Good morning to everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you to our Capital Markets Day 2021 here in London. My name is Oliver Luckenbach. I am the Head of Investor Relations of GEA, and I joined the company 18 months ago. Today, the entire management team of GEA that is present here today is very much looking forward to meeting and interacting with you, our investors and analysts in person here in London. Thank you very much for coming here to the Landmark Hotel to be able to interact with us in person despite the ongoing pandemic. At the same time, I know that there are many of our investors and analysts and friends of GEA visiting us from home or from the home office.
I know that many of them would be happy and would have loved to be here with us in London today as well. I'm pretty sure that sooner or later we will meet again on one of our next road shows or conferences. I'm quite positive and confident here. What do we have prepared for you today? Let's have a look at the agenda. We will start this morning with our CEO, Stefan Klebert, talking about the turnaround story of GEA and our Mission 26. We will get more details on all the pillars of our Mission 26. Later on, we will have two deep dives into the two largest divisions of GEA. That is our Separation and Flow Technologies business, represented by the CEO, Klaus Stojentin. We also have Ilija Aprcovic here, the CEO of our Liquid and Powder Technologies business.
Both businesses combined account for around about 60% of total GEA sales and 65% of EBITDA. Later on, we will then have Johannes Giloth talking about our Operational Excellence program, what we have planned here for the next five years. At the end of the day, we have our CFO here on stage, and he will then bring everything together to show you what we are doing here with our Mission 26. The only thing that is between me and our Capital Markets Day, that is the disclaimer. I would like to ask you to have a look at the disclaimer. I will not read it word by word, but will assume that you have read it, and we will take it as read to the notes of this meeting. With that, it's my pleasure to hand it over to our CEO, Stefan Klebert.
Stefan, please come on stage.
Thank you very much, Oliver, and a very warm welcome from my side. Welcome to London. It's a pleasure for us being here after a long while of the COVID pandemic. It was not possible to travel for all of us, and it is really great to see you all in person here. I hope that we can deliver a lot of value for you today and a lot of information. Where are we? What did we do? What are we doing forward-looking? Let me just start with the turnaround story. When I started two and a half years ago at GEA, there were some really positive things. The company was in stable and growing markets. The company was and is still technology leader in many segments, and we have a lot of bright engineers and good engineers.
These are the very good things of GEA. However, on the other side, at the end of 2018, the company was in a difficult situation. Like you remember, there was no P&L responsibility below the executive board level, and therefore, there was a huge lack of accountability. There was a financial underperformance. All in all, we had seven profit warnings in a row. We had a high staff turnover. Managers were leaving. That was the opportunity for me to step into this great company and to build up a new management team. You will meet many of the new team today and can make your own opinion about the new team. As I said, the company had seven profit warnings in a row. A lot of trust was destroyed. When I started 19th of February as CEO of this company, the share price was EUR 20.51.
That was long before COVID, let's say, and not impacted by any outside influences. We also had some analysts saying this is an uninvestable stock. We also had yesterday a dinner where some of you participated, and I heard the same things also yesterday. This definitely changed during the last two and a half years. We are proud about that. The team, I would say, did really a good job. Just to reflect, what have been the five key drivers to this contribution? What did we really change? What should also give you trust that GEA nowadays is a completely different company than it was at the end of 2018. First, and utmost important, we changed the organization. Changing of organizations is normally a very challenging issue in a company.
In that case, everybody knew and felt that the organizational change called OneGEA led to the wrong direction. There was a great openness to change, and we worked it out without any support of consultants. Only the management team, we started, we went to the mountains at the weekend with a small management team out of 40 or 50 people, and we created the first idea, where do we want to go? At the end, we ended up with five divisions consisting out of 17 business units, all with a clear and full P&L responsibility. We created a new management team. We brought in new people from outside industries with completely different backgrounds, and we mixed it with very experienced long-term managers from GEA. I think all of this is a great success factor of what you can see today.
We promised at the last Capital Markets Day here in London about quite exactly two years ago, that we will improve the efficiency, that we need to take out staff. We were talking about Headcount 800 program, that we want to decrease the number of staff by 800, keeping the same level of turnover. At the end, we achieved more than 1,400, which really shows you also how good the efficiency potential of the company meanwhile is. That was also possible because we had all these managers in place with a clear responsibility, with a clear accountability. During the first management meeting, I had a very simple presentation with very few words on a chart.
If you ask our managers, they all will remember that I said, "A budget is a budget, and a budget remains a budget." This is a very clear statement, and all our managers know they can do many things, but at the end, they have to deliver. If they don't deliver, we are looking for alternatives. That's also a kind of very clear performance culture, but we give a lot of freedom to the people. With that, we achieved huge efficiency. We started with a portfolio planning. We took out companies which are not in our strategic scope. For instance, we sold GEA Bock, a company in the refrigeration technology, doing compressors for large auto buses and lorries. This is definitely not our target market.
Some other smaller disinvestments where we are convinced that these are not strategically important and that they will not ever meet our target margins. By doing so, we sold seven companies, meanwhile EUR 300 million turnover with an average margin of 5% EBITDA. Net working capital optimization. You also remember, there are a lot of you covering GEA since many years. That was always an issue, especially also in the years 2015 to 2018. Net working capital went up, and there were always promises to decrease it, but it was not done. I think we did, as a company, a great job here. Marcus personally had every week a cash is king call, and we really put a lot of actions into place to decrease the net working capital. Meanwhile, we are very stable here on a level of about 8%.
Our new colleague, Johannes, you didn't meet him at the last Capital Markets Day because he was not yet there. He joined us 1.5 years ago, and he's really an expert in operations. He managed professional purchasing organizations before at Nokia, for instance, also production. He made a big difference in how to bring efficiency into our operations, and he will also tell you more about that later. There is a small number, but an important number. We also decreased, during the last 2.5 years, the number of production factories from 62 down to 50. These are the numbers. On the left side, you see the continuous declining margin. The blue bar shows the difference between IFRS 16, which was not in place to that time, so just to make it comparable.
You can see that we are having an impressive turnaround. For this year, we expect a margin of 12.4%-13%, and next year, this is our midterm guidance, 12.5%-13.5%. We are fully on track. We are really delivering or even overachieving what we promised to you at the Capital Markets Day 2019. You can see here our numbers. Of course, in 2019 at the Capital Markets Day, nobody knew about COVID and what it means. Despite COVID, despite this pandemic, we could deliver our promises, and we could perform and increase our margins. Let me now talk a little bit about our end markets, because I think this is a very fantastic thing. I also, like you know, worked for different companies before in the machine building sector. GEA is very well positioned in very attractive markets.
More than 80% is about food, beverage, pharmaceuticals, and we have a lot of mega trends who are really helping us to see a bright future. There is a growing world population, there is a demand for New Food, there is a demand for food safety, for sustainable solutions, and there is a growing middle class. All these factors will create very stable, steady growing markets for us. I always like to say as long as there are human beings on that wonderful planet who need to eat and drink something, we are in safe harbor. Some numbers about the markets. You can also see that production growth in our main market is quite good compared to other industries, and the industry volatility is very low. That also shows you the attractiveness of the market in which we are in.
This is one of my favorite charts because this is a fantastic picture to see how independent GEA is from a single customer. That gives us also a lot of negotiation power. You might also know that a lot of other companies, think about sub-suppliers in the automotive industry, sometimes they cannot afford to walk away from a single offer. If they don't get it, they simply need to close down a complete factory. We have a very huge number of customers in many different segments, and that makes us a very stable company. So far, so good. This is what we did during the last two and a half years, and which, hopefully, also created trust again that you can nowadays say, "This is a management team. This is a company I can trust." Now we are looking forward.
Mission 26 is our strategy program for the next five years, this is our main topic for today. I'm going to explain you what is Mission 26 about.
A bottle of nutritious formula, a refreshing glass of low-sugar orange juice, a precious vaccine. GEA technologies are working behind the scenes to improve quality of life and enable smarter, greener production processes. Across industries and around the globe, GEA is engineering for a better world.
Mission 26 is about accelerating profitable growth. The CREATE program, which we did in the last two and a half years, was to stabilize the company, to bring the company back in good shape and to set up a kind of organization which is ready for growth. This is where we are now, and Mission 26 will tell you how are we going to accelerate profitable growth in the next five years. The most important numbers: We believe and are committed and convinced that we can create organic sales CAGR between 4% and 6% during the next years. We are also committed and convinced that we will achieve at the year 2026 latest our EBITDA margin above 15%, and the ROCE beyond 30%. How are we going to do that? Let's first talk about our purpose. Engineering for a better world. This is nothing new.
This is what you know. We also discussed that intensively. At the end, we said, "This makes even more sense than all the years before," because sustainability is an important issue, and we will talk about that also later on. Engineering for a Better World is an extremely good purpose. We will have the buy-in from our employees, and this really makes a difference and is a great purpose for our company. We broke it down into a new vision, which is we safeguard future generations by providing sustainable solutions for the nutrition and pharmaceutical industries. This is what we stand for. This is a fantastic market, and as I said, this is also good to see how our people are committed to do good things, how they like the slogan also and the purpose, Engineering for a Better World.
Mission 26 consists out of seven levers. We will go through all these levers during the day to explain you in detail how will we arrive at 15% EBITDA margin and this growth 4%-6% until the year 2026. The sustainability is where everything starts. We have developed a comprehensive ESG strategy. We are committed to do our job to decrease the greenhouse gas emission in this world. We are already from 2021, from this year on, we are already nowadays CO2 neutral because we are compensating our CO2 emission by gold standard certificates. This is also what only a few companies are doing right now. GEA is already 2021 CO2 equivalent neutral. We want to go to a net zero neutrality to 2040. Nadine will tell you more about that later on.
Our targets are validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. They are also proven and checked from an external agency. Innovation and digitization is the second lever. We developed a clear innovation strategy. We plan a significant increase in R&D spend. We bundled all the digital initiatives under the responsibility of a new Chief Digital Officer who joined us beginning of August. We will also tell you more about that later. A very fantastic additional lever for the future is New Food. This is something which is very specific for GEA. You might hear a lot of innovation and digitization activities in many other industry segments. You will nothing hear about New Food because this is really something which is very special and only companies like GEA can contribute here.
This is an additional new growth market, and we will also give you a lot of insights later on about this new market and why are we very well positioned here. We are running different excellence programs. For instance, sales excellence. We will fully leverage the potential of our region country organization, and we will also manage performance more precisely, more effectively, and that also will help us to grow. Service excellence is also very clear target and one of the levers. We have a fantastic install base, and we have also differences in the quality of what kind of usage we take out of this installed base, depending on the business units, and we have developed very clear plans what we can do here. Of course, it's also about increasing our revenue stream, which is recurring business.
Software as a service plays a role here and also service contracts. Operational excellence, Johannes will tell you more about that later on. It's about further optimization of the production footprint, but it's also, and of course, optimization of the procurement organization and Johannes will show you a lot of very interesting examples what we already did and how big the potentials here in GEA are. Last but not least, we would be also ready for acquisitions. Whenever a right acquisition comes across, we would be ready to take it, and we can of course afford also significant acquisitions. It's very clear that we will not do any stupid things. We will also not risk our investment grade. It's also very important and very clear. The good thing is that we do not need to do acquisitions if there are not the right targets around.
That's important to know because we have so many good ideas how to improve this company further and how to create more value in the future. This is Mission 26, and Mission 26 is a pure organic growth program. If we have the opportunity to do acquisitions, we are prepared. We have a great balance sheet. That's also the reason why we started now with a share buyback program to be ready, but it's not a must. To sum it up, we have these seven levers: sustainability, innovation, digitization, New Food, three excellence programs, sales, service, and operations, and acquisitions, which comes on top if we find the right targets. So far, so good to turnaround story in Mission 26, and now I have the pleasure to introduce you to my first team member, Nadine.
Nadine Sterley is, I would say, representing the next generation in GEA and I'm very proud to have her in my team. She studied law and made a PhD in law, has more than 10 years working experience and is now really taking the job and the role as our Chief Sustainability Officer and I'm very happy and very proud that she is in the team. Nadine, let's welcome Nadine on stage. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Stefan, also warm welcome from my end. As Stefan just said, GEA's purpose is and stays engineering for better world. That is, we safeguard future generations by providing sustainable solutions for the nutrition and pharmaceutical industries. What does that mean? In early April, the executive board established the new sustainability department, which for the first time clustered all relevant activities which have been performed before by different departments. By doing so, we professionally handled the increasingly upcoming regulations. However, on top of that, we established also the new sustainability approach, which is the following. We engineer. We engineer sustainable solutions. We do that responsibly. We do that with great people. For a better world. We engineer sustainable solutions responsibly with great people for a better world. What does that mean?
Well, we as a company, we take our global responsibility very seriously, and we truly believe that we can make the difference. In other words, we actively support the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and by contributing to a better world. This is a bold statement, isn't it? What does this bold statement stand for? Let me explain in detail. Coming to our sustainable solution, which is our product portfolio. We enable our customers, with our solutions, to drive climate change mitigation, and we generate positive impact in environmental and social and in society with our solutions, like New Food and food safety. In terms of our global operations, we comply with stricter environmental and social regulations. We face growing waste problems, and we care for water scarcity and pollution. In terms of our supply chain, we drive transparency and traceability. We do have a great workforce.
However, by fostering diversity and inclusion, we are better able to innovate. We attract more top talents, and we are more likely to outperform. By enabling our workforce in terms of lifelong learning and in terms of long-term career development, we improve the company performance, we enhance human capital and employee satisfaction. All three pillars create a society value as we reduce food and water scarcity, and we improve the health and nutrition industries. By actively contributing our knowledge, our know-how, we strengthen the local communities we are operating in. What does that mean in detail? How do we measure that? Coming to our sustainable solutions. Here you see four KPIs, four targets, which are covering the three most important topics, such as greenhouse gas emissions, water, and our contribution to a circular economy. I do have two examples to explain what I mean.
The first example is our zero freshwater solution. Imagine you want to step out of your business of being an investor or analyst, and you start to produce milk powder. Milk powder is a quite interesting investment because milk powder is an essential ingredient for the food industry. While you are becoming an expert, you learn that 15% of milk is further being processed. The rest, namely the 85%, is water. In the past, it just has been displaced, just thrown away, while someone else in the world, for example, Australia, is facing a water problem. With our membrane filtration technology, you can capture the water, you can clean it, and you can reuse it. If you do it intensively, you can even drink it. This is what our Indian customer is doing.
By doing so, he's capturing the water, he's cleaning it, he reuses it. This means that he is independently working and does not need a fresh water connection. By doing so, he saves 2.1 million liters of water per day of operations. To put that into perspective, this is one Olympic swimming pool per day. The other example I have is our food tray. This time you do not invest in milk powder, but you become the CEO of a company packaging food, fresh food. Fresh food like meat, fish, pasta, or cheese. Due to the fact that your company is located in Europe, you are obliged to reduce plastic waste. With our sustainable packaging machine, you can use cardboards, and cardboards are made of natural raw materials, or at least 100% recycled by natural raw materials.
The legislation on the plastic waste is not the only one you need to consider. You also need to take care of, due to the fact that you are dealing with fresh food safety, hygiene. You need to acknowledge that plastic is the one and only material to properly wrap the food. Our film is super thin and is reduced to the absolute minimum of quantity to maintain the necessary level of food safety and hygiene. With that, you save up to 80% of plastic. Coming to our global operations. Also here, we have set a number of targets, which are listed here. These targets also addressing our corporate responsibility towards the local communities we are operating in. In the interest of time, I just pick one example. It is about our suppliers. By 2026, we want to have all preferred suppliers to fulfill our sustainability criteria.
What does that mean? I also have two examples. The first one, the first criteria, is about greenhouse gas emissions. If we want to bring down our greenhouse gas emissions, we need to know how much emissions are coming out of our supply chain, such as purchased goods, such as logistics or distribution. The next example on the criteria is about our responsibility on human rights in the supply chain. Finally, coming to the focus on our employees, by 2026, we want to become the employer of choice in our industry. Also here, we have set a number of targets which shall measure our progress. As said before, by fostering diversity, as of now, we want to have every third position, which is a new hire or in replacement, filled by a woman. In absolute terms, that is a 21% female representation in our top management.
Well, this seems to be rather low, this figure. Let me put that into perspective. We are an engineering company. We are active in an industry driven by men. For us, this is a very ambitious target. However, our most ambitious target for us to drive is our net zero goal by 2040. This is the overarching goal. This is for us, that means this is leading by example. Let me explain that in more detail. By 2040, we want to be net zero. This is a long way. In terms of interim targets, by 2030, we want to be down in our greenhouse gas emissions in our own operations by 60%. In technical terms, our own operations is the so-called Scope 1 and Scope 2. In terms of our product portfolio, we want to decrease our greenhouse gas emission footprint by 18%.
This is the so-called Scope 3. To cross that bridge in achieving our targets, we are, as of now, carbon neutral by investing in so-called gold standard climate protection projects. This secures that we are in our own operations are carbon neutral as of now. Our ambition, being net zero in 2040, is bringing forward our goal five years earlier than the government of Germany, and even 10 years in terms of the commitment of the European Union. We don't only aim for being net zero by ourselves. We also enable our customers of driving their decarbonization. Let me show you what I mean.
The Earth's climate system is under pressure, threatened by the increased greenhouse effect. Now more than ever, it is time for us to be clever about energy. GEA recognizes the need to act now. We design sustainable and integrated process solutions by offering a unique holistic approach based on our in-house knowledge in process and utilities that minimize your operational costs, reducing your energy consumption and carbon footprint. By utilizing waste heat from the refrigeration plant and reusing it in the production process, we can reduce your energy usage and operational costs by more than 30%. Actually, more than 90% of a factory's heat demand can be supplied from upgraded waste heat. Furthermore, by applying green energy to the optimized production process, CO2 emissions can be reduced to zero.
We help you reach your sustainability goals while decreasing your operational costs, and at the same time, help to keep Earth's energy budget in balance. That is why we are engineering for a better world.
Now, let's take a look from where we are coming and where do we want to be in 2026. Our journey started in March 2020, when the so-called DAX 50 ESG has been established. Since then, GEA is listed in the top 50 hit list of companies with special focus on environmental, social, and responsibility. This is followed by our excellent A List score for our management in water and our A- award in terms of climate, and both are part of the CDP sustainability ranking. Since then, a lot happened, what you can see here. Let me highlight two milestones. The first one, in April this year, and to encourage our company's management to have a tangible sense of responsibility of sustainability, our supervisory board agreed to anchor sustainability into the targets of the variable compensation of our executive board.
The second milestone, just a few days ago, last week, is the validation of the Science Based Targets initiative in terms of our decarbonization roadmap. It's the approval that our targets and our plans are science-based and in line with the overall goal of limiting the global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Sorry. We have done a lot in the last couple of months to drive sustainability in our company. The sustainability strategy in terms of Mission 26 constitutes now the framework to gather pace in the future. What is new now is that we start to systematically and extensively communicate our roadmap, our actions, and our targets in our sustainable report, which is on an annual basis. By doing that, we actively support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and by doing so, we foster engineering for a better world.
By having said this, I hand back to Stefan. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Nadine. I hope you could see that we are really taking this issue serious, and that is a real commitment for us, and that we really want to be at the forefront of sustainability. Nadine did a great job since she took over the role as Chief Sustainability Officer because there's a lot of work behind and many things we have to roll out into the company and more to come. I hope that this is something which also you appreciate. Let's now talk about the next topic, innovation and digitalization. Already last year, we defined a clear innovation strategy, and we said there are four pillars in which we want to put our money and where we want to invest more in R&D. First of all, it's about environmental sustainability, and this is of course also in line with our sustainability targets.
We want to develop new machines, new equipment, which are much more sustainable than the former generations because we believe and we think that this is, first of all, our commitment which we need to fulfill our sustainability targets. It's also for us a growth opportunity because more and more we see customers asking us not only about price and quality of products. They are also asking about energy consumption, water consumption, and especially larger corporations will do so more and more in the future. Therefore, we need to develop and we want to focus on sustainable environmentally friendly products and solutions. Second is New Food. We will also talk about that later on, but this is a completely new market. The time is right. We can also develop a lot of applications here, and we are doing so already.
This is a focus in our innovation strategy. Digital solutions, of course, this is something where we see a lot of opportunities also for recurring revenue. We stopped selling software. We sell software only as a service in the future, which gives us a lot of opportunities. You are very familiar, I think, with these things. Last but not least, it's modularization and configuration. This is something which helps us to drive efficiency, to reduce complexity, which helps us to create faster delivery times and which also helps our customers to make their choice easier. By 2026, our clear plan and intention is to increase the number of products sold which are not older than five years from 10% to 30%.
In 2026, if we look at the total turnover in 2026, we want to have 30% of this turnover coming out of products and solutions which are not older than five years. If you look at the distribution of these four pillars for this additional or new turnover, we expect that the majority is coming from environmental sustainability, New Food modularization, and also from digital solutions, because this is, of course, the smallest bucket because it is also from the value, the smallest thing. We also have about 10% others which are contributing here. What is also important to know, we defined very clear targets for each business unit for all four buckets.
You can understand that there are business units who can significantly contribute to innovation in New Food, but maybe not so much in sustainability, and that there are other business units where it is vice versa. To give you an example, if we are talking about milking robots in Farm Technologies, that has nothing to do with New Food, but of course, we can come up with more sustainable solutions. If we are talking about another business unit, Refrigeration Technologies, a cooling compressor has nothing to do with New Food, but it can be more sustainable as well. If we are talking about Liquid and Powder business units, we can innovate in New Food or Separation, for instance.
That's the reason why it is different, but we broke it down, and each business unit has a clear target and is clearly committed to innovation of these four buckets. The intention is to increase R&D spendings from today, 2.6% to 3%, and what is probably even more important, all this increase will go into the projects, in the R&D projects. We are not talking about increasing investment in R&D centers or test centers or so on. It will be really project-oriented, and therefore, we will really definitely increase significantly our R&D spend here. Our innovation strategy is already bearing fruit. It's not that we are saying this is what we intend to do in the future. We already started, and we will also give you some insights and some deep dives to give you a better understanding what we are doing here in innovations.
I would like to welcome another team member on stage. It is Frederike. Frederike is also another representative of the new generation, let's say. She's working in my CEO office, studied mechanical engineering. You know, it's hard to find women studied mechanical engineering or engineering at all, at the RWTH Aachen, which is a very famous university for technique in Germany, probably the most famous one, and she graduated there. Seven years of work experience. She will give you now some deep dives and some information in detail.
Thank you, Stefan. One project which we have achieved in the area of environmental sustainability is our biosolids granulator for wastewater treatment plants. I would like to give you a deep dive into the technology by showing you a short video first. Wastewater treatment plants usually produce a large amount of sludge. Sludge contains a lot of water. This comes with high transportation costs and energy-intense disposal. You see this causes CO2 emissions. With our centrifuge-based decanter, you can see we are very efficiently dewatering the sludge and then putting it into a drying chamber to dry it even further. We have improved the process here significantly. What you see here now is the sludge going into our decanter. You see how it's separated from the water and pulled further into the drying chamber.
The result from this process is basically a very fine powder, which is then further processed, which you see here.
Very late innovation, just introduced.
Exactly. Here on the left side, you see how the powder looks like from the conventional processes, and on the right side, you see how it looks with our processing techniques. With this technology, if we calculate it for a country like Germany, we can achieve a CO2 savings of up to 21,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is quite significant. Another project that I like to introduce is the high-performance slicer, which we have developed this year as well. If you cut the cooked ham or sausage, usually you need to shock freeze it before in order to slice it to prevent it from deforming. Our engineers have actually developed this new special sawtooth edge, which you see on the picture up there as well, which can cut the meat without the need to shock freeze it first.
This process step can be avoided, and we can save quite a lot amount of energy. If you calculate it for a slicer, it's around 32 MW per hour per year, which would equal the amount of energy that around 7.5 households are using. In a short video now, I'd like to show you how this looks like. There you can see that it's a very high technology process and that the meat is cut very straight. Thank you. Back to you, Stefan
Good. That was an insight in already existing innovations, which we just recently released in environmental sustainability. New food is something Ilija will tell you more about later on. Now let's go to digital solutions. We created this year with our new Chief Digital Officer, a new virtual unit called GEA Digital. This is, I would say, a very interesting organization because it's a virtual organization. People continue to work in the individual business units or divisions for their individual digital applications, but at the same time, we put a corporate organization on top or together, and so that we can ensure that everything which is synergetic will be done only once, and everything which is individual will be done in the business unit or in the division.
We have already today about 150 employees working on digital solutions only, and they are also very proud to become a member of GEA Digital and be a part of this journey.
I would like to introduce DairyNet to you, which is a software that we have developed recently. It has been co-developed together with our customers in order to bring them real value and give them a transparency about their farm and their cows. It's accessible from almost everywhere. Let me now show you first how this looks like. This is the dashboard. This is a real-time monitor of the data. This is from a farm based in the rural areas of Germany. It has around 170 cows. Imagine you would be a farmer with a farm of that size. What would be the most important parameters for you to look out for? It would probably be the milk yield, which you see on the right side, compared to the previous month, and then on a daily basis.
The other important parameter for you should be the milk quality. This is what you see here on the right side, and this is highly depending on the health of your cows. If we then scroll a little bit further down, we see that this farm has actually three milking robots installed. Those are our automatic milking systems. Also important for you as a farmer now is: Where do you need to act? What do I need to do? Is there anything important? This is what you see on the right, where you do see there are six cows which might need your attention. You can click on it. Let's now select the cow, Louise. Here you see all the data about Louise. You see the red triangles, and here you can get some further information.
This one shows that the rear left teat might be infected. With our sensors, we measure basically the inflammation values very early on, and therefore, we can inform the farmer that he needs to check it. Thereby, he can act directly in order to prevent further milk losses. It's quite important for him. One further feature which I'd like to show you, as you're probably known to quite a lot of graphics and curves, let me show you the lactation curves. Here you see when the cow has calved, that it increases quite steadily, and then over the time it decreases. We have noticed that our farmers really like to look at those curves, and they like to look how the individual cows are performing. Let me show you one as well. 48. Here, we've actually selected a high performer.
This cow, you might want to consider for your further breeding, and thereby, we do help our farmers in order to get more sustainable to herd to grow their farm sustainable in a good way. Isn't that impressive?
Absolutely. Great. I think it's a very good example what you can do with digitization and how advanced GEA already is here. Even if we are talking a lot about New Food today, this is an existing stable market, and we also expect a continuous growth in this existing dairy market, because simply of the growth of the world population. Yeah, DairyNet. It's, by the way, software as a service. We don't sell that. It's software as a service. Every farmer has this identical release, and this is also a good example for a continuous growing revenue flow. Modularization and configuration is the fourth pillar, and we also have a deep dive here. Frederieke.
Exactly. We would like to introduce to you the configurator that we're using in our business unit, homogenizer. They have already 100% modularized the portfolio, so the machine is 100% configurable with the configurator that I'll show you in a second. We do already have today around 180 orders per month going in through the system, so it's quite good use. In former times, one of the biggest issues was that our sales guys went out, sold a machine, and then the back office and the engineers had a lot of questions, so the orders took quite long, and there was a ping pong of questions going back and forward. This we could tackle now all in our system because it's a guided selling solution, and we could improve our selling by 50%, so the amount of time is very well spent now.
Let me now show you how the system is looking like. It's a SAP-based solution, which I show you in a demo here. There it is. Our sales people take this tool to our customers and then configure something with them. Let me now buy a configurator for a homogenizer here. I go in the system, I select the homogenizer. I can look in for further information on this one. Let's select dairy. What do you like? Coffee creamer. You see the parameters are pre-selected based on the selection that I've done, and I can still customize it. Let me now confirm those. I continue. I need to add the parameters from my production line, the flow rate, and the pressure. Let's use 300 here.
Here you see then the system directly calculates what kind of machine fits best to my parameters. Here is a recommendation based on my selection, which I can then directly pick. What we have seen that the customer likes to have a little bit of choices, so we do give them two option. First option, most important, what happens if the customer wants to upscale his production soon? The next bigger machine, let me see, is then here, so the big next upgrade. The other question that the customer usually has is, "Well, what's the machine that's a little bit smaller than this one, and what's the price for it?" That we see here then.
In the next step, we can then actually select the choice, adjust the parameters as well, and then you can book further options and modules on top of the machine selected. It's similar to a car configurator, basically, where you can have a basic motor or you have an upgrade of the motor, and this is, of course, based on your production needs. In the end, you can upload your terms and conditions into the system, and you get a direct quote, which you can print even at the customer site, and then hopefully this is signed soon. The hit rate also of this is at the moment at around 47%, which is quite significant. Okay.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Frederieke. I hope that also gave you some insight that during the last two and a half years, we did not do only restructuring and optimization of basics. We already started to lay the ground for further growth. I think these are good examples and, which also gives you trust that there is more to come. We are now having a coffee break. Yeah, let's meet again at quarter to 12. Thank you.
Yeah, I hope all of you enjoyed the coffee break. We will now continue with our pillars. It is my pleasure to welcome Ilija on stage. He studied chemical engineering and holds an MBA. He has more than 30 years of work experience, more than 20 years with GEA. He is not only the CEO of Liquid and Powder Technologies, but he will also tell you about our fantastic New Food story. Ilija.
Thanks, Oliver. Welcome all, I'm very pleased to be able to give you a brief presentation on our topic of New Food. You'll see from my brief resume here, I'm one of the old school that Stefan has brought up from the old GEA organization to support this development nevertheless. I'm here to talk to you today briefly about New Food, first of all, I want to talk about what is New Food. We've heard the phrase very often, but really what does it mean? Why New Food? Why is it important for our community and sustainability? Finally, why GEA is really positioned well to support this industry, but also why this industry is there also to work with GEA to develop it further. First of all, what is New Food? Let's define what we're talking about here.
For us, New Food are products which are produced by using proteins or other ingredients like essential fatty acids, which are sourced from non-traditional sources. Okay? These food products are then produced and manufactured to either substitute a traditional food source or at some point, even completely replace that traditional food source. Here we'll show some examples, and we've got three categories of New Foods. First of all, in the plant-based category. This will be familiar to all of you, most likely. You'll all recognize the dairy alternative beverages that we see in the marketplace, those beverages made from oats, almonds, soy, et cetera. We'll also see in our supermarkets the growth of the number of, let's say, plant-based foods, solid foods, which we're seeing on our market shelves. You've all got bars in front of you, chocolate bars, which haven't got any dairy in it whatsoever.
Finally, a move into plant-based ingredients. These are intermediates which are used as building blocks to produce plant-based foods. These are quite common at the moment. We move into the cell-based protein category. Here we have an example. Cell-based applications, cultured meat. We've heard about growing laboratory meat products without harming a living animal. Precision fermentation. This is a really exciting area that we're looking at right now. What is this? This is about mass production of cells, specific cells, through fermentation, and then isolation of very specific, unique proteins which have the functionality which can then be added to food products to give you texture, taste, functionality, similar to products which we're already used to. Probably, let's say, the least palatable of those alternative proteins, insect proteins. What we've also seen, proteins from crustaceans.
There's a whole raft of different categories in this marketplace that we are now looking at to focus on. Why do we need New Food? What's the point? Here are really two charts. Firstly, the growth of the population of the world. We expect from 2018 to 2030, over 10% increase in the global population. What's also key here is the growth of the middle classes in the global population, because it's the middle classes that are demanding these high-quality proteins. Put simply, if this continues in this way, which we know it will, we will not be able to provide enough proteins, acids, and foods to feed this growing population going forward. This is a longer-term view, but it is happening. The here and now is driven by you and me.
We're living in a period where we, the consumer, have never had so much influence and power on how we can affect big industry, how we can make them change what they do by our preferences. What this chart shows us is right now, these are the four main reasons why consumers are moving towards a flexitarian diet. This is not about vegetarianism, it's not about veganism. Right? It's about flexitarianism. These are the top reasons. First of all, because we want to be healthier. We want to feel healthy. We want to look after our bodies. Secondly, environmental concerns. Finally, growing awareness of animal welfare. This is what's happening now. What's big industry doing? I'll just pause for a moment while you digest some of these statements which we've collected.
Just to point out, each of these customers here are actually current customers of GEA. What this shows us is these big food producers are really taking this seriously, but they're taking it the seriousness the here and now. Look at Nestlé. They're focusing on oceanic sustainability. Danone. Danone are calling it a food revolution driven by consumers. Both Unilever and Impossible Foods are focusing on the environmental impact of traditional food manufacturing and the sustainability of New Food. This is what's happening. It's really current. Why is this such an exciting opportunity for GEA? Why is GEA such an exciting opportunity for this industry? What I show you here, these are, let's say, the process steps required in the production of an advanced protein, an animal-based protein, or a plant-based protein. Okay.
There are many process steps, but these are the key ones, from mixing, from sterilization, fermentation, separation, drying, milling, you name it. These technologies, each one of them already exist in GEA's technology portfolio. We already have this in-house, which is used for one application or another. It sits within one division or another. When we compare to other competitors that we've seen moving into this space, we see we have a unique position in terms of the technologies that we own in-house. We don't know of any other competitor at the moment in this space that has a portfolio covering the whole process requirements. It's not just about having the unit technologies for this process. This is a very, very simplified process flow diagram of a typical plant-based or cell-based process line. In reality, it's hugely complex.
Each process step has multiple sub-steps in preparation, in heat treatment, in pH adjustment, in homogenization, et cetera. Somebody needs to put this together for our customers. We also think that there's a lot of startups moving into this business as well. They don't have the experience or the knowledge of how to build these types of plant. GEA does. GEA has this core competence in its toolbox through its Liquid and Powder Technologies division. We are capable of integrating all our own unique technologies into end-to-end industrial scale processing solutions, and we can do it globally. Therefore, we are uniquely positioned to support this industry, but this industry needs a supplier like GEA to move it forward. Now, it's not just I or we that believe this. The industry has already recognized it.
As Stefan said, this is not what are we going to do, this is what are we currently doing. I'm really pleased to announce that Novozymes is a world leader in biotechnology and biochemistry, has recently partnered with GEA to build their first advanced proteins plant in North America based on plant sources, which will produce advanced proteins as an ingredient to meatless burgers. We secured this contract from Novozymes, and the reason they selected GEA were for exactly those reasons that I described in the previous two slides. This plant is currently under design. Construction will start next year. It will come online in 2023. It's not the only thing we're doing. I'll talk a little bit more later on in another presentation that I'll give you about what we are doing here.
This just describes in a little bit more detail exactly what it is we're doing from Novozymes. We're harvesting cells from fermenters. We're collecting cells, and then we're preparing those cells in order to break them down and release proteins. The breakdown is done through homogenization, GEA homogenizers. The cells are then released, and then we separate into the various different protein fractions. We then isolate the specific protein that we need for the final product, and then we take it through a clarification phase, sterilization, before finally filling it into bulk containers for dispatch to end use. This is what we are doing for Novozymes, and these are examples of GEA technologies which will form part of this process line. Finally, what does that mean for us? Well, the consumption of New Food will grow threefold between now and 2030.
For us, for GEA, we see that by 2026, we will achieve an order intake in this application of in excess of EUR 400 million on an annual basis. Today, we're at EUR 120 million. That concludes this brief presentation. I hope that's given you a little insight into where we're going in this application. With that, I'd like to invite my colleague, Azam Owaisi, to join me on stage here for the next presentation. Azz is the newest member of our leadership team, having joined GEA in April 2021 as our Regional CEO for North America. Azz brings with him a wealth of experience that he's gained from various leadership positions that he's held in Fortune 500 listed stock companies in the U.S., and we're very, very pleased to have him on board. Azz?
Thank you, Ilija. Good morning. I'm extremely excited to talk about the Sales Excellence Program that we have at GEA as part of the Mission 26. As you know, new machine growth is a critical target for the GEA global sales organization, both from a regional and country level to the BU level. Primarily because the more new machines we sell, it's a larger installed base, which gives us opportunities for recurring revenue and also the service side of the business. Recently we went to a regional organization, and what that does is it really allows GEA to leverage our best practices in the region and really optimize our routes to market. Traditionally, when strategic plans are done, they're done from the top down.
What we do now is we're actually doing it from the region and country in conjunction with the BU level, developing it from the bottom up. What this allows us to do is we develop these strategic plans. We have specific initiatives in those strategic plans tied to really detailed action plans with owners, time frames, and then the resulting financial commitments. Those then are all aggregated up as part of our overall budget. What this really allows the region to do, now it gives local control, ownership, and accountability down to the local salesperson and the sales manager. There's a lot more daily interaction. I'll talk a little bit later about some of the KPIs we're using, but really allows for a closer monitoring of our process. In addition, as we're developing our plans, we're actually developing not just goals, but stretch goals.
Really looking at, obviously, we want to take market share, but what other actions can we do to maybe even double, triple what we want to go towards? That's part of the original action. As we started developing the process, it's been in development for a while, but there were certain areas that we really saw as opportunities to get better. Number one was really there was a significant untapped potential worldwide. GEA, we are the market leader in several regions or one of the top providers in those regions. However, there are some areas which we call white spots that present some opportunities for us to really make investments, make sure that we're positioned properly for growth. The second thing is we did realize that in some areas, we have some underutilization of our sales force.
The goal is really how do we provide the tools to really utilize our sales force effectively and get the biggest return on investment from our sales personnel? The next thing is really our channel, understanding our route to market, and obviously by region and by business, it's really going to vary what kind of channel. Obviously we've got a direct sales channel. We go to channel through independent reps, through distribution, through systems integrators, but really depending on the market and where our position is and really the opportunity, we need to understand and make sure we streamline that process. I'll be giving examples of several of these just a little bit later on. Also, our incentivization systems for our salespeople, do they tie to the goals of the business?
As we've brought on companies in the past, when there was the OneGEA initiative, when we had some acquisitions, we'd bring those companies on, but we didn't do a really good job of integrating the sales organization into the GEA system. As now part of CREATE going on for 18 months now, we've got a process where we're formally integrating those businesses and utilizing standard processes across those businesses. There's two key levers really for driving sales excellence. The number one is really route to market optimization. I'll talk about this in just a second, but it's really identifying where do we need to play? Where are the big opportunities? Once we do that, the second one is really the sales excellence enablers. This really focuses on process improvement.
What can we do to get better processes in the system, standard processes, and at the end of the day, make our sales team more efficient? This is an example I'll give you of one of our business units within GEA, and as you can see, we've got some pretty good market share in several regions. However, as we did a deep dive on this particular business unit, we realized that we had some white spots here, as you can see in Greater China, NCE, and in North America. We consider white spots really less than 10% market share. We really saw this as a great opportunity. The nice thing is we have the products for the markets. It's just we haven't gone to the market effectively.
What we've done is actually said, "Okay, here's the areas that we really need to focus on." Not ignoring anything else, but these are the areas that are really going to drive some growth, and we know that there's some local potential there. The total available market is large for us, so this is the opportunity. Being responsible for North America, I'll use a personal example of what we're doing in the United States. With that same business unit, when we acquired that business unit, we had one sales representative in North America, and that person was actually based on the East Coast where our headquarters are. That person was handling all customer interaction from his location. Obviously, there was support from overseas, but the customer base was spread out throughout the United States.
We did have some reps that were supporting us, but typically with reps, they do a good job where maybe customers are a little bit more sparse. As you know, reps have several product lines that they're representing, so there's always a mind share play we have with our reps as well. What we actually did is we did a heat map analysis to understand where are the opportunities and where are the big cluster of companies. As we did this analysis, we realized that there were three main areas of the U.S. where there are big clusters of customers, and this was obviously on the East Coast, the South, and then also in the far West. What we've decided to do is really invest in sales personnel, direct sales personnel in these locations.
What this allows them to do is really develop that customer intimacy, so now they are developing relationships at all levels of the value chain. Not just from the engineering to the procurement side, but also to the leadership of each of these businesses as well. Also, as most of you know, the U.S. is a very large country. In our old structure, if you're going to visit a customer, that's a flight, maybe one customer visit, and then you're flying back. It's not very efficient. Your time and territory management isn't really there. This really allows our salespeople to focus in that cluster of customers, and now they can make multiple customer visits a day. What's also critical is now they're on top of projects. Ilija had talked about Novozymes' facility that's being done in the U.S.
Being upfront on many of these types of projects really allows us to be on the front end versus coming in afterwards and then trying to bid against, and at that point, sometimes it becomes a price war. We can actually start selling value upfront. We still have reps in the area, and those are in areas where maybe the customers are a little bit more sparse and where we don't need to spend as much time there. That's where we'll actually focus our reps. This kind of exercise is being done and has been done throughout the globe in various regions where we've identified many of these white spots. Now that we know what areas to go into, the second piece is really focusing on what kind of sales excellence enablers can we add.
This is really all about how do we make our salespeople's job easier, right? Our salespeople, they're out in front of the customer. We want them having as much face time as possible. We don't need them worrying about all this paperwork on the back end. If we can automate things for them, which we've done, it makes their life a lot easier. Giving them tools. We've developed a sales playbook. I'll get into that in just a second. What we want to do is standardize this across the globe. Obviously, the way we sell is going to be a little bit different, but the metrics and the processes across the globe are going to be the same. What's nice is it really allows for very good information exchange globally.
As part of the toolbox, there's really four main levers that we're focusing on, and that's sales force efficiency, effectiveness, growth, and at the end of the day, customer satisfaction. Because if our customers aren't satisfied, we're not going to be repeat customers. In that, I'm going to do a dive on three of these initiatives. One is our development of our KPIs, our further development of our CRM system, and then how are we optimizing our incentive plans to focus on the goals of the organization? The first thing I'd like to talk to are our dashboards. This is critical, and I know many of you have probably seen, well, there's a lot of dashboards that are developed now, but the goal here of these dashboards is really to provide, and I'll use an operations term, daily management.
Typically, when we have this kind of data, we'll get a month-end report. Many companies get this month-end report. They do analysis of, okay, why did we miss? Why are we good, et cetera? These are real-time data that on a daily standpoint, a sales manager can work with their salesperson and look and see their specific metrics that could be tied to their order intake, could be tied to order conversion, the number of quotes out, closed, gross margin, et cetera, whatever that is. This can be looked at on a daily basis. Every day there could be a conversation and a person can see, "Hey, am I winning or losing for that day?" What's nice about this is this really allows somebody to proactively make changes throughout the month.
Versus waiting after the fact, now before they can actually develop action plans and countermeasures to get back on track. This is actually done by division, but we can actually drill down to region and country and down to the individual salesperson. What's also nice is because this is a big database, areas where we're over-driving, we can actually utilize these best practices and help some regions or individuals that are maybe struggling and maybe utilize those best practices to get them back on track. The second thing is the CRM and digitalization. We established this actually back in 2017, but really with the advent of the CREATE system and when Stefan came on board, we've really put this into high gear. Now we have one central customer experience for sales, marketing, and customer service.
Now we actually follow worldwide the same process across all those disciplines. What this is doing is it's really allowing for efficient collaboration across internal businesses and then also externally to our customer. What the CRM database does is it really gives us visibility to our global installed base. Now anybody sitting in North America can look at one of our customers and say, "Hey, we've also got installed base, and they've got locations in other areas of the globe. How are we supporting them? What have we done service-wise, and how can we transfer that communication back to the customer locally?" At the end of the day, the result is it's a faster communication and problem-solving on the customer side, and at the end of the day, it's an overall better customer experience.
I talked earlier about some of the metrics and how we're developing plans. This is an example of what we're doing based on the four pillars I talked about, the efficiency, effectiveness, growth, and customer satisfaction. By business unit, each of the regions and the territories in the regions are developing strategic plans tied to those. We've got this for every business unit, and then what we do is we roll that up, and these clusters or region are actually rolled up to the business unit. You can see here in one of our BUs, we're actually growing at a 4.2% CAGR based on the plans developed internally where we know the market is at about 3.5%. The goal here is all about market share gain and growth. The last item I want to talk about is really on the incentive.
How do we incentivize our salespeople? As I mentioned earlier, when we had different sales organizations and it was a little disjointed, some of the KPIs and their incentives really didn't tie in directly to the GEA goals. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that we incentivize our salespeople and those goals that they have are tied directly to the end effect of what we're doing in terms of growth at GEA. This is obviously sales, order intake, gross margin, EBITDA, stuff like that. Prior to 2020, we didn't have a uniform program. We launched this in 2020. As I mentioned, it's focused on annual financial KPIs, but in addition to those KPIs, there may be some individual business KPIs. For example, Ilija talked about New Food. Salespeople may have a New Food target.
New product, we've got a lot of new products we're excited about. They might have a new product target. Any of the processes that we've installed in our playbook, those are all tied, and what's nice is the variable component, it's very attractive. We're really incentivizing our people to sell more and focus on the key goals and growth. Obviously, some of the critical metrics that we're measuring, growth is key. Order intake. Not just growth, but profitable growth, and that's where we get into gross margin. Also, there's cash and experience, and this is where we're also looking at payment terms, because obviously the higher margin, the better we get paid, it gives us more money to invest into additional people, additional development, et cetera. What does this mean?
Overall, if you look at our history, and obviously this has a little bit of effect for COVID, but 2018 to 2021, our new machine CAGR was actually slightly decreasing. It wasn't a big growth opportunity for us. Our service was really carrying us. With some of the processes we've implemented, moving forward, we're projecting our CAGR over the next five years to be 4%-5%, versus the market CAGR that Stefan mentioned earlier, about 3.6%. Definitely this is a market share game play. It's not just about driving market share. We talked about efficiencies. One thing we're also measuring is our selling expense as a precentage of total sales. Traditionally, we've been hovering around 11.5%-12.5% of selling expense as a percent of total sales.
With our efficiencies, we're projecting to be somewhere between 9%-11% corridor, which is very efficient for the sales team while we're continuing to grow. Just as an example, industry average is about 10.5%. We're looking to be even better than that. In conclusion, our new machine business, we're going to strongly accelerate that growth by, number one, improving our route to market. We talked about those white spaces, really driving those. Developing these sales optimization tools in the organization, and then also setting the right incentives for our people to make them excited to sell. That, at the end of the day, results in an optimized sales force and really a reduced cost to serve the market and hopefully continued growth in the market.
With that, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Armin Tietjen, who's been at GEA since 2007, and Armin's had several senior leadership positions within GEA.
Thank you, Azam.
Sure.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome also from my side. Allow me a short introduction into my current position because it shows what we have done with our turnaround story. I'm the Chief Service Officer for the division Separation and Flow Technologies. With this, I have the profit and loss responsibility for three business units: separators, homogenizers, and valves and pumps. This means managing, together with several teams, the whole value chain for service. Today, I'm standing here as the leader of the work stream service excellence, one of the work streams in the Mission 26. With this, we'll be covering all GEA businesses, and we will talk about service in all 17 business units. Mission 26 for service has two lines of attack. The first line of attack is really growing the service business.
The second line of attack is to transform as much business as possible for service from a transactional character to a recurring character. This means tying the customers closer up and working in customers with real partnerships. In the next 20 minutes, I will show you how these two lines of attack will make the difference and how we can grow the business in the next five years. Let me first show you what our performance and service has been till this year. We are around a EUR 1.6 billion business in service. The growth of service is moderate, with 2.3%. Our service share, with 36% already in 2020, is good and is, in an industry benchmark, quite good for a machinery and engineering company. We are targeting 5%-6% CAGR on service business till 2026. You might ask how to do this.
How can we go down this road? Well, the first thing is, in the last months, we really, like also Azam said this, we really analyzed our organization and we found a lot of different opportunities. Small ones, the typical low-hanging fruits, which were implemented already now. Examples, here, for example, is cross-selling opportunities. Not really done in many of our business units when a customer called for spare parts to offering other services so that we can offer him a better solution. Second part, for example, is to have spare parts kits available for things. Very simple things. No rocket science, but really making already today the difference. The key foundation for our service growth is the installed base. Installed base means all the machines, the equipment, the plants that are in operation and that we have installed in the last years. We really look clearly on this.
How does this installed base now develop in the coming years? Looking at Azam and his initiatives, it's really relaxing for service because we will have a growing installed base, which will help us to grow our business even stronger. What we also identified is, if we are honest, and we will talk in a moment about this, that we are not already at the edge serving our customers today. In parallel, we have also checked how much recurring character has our business. How much have we really built partnerships with customers based on contracts like service level agreements? We learned that there is much more opportunity in, and we will now look at this and convert as much business in the coming years to a recurring character. Let me make one comment to it.
It means also transform existing business from a transactional character to it. It's not all only growth. Now, if we look at this, it's about installed base. This means for us, we have two growth dimensions. This you can see here on this. The first growth dimension is service coverage. Service coverage is about how many of the installed base is served by us today. You can see this in this line here, in the x-coordinate. If you look at the y-coordinate, it's the share of wallet. This means how much revenue we already generate with customers today compared to the potential we have with this customer. This you can see here. Now, if you look at the green dots, these are our existing performance we have in these both growth dimensions today.
A green dot up in the right corner there means we really do an excellent job and we have a strong service business because we have a high coverage. We serve a lot of our customers, and with each customer, we get the maximum out of the relationship. If you now look here on this slide, you see the blue dots are the commitments of our 17 business units for 2026. How to improve the business exactly on well-defined measures. If you look at this slide, you might say, "Phew, it's a little bit complex." I decided to really show this because this shows you what potential we have in service today. Let me go through the slide. The first thing what we can see is our service sales share. It's the service sales in relation to the total sales we do.
You can see we have quite a broad range from 20% up to over 60% in our business units. By the way, this is also where our ranking of top and low performers is based on. The second one is service coverage. It's about how much of our iBase do we already today serve well. This is from 21%-85%. Quite a wide spread in our different business units. What all business units have, they have real good touch points with the customers because even engineering solutions have a lot of OEM products where the customer comes back to us to ask for customized molds, wants to have special spare parts, or where we have protected designs for. This is a really huge opportunity for us in that way. The third one we can see is how many service FTEs we have for total FTEs.
You might first say, "What does this mean?" Well, it is not really scientific that you can see by the ranking. The better you perform, the more service people you have, which means also you have a higher service coverage, capacity and service is one of the most important points. Even if we talk today about digitalization, we need local service people to make the difference. With this, I come to another criteria that we have set up. It's a global presence. This means for the individual business units to see how do they do their service today. It's a little bit what like Azam said, what is our route to market? We have some, mostly the low performers, who do with a central approach. This means from the headquarters, they go out and serve all types of customers in that way.
We have the well-performing ones, which have local service people at their place where they really can get an interaction and have a high service coverage there. The last point here is about our iBase. As you said, it is our foundation or even backbone for this. What we can see here is that we have only three business units which by heart know where their machines are and know where they are in operation. We have many of the business units where we can really improve our data, our knowledge about our customers, and improve with this our coverage and our share of wallet with these customers. In summary, we have very strong business units, which already are top performers. You find them here on this right-hand side. We have a lot of business units with improvements.
Already with best practice sharing, with using the same infrastructure, with having same tools in place, and even in some places, sharing service capacities, we can really improve it and make a difference in that way. How will we do this? How will we do that? We have put three lines of action together to make this happen. The first one is the very same. It's for the foundation. It's about base service. It's to set the ground for a real, proper, normal service, a normal service that you would expect when you go to your car dealer, which means you have competent service people in place that really can repair the machine, maintain the machine, and do the difference. We have here seven action fields defined that we work on. Operational service excellence. These are five activity fields where you can constantly improve the service activity.
I will talk about this in a minute, and it will help us to manage our growth and transform our business without adding a lot of people. Last but not least, you need special activities to increase the recurring service character of our business. That's where we have also put a lot of measures together that the different business units select to really develop their business with the customer. Before selecting measures, we did a self-assessment, a maturity self-assessment along these three pillars, or the, what is it now? 12, 16 different action fields. You can see it here. It's like a heat map. It's maybe a little bit overwhelming. You see here the different areas of action, and here the self-assessment of the 17 business units.
Again, on the right-hand side, you see quite strong ones where you can say very well matured businesses already established. Still also for these, you can see when we look at recurring services, we have a lot of room of improvement here. When we look, we have some which even have white spots in the base service. Very easy to fix because we have the knowledge already in-house to do it. This is what has happened in the last months and how we have now put together action plans for each individual business unit to make it happen. Here we go a little bit deeper into the base service action line. If you look here, we have seven different ones, and let me pick, for the sake of time, only one, which is place. Place means this is our route to market.
How have we set up our service business locally? We already identified that we can't be present on our own in every market because the installed base might not be the right. If we ask somebody to do it for us, we need to certify it. We have certification programs for us in place for service technicians. We improve this in that way. We have set up in certain markets, combined service teams, or we're talking about so-called first responder teams, more a generalist who takes care of the machine and the specialist is, for example, from this remote service, connected to this guy and advise him how to help to keep the machine in operation and do the right maintenance. If you go to the next level, my really favorite is operational service excellence. Every day we can improve our service business along five different areas.
Because it's so famous today to talk about it, I think we, let's talk about e-commerce. e-commerce is a buzzword, I know. For me and for us, e-commerce means that in our internal organization and our customers have an easy access to order field service and spare parts by us with the right systems. It makes life much easier for us, and you just heard it. Everyone is used to it as a consumer because of car industry is mainly where we compare ourselves to, but we are a machine building company working in niche markets with highly customized solutions. For us, it's always important if we do e-commerce that we have the right setup. The foundation was just set by Frederieke, for example, with having a real solid sales configurator, which helps us really to offer also the right service later on.
I will use the sales configurator also in the next example that will come up for the recurring business. For the recurring business, we have detected four areas where we really want to focus on. The logical, simple one everyone knows are service-level agreements. Simple ones where you have a contract with the customer for spare parts and field service around maintenance. The second one is really that we already take care of the performance of the machine and really inform the customer if it goes out of balance, and if we should interact. The third level we do, we even re-manage the machine, which we call then PerformancePlus systems that we put in place. This is all done under the service-level agreements. The important point is now, which often we have detected is a challenge for us, the handover from new sales to service.
This is why for the sales configurator, two business units have now worked on that we have also a kind of service-level agreement configurator available. We have modularized all our service-level agreements so that we can have customized solutions, but the customized solution is easily selected by the salesperson already online. This will boost our recurring character. These are all the types of measures, and we have built a kind, we call it Cookbook of Service for GEA, where all these different initiatives and measures are explained, that business units and country can really work with it and implement it because it's about execution. To get real commitment, each business unit puts together a kind of roadmap for the next five years, having a clear plan when to do what. Depending on the maturity level, each of these business unit has its own path to go.
Some really focus on base service, others are already very advanced, and for them, the clear goal is to have more recurring service in the next five years available. If we summarize this all together, it becomes a real big package. All our actions we have done will result in an organic growth of 5%-6%. We have several measures, as we said, to improve our service coverage. We have a clear commitment from each business unit that it will grow to 64% within the next five years because they have clear plans how to do it. Other measures will be around share of wallet. How can we gain more business with our customers from today till 2026? We want to go here to 62% in that way. You might ask, you missed your third dimension. What's about recurring service?
Our ambition for 2026 on recurring service is that 20% of the service revenues in 2026 will be based on recurring business models. There we have a clear thing, 20%. On top, 50% of the new equipment sales in 2026 will be linked already with a service level agreement. A real strong development to maintain our growth and at the end, increase our service share to 36% in 2026. The organizational changes, the improved financial transparency, and the clear profit and loss responsibility in service, which all were introduced with the turnaround measures end of 2029, are our foundation that we can do the growth. This is important for us that we have an organization set up that can focus fully on the service activities and is measured on their own KPIs around this.
With this, we will further contribute as a predictable and profitable revenue stream to the success of GEA and together with our colleagues in new machines and service, grow our business in the next five years. With this, I think we are at the end of our second session, and we invite you now for lunch, and we will come back in 45 minutes for the third part of our presentation around Mission 26.
I hope you all took the opportunity to get something to eat. It's good to see you back here in the room, and for sure also you at home were able to take the opportunity to get something to eat. It's now my pleasure to announce Klaus Stojentin, the CEO of our Separation and Flow Technologies division. As you can see, Klaus studied energy and supply engineering, has more than 30 years of experience in various senior manager positions, and for almost two years, the CEO of Separation and Flow Technologies. Klaus, please come on stage.
Thank you, Oliver. It's my pleasure right after the lunch now to present my division, that is Separation and Flow Technologies. I would like to start with our position for GEA, or even to say the value of Separation and Flow Technologies for GEA. We account for 48% of the EBITDA share of GEA and one quarter of the top-line revenue. We are currently performing at a ROCE of 23%. Our ambition is it to grow by a sales CAGR of 4%-5% till 2026 at an improved EBITDA margin of 24%-26%. By saying that, I would like to present four, I would say, top priorities for our division to develop our mission to achieve our results. It's first of all participating on the growth story of New Food.
Secondly, is maintaining our position as technology leader. I will show you later today some nice examples how we are doing it. Driving top line further by increasing our market coverage in sales and services, mainly in the regions North America, Latin America, and APAC. Finally, taking care of our operational, I would say, excellence and efficiency. Starting with our markets, you have heard a lot about New Food today. New food, it's not by coincidence, is one of our growth territories for Separation and Flow Technologies. We assume a strong growth, not only of the industry, even our share in growing with the market trends and beyond. In addition, we have a significant footprint in pharma applications. They are worth for 15% of our revenue. We are able to outperform the market growth of 5%, even to gain market share in significant numbers.
I will show you later why we are doing so. In combination with some upcoming trends like plastic alternatives, so industrial applications and a solid backbone in our traditional applications like dairy and beverage, I would say the market trend is a friend of us in Separation and Flow Technologies in the next upcoming years. What is of utmost importance that is really maintaining our position as technology leader and we not only claiming it for us, you can see it in our bottom line results because technology leadership means at the end, pricing power in the market. I would like to give you two examples how we are doing it. First of all, it's about test capacity.
We have made significant investments in our test capacities, test centers in all our locations, being able to offer our, I would say, customers of any size from the startup to the big corporates, ideal test possibilities, opportunities for their new products and new processes. This brings us in a leading position whenever we talk about the next offer, the next order, and we will continue to do so. You can not imagine how big the market trend is with us in testing new products as Ilija have presented in New Food applications. The other part I would like to mention is about the innovation as such. We are aiming for a share of radical or breakthrough innovations of minimum 30%. You saw the nice presentation of the configurator of the homogenizer equipment. In homogenizing, we are aiming for a share of nearly 60% of radical innovations.
This is very much important, very much of importance for us because this maintains our technology leadership. The last column is about market coverage. This is something we have the largest sales force amongst all divisions within Separation and Flow Technologies, there are of course some white spots in service and sales, and you have heard something of our efforts, what us presented to, I would say, become better. In a nutshell, we think we are well-positioned, the markets are with us. Technology leadership is our aim, and we have some growth opportunities in the markets. Markets, it's the buzzword, New Food, you have heard a lot of it. New food, only to give you a flavor how important it is for my division, we are growing by 30% this year in New Food, and we are aiming for a sales CAGR of 15%.
We would like to clearly outperform our competition, and we are perfectly prepared by offering the complete portfolio, what our clients requiring. By having launched new, I would say, advanced product series, perfectly fitting to these kind of applications in separation and in homogenizing. We are in the leading market position, and we are able to maintain it in the course of the next years. The story about pharma application is a little bit different. The market growth is nearly 5%. You have seen it in the presentation of Stefan, but we are daring to say we will grow by 10% and we have shown the growth in the course of the last years. Why that?
We put a lot of efforts in development of new perfectly fitting equipment for liquid biopharma applications and now we are in the process to harvest all the investments in the course of the last two years. Even this year, we are growing much faster than the market trends, and this is of utmost importance for our bottom line because it's a highly profitable business and we have launched in all three BUs new specific pharma product lines and especially for the small batch productions, we have launched a laboratory homogenizer and it sounds like a nitty-gritty thing, but it's the entrance card to go for a larger scale production for pharma applications. Today, I would like to present something, later today, called kytero, that is similar story so we would like to offer the perfect product for the test batches of the big pharma companies. Last but not least, when we talk about our markets, dairy is always worthwhile to mention.
It's our backbone, our solid traditional business, as well as beverages. This is not volatile. This is bringing, I would say, the base load for our production, for our business as such. We are going to launch eight new products next year, and we are talking here rather about incremental developments, some smart things. This is a traditional market and we don't see really breakthrough innovations here. Why is it so important? Why is it so important that we in GEA are keeping two parts of the business? First of all, the business, the solutions part, so being the turnkey solutions provider for our clients, What is hosted by the colleagues from Liquid and Powder Technologies and the components part for us. We are selling 25% of our components through our colleagues from the solutions part.
In the eyes of the clients, there is no difference. There is only GEA as the partner for the dairy business, so we will keep our position. If you look to the growth rates, there is a flip side of the story. If I'm talking about a flip side, it's about oil and gas business, marine business, what is declining. This is a little bit limiting our growth scenario, and therefore, we are talking about 4%-5% in the course of the next years. I would say, the good part of the story is we're exchanging, I would say, business from red oceans, so quite competitive business in especially marine, through highly profitable business of pharma and New Food applications. This is also triggering better bottom line results. Talking about innovations, this is the key message for my division.
I will give you two examples here. First of all, we talked a lot about sustainability and what does it mean now. If our clients require really breakthrough sustainable products, we have to do something differently. Incrementally, you can save energy of 5% to 10% by improving motors and so forth. To doing something really different, you have to think differently. We are in the process to develop a full-fledged portfolio offering sustainable separators, and by saying that, we will save up to 45% of the energy consumption. Why is it so important? If the decision criteria will change in the eyes of our clients in the demands, we will be prepared. We are the front runners to offer sustainable solutions for customer needs. On the left side of the chart, you can see a future trend, what could be the next mega trend.
We're talking about plastic alternatives made out of biopolymers. Again, we are in this cell-based fermentation process business, and we are well prepared because we, as GEA, we have a footprint in industrial applications, and if we are talking about plastic alternatives, it is not comparable with food or dairy applications. It's an industrial application. We run through different test cycles with main clients, and it has been proven that our equipment is a perfect fit to the requirements of our clients, and the first large-scale production site in Japan will be built in the next year, and the order will be placed this year, and it will come to us. Why makes it me so excited? It's a large-scale production or even a mid-size production, and there is equipment in worthwhile of EUR 10 million-EUR 20 million of GEA's equipment.
If you think about the breakthrough innovation, what turns into a large-scale production, it could be a huge wave in growth for GEA in the near future and definitely in the far future. Talking about innovation, I will give you another example. I was talking about our ability to outperform the market growth in pharma. This is a small device called kytero, that is a Greek name for cell, and why is it so important? Since 10 years, we have got requirements from the big corporate pharma companies in the U.S. to replace big filter banks that size for a specific process, for a specific small batch process. You think about a fermentation process where the broth is coming out of the fermenter and it's going over a large filter bank.
You can see it flowing through the filter. For the pharma corporates, there's no alternative to it today. It's not really, I would say, a charming process. You will lose a lot of valuable product in the filter strips. It's somehow difficult to get the certification for each project. It's time-consuming, it's costly. They were approaching us. If you are talking about harvesting cells, that is a separation process, why not offering a disposable separator for exactly these applications? Today, I can tell you, we have tested a machine for two years. We are going to launch it this month. It's a disposable separator made out of plastic. It's a friction-free bearing. That means it's running friction-free. It's flying, the separators, or that is from the, I would say, German engineer perspective, the biggest argument.
In the eyes of our clients, it's batch ready in 10 minutes. Before, it took the clients up to weeks to prepare such a process. You will get the maximum harvest out of it. Finally, there is no sterilization and no cleaning process in place anymore. From the customer perspective, it's of highest value. If we are talking about pricing power through innovation, that is a very good example. Nobody else can offer it. It creates massive value for our clients, gives us power to price it at the customer's value, and it's recurring business. With each batch, you will dispose the separator, the sealed bags, the plastic stuff. If you question now the sustainability side of it, in the eyes of our clients, it's a major step because beforehand they have used these big filter bags, so much more material and much more waste.
It's a small device, it's triggering market share gain, and it's improving our bottom line. It's a breakthrough innovation. Digitalization, that's a buzzword, probably you have found all the five headlines here somewhere else. What is in for Separation and Flow Technologies? What is the main driver for us? It's speed. Digitalization has to do with speed. We have equipped all our components with a connectivity gateway, all sensors, so it's easy for our clients to decide whether they would like to get remote access to any equipment. It's easy and transparent to use apps on your smartphone to run and supervise your operation mode. Finally, you can offer remote services by predictive maintenance and so forth. Sales tools, e-commerce, you have heard about it. You have seen the example from homogenizing from my division.
We are aiming for integrating all our components to an extent of 90%, 95% into such a system. This will bring enormous efficiency gains for us in Separation and Flow Technologies, and this is one of the main driver, again, keeping our bottom line stable or even improving it. Finally, to mention intelligent equipment. That has to do with big data, with software applications. We are using or we are cooperating with universities, with startups to be fast, because speed is a differentiator from the competition. We are just running test runs here in London with Thames Water to optimize decanters, for instance. There's much more to say. The message here is speed, power to do things, not only to talk about it, is a differentiator.
Talking about margin again, because quite often I have been asked, so that is a high margin level, even in comparison with our competitors, how to maintain it. You have heard about innovation. I would like to touch the service point again. Armin presented the service share. Within GEA, it's 33%. We are talking about Separation and Flow Technologies. We are well beyond 40% in our service share. That is one of our profit momentum, I have to say. We are quite advanced in doing our service, on organizing our service activities, but there's always some room for improvement. There are three levers. First of all, growth in new machine business, of course. The second one, capture rate, and the third one is about service level agreements.
This is again, a big lever for our division because we are in the process to accelerate these activities, and it's even welcome by our clients. You can only successfully offer it by digitizing your complete value chain. We are in a good shape to do that. The second one worthwhile to mention is about operational excellence. In a fully digitized production site and a lot of automation will create bottom-line effects in a positive way. Together with the colleagues from my COO, Johannes Giloth, we are in the process to optimize our factories further. One, I would say beneficial point is again, the standardization and the modularization efforts that we are undertaking. This is the foundation to fully automate production. Last but not least, I would like to mention our production footprint.
We are in the process to move our production of pumps from Germany to Poland. This is again, a profit contributor for our bottom line, and we are constantly localizing products, especially for pipes and pumps in the different areas of the world. In a nutshell, we are in a good shape and we dare to be confident that we can even become better. A sales CAGR of 4%-5% is our ambition at an improved EBITDA level of 24%-26%. Finally, summing up our main fields of improvement or focus fields, it's capturing growth, it's launching new innovations, it's service business, and finally, taking care of our costs and our efficiency. Thank you very much. I would like to hand over to my colleague, Ilija, again, presenting now the division Liquid and Powder Technologies.
Thank you, Klaus. Just to remind everybody, my name is Ilija Aprcovic. I have since 2020, been the head of our Liquid and Powder Technologies division. We are the solution provider, the end-to-end process solution provider for GEA. I'd like to take you through my journey over the last few years. Before I take you on that journey, I just want to position LPT within GEA for you. We account for around 36% of sales share in GEA. We are the largest division by volume. We contribute 23% to EBITDA share. Currently, we have a ROCE of in excess of 170%, which demonstrates our capital efficiency here in the division, and also shows our contribution to GEA's cash generation, but also shows our contribution to GEA's ROCE targets set for 2026.
In terms of market position, we choose to work in markets where we are either the first, second, or third in the markets that we want to operate in. Examples here are dairy powders and infant formula. We are number one market leader. In brewing for beer, we are number one market leader. In fermented products, yogurts, desserts, we're number one market leader. Then it's our other industries, fruit juices, non-alcoholic beverages, certain chemical applications, we play as number two or number three player. This is where we intend to play. This is by choice. Certainly based upon feedback we've had from various customer surveys, I think we can call ourselves technology leaders in the marketplace. What do we want to achieve by 2026?
We truly believe with the strategies and initiatives we put in place, we can achieve a sales CAGR growth of between 4% and 5% up to 2026, and an EBITDA margin of between 10% and 12% by 2026, coming from our forecast position this year of 9.2%. How we will achieve that are through our strategic focus on growth and profitability. Growth through development of new applications, through innovation in sustainability. Profitability through focus on our operational excellence and driving service as a major profit lever in our organization. Just a little bit more history. Stefan took over the position of Chief Executive Officer of GEA in early 2019.
At that time, he asked me to take care of what was then our application center in dairy from the old BA Solutions in the One GEA structure, with a clear objective to stabilize that operation and deliver our promises for 2019. Here you can see on the right-hand part of this slide, the financial performance of this division from 2017 down to 2019, and then what's happened in 2022. This is the inflection point. This is when Stefan took over. This is when I came into the picture. Clearly looking at this development, there was clearly a problem with this division. In order to turn it around, we need to understand what caused this issue. We embarked on real root cause analysis to understand what the issues were, and then we came up with plans to resolve and rectify those issues.
This is what we did in this two-year period. First of all, we right-sized the division through our Headcount 800 program. We had a portfolio of poor-performing projects. We cleaned them up. Now we have a very healthy, clean project portfolio. We focused heavily on improvements in our project management processes, and in fact, end-to-end processes in the delivery of our projects. We improved through the new CREATE structure, the engineering efficiency of the organization. Also through this CREATE structure, naturally, we devolved EBITDA accountability and responsibility to the local operating unit managers. These steps resulted in this turnaround of the business. Here we are now at the end of 2021, and I think we have created a really solid and sound platform for LPT now to stop focusing internally on resolving what was going on to now look externally and focus on profitable growth.
That's what we intend to do, and we have been doing now throughout this year, which will also position us to adapt and flex to our changing customer demands, customer needs, application changes. How are we going to do this? We've developed a strategy which is now in place, which is firmly embedded in GEA's Mission 26 strategy. We will look for growth through development of new applications, and here, specifically establishing a New Food core competence within LPT and within GEA. We will drive innovation in sustainable solutions in order to support our customers achieving their targets. We will enhance our digital offering to provide more services to our existing customer base and our new customer base while capturing them for plant lifecycle time.
Profitability will come from continued focus on our process excellence through the sales process, through execution, through site installation, coupled with work that we do with our COO office in procurement excellence and production excellence. We will grow our service portfolio and our service share. Klaus mentioned at SFT, they have a service share of over 40%. LPT is in the range of 20%. We have a significant opportunity here to grow a highly profitable business. Let's look at those growth levers first of all. New food. We've talked a lot about it, so I won't go into too much detail, but what will we do? As I said, we will establish a biotech center of competence by pooling the relevant knowledge and resources within GEA into a central core competence so we can support this business.
We will invest in a new R&D and science center where our customers can come and develop products with us. We can demonstrate our ability to scale up their operations. Incidentally, we are building mobile pilot facilities also. These will be containerized units which we can send to our customers so they can run tests themselves. If anybody's interested, we will be exhibiting one of these at the Anuga Food Fair next year in Germany, and if anybody would like to come, we'd very much like to see you there. You saw from the New Food presentation, the players in this space are our existing customers. We'll leverage those relationships in order to develop this business for us, but we'll also partner with the huge number of startups.
We'll be selective, but we'll partner with those startups to enable them to develop their products, which we can then industrialize, take to market. Sustainability. We will drive innovation in our technologies in order to meet not just our own bold sustainability targets, but also to support our customers to meet their sustainability targets. All of our customers, and you can read it, they're all setting their own sustainability targets, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, et cetera. They simply cannot do this without a partner like GEA who is driving sustainability into their technologies. We will be focusing on providing solutions with reduced water consumption, reduced carbon footprint. We'll be focusing on sustainable food products and applications and recycling, reuse wherever possible. Finally, digitalization.
We'll grow our digital offering, which will be complementary to our equipment, providing customers with additional insight into their plant operation and allowing us to provide them additional services which we haven't been able to do until today. These are not just words. Let me give you some examples of what we've actually already achieved. In New Food, at the bottom example here is the Novozymes example. This I talked about a little bit earlier. Look at the other two here at the top, alternative proteins. We're building the world's first pilot installation for harvesting of krill proteins. We talk about a pilot installation. This is a double-digit million project. It's not a small project. The customer is Aker BioMarine. We will develop this technology with them, which will then be rolled out on industrial scale.
The second example here is a plant-based beverage project which we've currently executed. We were contracted by one of France's leading dairy companies to build them a process line, an end-to-end solution for production of a dairy alternative beverage based upon oats, rice, and soya. Of course, finally, there's the jewel in our crown of today, which the Novozymes example we talked about earlier. If we look at sustainability, these are real examples of what we've already achieved today. The top example, which we're really proud of, we partnered with our company, with our client Innocent Juices. You may know Innocent. They're one of the world's leaders in production of smoothies and fruit juices. They wanted to produce smoothies in the world's first carbon neutral juice factory. They didn't know how to do it. They approached us.
We used our expertise in processing solutions on how do we make these juices together with our colleagues in Refrigeration Technologies and the expertise in heat manipulation from refrigeration and heat pumps. You saw earlier in the day, Nadine presented the SEnS initiative. This is a living example of SEnS. This is where we take waste heat from the refrigeration process, we compress it, we make usable heat, we feed it into the juice production process for sterilization, et cetera, and for CIP. It's a completely closed cycle, and together with the customer who are powering this plant with wind energy, this is the first carbon neutral fruit juice factory in the world. Developing new technologies. We're developing a carbon dioxide abatement system for use in heavy industry, such as glass making and metal making. We already have a product line in exhaust gas treatment here.
This would then be complementary to that as an add-on to remove carbon dioxide from exhaust gases, thus reducing our greenhouse gas footprint and that of our customers. Not only here, we're also looking at recovery of carbon dioxide from brewing plants or from soft drinks plants as well, and reusing. These are real examples of what we're doing. Then looking at the digital space. These products are available. The first product, GEA InsightPartner, and we use the word partner, something Armin mentioned earlier. We want to partner with our company through our digital offerings rather than just supplying them. These are subscription-based products which are already available in the marketplace.
Insight Partner, designed specifically for the brewing industry using GEA knowledge and core competence, provides our customers with detailed insights into how each brew in their daily, weekly, monthly production plan is operating, allows them to compare one brew against another, gives them insight and allowing them to make informed decisions on how to optimize the operation of their plant. GEA OptiPartner. This has been designed using GEA expertise and knowledge in the dairy industry to optimize production in dairy powder plants. This is an autopilot. What this does is this monitors constantly the operation of a dairy powder plant, and depending on the KPIs that the customer wants to optimize, could be energy, could be throughput, could be moisture content in the powder. This software automatically adjusts in real time the operating parameters of that dryer to optimize those KPIs.
We've actually seen customers that have installed this, improvements in productivity of between 5%-7% to nameplate capacity. These are already in the marketplace. They're subscription-based. They're recurring revenues for LPT, and we are now rolling this out fully into the marketplace. Finally, through connected services, through our standard automation platform, we can provide our customers with automation services, maintenance services from wherever we are by connecting into their plants. All this is available. When we look at improving profitability, we as a contracting entity, our success is based upon our ability to deliver our projects to our customers on time, on specification, on budget. As long as we do that, then we will be profitable.
We will continue to focus on the end-to-end process of everything we do, starting in sales, through project management, through engineering, working together with our COO organization. Finally, in service, using all the pillars that have been described by Armin earlier on today, we will look to grow our service share, we will increase our digital offering, we'll extend our service products, and we will develop local service maturity. What have we done? What have we already achieved? Well, first of all, we have focused over the last two years on really professionalizing project management and project engineering in LPT. We have developed state-of-the-art project management techniques, models, policies, procedures that have been rolled out to all our engineering units globally. What does that mean? That means that all our engineering units operate in the same way.
We understand, we can interrogate projects, we have early warnings of the what's going on. We can see what's happening in all our projects. We've developed a very strong governance model all the way through strict adherence to our project management principles, but also through risk management. All our key large projects go through a risk management process, including the executive board, who interrogate those projects so we understand what it is that we are getting involved in, and we do not take any unmitigated risks. We'll focus particularly on those rather difficult areas in project management and project execution, which is what happens when you get to site where you have scope creep and all types of eventualities. We also want to make project management a career choice in GEA.
We want to make it an attractive career choice to our employees, and we have developed a very clear project management career path and training development program for our engineers. Also we've been working on rolling out standard project management tools so we can maintain that consistency. At the end of the day, our mission here is to be the implementation partner of choice for our customers. Once they trust us, which I'm happy to say we've gained that back, they will continue to work with us. Service. Our vision in service is to be able to support our customers and their projects to improve performance of their plants wherever they are, whenever, globally. That's it in a nutshell. That's what we want to do. The pillars of our strategy to achieve that is very much as defined by Armin in the Mission 2026 service work stream.
We will grow our market coverage through our iBase. That's our installed base. I don't recall, Armin, the installed base coverage we have at the moment, but in LPT, it's around about 40%. We still have a huge installed base we haven't even touched. It's not just about the installed base, it's about the share of wallet. We know even now, the installed base we touch, we haven't maximized what we can get out of that. We'll grow our digital service offerings, some of them I've shown you already. We'll increase our operational excellence through logistics, supply chain, pricing excellence, et cetera. We will grow our organizational maturity. As Armin said, service is local. We have to ensure we have the right competencies and the right number of resources where our customers need them.
In a nutshell, that's the journey we've been on in LPT. This is the journey we're going on from now. We feel very confident that we can achieve, using our strategic approach, a sales CAGR growth of 4%-5% and achieving these EBITDA targets of between 10% and 12% by 2026. That brings me to the end of this short presentation. Now I'd like to invite our Chief Operating Officer, Johannes Giloth, to the stage. Johannes joined us in January 2020 as a member of our executive board. He's brought an awful lot of innovative ideas, insights, and new ways of thinking into our organization. Johannes, over to you.
Thank you, Ilija. Welcome everybody to the part of operational excellence. I'd like to start with explaining what the operational function is all about. As you have learned, we are organized in a matrix since two years. The new organization of GEA took place two years ago, with that, we were introducing an organization which is built on accountability in the regions, in the divisions, in the business units, paired with a strong layer of operational excellence, operational functions comprising procurement, production, supply chain, and executional excellence. We're talking about 6,300 people working in all kinds of businesses in the different areas, in the different factories, in the supply chain production procurement across the divisions and across the regions, steered by a small global team, organized in a matrix.
The idea is to establish a resilient operative model, sustainable operations, and to strive for best in industry expertise in those functional areas, because we believe that the accountability in the divisions, in the regions must be paired with an expertise on those areas of operational excellence. Why we are doing this? You see that here in the middle part of the slide, we are addressing with those people, with those 6,300 people in the factories, in the procurement, a cost block of more than EUR 3.2 billion, broken down into EUR 2.8 billion in spend, EUR 2 billion in direct and EUR 800 million in indirect spend, our procured COGS, and a EUR 400 million cost block in our factories. That's the value add we are creating in the factories.
To optimize this cost block to really kind of make this as a design factor for the company, we formed the operations as we have it now. Looking back to the Capital Market Day to 2019, there were a lot of things we need to start working on. I can proudly say that in the last 18 months, we have developed a lot of progress in many, many areas. Just to point out a few, we have established a one global procurement organization, not fixed line, but in the matrix as a procurement community around strong categories, around strong performance management. We have elevated that procurement function from many, many different separated functions and not aligned accountabilities.
We used a lot of time into creating a spend cube, a spend analytics where we have now visibility on our supplier base, on our spend, on our actual EUR 2.8 billion visibility. In the production areas, we started a productivity initiative now comprising of more than 400 different initiatives based on Lean Six Sigma continuous improvement in order to get the productivity of each factory up, paired with a manufacturing footprint strategy where we have already consolidated many factories. We have started, as it has been mentioned already a couple of times, our new factory in Poland. Everything is based on a very strong performance management. The idea in the operational excellence is to establish a performance culture, a delivery culture, an end product focused culture.
We are pairing that with a strong monitoring, with clear KPIs, with clear target setting, also expanding the target setting through the functions and have a cross-functional approach to it. Last but not least, I would like to mention that throughout the COVID crisis, we have maneuvered our company very well through that crisis. We did not have major outtakes. We have been really successfully managing this crisis. In a nutshell or in numbers, just to refer to the numbers, what we have given you in 2019. We are meeting, we will be meeting our procurement saving targets. Remember, it was EUR 34 million, where we said there is a net saving to the EBITDA of the company. We will be slightly overachieving it this year, but it needs to be understood, we had a headwind of more than EUR 28 million we were able to compensate in addition.
With that unforeseen headwind, we would have achieved by far a better result, but even with that headwind, we were consuming or we were digesting that into our savings. The production hours we were moving, we said we will tackle 500,000 production hours until 2023 to consolidate, to move and optimize. We will be much faster on that. Our plan until 2023 will be to touch more than a million production hours. 50% is best cost country move, and 50% is consolidation within the existing factories, for example, in China, for example, in Italy. Our best cost country percentage, we had a target of 33%. That will be met. The production productivity, though, we have the plan to significantly overachieve that. In addition, we have been able also through our portfolio optimization to reduce our production sites from 62 to 50. What's next?
Operational excellence. I was introducing the EUR 3.2 billion cost block. It's not only about cost cutting, it's not only about cost optimization, it's both. We need to reduce our cost base. We need to optimize our cost position on the one side in order to increase our chances and in order to enable ourselves to further growth. How do you want to do this? That is exactly what the Mission 26 plan is about. What we have started, we have created in the last couple of months a comprehensive program for each and every function, for each and every factory to work on a comprehensive implementation plan around efficient operations, around countering the price erosion and cost increases. What we also will be seeing next year to come around our product cost optimization. It's not only about procurement savings, it's about really taking cost of the products out.
That will help us in order to contribute to the EBITDA. On the other side, we have also paired those targets with even conflicting targets like inventory management and customer excellence, like lead time reduction, like customer centricity. That is helping us to address new markets and to be more competitive in the marketplace. We need to invest in the resilience and flexibility of the supply chain, because that is, in that new normal world, a very important topic. How can we flexible react on the market changes? With that, gaining also market share through our cost competitiveness. As I stated already, we put everything into a major program called Mission 26. We are trying to satisfy five major dimensions with that, because it's not a unilateral dimension that we can focus on. It's about value delivery through TCO, total cost of ownership leadership. Definitely, yes.
That's the core of everything. It won't go without digitalization and its technology in all our supporting processes towards the customers, but also within the factories. It's around people. It's around organizational excellence. It's around rallying the teams behind and elevating our people in the different functions. A lot of work goes into enabling our people to address the new challenges. It's about customer centricity when I talk about lead times, when I talk about on-time delivery, flexibility, agility, responsiveness. Last but definitely not least, it's about sustainability because the operations piece, whether it's in the factories or whether it's in the supplier base, will contribute big time to the targets, what Nadine has pointed out earlier. Let me just introduce that program to you function by function, starting with the procurement.
On the left side, you see the major areas, the major core programs we have started with clear program plans, but also with clear deliverables. It's around supplier management and sustainability. It starts with that. We need to manage our supplier base better. It started with the visibility. Now we are going into claims management, into contract management, into long tail management, but also in management of the sustainability of our customers with very clear selection processes going forward. We will invest big time in digitalization of the procurement processes, source-to-pay optimization, catalog business, e-auctioning. All that will enable us to be faster, more transparent, and more effective in that what we call procurement. The other part of it is the organizational effectiveness. It's around clear accountabilities, clear roles, and optimization of the processes. There's a lot of churn in our processes still, what we need to address.
There are two major other programs, the Design to Value and the Project Excellence, which can be summarized in a word, early involvement. Design to Value, early involvement means that the procurement people need to be early involved in the design of our products in order to be able to choose or help the engineers to choose the right suppliers in order to take out costs on the left side of the chart. Basically, in an early phase, already optimized on the cost and on our deliveries. In the Project Excellence, like Ilija has mentioned, we need to be early involved. It needs to be a combined team of engineers, service people, but also procurement people to optimize the Project Excellence, because a lot of project overruns are actually root-caused in an early phase of the program.
If you take all those four areas together, we are committed to deliver a EUR 90 million EBITDA effect until 2026 to the company's bottom line. We will work on the payment days. That's the cash dimension of it, meaning that we are contributing with our increase of the payment days to the net working capital of the company. Just to give you an understanding a little bit about what supplier management in reality means, and just to give you a successful example. Everybody knows that this year, the logistics cost went up big time. When I compare the logistics cost of GEA this year as a percentage of sales compared to the logistics cost that companies spent in 2019, we were able to reduce our logistics cost by 15%. How can that be? It's very easy. We analyzed our logistics costs. We implemented processes. We have implemented policies.
We have negotiated tenders. We have professionalized the way we are doing our tenders and our choosing. We are not going to spot prices any longer. We have been able to move a lot of our air freight, for example, to sea freight by better planning. It's just a basic good idea how the involvement of procurement, of the awareness of the cost can help, even in a time when the costs are increasing, to optimize the cost situation. At the end of the day, it's about reducing the cost block, not necessarily just to negotiate a better price. It's a very important question. You can apply this example to many, many other examples and many other categories, too. Another area is about the Design to Value, as I stated already. Here, a good example in our automatic milking systems.
Through the early involvement and through the collaboration with our engineering people, we are able to take 15% of the costs out in our automatic milking system. We were not able to negotiate those prices down, but we are now using less material. We are optimizing. It's a design to cost measure, and that helped us to take 15% out. We will also professionalize that and expand that over the rest of the company and really tackle it with a clear focus on total cost of ownership, with a clear design for sustainability, because that is one thing we need to start early, too. We need to work with our teams, and basically, I'm also heading the Global Engineering Excellence meanwhile, so we need to look on the modernization of our portfolio in order to take the cost out. It's about supplier management. It's about, again, digitalization.
A lot of work to do, but we see good progress already. It's now to scale this to the entire company. Next function is the production function. Also here, we defined three major programs, one about production network optimization. It's about the production network, how many sites will we have? Where do we produce? What do we produce where? What does that cost us? A second part is on the GEA Production System and the productivity initiatives combined with that. We are striving, and we have made good progress already to define a production system which is applicable to all factories, irrespectively of the archetypes therein. We have three different archetypes, and we have a production system which is helping us to put everything on the same base. It's about Lean. It's about Six Sigma.
It's about the classic Kaizen mechanisms, that is helping us also professionalize our factory footprint. That is paired with a productivity tool and productivity initiative, which is, as stated already, comprising already 400 measures, from small measures to big measures. That is bringing also the performance management culture into the company. It's about cost awareness. You should not be satisfied with what you have achieved. It's just a starting point for the next, the classical continuous improvement process. Then as a separate topic is the factory of the future. That's more the step-up approach into digitalization, into automation, into sustainability. Also for that, I have prepared two deep dives, not too deep, but at least, to get you an understanding what we're doing. On the factory footprint, it's not about best cost country movement. It's one element out of six. You see it here.
It's about how can we use our manufacturing footprint to help the company to grow? Cost competitiveness is absolutely important, that's not the one and the only topic. It's about core competencies. How can we really focus on that, what we can do best and nobody else can do? It's about resilience. We saw that in the COVID. We see it right now with the energy crisis in China. It's about local for local. It's around sustainability. Those design principles we call them, will define the manufacturing footprint of the future. We need to apply that differently to the different regions, obviously. In Americas, we are looking for best cost country hub. We are looking for local growth, also in the eyes of the sustainability. In APAC, we are expanding our footprint in India.
We are stabilizing our footprint in China and looking for other alternatives outside of China to create local for local contribution. In Western Europe, we are focusing on clear productivity, on clear centers of competencies, while in Eastern Europe, we are expanding our best cost country footprint and focusing also here on our factory of the future. Here, I'd like to give you one short example for our new factory, which is at the moment being built in Koszalin, Poland. The third program was on the factory of the future. I said already, the factory of the future is a program which is consisting of three different sub-programs, one on digitalization, one on automation, and one on sustainability. Here on that chart, you see our different archetypes of production, engineer to order, configure to order on projects, because we have three different ways how we produce things.
What we will do now, we will apply the different use cases to the different factories. For each of the factories, we will have a digitalization roadmap, an automatization roadmap, and a sustainability roadmap being built up, paying into those targets, what we have outlined before. We are not starting from scratch. We are doing a lot already. A lot of proof of concepts, a lot of projects have been executed in the last 18 months. I just want to give you one example out of Büchen, our valves factory, where through an automated loaded system with a collaborative robot, we were able to increase our productivity by 35%. We were also enabling our factory to have a 30% more output, which is important, not to invest in new capacities necessarily, by at the same time reducing our throughput time by 85%.
That gives you a good understanding what automation can bring us, but it needs to be tailored to each and every factory, and that is something what we are now developing with that one program. Last major topic is supply chain. I was focusing in the last couple of years very much on procurement and production, but the supply chain in the classical sense is a field also GEA needs to step up and will be stepping up. We are working on a comprehensive supply chain operating model, which is bringing also the planning, the sales and operations planning closer to our execution. We will be focusing on an improved supply chain distribution network, warehousing, logistics, transportation.
We will create a lot of measures around our performance in on-time delivery, in throughput, in lead times. We will need to digitalize our supply chain, track and trace, one very important topic. With that, we are having a target and we are pretty confident to achieve that, to reduce our customer lead time by 30%. That's the customer centricity element I was referring to earlier. We will also take out inventories from the supply chain, and we will improve our inventory rotation days by 10. Putting everything together, that is our commitment from operational excellence. Just remember, the operational excellence is only 10% a global team, 5%. The majority of the people are in the divisions, in the regions, and collaboratively, we are striving for those targets with shared targets.
150 million, EUR 60 coming from the production, EUR 90 from the procurement, 15 days in payment, 10 inventory days. Customer delivery lead times, on-time delivery, and our sustainability targets to reduce 60% of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030. With that, I would like to conclude my presentation and enjoy your coffee break.
I hope you enjoyed what you have heard and seen today so far. Nevertheless, before, and I can imagine at the same time that nevertheless, you might have the one or the other question, but before we come to your question, there's one very important topic left, and that is our financial ambition 2026. Who would be better qualified to do this than our CFO, Marcus Ketter? I don't have to really introduce to you because I think, first of all, your CV is self-explaining and they know you already anyway. Marcus.
Oliver, thank you for the introduction. Glad to be back. It's two years since the last Capital Markets Day. I've since then actually only been December in 2019 here in London. It's good to be back here. Good to see you. It's the last presentation. It's a promise, before Q&A then comes, and you can ask your question. I'm, so to speak, the cliffhanger here. I'm going to show you how the financials all tie together now from here on. Before I do this, I actually, everyone, we have this here and also for the outside audience, this bar here. It's plant-based protein. I really want to emphasize this. The company is going to new frontiers. You need to see there's plant-based, there's cell-based proteins, and there are insect-based proteins. Why is that so important?
I emphasize this because I got the question during lunchtime and also at dinner. Isn't this just a CapEx substitution? It's a good question. However, it's not, because it's very simple. When you look at the world, and we heard, Stefan myself actually heard an ambassador speaking from the U.S. who actually had this agenda, Feeding the World. Her point was, there is enough food in the world, but not enough protein in the world. With animal-based proteins, we will not be able to feed the world. It's not a substitution, actually, when you see the whole demand for food. Quite the opposite. It will be needed to feed the world, and it's starting right now, actually. It's still very expensive. It's still lifestyle. How do you like it, actually? So-so, or it's good? It's good. Thumb is up. Okay, very good.
It's really a question of feeding the world. Now it's lifestyle. Now it's in the industrial countries. It's in the main capital of emerging countries where people can afford this. It will come from lifestyle into feeding the world. GEA is really, as we emphasized earlier here, is really the enabler for the New Food industry there. I think I really want to bring this point over. I think it's very important to understand with that, actually, we are going to new frontiers. Will it be EUR 400 million? Probably it will be more in the year 2026, but right now we are starting with that, and that's why we said it's at least EUR 400 million in order intake in the year 2026. Think of it, how to feed the world and the New Food industry. Our customers will do that.
They will do this on a cost basis, which will be also then available for people in countries who are not that wealthy. With that, actually, I'm going to start the financial ambition 2026. As I said, the cliffhanger here, but it's not going to be a too long presentation here. Let's start with the first slide. You can see here we said turnaround accomplished, and I think we can really say that. The EBITDA, actually, we showed numbers before 2018 here, and it all went downhill till the year 2019. In 2019, we had the lowest EBITDA margin of 9.8%. From there on, actually, we quickly were able to increase it again, 11.5%, and now this year it's 12.4%-13% guidance. Of course, we have the year 2022, where it's even going to be higher. How did this happen?
We increased financial transparency. We reduced headcount. We had better project execution, especially as Ilija pointed out. It's very important that LPT is back on track here, back in good margin. Procurement savings, as Johannes put out, very important for us. This is also a new area for us, going into procurement, getting savings, getting a new procurement organization. That all worked out so far very well, and there's more ahead, as he showed. We had also elevated capital efficiency. You see the ROCE. We are barely making our weighted average cost of capital with 10.6% here. The year 2020, that went up to 17%. This year, we're going to be between 23% and 26% because we were able to reduce the net working capital considerably, and we are now flatlining at around 8% net working capital over sales.
That, of course, was a boost for our return on capital employed. As you can see, as just mentioned here, net working capital, but it's the target range now we had in 2019, which was 12%-14%, and the target range then actually was leveled down to 8%-10% here. We think also going forward that that is really doable. Coming to the next slide. We made promises in the Capital Markets Day 2019. You can see this here, our programs. It's operating efficiency increase. That was the Headcount 800 program where we said we're going to cut 800 FTE positions in the company. That's executed. We have now, as Stefan said, around 1,400+ people less in the company. Some positions will be replaced. As in all bigger companies, there's always coming and going. Right now we are saving basically 1,400 employee FTEs here.
Footprint optimization, we said in 2019, that's going to be long-term. We started already with that. That's why you only see EUR 10 million here because it's going to the year 2022. EUR 5 million achieved, EUR 5 million to go. Sales efficiency program, we said it's EUR 40 million. We achieved already EUR 50 million here and as Azam pointed out, we are well on track with our sales efficiency program. Of course it's something which is more backload because we needed to make a lot of changes there.
I'm coming now on purpose. Last one, procurement consolidation. We achieved EUR 35 million there, EUR 50 million to go. Quite openly, we will not achieve that. As everyone knows, prices, material prices, shortages which also drive prices, we will not achieve that. We are working hard. Johannes with the organization is working diligently on this, but we are able to somewhat mitigate that.
Next year, there will be a net increase on our material expenses. We will mitigate it on the procurement side and whatever cannot be mitigated, we will pass on as price increases to our customers. Luckily we are in a position due to technology and due to the way the market is, that we will be able to pass this on. The price increases are really hitting us as everyone else in the industry. This made us mathematically possible to achieve and even overachieve the EBITDA margins already in this year. I think that's very important to understand. We are already achieving our margins or overachieving it here in three divisions already in this year. This chart here you can see is really the original chart from the Capital Markets presentation here in Latin from September of 2019. It's a copy-paste.
Really to say what did we promise, what did we achieve? The three divisions actually who are already overachieving the promised margin at that time are Liquid and Powder Technologies, Food & Healthcare and Separation and Flow Technologies. You can see at Farm and Refrigeration Technologies, we are at the upper end, close to the upper end of the range we set at that time. We are well on our way also for next year. With that, I am coming to the next level. What is the next level? Stefan showed it. I will make it short. It is accelerating growth, 4%-6% per annum until the year 2026. It is reaching new margin levels of greater than 15%. Thirdly, it is also a capital efficiency reaching an ROCE of beyond 30% there. How do we want to do this?
Now I put in a bridge all the presentations that you heard. It's going to tied up in these two bridges now here. First we start with 2021 estimate and you can see here a EUR 5.6 billion in revenue. That's a little bit lower than everyone is expecting. There's a reason for it why we put it in this bridge here, because this is the revenue going concern. We eliminated the revenue of the companies we already sold, which were there still in partly in 2021 and then also a company which will be selling beginning of next year. There will be the closing as it looks right now. We eliminated all the companies who are not going concern. That's why we are starting here with EUR 4.65 billion. You have seen the presentation, sales excellence of us here. New food innovations also very important.
This will drive the new machine business and we see CAGR there of 4%-5%. Service business as Armin very extrovert actually did the presentation. I hope actually that everyone really saw the potential here, which I was bringing over. We see that the growth can be even higher, 5%-6% here. It's increasing shelf wallet, it's increasing penetration of the installed base and of course it's launching new services as we have seen in his presentation. New machine, 4%-5%, a little bit slower. Service a little bit faster growth is possible and we reach then around EUR 6 billion in the year 2026. Tying it up for the EBITDA margin. This year, 12.4%-13% EBITDA margin. With sales excellence, 1.5% and its volume and its margin driven there. Service excellence, we even see a better potential. It's more margin actually.
The more actually revenue we have there, the more it adds actually to our EBITDA margin. We see 2.0 percentage points as possible going there. We split up operational excellence as Johannes showed us. One is the production savings, EUR 60 million. That's straightforward. You have seen the factory of the future. We already are down from 60 factories to 50 factories with all the changes his team is doing. I think that's pretty straightforward. What I need to explain here a bit is probably the procurement saving and sales price increases, EUR 90 million. When we looked at our cost base before the price increases on the material side started, we said EUR 90 million savings just through procurement is possible.
The price increases started, and we said, well, there are some of the price increases when you take a look product and volume in 2021, product and volume in 2026. Do we are really going to be EUR 90 million lower in material expenses? Answer to that is no, even though with everything we are doing, because the price increases will overshoot. We say we still can get EUR 90 million out of it because we are getting some savings, and as I said early on, the rest will be passed on via sales price increases. In total, it adds up to EUR 90 million there, even though it's not everything on the procurement side, but it adds up with the price increases due to the fact that we have material price increases there. EUR 90 million there. Of course, we have additional expenses.
We put in a 2.0% OpEx inflation, so everything below the gross profit, we said it's going to get more costly, obviously. Is it going to be 2% or it's going to be high inflation environment? We don't know. Assumption is 2%. If it's a high inflation environment, once again, we say that we can then actually, because it's an inflationary environment, increase our sales prices then more to counter-effect any OpEx inflation which goes beyond 2.0%. We, of course, have seen the programs, digitalization, innovation, Nadine presented sustainability here. That is all, of course, also a cost, but it's also supporting. What we said, we're going to single it out as expense. We're not going to allocate it here to the Excellence Program. We could have done that, but quite frankly, how to allocate this? We are saying we need to do this.
We need to do sustainability, innovation, digitalization, and investment in ERP. We single it out as cost because it's all supporting all the three levers here we see in the excellence programs there. That's why we have it here as a cost, and we say it's going to be around 1.5 percentage points as a deduction to it. That's how we're going to come up with 15%, greater than 15% EBITDA margin in the year 2026. That's a question we are always getting, of course, because our KPI is EBITDA before restructuring. Let's take a look. Also, what did we promise? We promised a range here of EUR 210 million-EUR 250 million on the capital markets day in 2019 there. We said at that time, that excludes any write-offs we have due to our portfolio pruning and related restructuring expenses. Just the programs we are doing.
We are right on track, actually. We didn't do more. It's plus EUR 60 million of portfolio pruning. That's mainly non-cash there. That's going to end this program in the year, next year, and we are finished with that program. You can see this here. We have another restructuring, but it's mainly manufacturing footprint related. In the next years, we're going to restructure the manufacturing footprint to be more competitive, to be more customer-centric, in the supply chain there. What is the promise here from the executive board? Restructuring ends in 2026. To make it quite clear, there will not be another third program restructuring. That will end. These two programs, and we have the company completely restructured. I think that's important to understand. Let's take a look at the next level EBITDA margin targets.
You have seen here, once again, the copy-paste template we had from our Capital Markets Day in 2019. We have put in the sales CAGR. You have seen that for the group and the EBITDA margin also. This here is the split up for the divisions. Let me give you a little bit of a flavor here why we think that is doable. Farm Technologies, 5.5%-6.5% the growth rate. The farming business is getting more and more automated. There are more and more bigger farms out there, and with bigger farms there come more automation. We have the automated milking robot, which is a great success, and just give you a glimpse. We haven't announced that yet, but we're going to also do something else automated for the farms, which we think will be a great product there.
We think with that, we can outperform the growth rate of the other divisions with 5.5%-6.5%, and also we are very well on track to reach higher margin levels there with an EBITDA margin goal now in the year 2026 for 14%-16%. Refrigeration Technologies, also high growth rate. Why is that? It's environmental, it's sustainability, it's heat pumps. We are providing RT heat pumps, and we think especially with that business, we are able to grow the company or the group here 5.5%-6.5%, and we also see a good potential to reach 12%-14% EBITDA margin. Liquid and Powder Technologies. With, earlier we said you need to have at least 10%, and earlier committed here it's going to be at least 10%, but he sees potential going up to 12%. That's great. Growth will mainly come out of the New Food business.
Of course, we do not want to lose any market share in the, let's call it, the classic process technology business there. The growth should really come from New Food in LPT. We think 4%-5%. With an upside for New Food, as I said, let's see how it's developed in the coming years. If it moves faster from a lifestyle product into feeding the world product, then there could be great potential, in addition to what we are showing here. 10%-12%, I think it's a very good EBITDA margin, considering that LPT has since two years now, 1.5 years since we really, and earlier really, this team revamped it, has a negative net working capital constantly. In most quarters, actually, we are doing business with a negative capital employed there. It's a great business.
It's a great lever for the whole group to drive our capital efficiency and drive ROCE there. Food & Healthcare Technologies is a classic machinery equipment business. It's right now getting better. It's performing, but as you can see, it's obvious it's not anywhere else where customer, their competitors are with their machinery equipment because it's really food and healthcare. We are still in the process of performance managing it. It has become much better, but still, there's way to go. When you look here at the goal of 13%-15%, we have to say it's getting there and it's really doable when you look at the industry, which EBITDA margin you have there. That's a real doable goal, and we need to get there and the business is good for that.
Growth rate 4%-5% because it's more the regular growth of a food and beverage business and healthcare there. Separation Flow Technology is probably here with Klaus and his team, the market leader when it comes to margin there. Everyone is saying we have a GEA margin, when you look at SFT, well, we are above 20 already there. He has done a great job so far this year. He has further improved margins. That's fantastic. He says we're going to see further potential by simply growing volume and getting the OpEx leverage here down to EBITDA. 24%-26% with a growing business as SFT is doable. At the 4%-5%, he's saying he definitely can do this, let's see if it's going to be more, we stick here with the 4%-5%.
With 24%-26% in the year 2026, all achievable. With that, I'm going to come to the questions: Is the company generating, with all these programs, free cash flow? The answer you can see here is we expect to generate EUR 2 billion in the years 2023 to 2026. What is the assumption here? It's a stable net working capital ratio of our sales of 8%-10%. I have to say, we try to have it at 8%. So far, as I said, it's flatlining. Let's see. There will be, of course, fluctuations between the quarters there. That's the range, and I think with that range, it's absolutely doable to reach that goal. It's a disciplined CapEx, but you have seen the programs.
We are investing in our company, it's around EUR 200 billion in CapEx we put in the model here per year. With that, it brings us to around EUR 2 billion with a strong operational performance I showed you before. You can see here free cash flow was huge in 2020, but that was of course, due to the fact that we were able to reduce net working capital by way over EUR 300 million last year. The strong free cash flow generation also allows for attractive shareholder returns. We started already, as you know, a share buyback program with treasury shares. This year, we expect to have EUR 130 million in spend. For that, we already have EUR 40 million spent in treasury shares now. Therefore, next year it's going to be EUR 170 million. I think it's very supportive for the stock.
Also, we can tell you and promise you attractive dividend payouts. Shareholders will benefit from sustainable profit increases due to dividend increases, quite frankly. Still, we're going to have an increasing net cash position till the year 2026. The free cash flow also allows for external growth. We are, and to say this upfront, in no hurry to do this, and we think that the GEA story also works without M&A. Still we are saying if there's an interesting company, if there's an opportunity, we would be willing to look at it and if it would work out also to acquire it. Perhaps to give you also some more flavor here, we did a really systematic search of the regions. We looked at the value chains of the divisions, put in our products, put in competitor products, and said, "Where are we strong?
Where are we not strong?" This is the way actually we did the M&A department, did the whole research. We had very interesting companies in our space. Unfortunately, they were all not for sale. It's usually family business who say, "No, it's going very well. Why should I sell? We are making enough money." Usually they don't sell. From this systematic approach, we are still following up networking and if someone wants to sell, they certainly going to give us a call. Now we are actually moving now to a bit more opportunistic approach in the sense we did our systematic homework. The opportunistic approach is we are now getting calls, as you know, also from colleagues in your banks, and say, "Are you interested in this or that company?" We are taking a look at that.
As I said, we are in no hurry to do this, and we have very strong strategic M&A guardrails and financial imperatives, defined to really, if we do a transaction, that this transaction will create value to the company. You can see this here on the left side. It is especially about filling white spot technology-wise, product-wise, region-wise. Of course, Nadine really emphasized it, the sustainable business model must be enabled with whatever we are buying in addition. Financial imperatives, I think, are straightforward. It is we need to be the best owner or the best operator of the asset. It is about leveraging synergies, and it is about value accretion at least after a certain period of time, like 12 to 18 months, when we have actually gained traction on the synergies there.
The question always is, at least I get this, and I got this also in the last Capital Markets Day, is the question, what is your leverage, actually? Let me first start with the statement, we have a very strong commitment to our investment-grade rating. Secondly, there are two ways to look at our leverage. One is the rating agency leverage. We have an example here of Moody's, who's taking, of course, our financial debt plus the lease payment obligations we have, plus the pensions, and who is not deducting any cash. Looking at that, we are now down this year to like 2.7. This is a bit below what we need to have or what the maximum is for our investment-grade rating. From that perspective, when the rating agencies look at us, we are leveraged.
When you look at it from a financial net leverage, so just say what is the financial debt, you exclude pension, and you exclude lease liabilities, and you then deduct cash. Yes, we look negative. It depends on which view one has to take. Of course, the rating view is very important because, as I said, it's a strong commitment to investment grade. Nevertheless, there is room for further growth of the company when you look at our leverage. The net working capital went down, as I showed. How did we do this? I tell you, one success factor was really to make it operational for the whole group, for everyone in the company. We used a KPI which is simple, everyone could relate to. It's net working capital over sales. This is actually what we worked with in the last two years.
Now it's time to do the next step and also say for capital markets, for investors, what's the cash conversion? How much cash actually do you get out of your EBITDA? We are now introducing also a cash conversion ratio. We define it as free cash flow because we are using EBITDA as a KPI for our profitability. We say it's free cash flow over EBITDA. This is going to be forward-going, also reporting KPI for us, and will show actually how we are able to convert EBITDA into cash. You can see here the very high cash conversion ratio, especially last year, it peaked at 127%. The reason is down here. You can see this year, we start with a net working capital of a sales ratio of 15.5%, and it went down to 8%.
The cash conversion ratio, when you put free cash flow in relation to EBITDA, obviously was not only operationally coming from the business, but also due to the fact that we were able to reduce net working capital so considerably. However, going forward and assuming a stable net working capital of a sales ratio of 8%-10% there, we say that our cash conversion ratio is going to be between 55%-65% of EBITDA to convert it into free cash flow. Going away for one slide, going away from financials. I had a very extensive presentation two years ago on GEA Global SAP. We cut it short this time. Wanted to say the message, we are on track. We also did hear what we promised. We started with a new team. We started with a new approach.
We're going to have the first template implemented now beginning of November. Therefrom, we're going to roll it out further. It will still take five years because we have 67 ERP systems, and if you do the math, it's five years. It's 60 months, we have to implement 1.1 ERP systems per month. This actually puts a little bit in perspective why it takes five years to really come up with one GEA Global SAP here. As I said, we are on track. This is a glimpse or 30,000 feet view of the time plan we are having. With that, I'm coming to my last slide and want to show you here we created already significant shareholder value since we were here in London. In September 26th, 2019, the share price was at EUR 25.89.
We have a total shareholder return, including paying of dividends of 62%, and we created EUR 2.5 billion in shareholder value since then. We outperformed DAX 50. We outperformed the MDAX. We outperformed the TMI engineering stocks. We paid constantly dividend. I have to admit, even though for the last four years, it stayed flat at EUR 0.85, we paid every year dividend. You can see here, there's not one year actually where we decreased dividend, even though, as you know, in some years the company was going through rougher times. As I said, the promise stands. Shareholders will benefit from sustainable dividend increases in the future from here on. To support this share price development in creating shareholder value, we have now twice implemented a share buyback program. One was in 2017-2018, the other one is now, 2021 and 2022.
As I said, this year, EUR 130 million, next year, around EUR 170 million in share buybacks. With that and all the measures, we are really geared towards creating more shareholder value also till 2026. With that, I finish my presentation. Thanks for listening. Presentation time is over, and now it's Q&A, and last remarks from Stefan afterwards. Thank you very much.
Yeah. To mention your name and company, I would say let's go to the Q&A. Maybe you can limit it to two questions at a time. I saw here the first nice gentleman. Rebecca, if you would be so nice to give the microphone to Klas.
Klas Bergelind, the nice gentleman. Thank you for that, Oliver. First question is on the targets, looking at the margin and ROIC . With the growth and the savings you have outlined, I can get to a, well, higher margin is obviously subjective because you say above 15%. When I look at ROIC, if I keep the net working capital terms as per your guidance, 8%-10%, and allow for your CapEx guidance, and if I increase the margin like you suggest, and take into account the sales growth, I can see much higher ROIC than 30%. I can see 40% ROIC. The first question mark is that's obviously best in class in capital goods, and you can get there without much prepayment. Looks pretty conservative. Seems like you're keeping the powder dry. If I start there, why not 40?
Why 30% on the ROIC? Thank you.
We thought that greater than 30% is a really good goal there, and if everything goes right, you might be right. Hey, we all know life. We never know if everything goes right till 2026. If we see that everything goes right till 2026, we are happy actually to operate that number.
Okay, sounds good. My second one is on the moving parts in the bridge. I understand that roughly one-third of the growth, speaking to Oliver in the morning, is price and mix and better net pricing, accelerated service growth should contribute to that. Within that OpEx inflation, where I think wages sit, have you assumed that we will see spillover effects from bottlenecks in supply chain onto wage inflation, so we have higher core inflation over this period? You're obviously going to require to hire more service technicians, probably, as you grow the service wallet. What kind of wage is sitting in the bridge there? Thank you.
Yeah. You're right. That could very well be the case that we're going to see higher wage inflation. However, we did just an assumption of 2%. As I said in the presentation, we are aware of that. That might be not enough if we go into a higher inflation environment. At the same time, we would be increasing sales prices there, and we have not put this into account either. Both is missing basically. A higher inflation on the material and wage front, and also higher sales prices, which go beyond the regular price increases. That would be a passthrough. As I said, luckily, we are in a position actually in our industry to do passthrough cost increases to the sales prices.
Okay. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. Just two seconds.
Two seconds of follow-up.
It's question 2.1, so it's close.
The reason I come back, because GEA in the past wasn't successful in passing on the wage increases. Wages typically was a bit of a challenge. Now we have the digital initiative. We have New Food. Obviously, cash flow leads profit, and you see net working capital collection is improving a lot. I guess you're more confident as well in net pricing, right, Stefan? Right? Marcus. I'm looking at you, Marcus, but yeah.
Yeah, definitely. That's also many things like you're mentioning. Yes, to do something with being consequent and with managing also sales organization and also as presented that we already started with a different incentive scheme and that our sales guys or the vast majority of the sales guys already is incentivized by margins also, and therefore we can much better steer it than in the past.
Okay. Our next question.
Lucie Carrier and then Arsalan Obaidullah.
is coming from? Can you just quickly introduce yourself so not everybody's already aware?
I will. Thank you, Rebecca. This is Lucie Carrier from Morgan Stanley. Two questions. I'll try to limit myself to that. The first one is you develop quite a lot on Separation Flow and also Liquid and Powder Technology. When we look at the breakdown of the targets, they are quite ambitious targets around Farm Technology and also Refrigeration, which you haven't touched upon so much today. Can you maybe help us understand why you see these businesses actually growing more than the rest of GEA? We've seen already in Farm quite a lot of margin expansion. How do you manage to expand above this level already?
First of all, the reason why we have only LPT and SFT here is simply because of the fact that we didn't want to overload. It was already a lot of stuff, I think today what we presented, SFT and LPT are our largest divisions, and that was the reason why we thought we just started this Capital Markets Day with SFT and LPT. Next time, we will also come with our colleagues from RT, FHT and FT. To be more specific on the growth, if you look at our growth we achieved during the last two years in Farm Technologies, you can see that this is also fantastic growth already now. Automatic milking is a really very clear trend. There are very important trends in the farming industry. First of all, there is a consolidation of farms going on.
That means that farms are getting larger and larger. That is a driver to automatic milking. Then all the farmers have the same problem. They have difficulties in finding enough labor. They also all try to automate, and that will really drive the growth, and the automatic milking will grow faster than the dairy market. That's a reason for that. On top what Marcus mentioned, we will also start quite soon with a completely new system for automatic feeding, which is also a sustainable product because today, normally the farmer is driving around the farm with their tractor. Yeah. Putting out a lot of diesel, gasoline to the air. We have developed a completely sustainable battery-driven automatic feeding system. There are many ideas we have, and this will accelerate the growth in Farm Technologies. For RT, it's mainly based on the heat pumps.
RT is, of course, a product or a division, which needs a lot of electric power to drive the compressions. The heat pumps are very energy-efficient systems, and we expect that there will be a lot of changes going on in the refrigeration industry, that companies are investing in that area to really also become more sustainable. This is the underlying reason for the growth in these two divisions.
Just maybe for the margin expansion induced, is that really just operating leverage from that additional growth or a re there other drivers?
Absolutely. Also, in Farm Technologies, the management introduced already a lot of good actions to optimize the cost structure. It's also, of course, about growth because when we grow, then we have over-absorption of the cost structure, and that all kicks in.
Fair enough. Thank you. My second question was around the software. It was not something that you had discussed much in the past. You spoke about your proprietary software as a service. Just to clarify maybe your exposure, how much of your revenues today are derived from software, and how much already is SaaS? That would be my first question. When you think about expanding this business, how much of the R&D increased budget that you're planning is effectively going into that field? How do you target the, I would say, the go-to market for your software offering? Just out of curiosity, whether this is similar than your regular go-to market for the equipment and service.
The DairyNet, which Frederieke presented to you, is a very new system. We used to have another one. The DairyNet is a really fantastic system, which is really a comprehensive software system for the farmer. We just started. This is a first really very strong and clear example of a software as a service. This will not be sold. There will be only one release. Every customers get upgraded at the same time. We are selling it at the moment for quite low price because we want to cover the market. It's, at the moment here, not such a significant revenue, but we have to win this market. We have to be present because there are also smaller software companies around who try to enter this market because there is, of course, a lot of opportunities, what we have here.
It's about being present in that market, yes. That is to this topic. The second question was about how much do we spend in R&D, you mean?
Yeah. I was just wondering in the 45% increase in R&D spend you're planning, how much of that is targeted to increase the software portfolio or perhaps also kind of improving the go-to market for your software?
Yeah. The vast majority of that investor project will not go into software. It's simply because of the broad range we have. As I also mentioned and showed, we have already 150 people working full time in R&D of digital solutions. This is something we will increase definitely. The big majority of the R&D invest will go into our traditional products.
Okay, next question. Who's first? Okay. Arsalan, can you quickly introduce yourself?
Sure. Arsalan Obaidullah, Deutsche Bank. First question is on the 2022 guidance and just looking at where some of the key divisions, if you look at, I guess, the majority, or if you look at LPT and SFT, they're significantly above for 2022 in terms of expectation of margin. I'm just wondering the reason for not looking at the group level, for sort of increasing your margin corridor if there's sort of other potential headwinds that to factor into that, or is that something that, potentially in the next quarter or two, that's something to be considered?
Well, there is of course some headwinds we are seeing right now due to material price increases and due to shortages in the supply chain. We already did an increase for next year, right from 11.5% to basically 12%, 12.5%, 13.5%. It's still going to be a big step for us. It's easier to increase the EBITDA margin when it was lower, and now it's getting a little bit tougher, of course, there. Still, we are saying this year it's 12.4%-13%. I guess when we have a range for next year, it cannot be below 12%, 13.5% there. We leave the margin in there. With that, if we come out in 2021, as we just said, so it's going to be at the upper end, at least there for next year.
Brilliant. The next question is more broadly whether, I guess if you're seeing sort of trends especially more you could say in the sort of developed world towards more actually in terms of dietary patterns. You've obviously talked about New Food, but actually maybe towards localization and less sort of packaged or processed foods. Is that a significant trend, do you think? Are you seeing evidence of that as almost a counter-trend and an opportunity to maybe see some compression in some of your markets?
Is that not significant?
Yeah. First of all, the vast majority of our business is in processing of food and not in packaging. I also would not be afraid of the packaging business because it has to do something with the sustainability of the product. It's simply not possible to produce food and then to deliver it or keep it stable for some days or weeks if you don't use the right packaging material. That's also the reason why we will also see in the medium and long term plastic packaging in the food industry because this keeps the food safe, yeah, and fresh.
Our next question comes from Sebastian. Can you also quickly introduce yourself?
Yeah. Sebastian Kuenne from RBC. I have questions on the New Food business. It was a good presentation, but when I do the calculation, you made EUR 120 million orders this year, or that's your plan, of which, I don't know, EUR 70 million-EUR 90 million is the Novozymes order, and that leaves maybe EUR 30 million for other New Food orders. It still seems a bit unbalanced, and I was wondering, given that you're so confident on the growth, what do you see in the pipeline? Is it the big food manufacturers? Is it Danone, Nestlé that want to invest big, or is it small startups that come at a large number and order EUR 20 million worth of projects? I would like to understand a bit more what you see in the market.
Secondly, on pricing, again for the New Food equipment, do you price these new very fancy equipment units at a level where you can achieve your margin targets, or do you price it in a way that you try to get into this market in the first place and be the dominant player there?
I could answer the question on the pipeline. Currently, first of all, it's very dynamic at the moment in the New Food space. We are seeing a huge number of new projects on a monthly basis entering our pipeline. The value of those projects, I think as you've alluded to, actually vary greatly. We have projects which are of single-digit million projects into the mid to high double-digit millions. The customer landscape is just as varied. We have, of course, some of the customers that, the clients that you saw in the presentation, are already in discussions in that space. We see many, let's say, smaller startup type businesses that are looking at developing their technologies which are in that smaller scale. The Novozymes project, I wouldn't say is unique, but the pipeline isn't full of that size of project.
It's a lot more mid-size types of projects in the range, I would say the bulk in the range of EUR 15 million-EUR 30 million, perhaps up to EUR 50 million.
The second question on the how do you price it? Do you price higher because it's a very dynamic market, or do you price to get into this market and be the biggest player there?
Right. Well, first of all, our pricing is, in this new market, is based upon the value that the customer gets out of us. I hope I was able to demonstrate to you through the presentation the value that we can deliver through the technologies which belong in our group, plus our ability to deliver. What I can say is that the projects that we are currently executing are being executed at, let's say, higher than average margins that we see in some of our traditional businesses. It's certainly not a market that we're buying into.
Okay, next question comes from Max. Also, Max, can you please introduce yourself?
It's Max Yates from Credit Suisse. Could I just ask about the phasing of the cost savings over the period? Do you expect these to be, so when we look at the procurement and the factory efficiencies, do you expect these to be fairly linear, or is there any kind of back-end loading to these?
Johannes?
Well, in the factory, we started a year ago already and with creating the factory, so they will kick in in 2022 and 2023 already. It's a kind of a linear, not a back-end loaded situation there because we have many also small projects now kicking in. It's not the one big thing what we are doing. On the procurement, we also have tried to somewhat balance that. There are some elements which require more time, like design to cost activities. We're really looking into changing the gear and with engineering support, taking out the cost. That takes a little longer, and that is basically compensated with still to be done negotiation topics. The negotiation part, we started early when I started, and that will continue also in 2022 and slowly being replaced by those longer-term measures.
As a net-net effect, it's a kind of a balance.
Okay. Just the follow-up was on heat pumps. Okay, you talked about a lot for refrigeration. Is this heat pumps in buildings, or is this heat pumps for sort of commercial customers?
Yeah. The heat pumps are for industrial purposes, but we also delivered heat pumps, for instance, in Malmö where we are helping the community to use our heat pumps for the heating of the buildings. Yeah.
How big is this of your business right now?
That's a small part of what we are doing.
Okay. If I could just ask one very final quick follow-up. Just on the temporary cost savings. You had sort of in COVID, less travel and reduction of cost. Are we now at kind of more normal cost levels? Do you think when you look into sort of 2022, this is probably for Marcus, how you think about the travel cost budget and kind of what kind of headwind that might be as we move into 2022? Obviously dependent on how COVID evolves, et cetera. Assuming we go on like we are.
So to speak, headwind, there will be some more costs associated with that. I can tell you that we said that we're going to cut the travel budget to 70% of pre-pandemic actual level. That is actually 70% of the expenses we had in the year 2019, and 30% is supposed to be savings. We are well on track this year, but of course, next year counts because probably everywhere travel will increase again. We have to succeed that we're going to keep the budget. Once again, we expect to see a 30% saving still also next year in comparison to pre-pandemic actual cost.
All right. Are there any other questions left here from the audience?
Klas 2.2.
Klas 2.2, and then Sebastian 2.2. All right.
Thank you. Yes, I have two follow-ups. First on current trading. We talked about this during the dinner yesterday. This is more an open forum. You said, Marcus, that you feel very confident on price cost. The freight costs have come down, et cetera. This is a broader thing in industries at the moment, logistics costs are going through the roof. Could you first comment on that? Also in terms of the development of large orders. The pipeline is good. Underlying was very good in the second quarter. Are we seeing large orders in the third? Thanks.
Maybe I take that. Johannes had some good insights in the logistic costs. The team around Johannes optimized many, many things, and despite the prices are picking up in logistic, we in GEA were able to decrease our costs. That's a good thing of all the inefficiencies we still found and find in GEA that we can work on that. Concerning the pipeline, we are very optimistic also about the large projects we see. We also see that the Q3 so far is very good underway. In line what we promised you in the last analyst call. There is nothing which worries us that this could stop.
That's good. My second one is on just a general reflection on FHT and the margin. When you go through each division compared to what I assumed, FHT's margin ambition to me looks quite punchy, considering we have a lot of old M&A in there, duplicate cost structure. You have the old food solutions business that was struggling in the past. Stefan, can you comment on how can we improve the margin here, and how conservative or bullish are you there?
It's right. FHT is a kind of conglomerate. Yeah. Of course, we also see a necessity and also opportunity to increase margins significantly here. When you look at the different business units, we have some fantastic business units with very good profitability, and we have some others who need to improve, but this is what we are working on. There is also a clear focus from the executive board on that division, and we will work our way.
Okay. Sebastian, your turn.
Yeah, a question on China. With China and Australia conflict boiling up a little bit, do you see an incremental drive of China that they try to become more independent, the dairy industry with milking equipment, milk powder production, cheese production? Basically to become more independent of New Zealand and Australia. Is that the trend that you've seen in the past intensifying? The other question would be on M&A. Do you think the meat market is still interesting, or do you think that's a terminally declining industry in future? Maybe in new plastics, you mentioned it briefly in the presentation, but that would be more like, so bioplastic would go into chemical industry. It's not really food related, but is this an interesting area for M&A? Thank you.
The first question concerning the independency of China, yes, there is a clear trend. Shortly before COVID arrived, I visited the first Chinese customer producing insulin. In the past or still today, China is importing the vast majority of the insulin from Western countries, but this is also what they start to do by themself. We see a similar trend also with the milk powder. After the scandals we had in China, now a certain trust is obviously coming back that the Chinese can produce that by themself. Yes, I think this also will drive additional business. M&A is a very complex topic we discussed already. It will be driven by opportunities. It is not so easy that we say exactly in that area, in that segment, we want to buy something, and then we have a choice out of five or 10 companies we can buy.
It will be driven by opportunities, and of course, we will focus on companies with a good growth perspective and which will fit into our value chains, that we can also ideally expand our value chains, and this is what we are looking for.
Okay. Any questions left from y'all? Oh, Lucie. Okay.
After Lucie, I would suggest that we take the first questions from the web.
Thank you. Lucie Carrier again from Morgan Stanley. The first one, I wanted to connect a little bit more the sustainability aspect with the financials. I think we saw from the operation that there is some saving links to the sustainability objective that you have. I was wondering, if we look at the bridge that you've presented, where do we find or the link with sustainability? Is it some of it investment on the R&D? Where do we find that in terms of sales? I appreciate the savings for a lot of your customer and the benefit for the planet, but where does that also benefit you guys?
Marcus?
It's a Well, this microphone doesn't work. Oh, this one works here? It does? Good. It's a supportive function throughout our excellence programs there. We cannot allocate, say, okay, there's a 0.1% here and 0.1% there, or even more in service or in sales. That's why I said we singled it out here and said it's part of the 1.5 percentage points in cost. It's a supportive function through all of our initiatives there, the other six levers.
That's the cost. What about the benefits?
The benefits are included in sales, service, and operational excellence there. As I said, we were not able to allocate the cost. It's needed actually to bring these kind of profit margins then going forward because customers really are asking for that. Sustainability is a key issue for our customers.
Thank you. Just a quick question on sustainability. Are you able to give us an idea of h`ow much you think your revenue will be eligible for EU taxonomy at this stage?
At this stage, quite frankly, we are still working on that like everyone else. We're in contact with other companies. Everyone sees this as a challenge to really go through the classifications of the EU taxonomy and see which equipment are we selling, which equipment is mentioned in the EU taxonomy. Unfortunately, as of today, I cannot give you a number, but we are diligently working actually to get the number together to report for this year.
Okay. I had a question on the service side. Just maybe very practically, when you want to increase your share of wallet or have a subscription contract or recurring contract, how do you go to an individual customer that has used a GEA machine for years and years and maybe calls you from time to time just for a couple of spare parts? How do you convince that person that they actually need to sign up a long-term service, with, let's say, an annual payment for the company? What's practically the process?
There are two very practical ones I can say today. First is that we offer certain digital solutions that you will get only also on existing equipment if you then with us have a contract. This means you can have an online monitoring on your existing equipment, but only if you then with us make a service contract. The second point is always, yes, it's about spare parts. That's the worst case, when we have only a spare parts partner relationship with the customer. Even if something goes wrong, it's always an opportunity with an existing customer to offer him that we can say, "Look, if you would have made with us a maintenance contract in that way, these things would have not happened, and we could handle it better than you can handle it on your own." You always come in that direction.
What we have launched also in certain business units is then to help the customer that he can make a TCO comparison between if he does it on his own and if he would do it with us. He can calculate what are the benefits for him doing it if he does it, for example, with his own facility management. These are the typical things how you can get introduced in that one. The other one what we do very clear is at the moment in certain areas, we have this already available, that we really target certain customers with the installed base for repair and upgrades. This is a point where we are strong. We did not talk about this today, but repairs is really extending the lifetime of the product.
This is where you can have a new relationship with a customer when you get in and say, "Hey, we can help you, that you can extend the lifetime of the machine. It's sustainable, and it's for you a cost advantage.
Would you like to take the number one here?
Thank you very much. I would like to take the first question from the web. It's actually coming from one of our analysts, Sven Weier from UBS. I will read the question question by question, would ask the team to answer. The first question is, in your food business, which end markets are likely to grow above the 4-6% range, and which ones below? Where does dairy fit in there, given that dairy processing sales are still well below peak?
Yeah, I can take that. If I take LPT and the LPT business, if I eliminate New Food from the portfolio, we see an overall growth potential of 2.3% to three and a bit percent. Dairy, I think as Klaus mentioned earlier, is fairly robust, and we see growth rates in the region of 2%-2.5% per annum in that industry. The major growth area we see will come from New Food, and that's what will give us the overall CAGR in LPT of 4%-5%. Growth opportunities outside of the non-food business. For us, in the last 12 months, we've seen a significant growth in the lithium processing sector, and particularly in China. It's been over 100% growth last year over previous years. We don't expect that level of growth to continue, but we do still expect growth rates above 20% in that particular sector.
This is lithium ion hydroxide production for automotive batteries. That's from an LPT perspective. Klaus?
In regard to the non-food business, I made you aware of these plastic alternatives, and there are other technologies in the field of so-called industrial applications where we have a strong footprint in. Only to give you a flavor about our homogenizing business, industry applications are good for 30% of the homogenizing business. There are more growth opportunities, and we are not really sad about the trend, I would say, in marine. The decline, exchanging the decline in marine by quite profitable industrial applications. We do see a growth CAGR of 4%-6%, even if some of the industry applications like marine will go down.
Maybe I can take the next one. We didn't give a guidance for Q3. We said it will be also in a similar range like Q2. It might come up to this direction and then, yes, it would be, and it will be including Novozymes. Marcus, are you taking the last one here?
Yes. I take the four here. We come back here. Oliver, you come back to number two, I think. The working capital target here. Yes, that will be very helpful to keep us at the lower end of the range, 8%-10%. If we don't have any fluctuations, it will give us some upside actually, or some downside in that case, for our range. We actually want to keep that at around 8%, that is, here the Johannes team very much supporting that, with the payment days +15, inventory days -10. Number two, Oliver?
Actually, there was a second question on what growth opportunities do you see outside your non-food business, i.e., the other 20% of sales, you just had an announcement on your role in new marine fuels, but I think, Ilija, you also mentioned that during your first answer. Yeah. Okay, I would like to take another question, maybe here from the room, if there is any in the meantime. If not.
Wait, just one second.
Klaus Stojentin once again, and then also we have.
All right.
One from the net again, and then Max, it's you.
Thank you. Klas at Citi. First on the service opportunity in Liquid and Powder Technologies. Obviously, you have a much lower share, 20% compared to 40% in Separation and Flow Technologies. Isn't the business structurally different in that you have, in Separation and Flow Technologies, you have much more components, rotating parts? Structurally, you will always have a higher service business than in a project business. I'm just trying to understand what the true upside potential is for LPT. I'll start there.
Yes, you are correct. Structurally, it is a different business model, and I don't ever expect that we will achieve the service share levels that we see in SFT. As I mentioned in my presentation, we currently have an installed base coverage of approximately 40%. I also think on Armin's charts, we're probably one of the divisions that has some kind of estimation on what our iBase coverage is. Nevertheless, we do know that there is a significant install base out there that we haven't yet touched. We also feel that we haven't maximized our share of wallet from the iBase that we do service. I think it's a mindset change in LPT. Normally, this division is a project in business seeking those nice meaty projects. What we've recognized, service contributes significantly to our profitability.
That's why we see it as a real positive lever. What you might see with the service share moving forward, you won't see a huge change in the service share because what we see with our new equipment growth will come from new applications and particularly New Food. Typically with our projects, service activities will kick in sometime after new equipment is designed. For example, with the latest projects in advanced proteins, they won't come on stream until end of 2022 into 2023. We'll start to see one or two years after that, more growth. If we eliminate that part from the portfolio, we expect 2%-3% growth in service share over the period.
That's great. Okay, my second and final one is on Connected Fleet. You're very helpful in talking through the wallet opportunity and service, but not sure if I saw how much of the fleet is connected today in terms of a commercial contract, and how that has changed over the last five years. That would be very interesting.
A general answer would be, it really depends on the business units. We have business units where we are much further advanced. Farm Technologies, for instance, also in the SFT business. We also have other business unit where it is not used at all. It's a mix. There is no one single number.
Okay. Max, before I get back to you, I will take one question from the web, then I will back to you immediately. There's another question from one of our analysts, is Akash Gupta from JP Morgan. First question is regarding the phasing of our organic growth and margin. Clearly 2022 will see a good growth from recent order momentum, but post-2022, shall we expect slow progress as you first invest in the business before potential recap in benefits in 2025 to 2026? Or do you expect a steady progress towards targets 2026?
Maybe I'll take that. Predictions are always difficult, especially if it is about the future. Nobody knows what will happen 2025 or 2024. Therefore, we guide a CAGR, and we are very optimistic that we can achieve this CAGR. Look, at the moment, I would say the bottleneck is rather supply chain. In China, the world is meanwhile talking about a lack of electric power supply. In U.K., there is missing fuel. I would say if maybe late, and chips are missing and so, if hopefully in one year or so all these issues are solved again, then this might also cause additional boom or acceleration of the growth. Therefore, we see no specific differences here, and we are very optimistic that we can achieve this CAGR until 2026.
The second one is actually, can you talk about risk of cannibalization from New Food growth as it could reduce demand for machines used in conventional food?
I think, as we also said or explained, there is very limited risk that this will be a cannibalization because it's about feeding the world. It's up to now a very, very small proportion of food which is produced worldwide. Therefore, for the next five to 10 years, we don't expect any significant cannibalization by New Food. It will be an on-top opportunity for us to grow.
The third question, I think we already answered, was on price increases included in our organic sales growth target. I think that was your question, Klaus, when we said, okay, we'll be around about one third. 1%-2% out of the 4%-6% will be coming from price and mix. With that, Max b ack to you.
Here we go.
Thank you. My question was going back to the sales presentation, where you showed how you looked at the sort of white spots and the gaps. You mentioned Asia and U.S. in that specific example. When you go into, say, a market like Asia, who do you typically come up against when you're trying to take share, when you add another salesperson? Is it local, smaller competitors, or are you coming up against Tetra Laval, SPX, Alfa Laval? Who do you normally find there, and how easy is it to take share against them?
Maybe because the question is more focused on Asia, I'll take it. As I said, GEA is a very complex organization with a lot of different businesses, and in each of our 17 business units, we have a completely different set of competitors. That also varies sometimes from region to region. Of course, the big ones are those we meet very often, and also the names you mentioned, are also the ones we meet in Asia and in North America. It's always a different mix, let's say, depending also on the business unit we are talking about.
Is it so when you put a new salesperson there, is it as simple as you go in, you think your product is more efficient? If I take, say, your biggest division, say, Separation and Flow, what you really go into a customer and say, "Right, we've got a salesperson now here." Is it the efficiency of the product? Is it the service? What do you really compete on when you're coming up against them in these areas?
At the end, you are always successful in sales if everything fits. If you have the right product, if you understand the customer needs, if you offer a competitive price, and if you have a salesperson who can really connect with the customer. It's always a mix of that. Definitely, we have the right products. We are competitive, otherwise we would not show this order intake or this growth we see right now.
Just finally, just a very quick clarification. Marcus, you talked about when you went through the targets that you have for 2022, as in each of the cost savings buckets. Did you say that the EUR 15 million that was still to come from procurement, you probably wouldn't get it because of cost inflation, but if cost inflation was high, you would offset it with price? I just wanted to clarify it. Overall, that net impact could be broadly neutral next year. Is it that?
Yes, that's exactly what we are doing right now. We are increasing prices to compensate for the material price increases.
Overall, net neutral, essentially.
Overall, yes. There are, of course, in other areas, and Johannes can take that, are some cost savings. Overall, we expect to see a net cost savings next year. Johannes, you want to perhaps?
Obviously, our pipeline is full of ideas also for next year. We have a lot of topics what we can take down the prices and optimize the cost. We will see, like we experienced this year, EUR 29 million-EUR 28 million as net effect negative savings. We also will experience that next year, mainly driven by the allocation situation we are exposed to. Net-net, it will be basically not diluting our margin.
Let's go back to the web once more. We have a question or two questions, actually, from Will Macaulay from Morgan Stanley. First question is, in terms of the lifetime cost of a product, what would be the rough split between the new equipment and the service? How does your market share split between the two areas?
Yeah. It's again, practically impossible to say for GEA as a group because of the variety of our businesses. I give you two extreme examples. For instance, if you are talking about a separator, the service costs during the lifetime are much higher than the new investment. If you are talking about a spray dryer, for instance, the new investment or a yogurt line also, the new investment is much higher than the service over the lifetime. Therefore, it's difficult to say. Yeah.
Yeah. The second one is actually, what are the implications for a BU if they do not meet a set of targets?
They win a meeting with me.
Okay. I just see there was a third one coming up, if I see this right. What is your content or market share difference between traditional dairy and new alternate milks such as almond or soya?
Yeah. Okay. Here we need to differentiate in dairy between liquid and powder. Of course, we need to differentiate between drinking liquid and fermented or yogurt-type products. Broadly speaking, in dairy, I would suggest our market share in this space is somewhere in the range of 15%-20%.
Whereas in the alternative space, it's probably a little lower, around about 10%-15%.
Coming back to the audience here, are there any more questions? If not, let's go back to the web. There's a follow-up one from Akash Gupta from JPMorgan. It's actually on the service business, service presentation today. Service excellence. If you're not servicing your installed base, who is doing that? Customers themselves or competitors? Can you also talk about service opportunities for non-GEA installed base?
Yeah. First of all, as you know, our products are often in niche markets and very customized to the needs of our customers. What we see, that most of the machines are normally, or the service is organized then by the customer themselves. Either they do it themself, they have people, they do it, or they will ask local people, like local electricians or mechanics, to take care of these machines if we don't do it. In certain markets and for certain products, for sure, you find also service organizations to do that. Often this is also why customers ask us if we can qualify and certify their people to do the job for them on their machines. This is where we have an opportunity to get in because it's not competition who's taking over our business in that way, but it's often the customer themselves.
The second part is about this. Yes, for sure, there is a lot of installed base out there, and I think that's the second step of growth when we have our own house in order also to look how we can utilize our competence we have for servicing certain technologies, also to expand it to a broader installed base. We decided clearly to have an organic growth for our own products first, and to really have this in place and protect our customer base before going out. By the way, we do this already in certain things. We have already independent private label activities where we target with our companies, the installed base of competitors. This is only in special areas, and we are now seeing how we can further accelerate this.
Okay. Just to remind everyone, we have 10 minutes left in our Q&A session. Lucie. Coming back to the audience here in London.
One second. Thank you. Klaus, you were discussing earlier the connected install base. You presented earlier your quotation system or, it seemed a little bit like almost an e-platform or e-commerce platform. I was just kind of wondering, how are you rolling this out to the 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000 customers that you have globally? We know you have very fragmented customer base. How do you roll that out? Secondly, how do you think about the change of business model of digitalization? We hear from a lot of industrial companies which are active in service that actually what they're trying to do now is almost to reduce the labor force and, or optimize the productivity of the labor force using more digital innovation. You want to increase a lot more your service exposure because maybe you start from a slightly lower level than others.
How do we think about increasing the service, but obviously still using these digital tools or the change in business model versus the men in the van going around and fixing machines?
When you look at this, I think for sure digital tools are enablers. We have, and we are selling mechanical machines in many cases. You need hands to make it happen. A digital tool can't do it. A digital tool is always then good when you talk about automation or if you talk even about optimization, when you do it on data. Data patterns, algorithms. For the local work, and what we have seen is that we can really also do the first thing, which is the base service. This means really touching the machine, exchanging spare parts and repairing this thing. This is why we see this as a first step. The point what I see there is not that digital solutions replace the mechanical thing.
What I think is certain companies do, and we also check on this, is to certify third parties to be your service technician in the field and do that because that makes sometimes the life for us in that way easier, especially when we are in remote areas. We are also on this path to do that. We have certification programs for service technicians established. At the moment, it's mainly used by our own customers who want to certify their facility management.
Okay. We have here one question on the web from our Italian-based analyst. Hello, Gianmarco Bonacina from EQUITA. The question is, good morning. In the past, you showed around about EUR 40 million SG&A headwinds per year, while from the EBITDA bridge 2021 to 2026, it seems lower, 2% headwind or EUR 100 million in five years or 20 per year. Why? Thank you.
Going forward, we're going to run a tighter control on the SG&A expenses, quite frankly. That's the reason. That's going to be the budget for everyone, and they need to keep it. Otherwise, as Stefan said, you going to get a meeting with him.
With you.
Okay. Klas? Yeah.
Thank you. Let's say that you would, at some point, push ahead with a little bit bigger portfolio change, maybe one of the divisions struggling to meet these ambitious targets and so forth, without mentioning who I think could be the one. You all look extremely confident here, which is great. What are the synergies, i.e., when we have this zebra structure on the cost side, is it still difficult to cut one off, basically? That sounds brutal, just trying to understand in terms of how interlinked all the divisions are within each other.
Okay. Let's start with the two representatives who are here, LPT and SFT. I think you also heard a lot of good examples. This is really an interlinked business. Maybe this is at the core of our business because the components and the Project business goes along with each other. Its fruitful combination, there is also a lot of synergies. FHT is a business which is exactly at the same markets. We see a lot of similar or equal customers. This is also where synergies are coming from. At the end, it's also machine building, where we need the same components. When Johannes is purchasing, you always have to remember, out of the EUR 5 billion turnover we generate, we spend about EUR 3 billion to suppliers. As bigger the volume is, as more effective and efficient we can source normally.
RT is also present with similar customers, but it is a bit more independent, let's say. It's an interesting business, and the same is valid for FT. It's also a bit more independent. It's a different route to market. At the end, everything has to do with food and beverages and also cooling technology, also with pharmaceutical. This is the core in which we are in. At the end, we have a very safe balance sheet. We have good ideas what we can optimize in each of these five divisions. Selling a complete division is not an issue for us at all at the moment.
Okay, we are taking one more question from the web, and then the last question from the audience, if there's any. Then I would give it back to Stefan for the closing remarks. The last question we take from the net is from William Macaulay again, Morgan Stanley. What kind of cost savings can your more sustainable systems generate for a customer versus acquisition cost? Can your competitors offer these systems? What are the main drivers for customers to go to these systems?
If I understand it right, it's a question. I don't understand why the acquisition cost. What does it has to do with the?
Cost of markets and cost price. Cost price for the product.
Okay. Yeah, okay. Again, it's very difficult to answer this question for the whole portfolio we have. For instance, if you now think about the sludge decanter, which Frederieke presented, this is a fantastic device, and the payback will be very quick after probably two or three years because the investment is really helping to save a lot of energy. It depends on the application, depends on the product. There is no general rule, let's say. Can your competitors offer these systems? This is exactly our innovation power, our innovation knowhow. There might be, of course, also systems where we compete with others. If you take this example again from the sludge decanter, this is something we recently launched two months ago. This is a new application, and this is what GEA can offer, and to our knowledge, nobody else.
Who wants to ask the final question for our 2021 Capital Markets Day? Is there any?
I think no questions.
No?
Left, if I look into the faces here.
Okay, then. Very good. Yeah. Thanks for the Q&A. I hand it over, Stefan, to you.
Yeah.
Yeah. May I then also ask to put the big screen back on the small screens?
Thank you. You are almost ready. You survived. I hope it was a very interesting day for you, and I hope that you can digest all the information we gave you. Let me try to sum it up. We are about to shift from our self-help story to a profitable growth story to accelerating the profitable growth. We gave you a bit more insight what we did since the last Capital Markets Day, which was two years ago, and where the share price was EUR 25 at the time. We presented to you our Mission 26. This will lead us to 4%-6% growth, organic growth a year. We expect our EBITDA margin beyond 15% and the ROCE margin beyond 30%. This is a bunch of ideas, and not only ideas of concrete measures and activity we are going to set up to achieve that.
Innovation plays an important role. New food, sustainability, all the things we spoke about today. I hope that we could give you enough insight that you see that there is a lot of detailed planning already behind. At the end, I hope we could convince you that we have leading positions in attractive and growing markets, and our markets are really fantastic. Food, beverage, pharmaceuticals, and as I said, as long as there are human beings on that earth who need to eat or drink something, we are really in safe harbor, and GEA is needed. We are also very well-positioned in this very interesting upcoming market, New Food. Ilija presented you a lot of insights into this fantastic new growth opportunities, and what also hopefully came across that we are a technology leader in many of our businesses.
We have a strong commitment to sustainability, and that also comes from the bottom of my heart, and I hope that you also could feel that. Nadine also asked me when she took over this position, she said, "Hey, Stefan, how serious do you take that in a scale from zero to 10?" I said, "11." This is exactly what we are doing. If you also compare our targets with other companies, you can see that we are really at the forefront because we believe it's a commitment from a company, and we also believe that this makes a difference in the medium to long term because our customers sooner or later will go to companies who are putting a strong focus on sustainability. Yeah.
With that, we have a clear plan to grow and, as Marcus presented, we also are reliable dividend payer, and we also have the intention to increase the dividend. Last but not least, I think we are a good team meanwhile. Two years ago, the show was run mainly by Marcus and myself. Today, we could present you already some members of our great teams. We have some more of these great people, but I am also very proud about the team who did a very good job here. Thank you very much, and I hope this all increases your trust and your commitment to our fantastic company, GEA. Thank you very much for coming to London to participate in our Capital Market Days. Stay healthy, stay safe, and have a safe trip home. Thank you very much.