by far market leaders. We have a world market share in HOMAG, 30%+. We have in application technology, when it comes down to paint robots, we have a world market share of more than 50%.
Very much the same is true at Schenck, which is measuring and process systems. For balancing equipment, we have, in the arena where we play, a world market share also of more than 30%. This is machinery business, including potential for service and spare parts. Those are businesses that have to achieve 10% or more in returns. Actually, APT and Measuring and Process Systems have historically shown this. Some of you accompany the company for a longer time. They know that MPS has been doing 15%, 13% on returns on sales. Now we've added another small business with a little bit of lower profitability, but still this business is at least good for 10%+. APT, the same. Historically, APT has delivered that performance, and what we now want is to achieve it again.
If you look at the profitability that we achieved, for example, this year in HOMAG and also in application technology, somewhere between 8%-9%. If you add the anomalies that we have to cope with this year, actually we're not really away from that. Again, we have to start delivering in a consistent way. We have the more construction type business, the system business, where we said the target margin has to be above 6%. Actually, Clean Technology Systems has delivered that, or at least close to it. You see it in 2019. We've been affected big time this year by material prices. We have started to manage it, and we'll talk about this later.
6% there, and that does not even take the wild card of the battery business into account, is also good for more than 6%. PFS, actually, this is, how should I say? That's a personal issue for me because I've been driving this myself. I've spent a lot of time this year in negotiating with automotive OEMs, on prices, on price escalation clauses, and we have seen this year good orders coming in. Actually, in terms of balancing the overall margin mix, we were even trying to slow this business down, as it has been extremely successful. The good news is we have booked, and we still book until the end of the year, very attractive orders, with a different margin perspective than we had before, and I'll get back to that, later.
Looking forward, especially on the machine building side, we have a lot of future potential in service and spare parts. HOMAG alone, we hired 100 service engineers this year in order to cover the market because we get a lot of complaints from customers for good reasons that we are not there, that we don't support them well enough. Of course, that's good news. A couple of examples. The PFS, we have, in a very silent way, reduced the capacity in Europe by more than 30% in the last three years. We have closed four shops. We've even closed, how should I say, a very traditional shop near Cologne, which was one of the first production facilities in Dürr.
I think that was very relevant to go this step in order to show the organization that we cannot continue like we did, which means we cannot have a big beast that needs to be fed, in order to avoid under absorption. Now we've reduced the capacity by 30%, which now gives us the chance to become much more picky when it comes to new orders. We have formalized this in a new strategy, Value before Volume. As we have analyzed, it was a very interesting and not very smart, but needed to be done exercise. We went back 10 years by customer, by region, by project, and analyzed the margins that we achieved.
There was a very clear pattern of where we were successful, where we even improved margins throughout the course of a project, and where actually we didn't. We used this pattern to define our bid/no-bid strategy. This year we have, I would say for the first time, in Dürr, in PFS, neglected a number of requests for quotations because we simply told the customers we will not be going for those projects. In our case, if we bid, for example, a big paint shop value, say EUR 200 million, we often have proposal cost that is EUR 1 million or more because it's not just a proposal.
We have to do all the pre-engineering in order to have a costing for the project, and we simply don't do that anymore. I have a lot, and still have today, a lot of discussions with OEMs where I simply say, "We're not going for this anymore." This is, of course, maybe at least as difficult of an exercise internally as it is externally because, of course, sales people were used to bidding everything to satisfying the customers. This is really now a real change of direction, and it works. We will see probably more next year with a little lower order intake this year. We've still been very successful, and you see we've been improving the order intake margin in a difficult year already by almost 5%.
HOMAG, we've seen many topics here, and we have, I would say, made probably 30%-50% of the journey of all those improvement measures. Some of them really, as I mentioned before, have come with the support of Dürr Group. If you look at, for example, number three, streamline value chain. That's what we call internally the project Smart VC, Smart Value Chain. That's something that's actually driven by the former division head of APT because he has a lot of knowledge from the supply chain, from the setup that we have in APT, has retired at HOMAG. Big movement forward. Building the service business, you can read it there. Material cost optimization. Standardization, that's big time.
We have too many machines in our catalogs at HOMAG, and we've already reduced significantly our amount of machines that we offer to the market. Plus, of course, as a separate whole separate thing is the potential that we have from the construction elements business. That all together makes us confident that we achieve next year the 9%. Actually, again, if we looked at where we stand today, you see the 7.7% nine months. If you add inefficiencies, actually we would have been double-digit this year. This year would have been a fantastic year. Looking at, and I'm complimenting actually the team because reaching roughly 8% in this environment where we had all sorts of issues, I think is a real achievement and really shows that our targets going forward are feasible.
Example on the PFS, I was touching on that, already a little bit. Price escalation clauses. We have not done any larger project this year without price escalation clauses because we simply told customers we cannot take the risk. Either you pay so much more that we are on the safe side in any case, or we negotiate with you price escalation clause. I can assure you, we have customers who said at the beginning of the year that their purchasing processes don't foresee that because they need to know a maximum price. We said, "Look, then we don't bid." Then in some cases, we didn't bid, and customers came back. That's, for example, with one very big German customer who is building a new facility in Mexico, we've had exactly the same thing.
Finally, we now have a formula that includes labor cost, purchase parts, raw material, exactly following the scope of supply, which partially comes from Germany, which to a large extent comes from Mexico, with a very clear formula. Each quarter, we calculate the differences of prices and indices versus what we sold, basically. HOMAG maximizing capacity utilization. We're, for example, using Teamtechnik. You've seen Teamtechnik yesterday as a overflow facility for our woodworking business from Weinmann. We are not intending to extend the capacity easily at Weinmann, but we use existing machine building capacity at Teamtechnik to support Weinmann. There is many more examples like that.
Teamtechnik, HEKUMA, Stefan last night explained, you know, the acquisition of his business and consequently with one, the first large order in North America at, forget the name, Thermo Fisher Scientific, which is a double-digit million EUR order. That's about half of the order intake that HEKUMA had the previous year. Why has the customer awarded us? First of all, the customer has awarded us because HEKUMA with Teamtechnik together can build the whole plant. Because in the production process of the customer, typically HEKUMA comes in the earlier part of the process. In many cases, you've seen those self devices yesterday. They're typically, it's a plastic device, so the frame is plastic, then you have springs, then you have different pieces inside that need to be assembled.
The first step typically is the deloading of an injection molding machine. HEKUMA are specialists in the high-speed deloading. We're talking less than one second deloading of material from injection molding machines and then bringing them into the first process steps. After that directly comes Teamtechnik with the completion of the assembly. We've won this order together because we can offer the process. Not only that, we've won the order because Teamtechnik has a local footprint in North America, which HEKUMA didn't have. Third, Thermo would not have awarded neither one of the two without the balance sheet in the background that we provide for such a large order. I think that's a perfect example for sales synergies from such an acquisition.
In a bit broader perspective, again, just touching on a few points on our growth strategy altogether. You see there is many possibilities really to move forward, especially when we talk about, again, PFS and final assembly. E-mobility is a big driver. We'll see a few pictures later. In terms of first, the capacity buildup, but second, at least as important, the second point, the sustainable decarbonization of production. This means most of the production facilities for automobiles will have to be touched in the next 10 years. There is, for example, 700 paint shops on this planet, and many of them have been built by Dürr. All the refurb work that will come, and again, you will see a few examples later, will generate business for us.
We'll move away, especially in Europe, more from the greenfield business, more into the brownfield business, which offers much better margins as we are basically touching the equipment we had built before. Furniture and house building. You know, we're talking a lot about deceleration now. The furniture industry slowing down, which is the case. If you look at the business, you know, order intake has slowed down to some extent. Nevertheless, the scenario is intact. What we will see and what makes us confident for the next years is that we will need much more automation in the furniture industry, starting from a lack of skilled workforce, starting from cost pressure, et cetera. We will see more of what we've seen before. Small carpenters with simple machines will close. The business will consolidate.
I'm not saying everything will end up with IKEA, but it will be larger customers with different demands, and in the end, that plays into our pocket. On the woodworking, or on the construction elements business, I'll touch later. The battery business for us is a wild card. Again, I'll touch on that later. We have not too much factored that in our perspectives going forward because, how should I say, it's almost negligible because the size of this project is so huge. If you start adding too many of those, that gives a picture where we say, "Hmm, let's be a bit more cautious." Automation, MedTech, we're sitting on the right driver. I mean, with the aging population, more healthcare needed, more automation needed, again, in order to provide cheaper healthcare, we're sitting on the right trend.
Environmental, I think that story is there for quite some time, and will continue to be there. We benefit from from tightening emission standards going forward. Balancing, which is basically Schenck. We've been suffering in the last couple of years with the shift from the internal combustion engine to e-mobility because we've had market shares of 70%- 80% in turbochargers, in crankshafts, in camshafts. Drivetrain, everything that's really related to internal combustion engine. It took us a little while to change, but we meanwhile see that our equipment, for example, for electrical motors, et cetera, of course, now creates demand and where we are convinced that we're through the trough going forward. Now, touching on some examples. Prefabrication of wooden construction elements. Also, we were discussing this yesterday.
We believe that from today until 2030, you see there is huge potential because we're just at the beginning of a transformation that we see right now, meaning the industrialization of wooden houses. So far, wooden houses, in many places, in most of the cases, have been built by carpenters on site. That doesn't work anymore in the future. There is not the labor anymore. The cost is too high. It takes too long. What we are now seeing is the first gigafactories coming up. If you, for example, Google Nokera, that's a company that's basically a startup for the production, pre-production of elements for multi-unit houses. We've built the facility. I was relating to the contract before. Weinmann, our company who have delivered that before, had a turnover of, say, EUR 50 million-EUR 60 million. This order alone was the annual turnover.
This was the first of a kind, and this was for 7,500 units a year. If you just follow only Germany, the discussions that we have by our famous chancellor, that we need in a social way, 400,000 units a year. It's even been in the news that a large piece of this should be in sustainable, cheap living, which means wooden living. Then it gives you a little bit of a feeling of the dimension that's out there for this business. MedTech, I touched on it. Then electrode coating, you will see a film later. That's the cooperation with GROB and Manz. I'll touch on this a bit. Where we believe that the time is right for European supply chain to compete with what comes from Asia, for good reasons.
We believe there's a number of angles where we can do things differently and definitely better compared to what's coming from Asia. That is exactly where we are a bit cautious in the volume, because just one idea or just one number. A typical gigafactory is 10 gigawatts. 10 gigawatts for battery cells is an investment of typically EUR 1 billion without building and auxiliaries. Of this, 10%-15% is the potential that we can cover with our dry coating and solvent recovery equipment. That shows you can reach the volume relatively easy. Nevertheless, it's a market where we still have to prove that we're able to deliver large scale equipment. That's why we're a bit cautious at the moment, but I think we can only be positively surprised.
All in all, that gives us the perspective that we've published earlier yesterday. CAGR 5%-6%, historically proven, with going forward, I would say an even more resilient set of businesses, putting together our volume. You see, we assume that the auto. Especially, that's the main thing here, that the automotive business will be around one third, compared to a bit less than half today. Finally, that's our strategy house with the targets that you see on the right. In the end, return on capital employed is also relevant. That's by the way, why PFS also. If PFS does 6%-7% return on sales with return on capital employed above 25%, it is, I would say, respected business within our portfolio. All right, that is.
I've even taken too much time, I see. Let's shift to the first Q&A.
Thank you very much, Jochen. I ask Dietmar to get on stage as well for the Q&A. Actually, my introduction, I forgot one thing to mention. I mean, you have heard a lot of interesting topics already, and you wonder whether it's possible maybe to watch that again afterwards. It's possible, this session, this morning session is recorded, and we will provide the recording on our internet pages, tomorrow morning before noon. Now let's start with the Q&A session. Peter Rothenaicher.
Yeah. As a clarification, in your chart here, you have, in here midterm. Does this mean explicitly 2024?
When we refer to the 8%? Definitely, yes.
And-
Of course, I would assume that until 2024, we have the chance to deliver the CAGR. The CAGR is more meant as an average until 2030. You see here the 8% and the ROCE is specifically for 2024.
Also for the divisional margin targets?
Yes, absolutely. Yep. The picture with machinery and systems business, yes.
Okay, Stefan Eitel.
Stefan Eitel from LBBW. Is the 5%-6% growth rate a pure organic growth rate or do you have factored in some M&A?
I would say some normal M&A. I'm not factoring in the, I would say, the HOMAG 2.0. Normal M&A, yes. We would say that's in there, and hopefully that might bring us to a slightly higher number. I would not say 5%-6% is explicitly just organic.
Maria.
Just to clarify on the new price negotiation you've done with the autos OEMs. If you look since January, could you maybe quantify a bit, the price impact on the PFS? Is it more low single digit, mid-single digit?
Yeah. I can only generically answer the question because, you know, it's not a product business. We quote each project in itself and do the cost, and then we apply a margin. However, comparing similar paint shops, I would say price increases were between 10%-20%. That also is very much in line with the renegotiations that I've done on some of the products that we already had on our books. They also go in that direction.
Okay, thank you. If I may, a second question.
Sure.
On the M&A you wanna develop in the med tech and automation, are you looking more at target specifics in the med tech business or more into the automation?
Mm-hmm.
processes?
It's a combination of the two. MedTech automation. We've done the first steps in Germany. The two acquisitions were a piece of Teamtechnik is MedTech, and the biggest piece of HEKUMA is MedTech. If you look at the world, the biggest MedTech market by far is sitting in North America. The ideal target would definitely also in North America to expand the business. We've been successful on some orders in North America, but we know that we could be much more successful if we had a much better local footprint.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question comes from Mr. Schachel.
Yeah, thanks. Maybe one on your margin targets and for APT.
MPS, you were saying they've already reached margins 8%- 10% in the past.
Hello?
I think in reality it was really very.
Hello?
a mixed picture with some business units within those areas making
Yeah?
Mid-single-digit margins, others making double-digit margins. Also APT, some activities being loss-making, others really double-digit. Going forward, does your margin target also imply that the pressure is on each business unit to be double-digit? Or is it rather a mix and the assumption is it's going to be a mix?
Mm-hmm.
Where you tolerate lower margin portfolio elements in each division?
Yeah, thanks for the question. It is as we described, and, look, when I was saying we did reach profitabilities in the past already, I was specifically mentioning the divisions. If I take Schenck or Measuring and Process Systems, actually, if you go back three or four years, and from there you go back five years, MPS had consistently delivered more than 10%. This is what we want to go for again. This is feasible. That's what I meant when I said that. PFS, picture is different. Yes, PFS, I think in one year once had, like 10 years back, 9% or so in the peak after. I think that was after the.
Financial crisis.
demand crisis, when we've then booked big orders. What we now really want to achieve is consistent profitability. The target, actually, we were saying more than 6%. We're building a business plan for 2024, which goes in the direction of 7% internally, and this is what we want to defend. We rather, in this business it's not about size. The way we now may be more now than in the past, Dietmar and I look at the business in a, almost like a portfolio management. We say, "Look, dear PFS, we have the 8% target, and we have to build those together in the right way." If you grow too much without being at that profitability level, you're distorting our targets. This is why we rather keep this business not small.
I mean it's big still, but we don't want to grow the business in case it does not significantly increase the profitability.
Thanks. Can I follow up with one on the HOMAG margin target? I think you clarified it's a 2024 target of 8%.
Yes. Yes.
I think you said you are at 10% already, excluding inefficiencies this year. Can you tell us under what volume assumption this 10% should be achievable?
Mm-hmm.
I guess volumes might be slightly lower, and that's compensated with.
Yeah.
more and more productivity.
The 10%, let me answer generically. The 10% is not expected to be there at peak volumes, yeah, which we might achieve next year, depending on you know, the story goes. But on whatever a normal volume will be. I mean, we end up this year, like 1.7?
1.6.
Roughly.
EUR 1.6 billion in sales.
1.6%. Even if you take EUR 100 million off in terms of making it simple, we still have to be there. It's not that we. That's why we say we want to deliver in a resilient way. Yes, might be a challenge to some extent. On the other hand, it's not that we say we're now shooting for the 8% as a one-time event in 2024, and then we relax, and then we go back to the old days. No. We want to form a group that consistently delivers.
Okay. Let's. We have another question.
Yes. Hello. Actually, I have two questions.
Mm-hmm.
First, your prospective top line growth with the CAGR goal 6% is roughly in line with what you have shown in the past since 1999. Looking back, this was a period of decreasing and very low interest rates. Now we have a changing environment, and as a capital goods supplier, you're actually exposed to interest rates. What is your view on that? And how do you wanna make up headwind from rising interest rates which are affecting your customers? How are you going to make up to achieve the same kind of growth? That's question number one.
Mm-hmm.
Question number two, talking about resilience. What I'm actually missing is the resilience when it comes to China, we're talking a lot about these days. What is your view on that?
Okay.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. First on the interest rates, let me start with automotive. The picture that we see in automotive, I would say, is to a large extent independent from interest rates. Because the investment pattern of our customers for the next 10 years will be not driven, necessarily by capacity expansions. It will be driven by the decarbonization of their production chain. We are today, we meaning, like paint shops, and if you add with it, final assembly, this is more than 50% of the footprint of an automotive facility. Today, all those facilities, if you take a paint shop, are gas heated. In 10 years, they have to convert all those facilities into electrical heat and that otherwise the business plus any other areas in that respect.
As we don't depend to a very large extent, we don't depend on capacity increases, but on the version of industry. In the woodworking business, where we'll be a bit closer to the end markets. Yes, do we see insecurity and customers may be buying less kitchens at the moment, et cetera, might all be. Nevertheless, there is a number of markets that are about to develop. We are, you know, the one mistake we often do, once some of us are, that we focus too much on what's happening here. I'm not concerned about the U.S., really I'm not. I'm not concerned about India. I'm not concerned about many other markets where we play. Let's widen the view a bit away from Germany. That's maybe a few comments on interest rates.
On China, yes, China is an issue. We are currently overall well prepared. You see that, our especially our automotive businesses, to use the word, is very much decoupled from here. We build big paint shops, just a new paint shop for Tesla. We've built all the German paint shops and extended them during the pandemic. We're building as we speak, facilities for the all of this done by Chinese staff. We're not impacted by, you know, the disruptions here. What will happen with China, you have to make a guess. I'm not as pessimistic as some are because they are so huge that neither side bring it to really a final escalation. My guess, yours may be different.
On the other hand, if I put myself into your shoes, most of the businesses in our sector that are successful have a China exposure, and we have to deal with it. It is something that we look at. How do we look at CapEx? We might be more careful than we've been in the past. How do we look at the amount of cash that sits in China? We're probably more careful than we've been in the past. In general, yes, it is to some extent a concern, but again, for me, the most realistic scenario is not the catastrophic one, China invading Taiwan, et cetera. If that happens, everybody has an issue anyways. I think.
Yes. Thank you. Can you give us an update please about the PFS split in between established OEMs on the water side and new OEMs? How it is today and how it might develop over the coming years until 2030, please?
Yeah. What I think it's in one of the charts I'll show later.
Later on, yeah.
We roughly do 40% of the business with EV customers, pure EV customers. I would say if you deduct from that another 15%-20%, which are established players, you're there with maybe one quarter. 20% to one quarter, I would guess is the new kids on the block. Be it in North America or in Asia. Some actually in the near Asia. We just inaugurated the paint shop and final assembly system for Togg in Turkey, which is kind of an interesting project.
More time. Press one. Okay. In former years, this performance was, yeah, very often also influenced by competition.
Mm-hmm.
You have not talked about competition at all because, in the end, you can plan a lot, but if the market environment is different, then it could come out differently.
Yeah. Talking about the competitive environment would take us two days. I can give a few impressions. Also following some of the discussions I had last night where you know there was one saying. Look, I mean, your life in Europe should be easy as Eisenmann has gone bankrupt, which was in Europe our biggest competitor. Short-term, that was a little bit true because we finished two or three of unfinished projects for Eisenmann, which were, I wouldn't say extremely profitable but were profitable projects, but we completed them. That's done. In Europe, actually, we would have preferred an Eisenmann. Very simple. An Eisenmann in old days, which was a very respected competitor, that was an intact competitive environment. You know, we won, they won, others sometimes won.
Now we have a few, I would say, nail-biters. From this company, there have been deriving a few smaller companies. They sometimes steal our service orders. That's not always fun. That's just one piece in Europe. In Europe today, yes, we are maybe the only real turnkey provider for turnkey paint shops. The competitive environment in other regions looks completely different. In the U.S., for example, we are number three. We're not number one because there is two established players in North America who work mainly with the Big Three. There we're gaining strength. Actually, we've booked the single largest order this year was with one traditional American OEM, which we now book in pieces, but it will be. I've been talking about the one order in Mexico earlier. This will be double the size.
In Asia, we are a big player. In China, we're market leaders, definitely, but with a strong competition. There's two other very strong players in China, local Chinese companies, and we have to cope with it. Now, if we look at HOMAG, we are again, by far, the largest player. Our single largest competitor is less than half of our size. Yes. What does that mean? We are, in most of the markets, number one. There's a few markets, for example, Italy, we're not number one, or in India, at this point. What is changing there? I think if we look at the past years, we've been gaining market share, for good reasons. I don't see this changing.
Economies of scale in this industry is relevant because you can afford the footprint, you can afford the investments, you can afford the investments in digitization. That's why I'm quite confident for HOMAG also going forward. I would say that covers 80% of the business. If you talk about Schenck, again, it's totally different if you talk about our filling equipment. We have many competitors, different competitors by business and by geography. Overall, I would say in many businesses, respected competitors, but nothing that I see as a disruption. The only disruption that we currently see is in our favor. It is in application technology, where we are about to see the shift away from the traditional overspray painting that we've been seeing for many years into what we call overspray-free applications.
Actually, as we speak, I've been inaugurating a facility in Eastern Germany with the first real high volume industrial application of basically it's printing. Rather than spraying, the future is printing. This is the first application where high volume production the two-tone roof will not be overspray painted anymore, but it will be printed, which offers huge benefits. Because today, for example, if you buy a Mini, yeah, in many cases, you have a black roof and a white car or red car, whatsoever. This body has to go through the paint shop twice. One body costs the capacity of two bodies, plus you have to mask the car like in Stone Age. You have your red, which you paint for the whole body.
After that, you use masking, foil, tape, really manual process that takes ages, and then you run the same body for the second time. In this facility, you don't need that anymore. In an in-line production, you do the red, and then you do the black roof, and the body is done. We are the only company who can do that today, years away from any competitor. This is where we believe, in some cases, we really through competition, and I'll show that later, through technology, we have competitive edges. I hope that answers a little bit your question. I would also like to have a look at the Zoom meeting. Do we have questions coming in from the Zoom meeting?
Currently, no questions from the Zoom people. If there are questions in the virtual audience, raise your hand. There's the first one from Michael Majewski. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello. Good morning, gentlemen. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. My question is about assumptions behind your 5%-6% CAGR. How much is it volume-driven, how much price-driven, and what is your CPI assumption? Because we have now elevated inflation. Some economists think it will stay with us for longer. Taking into account high inflation, it doesn't look ambitious for me, for example.
It's actually midterm to long-term view, so until 2030. I think we are all aware that in near term, it's also supported by inflation in a strong way. At the very end, we do expect that inflation will go down, and there will be more momentum for the growth. As Jochen mentioned, there will also be a contribution in a reasonable manner, not in a transformation way, then coming from our M&A activities.
Do we have further questions from the Zoom at the moment?
Currently, no further questions from the Zoom. Are there any questions? Please raise your hand.
I think then we can maybe take a last follow-up here in the room before we continue with the presentations.
How much does the strong U.S. dollar influence your targets?
Yeah. Actually, this year, the impact on sales, but also on order intake is in a range of around 4%-5%, and in the third quarter, it was on the upper side at 5%. For next year, we are basically having in our planning also being close to parity between the euro and the US dollar.
Could it be that you got some of your orders in the US because of the strong US dollar, and you were more competitive because of that?
Partially, that's true. Yes. If we take that order, the large order I was referring to, there is the biggest piece comes locally because we use our local facility, and we have to for some union agreements, et cetera. There's some piece that comes from Europe, but I must say, that piece that comes from Europe, competition was also not quoting this basically from the dollar region. They would have shipped that from either China or Japan, I think Japan. Yes and no.
Okay. Thank you very much for your questions in this first round. We have more Q&A sessions coming up, and then I would suggest that we continue with the second presentation. Thank you very much for answering the questions.
Now we've been touching on e-mobility already. Three topics I have to offer in that topic. New EV players, we've been touching on this. The question was there already, how much of the business comes from there? E-mobility in general, opening up different opportunities, and then hopefully a topic that's interesting for you, the battery manufacturing. New EV players, see just some examples. And if you look and actually let me just check. They're all customers of ours. Worldwide production volume of BEVs, if the target is fulfilled, which we anticipate at the moment, that roughly 30% of the production by 2030 will be BEVs.
If you take the annual production, which will be in the range of 90 million-100 million light vehicles, this is the number that comes up. That tells you how much potential there is at the moment. Why do you see so many players? Because of course, the shift from internal combustion engine to BEVs is a chance for new entrants because battery electric vehicle is much simpler than the old car with an internal combustion engine and a drivetrain. It puts some of traditional OEMs in trouble would be maybe too much, but with their heavy balance sheets comprising all the assets, new entrants have this maybe as a once in a lifetime chance to enter the auto industry. This is the number that we book in these.
I was saying that's roughly 40% of our order intake. Also this year, roughly comes from EV-related orders, coming from the new players, as I mentioned, but also from EV related investment from traditional OEMs. What are the characteristics that drive demand to our favor? We have built a position with new startups, where we are by far number one supplier. Why? Those new startups, they have little knowledge. We have to deal in some cases with customers who have not even a handful of people with know-how in the respective areas that we supply. Those customers depend on a supplier who can do turnkey, who can easily adapt to their needs, who is globally available, and this has helped us to build our position.
In fact, we like to deal with those customers because they are receptive to proposals. Whereas when you deal with the traditional OEMs, they have specifications this thick, very complicated, very challenging in some cases, challenging our processes because they're not always logical. We really like to deal with those new EV players, and that's what has helped us to build a reputation. I'll show a picture later why paint becomes so relevant with EVs. Doesn't sound logical, but when we look at it, I believe it becomes logical. Two-tone painting also very relevant in the EV arena. Why?
The architecture of EV cars with a big underbody in order to make them look nicer from a design perspective, in many cases, they have two-tone applications on the bottom of the vehicle or on the top of the vehicle, black roofs, for example. That, of course, drives business for us. Reinforcement of conveyor systems. Battery electric vehicles, on average, are 300-500 kg heavier than internal combustion engine vehicles. In many cases, the existing final assembly systems, especially the conveyor systems, do not support this additional weight. That creates a lot of brownfield work, for example. The automation of final assembly, I'll show also picture. Final assembly is different with e-vehicles.
As you can imagine, you don't have the traditional marriage anymore of the body and the chassis with the old engine, but you have an electric marriage from the battery with the body, and that's different. There we've built quite a strong position. The automation itself in final assembly is becoming different. Actually, the plan is for many of those players that a car, basically, once it's assembled with wheels, runs itself through the final assembly because, you know, the electric engine works, et cetera. Just as one idea. Then the ones of you who have been at Teamtechnik yesterday, you've seen that 100% of the vehicles globally of this ex-Californian car producer are tested on Teamtechnik equipment. Of course, we're using the global footprint of Dürr to expand their business.
Last but not least, our wild card of battery manufacturing. Why is color so relevant? Actually, that was very interesting to see an agile company producing the vehicles that you see here. This is the first car that has up to 30-layer paint. Why so many layers? You can guess it a little bit when you look at the red car. On the top, it's one color, but depending on how you look at it can be from a light red up to almost a black, depending on the angles, and gives the car a totally different appearance, an appearance whether you like it or not, but a very different appearance and an appearance of quality and at least of differentiation. We've been running here tests, very interesting.
We've been running here tests for this company, for example, on a Friday, painting doors and making basically samples. Those samples were sent to California on the weekend, and from that one single person many people speak of, currently we got the response which red he wanted, and that red was then locked in. Very quick decision process. This is the Grünheide facility of Tesla in Berlin is the first facility of that kind, and we will see much more of that. I've been driving a Tesla before, and I could choose between five rubbish colors. Andreas knows it. He had a Tesla for some time, too. Now it's a totally different approach. The differentiation, where you don't have the sound of a six-cylinder, eight-cylinder, 10 or 12-cylinder engine anymore to differentiate, other elements become relevant.
It's the UX in the car. There we don't have to offer anything, but the paint we do. Here is our applicator for that process. I could have brought sims for everything, but that would have completely spoiled the presentation. The thing here to keep in mind, this new EcoBell4 is a complete new generation. All the elements of the robot are equipped with RFID chips. Why is that relevant? We can track the life of each component of a robot, very interesting. More interesting is a customer. You see that bell cup in just, you know, where you have the basically that creates the spray the metal piece here. This is a proprietary spare part. This is really our jewel, if you will. We've seen many other companies trying to copy this.
Now with an RFID chip, the robot doesn't work anymore if it's not our own bell. Two-tone painting I was referring to, you see just one example. We can today paint roofs easily, but you see also a little bit already there that soon we will be in a position to paint the outer body, completely the outer body of a vehicle. That is, in painting, a revolution. I was talking about final assembly, reinforcement of conveyor systems. Here, what you see here is a piece of an automatic battery marriage. Those batteries, those large, heavy batteries, they are sometimes 500, 600 kilograms. They are bolted, in many cases bolted and glued at the same time, in the underbody of a vehicle. You have sometimes 80, 90 screws that need to be assembled. We are specialists to do this reliable and fast.
That's Teamtechnik from yesterday, testing of eDrive trains. Battery manufacturing, that's the coating. Here you see an electrode, that's used in order to produce cells for batteries. We are the only company today with a unique process where you see that foil here, the electrode material that's either copper or aluminum, and then you have either carbon or silicon-based material that needs to be put on as a slurry in very, very tight tolerances. We are the only company that can coat from the top and from the bottom at the very same time. That, of course, reduces cost, reduces the footprint, and improves the quality. That's why we've supplied already some of those systems. For example, there is four of those systems standing with VARTA here, not so far away.
We've now inaugurated the first facility with Cellforce, where actually we have been renting out to Cellforce the facility just next door, and they build their production there until they have the final facility near Reutlingen. So potential there. Challenge here is the scaling up. We produce today machines at about 700 millimeters. That's too small for gigafactories. That's good enough for high performance, small production or pilot facilities, not big enough for gigafactories. This is what we, in terms of development, will accomplish by the first quarter of next year. Here, I was referring to that. We've been announcing this battery alliance. It is a non-exclusive, non-equity involved cooperation in order to be fast, in order to not have issues on an antitrust basis. Why? Because the three companies together can perfectly cover the whole production chain of a battery.
On the top, you can see the inauguration of Cellforce. In the middle, there is Mr. Steiner, the Porsche head of development. A lot of momentum in that business. We're storming the arena at the moment, and actually, that's the alliance I was talking about. The electrode production would basically be or is our responsibility. The cell assembly is Manz and the battery pack is GROB. As a nice coincidence, the three companies together in a very complementary way can cover the whole production chain. Will all the OEMs order the whole thing from us? No. That's also not the purpose. If it happens, fine. What we are now doing as three partners, we develop a much more efficient production process, including digitization, which Dürr will do for batteries.
Currently, you have from the Asian manufacturers for battery cells, for example, you have about 30% waste. This is all very expensive material. If you can only reduce or improve the first-time yield by 10%, this is EUR millions. This is where we believe we can differentiate and offer the market an alternative. I'll jump over that for the sake of time. I've touched on some of them already. Why do we believe that a European partner to European OEMs can make a difference? First of all, one thing that's completely undervalued at the moment and where some of the OEMs, as we speak, do a hard landing is compliance with EU standards. You've all heard about CE certification. Many of those players struggle.
Many of those players cannot adapt to the processes required by the German OEs. I'm not discrediting Asian suppliers. I'm just saying there is a place for European solution, and you see some of the arguments here. All those systems are. A battery production is highly fragile. You have to be close. Spare parts have to be available. You have to be on site very quickly. Just building a facility is just one thing. Optimizing the facility is where the money typically comes. Just as a snapshot here, why do we believe there's a market? It's very simple. If you look at the needed cell production capacity in Europe, it will be exploding. In the next seven, eight years, we will need a production capacity of, you see the numbers, so many gigawatts.
I mean, if that number is online, it has to be ordered the latest by 26. It's very, very close. Very close. Let me make one point. We're focusing, of course, big time on gigafactories, but there will be so many projects outside of the gigafactories. All the construction equipment will be electrified. Stationary batteries that you've seen yesterday. Gigafactories, of course, are the lighthouse, and we're also shooting for this. Already today, with projects that we've done for VARTA, for Cellforce, for an Italian forklift producer, there is a market besides that which we already today can touch with our equipment. This is how the equipment looks like. It has three elements. The real coating piece itself, then the drying, because it's a slurry that's wet with a solvent, very expensive and toxic solvent in there.
That solvent has to be recovered because it's very expensive and toxic, as I said, and it is recycled and be brought in the process again. The systems that we supply recover more than 99% of the solvent that's used in the process. I think we have a film thereafter, right? How can we start that?
Just click.
Just click one more time. Okay, here we go.
It takes more than the elements to make it. Our expertise and experience transform those individual parts into something big. Dürr offers electric manufacturing solutions for gigafactories as a turnkey supplier. We deliver fast and easy to install coating lines which are reliable and proven in the field. Tandem coating is an established technology characterized by applying a slot die coating on a backing roll to sequentially coat one side and then the other. In addition, Dürr also offers simultaneous two-sided coating with a single coating station, and thus a smaller overall manufacturing footprint. Our flotation drying process ensures equal drying on both sides of the foil to prevent edge curling. To ensure heat energy and solvent is not wasted, Dürr offers a pollution control and solvent recovery system that integrates perfectly into every electrode coating line.
In combination with our air recirculation control and heat recovery technologies, the coating line system is highly sustainable, consuming far less energy. The multi-stage pollution control lowers emissions to a minimum. With almost 100% solvent recovery, you can benefit from the most efficient process on the market. The distillation column is able to achieve a 95% reusable solvent electronic grade purity. In addition, digital data can be used to enhance quality control and traceability. The Dürr tandem coater fits seamlessly into many layouts while remaining fully scalable. The coating lines are production ready for both cathode and anode production. Together, we drive the mobility of tomorrow. Electrode manufacturing for gigafactories by Dürr.
That gives you a little bit of a flavor for our, if you will, main driver, for growth, which is e-mobility. Okay. We come to the next Q&A section, actually. Dietmar, may I ask you to get on stage? Mr. Schachel.
Yeah, two questions from my side. Maybe firstly on the profitability of the e-mobility business. You spoke a lot about the preference for profitability over just volumes. On battery coating, can you clarify what your minimum margin ambition is there? Are you willing to invest more in growth by accepting lower margins or should it be mid-single digit too?
That business definitely has to be double-digit in the end. We're investing still a lot of money. We see from the margins that we can achieve from previous projects already that if you take the margin, allocate an average overhead to it, that the profitability is quite good. That business is not generating money at the moment, of course, because we're heavily investing into R&D and in pilot plants. The projects that we have delivered, they are already today profitable.
On competitive landscape, you already spoke a lot about competition in various areas. I think you did not yet mention final assembly. I think the question would be, I mean, you're very successful with very big order wins, but in certain ways it sounds reminiscent of what you had in China a decade ago, where you were the first mover. The OEMs appreciated that you were the one that believed in the growth potential. We had a very early and big presence. Then a few years later, your competitors followed. Is it a similar pattern that right now you're winning because you have a two to three-year lead, and in three years, your big competitors will have caught up? Or do you think you can sustain the current lead?
Are you with final assembly or the coating?
Final assembly.
Okay. Final assembly, we're working selectively already today. We have all the means to do complete final assembly lines. We've put together a strategy that's called NEXT.assembly, where we offer differentiation. Nevertheless, in many cases, we've been talking about conveying, for example. Conveying is the most competitive piece. Already in Germany, you find easily a dozen competitors. We can easily let that out and focus on the key areas where we are competitive for many years, which is, for example, the filling equipment, double-digit EBIT rates for 20 years. The final assembly marriage systems, which we do, where we are specialized in marriage and end-of-line testing of vehicles. There we're very successful, close to double-digit returns on EBIT.
All this goes into our final assembly business, and there we become more selective on the conveying side only where we can make a difference. That is a very competitive business. Again, here it's not size. It's again profitability. Different to paint, we're not so much promoting the turnkey approach in order to protect profitability. Mr. Kempf.
Yeah. My question would be on the new kids on the block. They have had some issues this year because of higher interest rates.
Oh, yeah.
How do you make sure they're still paying your bills? Have they been slowing down in the order intake over the last month?
No, that's. You touched on a very good point. Actually, we've paid a bill already. We can admit there's one player in China. That's a while ago.
A few years back, yeah.
That's a couple of years back. If you carefully look into our P&L. When? Last year?
Over the three years.
You might find a little bit. Anyways, it doesn't matter. Yes, we've also learned our lesson there. In our risk management, we watch on an ongoing basis. We have classification for all those new players in our risk opportunity checklist. During the course of the project, we track all those projects. There's two layers. First of all, we have to be cash positive for the whole project, but we also watch at our supplier obligations. It's not good enough to just make sure that you're cash neutral on a project because you also have already supplier obligations in there where, you know, we'll get supplies from suppliers, which at some point you will have to pay. This is what we're monitoring.
Actually, we are currently, again, as we speak, having the discussion with the Chinese MD because we have a certain limit. Once this limit is reached for business with startup EVs, we're discussing whether we accept a project or we don't. We just have the case where we say, "No, we're not going to take this project because it might increase our exposure too much." This is something that ends up on Dietmar's and my level on a monthly basis, a risk report about those customers. After we paid the bill.
Okay. Do we have further questions, maybe also from the Zoom meeting?
No, there are no Zoom questions at the moment.
I think we have a question over there.
Is dry electrode something that is threatening your position in the coating?
Mm-hmm.
Arena? I understand it's still very much a startup technology, but companies like Tesla and others are working on it. There are alliances out there. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is putting effort in. So is that something you're looking at as well?
Yes. Theoretically, it's a threat because it will start with a cathode, theoretically. The Tesla facility doesn't work, so it simply doesn't. So far what they have, they acquired a company called Maxwell, who are specialists. To my knowledge, it doesn't work. We don't see anything in the market, and I can assure you we're carefully watching it. We're also in touch with Fraunhofer. This is a potential substitution, not now, maybe in ten years. I think it will come, and this is why we're watching it. Our assumption at the moment is that we will not develop it ourselves, but this would have to happen through an acquisition. The technology is still far away from happening.
Looking at the arena, you have to differentiate, you know, if you're interested in there between a solid-state battery and dry coating. Solid-state might come faster, but that's not a threat for us. Because there, only the electrolyte will be solid, but the coating of the electrodes will still be the same. Next step would be the dry coating. There are some companies, even you find here, Coperion, for example, trying to do this and a few others. So far, none of the companies is successful, but we are very close to the topic.
Okay. I think there are no further questions at this stage. I thank you very much for your questions and for the answers. We take a 15-minute break and be back at 11:00. Thank you very much.
Hallo. Ich weiß jetzt nicht, sollen wir da jetzt was ändern, oder? Wir sind über WLAN drin hier. Okay. Der ist also immer noch leicht pixelig, aber hier ist halt sehr pixelig und bei ihr ist aber leicht unscharf, aber jetzt nicht irgendwie dramatisch. Hier, wenn es überall so wäre wie bei uns, wäre schon dramatisch, weil die Folien kann man gar nicht lesen. Ja. Dann lassen wir es jetzt so. Okay. Ja. Ja, die ist ausreichend. Ja. Ja, okay. Ja. Nee, dann lassen wir es so, dass das nicht noch irgendwie zu Problemen führt mittendrin. Nee, dann lassen wir es so. Alles klar. Ja, das ist. Ja. Okay. We'll do it that way then. Many thanks for the support.
I just thought if it's like that everywhere or if somehow, yeah, internally someone here is just so blurry, then it might not be so optimal. Yeah. Yeah. The tone is also very good. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. No, then we'll leave it like that. As long as the recording is sharp. Exactly.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the second part of our Capital M arket Days. We now talk about sustainability and also about the finance management. Without further ado, I would like to ask Jochen to get back on stage for the next session.
Thank you, Andreas. Actually, my favorite topic, sustainability. Maybe as a short intro, we have, I would say, three years back decided that we wanted to be at the forefront of sustainability. If you look at our reporting, just one example, taxonomy. We are one out of four companies in the DAX universe who have not only eligible, but also aligned our relevant business in that respect. Why are we doing this? Of course, to satisfy the financing side. We could talk about ours. Mr. Auer is here today, I think. Can I see? Don't see him. Anyways. Oh, there. Okay.
Doing for quite some time, I think really inventions around green or sustainable financing. We started with a sustainable supply chain. Lots of activities. Why? The big benefit that we have, and that's the reason why even when I was not CEO, I was responsible as an operational board member for ESG, because for us it's a business model. We said from the beginning, for us, this is a differentiator. This is where we will make money in the future. On the next slides, I wanna tease you a little bit in terms of what that means for us. In general, sustainability benefiting from a circular trend. I'll show a chart. Examples around automotive, woodworking, and environmental technology.
First of all, I've pushed this a number of times already during my presentations, decarbonization is the main thing that's happening in the industry in many aspects. At the forefront automotive, but also in other sectors. All OEMs need to become carbon neutral. They've set themselves targets somewhere between 2035-2039. I can assure you, NGOs will watch OEMs very closely. If they fail in order to accomplish their targets, they will be in trouble. Actually we see it now. For example, one project for an OEM who will build or who builds as we speak, a new car plant, a car plant that we build in Hungary for pure electric vehicles, has now invested in a very green paint shop.
Already today, if somebody watches what the customer is doing, selling green vehicles, green vehicles have to come from a green facility. This is why decarbonization will happen. We can speak about how quickly will things pick up, but it's definitely something that's gonna happen. What it means for us, I'll show on some of the following slides. In general, resources and the consumption of resources will have to be reduced because of availability and cost. That has driven business for us already today with the sensitivity of customers around gas, et cetera. In all, our customers will have to reduce their Scope one emissions significantly, and even down to zero in the next decade.
Looking at the paint shop, as we speak, I've said that before, a paint shop is almost half of the carbon footprint of a facility. More than 60% of the paint shops are older than 50- 20 years. Today, a paint shop, you see that here, or the one car body consumes about 1- 1.5 MWh for the paint process. A perfect paint shop that we, for example, sold one to the Middle East now is less than 400. The consumption is one third or one quarter of current paint shops. Even more, those paint shops that we can build can be fired by electricity and consequently leading us to a carbon neutral paint shop.
On the right, you see just a few examples of what is state of the art in paint shops, what has happened in the last 15-20 years, and that doesn't mean that this is all established. Paint shops that we sell today already consume two-thirds less energy than before, and this is not even the end of the spectrum. In previous paint shops, the separation process of the overspray was in a waterborne process. Nowadays, paint shops are not using water anymore. Most of new paint shops, there's still a lot running, not using water anymore to take away the paint particles from the air because that creates a lot of waste, toxic waste that creates a lot of necessity for the conditioning of a paint shop.
Because if you bring air as a separation media into a paint shop, a paint booth, you need to constantly heat the paint shop, you need to recirculate the air, condition the air, again, consuming a lot of energy. Just to touch on that quickly, automotive OEMs need to reduce their carbon footprint and reduce their Scope 1 emissions to zero in the next decade or so, and the paint shop is about half of their footprint today, which means they have to touch our equipment. I was touching on the CO2 neutral paint shop already, not going into all the details for the sake of time. We have a lot of equipment that is especially also relevant for electric vehicles. You see one example here, our EcoInCure.
This is the only dryer of bodies after the paint is applied that runs through the paint shop in basically a 90 degrees direction. Normally, cars follow in line through a dryer. Why do we turn the vehicles 90 degrees and run them through the dryer? Because we need or we want to heat the body from inside. Electric vehicles have very stiff bumpers with a lot of material, a lot of metal in the bottom, and a normal body in the top. So you have a lot of difference in thickness of the material with the risk of heating very inhomogeneous the body when you dry it. A way to get around this is to dry the body from inside. With our way of doing it, we use the inlet of the not yet mounted windscreen.
We bring the hot air into the car body and heat the body from inside. Much better quality, the right system for e-vehicles. A lot of specific solutions, plus with our solutions, and I've brought an example here, of converting paint shops, by taking out the gas, bringing in electricity, that creates a lot of brownfield business. I was touching on it. Just taking a small example, meaning if you replace the heating for ovens, from gas to electric, these are the examples you see here, what it might generate as brownfield business. In a simple case where you have, I would say, almost a modern paint shop, dry separation, that is brownfield value of EUR 10 million just for the conversion from gas to electricity. If you have the old wet separation, it's EUR 30 million.
That, again, is only a fraction of the paint shop. Again, take the 700 paint shops, say, I don't know, one third, one quarter applies to Dürr, but the potential is basically all of the paint shops. Most of them have to be touched. You can find a figure of somewhere between EUR 10 million and EUR 100 million, depending on the necessity of refurbishment or change. That gives you kind of a brownfield potential going forward. This is what will drive our business first in Europe, second in the Americas. Actually, paint shops are much less efficient in North America because they mostly use that separation today. Then comes Asia. Asia, probably with the way they run their equipment, I would see maybe equipment being run down after 10- 15 years. I see more potential for new paint shops.
In the old worlds, there will be a lot of brownfield activity. Woodworking. See here on the bottom, what CO2 emissions are for one ton of bricks, you see 1.35 tons of CO2. Reinforced concrete, about the same. Aluminum, higher. Solid wood-1.55, but negative because wood conserves CO2. This is what drives actually the business around sustainability in solid wood because it conserves the CO2, it does not emit CO2 during production. See here, the global furniture market, and you see, on the bottom, the share of wooden single-family houses in 2021. Actually, we were surprised when we saw the number. one-third of houses here in Baden-Württemberg is already based on solid wood elements.
You see Lower Saxony, for example, with a smaller rate. Germany's average 20%. If you read documentation and the regulations that will be kicking in, for example, some European countries, France, but also Spain, there will be mandatory levels of wooden houses to be used for public buildings. In a second step, we assume also for private buildings, and that will drive the business. This is a sustainable way to build houses. Again, the market, for as we differentiate between the furniture business and the construction elements business, you see, we also expect a little bit, and this is sales, not order intake, in 2024 to come down somewhat in terms of the complete market.
On the other hand, you see that the wooden construction market will go up with a much higher CAGR. Why is construction elements so interesting for the future? First of all, the example I've given in terms of storage of CO2, it will more and more replace concrete. I've also given the example earlier today of Nokera, where the shift goes into prefabricated building elements. If you just look at the picture on the top with the manual work involved, the workforce needed, the time needed to build houses in the old-fashioned way, and you look at the bottom, elements that are produced on HOMAG machines, where you have prefabricated walls, ceilings, floors. The time on site is much faster. Production cost is much lower because you can industrialize the process.
This, I think, is a clear argument in that direction. What's happening now, we will see more and more high-rise buildings. I think there was a couple announced now. One is in Hamburg, I think 70-80 meters. A couple of buildings were houses also used then for multi-story buildings. We believe that this is the solution to help in terms of sustainability in around especially the building of social living room but also in other places. Again, I mentioned earlier, 400,000 units confirmed in Germany per year as new social living, affordable living. We believe, again, this is the right answer to it. You see the comment from the European Commission, all that plays into our pocket.
You see here on the top, 90% reduction compared to traditional methods in, for construction, et cetera, et cetera. 80 tons bound in a wooden house of CO2. Of course, there's a big debate, is there enough wood available? At the moment, we don't see a scarcity. Definitely something needs to be discussed, but we don't see this to be really the stumbling block going forward. As basically a summary, strong drivers for the building with wood, renewable, climate-friendly, et cetera. The bottom one is really important, urban redensification. What we've seen a number of projects meanwhile, where urban redensification happens on an existing concrete building.
You build another one, two, or even three floors of wooden houses because the construction of the building supports another floor or two of wooden construction where it would not support a concrete additional floor. See here, the one example I was referring to, first gigafactory is built in Germany. It's a much faster time for the construction of a house. All in all, much shorter time on site. How do we wanna grow the business further? Globalization.
I mentioned last night in the discussions that we don't only have the first orders or the orders from Europe, which we have for quite some time, but we also have the first orders from North America because the market, which has been wooden houses for a long time already, but again, in a very manual way, now starts to shift again into industrializing the production. This is where we want to benefit. We have the footprint. We will localize the business. Then innovation product portfolio. We've done two acquisitions in the last two years. We've acquired a company, Kallesoe. They do high-frequency presses for the production of cross-laminated timber, so where you do really the construction elements. A company called System TM, who route out imperfections from wooden pieces.
Meaning, in a piece of wood, you typically have, how is this called? An AST. What is AST in English? Does somebody know that?
Branch.
A branch. Okay. Holes from branches. We have equipment that analyzes in a quick way by running through of the element, where is the imperfection, and has a high speed saw that cuts out before the imperfection, after the imperfection, and then by finger jointing, creates a very stable construction element. This is where we've gone up one step, if you will, in the value chain in order to expand in that area. I can only say that business develops quite well. Nevertheless, we also want to work on the operational side by reducing product complexity. WEINMANN is coming from a not old world, but it's a single machine purpose producer, and we're now also applying our own processes, standardization, et cetera, to the company.
That's where we believe we can also further reduce the cost while expanding. You see here a picture for the CLT production market, and you can clearly see that Europe is at the forefront, but North America will catch up very quickly in a significant way. Nice CAGRs. Last but not least, in that respect, most of you will go to HOMAG this afternoon. We were joking last night, you can easily say where the money goes because we have CapEx programs not only in Schopfloch for our logistics center, which you will see in construction, but in a later stage, also our new customer center. As we speak, we are also expanding in other places.
See China coming later, but in many other places in order to keep up with the demand and to reduce cost, especially and use potential on the service business. The logistics center that you will see in Schopfloch is meant to become much better, much faster on our spare parts delivery, supporting our approach to better covering our installed base. Last but not least on this one here, environmental technology. That's a business we've been in for a very long time. It's a business that once started with the air purification of paint shops. Meanwhile, after the acquisition of our largest competitor, Megtec, in the U.S. about four years ago, that business is the automotive piece in that business is less than 10%. The rest is wood industries, glass, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food, chemical, et cetera.
This business is driven, of course, by emission standards. Those emission standards are tightening and that drives our business. Also here, you will see it in the film on the next slide, it is very important to become much more sustainable. In the past, also here, our air purification systems were gas-heated. The following film will show you what it means. Nicely done by our MD.
It all started in Gothenburg, Sweden, at Chalmers University of Technology. My fellow colleagues and I realized that volatile organic compounds, so-called VOCs, will be a tremendous impact for our environment and our human health. From the beginning, the industry was using regenerative thermal oxidizers to neutralize the VOCs by burning fossil fuels to oxidize the polluted air. We believe there should be an additional way. What if we could find an approach which utilizes renewable energy resources? Way ahead, we already found an almost CO2 neutral solution, and with today's shift to renewable energies, it became a real money saver. We invented the flameless regenerative thermal oxidizer, the Oxi.X RV. The crucial point of our invention are the small ceramic gravels. They enclose electrical heating coils which heat up the center to approx 1,000 degrees Celsius.
Now, the incoming VOC-laden airflow absorbs this energy. Coming closer to the center, the oxidation process starts. The full oxidation releases a lot of energy, which remains in the upper area of the bed. This heat buildup is a big issue. How did we solve it? The solution is amazingly simple. By constantly changing the airflow direction, this energy now supports the oxidation process. As soon as it reaches a sufficient energy level, it runs self-sustained. That means the external energy on the heat coils can now be reduced to a minimum or even completely shut down. This is our self-sustained running system. By now, we have delivered about 600 Oxi.X RVs globally in all industries. That's quite something. To deliver these units in modular concepts from 1 square meter up to 40 square meter sized vents.
For example, in paint shop, the exhaust air from paint booths and dryers are cleaned, also in typical batch operation. On top, the released energy is transferred back to the oven. I think it's the sustainability and the simplicity of the unit. A few moving parts flow up and down, and it's just standing there and running.
Another example of sustainability, actually, we're still debating whether the product name Oxi.X RV is really easy. I'm not on the supportive side, but the team has decided, but it did not prevent the success of the equipment. Again, another example how sustainable products can help to make a production cleaner. All right, that would cover the sustainability section. Again, happy to answer any question you might have. Okay, thank you very much, Jochen. Then we come to the next Q&A session, and we start with Marianne.
Could you maybe provide us the split of the sales in terms of services, brownfield and greenfield as of now, and how you see it moving forward in the future, maybe on your midterm target?
The business is, let's make it very simple, almost EUR 400 million turnover CTS. Is that about the figure?
Yeah.
Of that, currently 15% is e-mobility. Of the rest, as we're roughly at 20% service, 20%-25% US a bit more, and the rest is new equipment.
Going forward?
Going forward, of course, the e-mobility piece will significantly grow. That's the picture we painted earlier. That can be EUR 300 million or EUR 500 million at some point. The rest of the business will grow at GDP plus. I would say also in the range of maybe 5%-6%. That's what it has traditionally done. That's what we expect also going forward.
Okay. Another question, I'm not sure if it's exactly your area of expertise, but on the wood construction, so you talk about availability as a risk. What about other risk in terms of fire, water damage? Do you think this could maybe impact the construction demand in the future?
No. The discussion, of course, is all about the natural concern about fire. The way we have seen wooden construction, it is wood, interesting enough, when treated the right way, is extremely fire resistant. We've seen it for some public buildings, where wood is used in a big way, fulfilling all those, what is it, F90, whatever requirements. That doesn't seem to be a real issue of concern.
Okay. Thank you.
You see a lot of old wooden houses. I mean, I was in Poland last week at the HOMAG facility, and the people were showing the expansion plans and also the trend in Poland towards wooden houses. They were showing pictures of wooden houses of 500 years ago, which still are there. Wood is always perceived as something that will rot quickly, but it's not the case. Mr. Schachel.
You spoke about various upgrade potential in terms of the gas to electric switch and also maybe the VOC removal. Can you talk a bit how your client appetite for those projects has changed in the last-
Mm-hmm.
A few months? Maybe it's easier to justify a bigger plant shutdown or maybe also the gas price pressure is a bit lower.
There is very big demand. That product with this special name, we can't even supply enough following the demand at the moment. This is the key for the reduction also of CO₂ emissions in many industrial processes, especially also in automotive. What we're seeing in general, not only for CTS, but for the automotive business overall, I would say in the last 18, if not maybe 24 months, but maybe more 18 months, a complete shift in the discussion that we have with customers. Before, the discussion was always on a return on investment basis. This is what prevented decisions for many years, especially when energy prices were down. Now, what we see is customers applying budgets for sustainability and asking us for the biggest bang for the buck.
We are sitting together with the OEMs who say, "I have a budget of so many millions in order to reduce the CO₂ emissions in our facility. Where should we first start? Where do we get the biggest reduction per million invested." That's a completely different discussion to what we had a few years back. This is the beginning, exactly of the discussion I was trying to point at, earlier, that they now slowly understand the targets they've given themselves following the 1.5 degrees agreements will bring them under a lot of pressure. That's changing as we speak.
Sorry for co-condensing the very important topic of sustainability into very simple analyst metrics like EBIT margins. In the past year, told us a bit about the price premium you charge for the EcoDryScrubber and other things. Now when we look at the PFS order intake margin being up 450 basis points, as you said, I mean, do you have any internal perspective how much of that might be driven by the re-emergence of a green product premium and customers willing to pay a premium for green solutions?
Oh, that's a tough one. Anything I would say would not be, I would say, academic enough. There is a piece of that, but it's not the—it's currently not yet the main part of the story. That part will come as the brownfield business starts to kick in, stronger. Where we have, if you will, proprietary advantages because equipment supplied by us, of course, it's much easier for us to upgrade the equipment than it is for others. Of course, it's the same way a competitor has installed equipment, it's easier for them, but the beauty is we have a large installed base. I would say that element is not yet the relevant element in the increase of the margin. Another question?
Speaking of wood as a sustainable element of construction, what does Dürr and HOMAG maybe doing for the development of sustainable materials in that field, especially for wood? Do you have any initiatives you're supporting?
No, other than having all sorts of initiatives this week, we've supported the cultivation of 17,500 square meters of wood. All sorts of things like that, you know, that comes from sustainable activities. We are dealing with our clients, we're supporting our clients with a new material. For example, a different area from furniture business. IKEA, for example, in terms of making their furniture more sustainable, I mean, we're all victims of IKEA, aren't we? Yeah. In screwing bolts and things not working.
What they are doing is now they're going away from screws into clips, and that has a big impact on our business because you have to create special inlets into the pieces of the furniture to make those clips or to have those clips being clicked and make the furniture stable. When you change to another way that you can disassemble the furniture, and that's their approach to sustainability. What it means from a different angle, we're working closely with our customers, but we're not the product developer. We're supporting our customers who are the product developers with our equipment.
Yeah, Mohsin.
Hi, Mohsin Jahanbakhsh. You mentioned on slide 49 the big savings that you're able to deliver for paint shops in terms of energy, paint, water.
Mm-hmm
... uses versus the last 15-20 years. Is there anything you can, you know, talk about in terms of relative to, you know, your competitors? Like, what, how the labor savings look relative to them today?
That was 49. If we look at the electrification, our competitors in many cases are not there yet. Nobody else can build a CO₂ neutral paint job as we speak, because we're the only ones who have already converted all the equipment away from gas into electricity. Will competitors also offer changes from the old-fashioned way, the 1 megawatt to 1.5 megawatt? Yes, because also other competitors have different paint booths already today. In the sum of parts, I would say nobody can perfectly compete. I'm not discrediting competitors. Some do dryers, some do paint booths.
As a complete paint shop and with the management, I mean, we're talking about elements in a paint shop right now, but there's a significant piece of digitization manufacturing execution system on top, that is relevant to make an overall production efficient. For example, in a production not always happens in a car plant homogeneous. Sometimes there's maybe 10 minutes where there is no car bodies coming, either because there's a break or there's a shortage. Then what we do is our systems already predict from a much earlier process what's coming, and they let the dryer go cooler in order to save energy. This altogether nobody else can do.
Actually, we're just having a new digital product, DXQenergy.management, that we will have certified by an external body in order to give our customers the tool to, in a certified way, track their own footprint. That's things nobody else at the moment can do.
Thank you.
Checking for questions maybe on the Zoom also before we take another question from the floor.
No questions on the Zoom currently.
Mr. Eitel, please go ahead with your question.
Stefan Eitel from MainFirst. May we get just two examples of business lines where you get hit by sustainability because the new world is hurting you?
Oh, yeah. On the supply chain. "Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz". We have I don't know how many people we will have to hire in the next 12 months to satisfy all that crazy stuff that's coming from Brussels. Means very simple. We are, for example, on the EU taxonomy, which will be expanded. We have changed auditor. It's gonna be audit next year-end closing. If we talk to our auditors and say, "Look, this is the package. How are you going to audit us?" They don't know. There's a lot of administrative, useless stuff, to say so, coming over us that will create a lot of cost.
The second example?
Second example. I thought I would get away with one. On sustainability.
Business MPS, internal combustion engine.
Internal combustion engine, yeah. We're almost through that transition, yes.
Yeah. That's an impact that we had on the MPS division. There was a sales amounting to around EUR 70 million because by the internal combustion engine business of balancing and over the next years is going down towards zero. We are replacing this step by step with electric mobility solutions for balancing. Jochen mentioned earlier, there are moving turning parts, whether it's the crankshaft, whether it's the valve control, other areas in the gearbox, much moving parts we don't see in an electric application. You could see last night on the Teamtechnik side how small an electric motor including a gearbox is. I mean, today when you open up your car, it's a different view that you're having.
Thank you.
If you're lucky, you have a frunk instead.
Yeah. Mr. Eitel.
Can we take your market outlook for the wood processing machinery for 2024 as a blueprint for your sales development, at HOMAG in this year?
Honestly, very difficult to say at the moment because you have seen the drop in 2024. In our numbers, it will not perfectly look like that, I assume.
Mm.
Because we currently have almost an annual turnover on our books, which is quite unusual for HOMAG. This, to some extent already today, leads into 2024. Of course, we're not stopping bookings in the next 12 months. Our assumption is, yes, the business might, we might guide the business somewhat lower, but we don't anticipate it to be as much as it is shown in the figures at the moment.
May I follow up? That would imply that your competitors will lose more than you because you are part of that market.
Yes.
On one side, yes. We are also changing the characteristic of the business. You could see what we are doing on the solid wood side. We are expecting growth there. Not all of our competitors or only some are covering this area as well. It's the balance of the portfolio that we are having between furniture, construction elements, and it's the service where we are clearly targeting then from today's 25% of service to move toward 30%, what we are having on a group level as a target as well.
And this will-
Where we are actually at.
This will, to some extent, overcompensate because I tried to mention it before, we see significant additional potential on the service side, which is today about EUR 350 million at HOMAG that can go up a significant way in the next two years. Also, almost naturally, with the installed base that we have generated meanwhile. Mr. Kempf?
One follow-up on this service business. You mentioned earlier that one of your competitors tried to sneak in and steal a service contract. How do you make sure that something like that does not happen again and you sell the machine plus, like, three years of a service contract? Yeah, I think that's just it.
Well, this is ongoing competition. It's not just one. The example I was giving was from this Eisenmann insolvency, where there's been, you know, you cut the dragon's head, and there is a number of small dragons coming up. This is what we have to fight every day. This is what we're discussing big time. Actually, I was sitting together with the head of our paint shop service business just yesterday. We will have a very good year this year because obviously many of the customers, after some maybe not so good experiences, have come back to us.
We had a number of cases where those small competitors with their little balance sheet on some projects also miscalculated because they are accepting orders typically relatively easily and then try to manage themselves up during the project, which hasn't happened. I would say overall, that has played more into our favor this year than it was creating additional competition.
Can you just give some color, if you sell the machine, how long do you also sell the service contract with it? How many years?
What we typically do is, we not always get a real service contract, especially on the automotive side. What we normally do is that we supply with the original equipment, with a plant, a set of spare parts. They use, they consume those spare parts until they have to buy new ones. What we have installed over time is in many of the car plants, the bigger car plants, we have so-called antennas. We have two or three service people embedded in the facility, and they more than pay for themselves because they always find business with customers, and that's the approach. Customers, in not many cases, subscribe to long-term service contracts in our business.
Currently, I see no further questions. Any questions on the Zoom?
No.
Thank you very much for these questions, and thanks, Jochen, for the presentations.
Mm-hmm.
Dietmar will take over now, for the final session on finance management.
Yeah. Good morning. Also officially now from my side. Yeah, giving an insight in regard to the finance management. The areas that I would like to cover is our digital finance transformation, so how we are changing the way we are working. Then, of course, it's about the financial metrics, it's about the cash conversion, it's about how do we maintain a proper financial policy and what is the policy. You will get some insight, and the press release is just out right now as well regarding our green finance or sustainable finance framework. Of course, as an investor, it's always important what are we going to do with the cash that we are generating, and how do we do the capital allocations, so giving you some insights in that regard. Yeah.
First of all, Jochen mentioned regarding the One Dürr Group program, you could see there that One Finance is also one of these programs. What we are targeting basically is fixed with these five strategic targets, and it focuses on how do we enable to steer the operation, our business, in a better way. To me, that's a matter of resilience as well. That we provide better insight in a more timely manner. As such, operational responsible managers can, at the very end, do better business decision and can improve the business continuously. Nevertheless, for us, it's as well important to increase our efficiency, increase our value add, but also making sure, and this is the G in ESG, to assure that we have a proper governance over our business.
Jochen mentioned the example of how do we actually handle exposure towards the new kids on the block, the new entrants to the EV markets, and how do we make sure that risks and opportunities are balanced so that at the very end, we continue to develop the business in a profitable manner. Of course, it's also about making sure that we get the right people on board, that we keep the right people on board. Even in the surroundings of Stuttgart, where we have other nice companies, and you could see this morning the Porsche sales company's head office just in front of the Bietigheim city, then that we find the right people actually to do the business together with us.
As mentioned with the headline, it's also about how do we use the new opportunities coming from the digitization as well to further improve our area. That's the overall financial strategic targets. Now let's look into financial metrics, and let's start, first of all, with the cash conversion. You can see on the upper left side of the chart actually that our cash conversion was fluctuating basically over the years. We had periods where we had strong initial payments from our customers, and we could see the tension and budget constraints coming up on their side and then reducing the initial payments. Now, in conjunction with our risk management, we are basically targeting the big projects with five to eight milestone payments during the process work then to balance and to be cash neutral, so having a more stable operation.
During the last two years, we managed actually to deliver a bit over EUR 100 million in cash. 2020, 2021, right now, after nine months, we are at EUR 69 million. You might recall our guidance that we are targeting EUR 50 million-EUR 100 million. Of course, it's the ambition of the CFO getting closer to the figure of the last year, the year before again. That's what we want to do when we move forward. The key levels in that regard is then at the very end that we need to consider. We mentioned the EUR 200 million CapEx program on the HOMAG side that actually will have an influence in the future.
In regard to the contribution right now, of course, EBIT is the source for the cash flow generation. It's the stabilization and the structural improvement of the net working capital and the HOMAG program already mentioned. What we are targeting is actually that we should achieve a cash conversion of 80% of the net income in a consistent manner or even higher. You could see that during the last years. Now also after the first nine months of this year, we are above that levels. That's based on the policies. We want to continue this development. Now we're looking into various angles then. CapEx already mentioned is one of these areas. Typically, we did around EUR 80 million-EUR 100 million in CapEx each year.
This year, we are at EUR 98 million after nine months already, and it's in relation to the HOMAG CapEx expansion program. You will see this later this afternoon when we visit the shop floor site. We focus on improving logistics. We focus on improving efficiency and productivity by applying and implementing new principles of how we are assembling our machinery, and we have good pilot cases, really outstanding lighthouses in that regard. We will see higher investment this year, but also for the next two years, especially being driven by the program. In a medium-term perspective, we target to be below 3% CapEx in % of sales, like you can see on the lower left side in the last years as well.
It's a specific program to do catch-up, to improve, as mentioned, the operation of HOMAG, and then we will get down to a level of 3% afterwards again. Yeah, the next area that actually I would like to touch is the net working capital development. You can see that likeseven to eight years back, we have been operating in areas of around EUR 200 million net capital. Now it increased. There was a peak of EUR half a billion in 2019, and basically during the COVID pandemic. Now afterwards, we're operating with a level of around EUR 400 million. What we are striving for is to balance, on one side, the exposure to our customers, the sales outstanding, with actually our liabilities to our suppliers. We work on inventory optimization.
When you look into our balance sheet, you can see that during the last 12-18 months, we built up significant inventory to assure that the supply chain keeps running and that we can run the factory. This was important and necessary to be done in this volatile situation with a lot of interruptions in the supply chain. We do see first improvement areas, and we will then again balance the inventory safety levels to actually fit to the market situation. We operate with net working capital of 40-50 days. You can also see that in the past, we have been below 40 days.
One of the areas for next year will especially to look into optimization further in a, let's say, focused way and then we see no defined target to date as we need to evaluate, and we also need to see how the supply chain situation further improves. Then the target, from my point of view, should be in a reasonable manner to be below 40 days or somewhere around the 40 days when moving forward. Yeah. All this finally is reflected in our financial policy. We talked about resilience to some extent today already. To me, that's important. You also challenged us in regard to is Dürr able to deliver 8% EBIT margin in a sustainable manner. It's a matter of the resilience that we are able to cope with these kind of situations.
Jochen mentioned how much friction is HOMAG's result this year, then redundancy, waste of efforts because we cannot build a machine as we would like to do it going through in one way, basically. Yeah. That will improve in the future. Important is, and there will always be uncertainty, there will be interruptions. We do see the world became much more volatile, and we are preparing ourselves to deliver in a sustainable and consistent manner also in this difficult situation. I think the profitability this year already is highlighting that we are making progress in that regard. Solid balance sheet and cash flow is important for our operation. Already talked about this. We are not rated today. Nevertheless, our underlying to our activities is that we want to be perceived as an investment grade-rated company.
Actually, this means a leverage of being below two in all the other areas in that region. That helps us also to do the refinancing. We'll get back to this with the next chart, then also in a proper manner. We talked about sustainability, we talked about ESG. That's important to us. We had our sustainability council meeting yesterday morning. It was a long discussion, and we will intensify this for the future. To me, it's not because everything needs to be ESG and needs to be green. ESG helps us to improve our operation, the way we run, to assess the risk properly, opportunities, and it helps at the very end to make, again, the company more resilient and more stable, even in volatile and changing environments.
At the very end, cash flow on one side, what is available in order to grow our business further? We have currently available funds of around EUR 1.4 billion. The majority, around EUR 850 million-EUR 900 million, is really cash and money market that is available. We have a revolving credit line of EUR half a billion that is currently not drawn, that can be used if needed. You can see that we managed with the activities that we did back in 2019 and 2020 for the refinancing to have a better balanced maturity profile. The peak is in 2026 with the convertible. The only maturity coming up next year is Schuldschein loan amounting to EUR 50 million.
We will then see how we manage this. From today's point of view, we could manage it with cash, but on the other side, it's important to be active in the debt capital market continuously and also, of course, to see how in this changing interest environment, Dürr is perceived. And that's why I mentioned that the investment-grade perception is important to us, and then we see how we develop further in that regard.
Nevertheless, overall, this is not a comparison back to 2019, on one side, with the available debt, then despite not being drawn down on the other side with the cash position, we basically operate with a close to zero net debt, which gives us a good degree of freedom to do the M&A transactions like we did with Teamtechnik, with System TM, with Kallesoe, to enter into new business areas, but also to strengthen existing business areas. That's basically what we want to manage then here to be close to net zero. The other way around, as I already mentioned, is basically the target is a leverage below factor of two when moving forward, then as well.
In that conjunction, you can, and you might remember, I'm sure you remember, actually, Dürr did all refinancing since 2019, and Christian was especially the person driving all these efforts, with sustainability-linked, ESG-linked, components being based on the EcoVadis rating. From our point of view, it's now time to enhance that program to move forward to new market standards. To shift away from purely sustainability-linked finance also to align with the new market standards. We just released a framework that was prepared over the last months, one side by the treasury team, but on the other side, with the sustainability or corporate social responsibility team and released it now. It underscores again our position as being a leader also in that regard. What we are focusing on is basically two areas.
On one side, it's the green finance in regard to the use of proceeds, that the money that we are using is dedicated then to improving. Then the contribution from our side is helping our customers with our solutions to achieve their climate strategy, but it's also to continue with the sustainability-linked finance, but being more, going beyond just the EcoVadis rating. Now, we also have three clear targets that are embedded in there. It's our emissions, Scope one and two, it's the Scope three emissions of our customers, and it's where we believe it's a higher requirement, it's more demanding, also the ISS ESG rating that is behind. The improvements that we expect there should also be expression of our contribution, but also our continuous improvement that we achieve. I think we are too.
From today's point of view with this framework, really well prepared for future financing activities. Actually, as said, you might not see immediately some of them, but getting to the next point, how are we growing the business? You could see yesterday examples on one side with M&A activities, on the other side with the strong development with the organic growth. We already talked about our M&A activities during the last years. Actually, we want to further expand in the MedTech and the life science market in a wider framework with the production automation. We believe it's one of the drivers, and Jochen explained this as well, for the future, with the lack of people being available on construction sites for doing the wooden houses. We see certain areas. We will not go into adventures.
We will do this in very diligent, very considered ways. Our M&A types are having in focus basically the cross-divisional technology like IT, like digitalization, the bolt-on to actually get further market access or as Jochen mentioned, in regard to lithium or the battery development, maybe then also new technologies that might play a role for the future where we can then, with such acquisitions, can accelerate the development, but also with complementary business that is opening new market opportunities to us. Yeah. At the very end, of course, all of this shall help to increase our return to the shareholders. Of course, the stock price development is important, but it's also about the return that we are paying via our dividend. We have a clear policy of 30%-40% of the net income being paid to our shareholders.
You can see our track record is in line with this, basically with the good development during the last years being at the upper end, then in a peak, paying EUR 1.10 per dividend. It's not yet on that level, but, of course, it's an ambition as well with the growth in the business, in the profitability, in the net income at the very end with the defined target range, then to provide returns to our shareholders in that regard as well. Yeah. That's a little bit of insight from the finance area. With this, maybe Jochen, back to you for a few closing charts. Then, of course, we are available again for Q&A.
Thank you, Dietmar. Hope we could convince you on a few things, especially on our focus, achieving the midterm targets for EBIT and ROCE. We had interesting discussions last night on the ambition level. We hope we could convince you that those levels for us, yes, there is work to do. On the other hand, they're equally realistic. We will, maybe a bit different to the past, in terms of pretty much portfolio management, allocate the resources and the money where we see the growth opportunities and the margin opportunities. Also important, and, that's been a point of discussion in the past. Also, I mentioned that a number of times during the presentation.
As much as we want to achieve, of course, margins, the margins we talk about, we want to achieve them in a resilient way, and that can only be done by also strengthening the resilience of our business. Dietmar was very much focusing on it. Margin is one thing, but cash conversion is another one, and consequently also our ambition to achieve investment grade, which then would or will offer the right financing approaches, if you will. Key takeaways. We hope that you take those home with you. That with our leadership approach and a view on a structured portfolio, this management, and when I say this management, I'm not just talking about Dietmar and myself, but the team that you've seen before. Obviously their colleagues are the right team to work with.
Focus on EBIT and returns, resilience and revenue growth with the 5%-6% that we've announced, and we've confirmed. Hopefully we've given you enough and the right examples from our portfolio where there is growth opportunities, mainly driven by the two main drivers we were presenting today, which are sustainability and e-mobility, and then also the element, the growing element of automation, not only in MedTech, but also in other areas. The two main topics that drive our business forward are sustainability and e-mobility. Again, we want to deliver numbers not only from a P&L, but also from a balance sheet point of view that give us enough headroom to show the cash conversion of the 80% on EBIT, right? Not on EBITDA.
Net income.
Net income. Oh, okay. That's why I'm not a CFO. On net income. That would close the points from our end. Again, I'm grateful for the discussions we had on the other agenda items, and happy to continue the discussion now together with Dietmar.
Okay. Thank you very much. We come to the final Q&A session for today. Let's start with Mr. Course.
Yes. Thank you. I have two questions regarding M&A and portfolio management. Portfolio management can be buy and hold, or it could also be buy, hold and sell.
Yes.
Right.
What are your underperformers or potential underperformers or what are the criteria to define underperformers? Secondly, with regards to M&A, can you maybe share with us main KPIs or what are the don'ts or what are the must-haves, in financial terms? It's, I think, more of a CFO question. EPS accretion in year one, year two, or whatsoever maybe you can share.
Mm-hmm.
With us, the financial ideas.
Mm-hmm.
I'll just start off.
On the M&A side, of course, sell is part of M&A. I mean, it would not be complete to not have the sell in there. Our ideal scenario, if you will, is that we would first do some smaller or maybe also significant acquisition and then rethink to some extent the portfolio which also could include a sell option. We have different scenarios and definitely that's part of the discussion that we have. When we have the portfolio discussion in the management team, it's mainly about the portfolio consisting of growth opportunity and competitive positioning. This is how we cluster the business. When I say that we don't cluster the divisions, we cluster the business units below the divisions. That's about 40 businesses that we constantly watch and where we're discussing with the team on development possibilities.
Based on this, we allocate resources. You can imagine that's interesting discussions with sometimes diverging ways to look at it, but at least it's a good way for professional discussions and decision-making.
In regard to the contribution, what we are targeting with our M&A activities is to deliver into above average growth, but also to deliver into above average profitabilities. At the very end, it should be accretive that we are seeing more benefits coming from our M&A acquisition or from our EPS.
Yeah. If I may add one sentence to that. Interesting piece, if we talk about the 8% in 2024, of course, that has an impact on our view on M&A as well. In the past, if you take, for example, Megtec, we were of course buying Megtec at a margin below the 8%. If we're now looking at acquisitions, we of course have a focus on the one hand, generating value by margin expansion going forward, but we're looking at businesses that already would support to some extent our margin. We don't wanna purely achieve it by that or not the majority of it, don't get me wrong, but it has an impact which will be quite interesting discussion with stakeholders, as companies that have a higher than average margin, at least comparing with us, also have certain valuations.
First we take Mr. Schachel and then Aisha.
Let me think. This, the first question would be on your cash flow ambition. I think 80% from 2025. Can you talk a bit more about the next two years? You probably have a bigger reset of contract liabilities, which might come in the next two years. You've got HOMAG CapEx. What's really the ambition level that you communicate to your team for the next two years? Does it remain positive on cash flow or the next two years don't matter, it's all about 2025?
Yeah. Guidance will come out end of February next year, so that's a few days still to go. Overall, the situation is, as you said, we have a high level of contract liabilities right now. We do see that especially with a weaker order intake that we anticipate on the HOMAG side there, and also our working into the projects will actually consume of these contract liabilities. On the other side, we have the high inventory levels where we do see opportunities now to start with the adjustments, with the stabilization in the supply chain. Overall, from my point of view, the EUR 50 million-EUR 100 million that we are having today, and as said, not yet finalizing the guidance for next year.
I think that's from our point of view, a framework that we want to maintain also now for the next shorter period of time where we have in conjunction with the CapEx program, higher spending on CapEx.
Maybe you can clarify your remarks on the solid balance sheet and investment grade metrics. When I was preparing for the capital markets, I was thinking that you would talk about solid balance sheet, but I was thinking you would talk about you being close to net cash. Now suddenly this 2x number. Are you that bullish on the M&A pipeline that you need to prepare us for a scenario of 2x leverage, which would give you high triple-digit headroom for deals?
That if you do a bigger M&A transaction, that might or that would have an impact. That also be for a certain period of time, it probably would not be below the 2x, but the target would be again coming back into that area. Of course, in CapEx transaction, we would also align then what are the returns finally, so that we are able to manage this again into that direction.
Thank you.
I think we have a question from Holger Eissler next.
Yeah. Listening to your most recent comments about what is an attractive business for you, why not selling some of the not growing firms? Why not going to 100% in HOMAG, which all the prospects and potential you were describing to us?
Let's start with the latter one. Might be easier. I mean, there's shareholders involved. There's agreements, I think. Are this, the agreement public?
The pool agreement is public, yeah.
Yes. The pool agreement is public, and I think that describes the situation, of course. There's the ambition to do it. On the other hand, I mean, what's at the moment the downside of not having all the shares, that's limited. Yes, of course, it would complete the transaction in a way. On the other hand, with the agreements in place, the domination agreement, et cetera, and the pool agreement, there's no disadvantage, if I can say, though. On selling the businesses, of course, we're looking at everything and you could start with the lowest return on sales. How can I best answer it? One of the businesses is maybe not totally interwoven with the company. Yeah. Another
Is it so?
Oh, there's another one. One other not extremely performing business at the moment is part of the DNA in a way that it's very difficult to carve it out, if I may put it that way. We'd rather make it an attractive business, which I think is the easy option, than trying to carve it out.
The very first one, that's quite obvious candidate to get a nice price for it.
Which is your first one or my first one?
Yours.
My first one?
Yeah.
Yeah. Could be. We're not here to say we're not thinking in that direction.
If I may just make one recommendation. Taking a five to eight -year view, and you were talking already about 2030, you can have much higher margins if you really adjust and refine your portfolio.
Yes. Something will happen anyways.
It's been already a long morning. I currently don't see further. Oh, yes, I see another question here. Christoph Meisel.
In a high risk and a higher interest rate environment, isn't there a risk that your automotive clients might be more reluctant in terms of down payments in the future?
There might be a reluctance in that regard, but we are looking to the risk management at the very end. To balance our exposure in that regard with finally the initial payments and the continuous payments coming from our customer side. We feel it's important. At the very end, they are still financing it cheaper than we are doing.
Mr. Schachel?
Just to follow up on M&A ticket size, because you said how your M&A approach might have evolved, that you're looking for higher margin, more established businesses. What are the implications for the say, ticket size we should expect? Because for the last, it's almost a decade ago that you acquired HOMAG as a EUR 1 billion ticket, so to speak. Since then, it was more bolt on, more double digit. I mean, is now the time right for another bigger deal?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Now that you ask, I might have not answered your last question completely, because I think there was an element of where we are shooting at, right?
That's really one signal I want to say.
I might put that together in one.
It's not mathematically correct, but I was surprised in the last question that you mentioned the two times proactively. Yes, I was also wondering about the
Mm-hmm
signal that you
Yeah
sent to us.
Look, we would, and we are always looking at targets. I mean, we're looking at many, many targets. We have, meanwhile, a very professional corporate development department with a strong database. We have more than 200 company profiles meanwhile, and the companies that we're constantly watching on the development. You know, we were talking about the Teamtechnik case yesterday, where this acquisition didn't just fall from heaven. That was like 2 years of intense work, building relationships, et cetera. This is what we do right now. Why did we not announce anything significant? Because in terms of availability, price, perspectives, there was nothing yet where we said we will completely shoot for it. Are we looking at acquisitions of a magnitude of EUR 500 million or even more? Yes, we do.
Again, we will only move maybe even if I'm not coming from this region, there we have kind of a Swabian behavior. Yeah, we're careful, we look for the right moment, we look for the right angle, and we're typically not going for very big public auctions because then building value from there is maybe is more difficult. With the debt levels, or debt multiples Dietmar was mentioning, this would give us headroom for larger acquisitions, and we're not shying away from it. I mean, I've been in private equity and I've seen debt multiples. Of course, everybody here would run away. I'm not saying we're going in this direction, but we're not shy, especially now.
I mean, yes, high interest rates, but the interesting element to that is that the investor universe in potential acquisitions is changing. You're not seeing, for example, so many private equities at the moment because they don't finance those deals at the moment. Now might even be an interesting time. I'm used from my past of doing acquisitions, not when you know it's just everything looks easy because that's probably the time where you don't do the best acquisitions. That part. Other part. What we're shooting for? Of course, in an ideal world, we would do acquisitions that further reduce our automotive exposure. We would do acquisitions that are rather in machine building area than in construction. Meaning businesses that give a long life cycle resilience in a way, and businesses that in their DNA fit our business.
That's what we're looking for still at the moment. We have businesses where we've shown already that we want to expand. Those we want to further expand. Look at solid wood, look at industrial automation. Everything that's related to sustainability is interesting. There is a couple of cards to play and let's see when we're successful.
Okay, any further questions from the room? I think there are no questions also on the Zoom meeting. This would be then the last call, basically. Okay, Mr. Weyrauch, last call.
The last one.
Could you state your preconditions for a share buy program, which might be on your agenda now?
Good one.
Yeah. Currently it's not in agenda.
We're handcuffed at the moment.
Yeah, right. We don't have an authorization to do so far, so this is something we are targeting in next year's annual general meeting to reset basically the opportunities to raise capital and also to move into the other direction. You could see our ambition is in growing the business and we will need funds for that. We want to be prepared to be able to act in future again, if needed. Basically we are focusing on investing into the right targets that at the very end provide higher returns.
At some point, and I'm not a fan of buying back shares in general, but at some point this year we were regretting the fact that we were not able to do it because.
For EUR 20.
... with the confidence in the business, that could have been a nice sign to the market. As Dietmar mentioned, I could almost say we missed out on the shareholders meeting to get approval.
Okay. Thank you very much for answering all the questions, and thank you for the interest and for asking the questions. Thanks also to all the participants at the Zoom meeting. We are now coming to the end of our capital markets day. Thanks a lot once again for being here with us physically or for attending in the Zoom meeting. We're looking forward to do this now regularly and more often in the future in a physical way and hope that we will see also good attendance like we did today. Thank you very much and have a good day.