Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our Capital Markets Day 2024 in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. My name is Oliver Luckenbach, Head of Investor Relations of GEA. Before I come to our agenda, let me briefly address two housekeeping items. First of all, safety instructions. In case of an alarm or fire, please be so kind and use one of the two exit doors marked with a green exit sign here in front of the room and over there in the back of the room. Secondly, our disclaimer. I will not read the disclaimer, but please be aware of the cautionary language that is included in our Safe Harbor statement, as in the material that we have distributed today. And with that, over to the agenda we have prepared for you for today.
In a few moments, our CEO, Stefan Klebert, will kick off the CMD with the opening remarks. After that, the entire GEA team will present our Mission 2030 to you with the three important pillars: growth, value, and impact. In between, there will be a coffee break and a lunch break, and at the end of the presentations, we have planned 40 minutes time for you to ask your questions. For those of you that have signed up for our site visit in the afternoon to the Innocent plant in Rotterdam, please be aware that the bus departure, the bus will depart at 2:15 P.M., sharp, in front of the hotel. And at the end of the site visit, around 5:00 P.M., 5:30 P.M. in the afternoon, we have also organized a trip back to Amsterdam, airport first, and then back to the hotel.
With that, it's my pleasure to welcome our CEO, Stefan Klebert, on stage. Stefan, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Oliver, and a very warm welcome from my side. It's a pleasure, real pleasure to see you all again after such a long time. It has been three years since we met last time at a Capital Markets Day, and I'm happy that you are here. I think we can tell you a lot of things, what did GEA do in the last years, and what is, what is ahead of us, and what will we do the next years. For those of you who might not so familiar with the company, let me just remind you what we are, what we do. So we are focused on food, beverage, and pharma, and every fourth spaghetti worldwide comes from our machine and equipment. Also, every fourth liter of human blood is processed with our equipment. And another example is beer.
Every second liter of beer worldwide is made with GEA equipment, and therefore, it's always important to drink two glasses of beer; then you can be sure that one is from us, and many other examples like you can see here. We are structured in five divisions. On the left side, it starts with Separation and Flow Technology. This is our component business, highly profitable, high service share, and we are clearly leading here in that market. The second division is Liquid and Powder. This is our engineering business. This is where we do larger projects, brewery, spray drying factories, and so on. And what is important to mention, LPT is 20% of the route to market from SFT, and that is important.
Also it's important to understand and know this is a division which creates a negative net working capital, so it's really also very helpful for us in the group. Food and Healthcare Technology is a combination of different equipment, all for processing food, pasta lines, bakery machines. You all know the famous Oreo cookies. They are made on our machines. Also, packaging. Whenever you stop at the petrol station to buy your Haribo sweets, these are also packed with our machines, for instance, all this kind of technologies you find here, and the pharma cluster with the tablet presses, for instance, as well. Farm Technology, it's a different animal. It's a division focused on cow, on animals, on milk production. It's highly digitalized.
That makes it very, very interesting, also with a high service share, and we also improved our profitability significantly during the last years. And last but not least, it's about Heating and Refrigeration Technology, and you will also hear more about that, how we can contribute here to a more sustainable world with the technologies we own here. So this is in a nutshell, just to remind you of those who are not so familiar with the group, what we do and who we are. I'm extremely happy and extremely proud to show you this chart because this has been the journey of GEA during the last five years, let's say, the new GEA. And we had an excellent sales CAGR during that time. We really grew. We also have a pure organic growth here, and even more impressive maybe is the development of our profitability, yeah?
We increased, let's say, roughly from 10%- 15% EBITDA within five years, and we also improved significantly our ROCE, which is best in class, I would say, for a machine building company in that area, 32%-35%, what we expect at the end of the year. Also very important and interesting, this development is supported by all five divisions. All five divisions improved, grew, and improved profitability and ROCE, and that is also something which is important to mention, and let me say, all this happened despite all the multiple crises you are also fully aware about. We had the COVID crisis, we had then the supply chain bottlenecks, where a lot of companies could not deliver anymore because components were missing. GEA walked the talk.
We have been growing during that time, and we also increased profitability, and you know all about this geopolitical conflicts. So I think this is something which makes us proud and is important when you look back to GEA. On top of that, or beyond the pure financials, I'm also extremely proud to share with you that we can say we are really a sustainability leader. We have been the first company in the whole DAX Index family who went to the shareholders meeting to present our climate action plan, and we got a vote of 98.4%, "Yes, we support your way." And this is also that we broke ground here, that we also are here at the forefront, and we did something nobody did before us. We are also validated, SBTi validated, to net zero in 2040.
Other companies are validated to midterm targets only, so GEA is one of the, I would say, still few companies validated to net zero in 2040 . We have challenging midterm targets for Scope 1, 2, and 3 and even more important, we are in all targets ahead of what we set ourselves as a target. You can see it here in the middle of the chart. And last but not least, that was also a part of the video, the Time, the famous Time Magazine, ranked the 500 most sustainable companies in the world, and we are not only on that list, we are at number 33, and in Germany, we are number three. And if you think about how many famous brand names we have in Germany, how many important companies, it's an outstanding success, and this is also what we want to stress.
You will hear a lot about sustainability, what it means for us in the future. It's not only that we do something good for the planet, it's also that this is an important growth driver for us in the future. You see, sometimes company developing, improving profitability, but at the same time, it might be on the neck of the employees and some negative things are going on. We are very happy that at the same time, we could also increase our employee satisfaction, our employee happiness. We increase year by year. We do every year a employee survey, and we measure how happy our employees are, and this is improving year by year. That is a chart I need to explain, I think. You see, there are 13 dimensions.
All the questions we ask in the employee survey are clustered in 13 dimensions. So for instance, how satisfied are you with the leadership? What do you think about our sustainability work? What do you think about rewards and payment? And this is how we started in the year 2020, and then you see the layers, level 1, level 2, level 3, the reporting lines. And you can see that when we started in 2020, the motivation, the happiness on the first level was already quite good, yeah? A lot of green, and I show you how it continues. In 2021, you could see that this is flowing more and more down in the organization. 2023, we did not do a survey because we swapped from autumn to spring. That was the reason why you don't see 2023, you only see 2024.
But this is also something which shows you clearly, we did not only improve our profitability. At the same time, we achieved leadership in sustainability, and also at the same time, our people, our employees, which are the most important asset of every company, they are day by day more happy than before. So to wrap it up, what drives our success or what has driven our success in the last five years, since I'm also at the helm of the company here? I think the first and very important thing was to establish a clear P&L responsibility after One GEA, and this is broken down to 240 operating units. And at the same time, we introduced a clear performance culture.
There is one sentence: If you wake up any manager at 3:00 A.M., I promise, if you start a budget, everybody will continue while sleeping, is a budget. This is really at the heart of every manager, and they know that they have to deliver. At the same time, they get a lot of freedom if they perform. If they don't perform, then we change the team. That is the culture we have and we introduced, and we can also see that we can really attract good people by living that culture, because good people want to have their freedom, good people want to perform, and they have the freedom to do so. We also have combined that with an attractive payment scheme for the 150 top managers.
If they perform, if they deliver, if they overperform, they are appropriately paid for their performance, and that is also something where we put a lot of brain into these models. We had an active portfolio management. We sold seven companies with about EUR 300 million, where we had the feeling that they don't fit to our strategy. We significantly improved our service business. It has grown, meanwhile, to 38% of our sales, and we will talk also more about service later and what kind of ideas we have to bring it further ahead. We substantially reduced the number of production facilities from 62 down to 43, so a significant reduction. That is also something which helped us to improve the profitability, and we had various excellent initiatives in purchasing and procurement. Johannes will also tell you more about that later.
So the result is that we achieved our Mission 26 targets, which we explained to you three years ago, already two years earlier. So this year, we will fulfill our targets, which we promised we will fulfill in the year 2026. So we rather underpromised and overdelivered, and we walk the talk. Here you can see what we promised, and you can also see our expectation for this year. This is, by the way, of course, the current guidance you know. Yeah, so the journey of GEA started with a CREATE program in 2019, where we had the quick fix after the OneGEA situation. You also know that time. Then on top of that, we started the Mission 2026. We are faster than we expected, and of course, therefore, we are together today. What's next? Surprise, surprise, it's called Mission 30.
That is the new program. These are our new targets we are talking about today, and it's about growth, it's about value, and also exactly important, it's about impact. We will tell you also how we feel our responsibility, what we feel is important to leave an impact on the communities, on our employees, and for also responsible innovation. These are the new targets which we set ourselves for the year 2030. You can expect an organic sales growth CAGR of 5%. You can expect that we achieve an EBITDA margin 17%-19%, and you can see that we deleted before restructuring. You know that at the moment, we guide and report EBITDA before restructuring. We also promised already one and a half years ago that this will end at the year 2026.
And you can also add here 50 basis points or whatever, something in that range, if you wanna compare this number. So 17- 19 is even slightly higher if you compare it with our numbers today. ROCE, I also think this is extremely outstanding for a machine building company to create a ROCE above 45%, and this is what we promise to deliver until the year 2030. You might ask, of course, how are we going to do that? Let's talk about sales. What are the ideas? And you will get all these details afterwards, how we do that. Sustainability, like I said, it's not only that sustainability is embedded in our DNA, that we believe it's our responsibility to do something for the planet to avoid further catastrophic development in the environment.
It's also a huge growth driver, and we will explain that to you why and how we do that, because we strongly believe that this is also helping us to accelerate our growth while we do something good for the world. Therefore, we also commit to increase our share of sustainable solutions of sales from today, 41.5% to larger 60% in the year 2030. New Food. Yeah, those of you who spent the last night with us could taste excellent New Food. It was plant-based food, plant-based meat. We will also talk about cell-based meat today and what we do. Frederieke will tell you more about that later. And we are fully convinced that the consumption of New Food will accelerate significantly, and we are excellent positioned in that market.
Digitalization, we made a huge step ahead during the last four years, and we have meanwhile a comprehensive digital portfolio. And also important to look at this number, already today, we have a installed base, a connected base, from 7,000 machines. This is also a very impressive number you can see here, and we wanna go to larger than 35,000 in the year 2030. Service will continue to deliver. We saw growth rates during the last years higher than 10%, service growth. And it's of course, like you know, service is always more profitable than sale of new equipment, and we will also boost that further up to 40%, and we will add almost EUR 1 billion sales during the next years in service, which is always very resilient, and very profitable.
I will tell you later, different verticals we identified with different technologies in different regions, where we see on top of all that, additional growth opportunities, and of course, it's also about innovation. Our Vitality Index, that means the share of products which are not older than five years, will reach 30% in the year 2030. So these are the six important ways to boost and to grow further... our sales. You might have the same question for profitability. Of course, volume and margin expansion is important and is something where we will work on. Our service business will contribute here, and also the growth of the margin will give us additional effects to improve our profitability. We will conduct various COGS programs.
Johannes will also give you more information about that later on, and we also see here an additional potential of EUR 120 million net EBITDA contribution coming out of this COGS program, and then last but not least, you know that we are not best in class today in G&A, and that was not really on the agenda during the last years because we had different things to do. We saw different levers which we can use to improve our profitability, but now it's the time to address that, and we also see, and we'll talk about that later, about EUR 100 million additional EBITDA bottom line, which we can create out of more efficient G&A compared to today. All that together brings us to our Mission 30, to our new program, which is based on sustainability. We strongly believe that sustainability is important.
As I said, it's not only that we do something good for the world, that we feel our responsibility here. It's also an important growth driver for the future. Digitization, also AI, Tom will talk about that, and innovation is an important thing, which is another part of our fundament. Growth, we have a lot of ideas how we can grow further the company. And value creation, I also spoke about that. The numbers, I think, are great numbers, and just have in mind, if we achieve that in 2030, within 10 years, we almost doubled the profitability of the organization, which is, I would say, a challenging target and a great success. And we are fully convinced that the programs we defined and we worked on are solid, that we can really achieve that. So it's not a dream.
It's really based on a solid fundament. And last but not least, we wanna leave an impact, yeah? We. It's not only that we wanna be a profitable company, we wanna leave an impact. We wanna feel responsible for the communities where we are present, where we work. We wanna. We will also talk later about what do we do in donations. We also wanna see thriving employees. Like you could see with the employee survey, we are going in the right direction, but we wanna be a very attractive employer, and we wanna continue with that. And we also feel responsible for innovation, for responsible innovation, innovation, which also helps the world. With that, I hand over to Nadine, our Chief Sustainability Officer.
She did a great job with the team, like you could see already during the last years, and put GEA also at the forefront of this development. And with that, Nadine, I hand over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Stefan. Yeah, as you just said, sustainability is the foundation of everything we do. Nothing else says it better than our company purpose, engineering for a better world. And as an engineering company, we can make a significant contribution to the sustainability challenges like climate change, waste and water management, or circular economy. It's our goal to make a significant contribution for the decarbonization of our customers' industries. And this is where we see the business, and in particular, growth opportunities. Let's take the food and beverage industries that are our strategic core markets. Many production processes in these industries consume enormous amounts of energy and water, especially for cleaning, heating, and cooling. They are resource intensive. I just came back from the New York Climate Week.
This is maybe you know that this is the largest annual climate event of its kind. It features more than 600 events and activities across the entire Big Apple, and there I met not only European customers, but also customers headquartered in the U.S. or in the APAC region, and they confirmed that they are changing their approach to sustainability and decarbonization. This is their license to play, and we at GEA, we are in a unique position to enable our customers to produce much more resource efficient. The decarbonization revolution will be disruptive, and that impact is our business opportunity. At the moment, decarbonization is one of the most important issues companies face today, but their net zero strategies are not really implemented as holistic business transformations, but they have to in order to make real progress.
According to ongoing reports, of the World's 2,000 Largest Companies by Revenue, only 2% have a detailed plan how they want to achieve their goals. Our aspiration is co-creating climate transition plans together with our customers for a low-carbon economy. We started this journey already in 2021 with our climate strategy. And in 2023, we raised our midterm targets and got them, together with our net zero target 2040, validated by the SBTi, by the Science Based Targets initiative. And in the beginning of this year, in 2024, we launched our climate transition plan 2040. It shows how we want to achieve our goals by outlining levers and measures embedded in a holistic approach. The starting point is our corporate culture. It's the foundation of everything else.
It's for motivated engineers who use all their skills to make our product portfolio more resource-efficient, and to have the freedom to create disruptive innovations, and it's also for our committed teams, who rethink our operational processes everywhere on site. In short, we are creating a corporate culture that promotes effective actions at all levels. A holistic approach also means that we closely involve our customers and business partners. Their involvement is essential, as the entire value chain needs to change, and many suppliers have already joined us on our pathway to net zero, and our teams are pulling in the same direction. As Stefan said, in the annual employee survey, sustainability is consistently the best-ranked dimension. However, if we look at our overall emission balance sheet, one thing becomes very clear: the biggest challenge, but also the greatest potential, is our product portfolio.
I'm talking about Scope 3 emissions, that are the emissions along the entire value chain, from our suppliers to our customers. The fact is, the majority of GEA's emissions is caused when our customer uses our product. Why is that? For one thing, our solutions have a very long lifetime. This is a sign of quality, but it also extends the emission phase. On the other hand, many production processes in the food and beverage industries consume enormous amounts of energy, and this is due to strict heating and cooling requirements. So in short, we can make the biggest impact when our customer uses our solutions in a more sustainable way, and that's the reason why product innovation is so important to us. We aim for solutions that consume as few resources as possible over the entire lifetime.
Before I want to present you the levers and measures how we want to do this, let me explain you our ambition. We just learned from Stefan our ambition in terms of financials. Converted into greenhouse gas emissions, this would mean the following: Our starting point is 2019. This comes with a bunch of emissions, and assuming now we continue our business as usual, that means we grow our business until 2040, this would mean the following. But we are committed to net zero, so the gap between the projected business as usual and our commitment to net zero is called Climate Ambition, and the pathway how to close this gap is our pathway to net zero. Let's slice the elephant and simplify the things. Our pathway to net zero can be split into three dimensions.
As a matter of fact, by physical laws, our products need to be powered by energy, and did you know that in 2015, more than 190 countries in the world signed the so-called Paris Agreement? Their announced pledges differ from 100% renewable energy by 2035, like Germany did, up to 2060, like China or India did. Will they all keep their targets? We don't know that, and that's why our pathway is based on what we see already today. That means we freeze today's global energy grid mixes of the world and anticipate them still to be true in 2040, but we still have hope, and we anticipate that the global energy market will shift and will continue to shift to renewable energy.
Shifting to renewable energy means that we have to adapt our today's product portfolio. That means we need to electrify our products so that our customer can power them with renewable electricity. At the same time, we have to increase the energy efficiency so that the customer needs less renewable electricity. And last but not least, we need to innovate disruptive technologies in order to enable our customers to do things differently from an emission point of view as they used to. My colleague, Ilija, will present you in a few seconds how we want to do this. Last but not least, and most importantly, we need to influence the engagement of our customer. At the end of the day, they need to produce affordable food, beverages, and pharmaceuticals in a more sustainable way.
We empower them to reduce their emission footprint, and we enable them to reach their climate targets. But to produce food, beverages, and pharmaceuticals with zero emissions means that we need to create awareness, we need to trigger the openness for new business models, and the confidence to change a running system in order to truly deliver the impact. My colleague, Kai, will explain this in more detail. But before he's doing so, I hand over to Ilija. He will explain how we transform our product portfolio.
Thank you, Nadine, and good morning, everybody. My division, Liquid and Powder Technologies, provides full line process solutions to the food and beverage industry, predominantly. These processes are highly resource intensive with respect to heat, energy, electrical energy, and water consumption. And this presents us with a challenge when we come to meeting our net zero targets, but also those net zero targets of our customers. However, by leveraging our capabilities in innovation, R&D, engineering, we're able to address those challenges. We can't control everything within our processes. For example, the energy required to evaporate one ton of water will always be the energy required to evaporate one ton of water. But what we can do, is we can control where do we derive that energy from, and how do we use it within our processes?
So by focusing on what we can control, we identify levers where we are able to drive decarbonization into our processes. So firstly, we are designing highly resource-efficient processes. By, for example, use of our innovative energy recuperation technologies, the use of our highly efficient components, and incorporating digital products with artificial intelligence designed to optimize production processes and minimize energy consumption. We're also designing processes which significantly reduce, and in some cases, completely eliminate the need for fossil fuels. And where the energy grid permits the use of green or renewable energy, electricity, we can effectively reduce the carbon footprint of our processes to zero. Now, in order to realize these initiatives and to achieve our ambitious sustainability targets, we've continued to strengthen our own internal capabilities by embedding sustainability into everything we do, into our innovation processes, our R&D processes, and our engineering phase gates.
We are training our employees across the value chain to understand how our sustainability efforts can contribute to both ours and our customers' pathway to net zero. Now, these are not just good ideas. These are real, practical solutions that we are already introducing into the marketplace, and I want to give you some examples of what we've already achieved in tackling sustainability within the industries that we serve. This first example is a project that we have just recently completed for one of Europe's major dairy companies, Arla Foods. Arla, among other things, produce milk powders using GEA spray drying technologies. Now, what does a spray dryer do? A spray dryer creates a very fine mist of milk droplets, and then uses huge quantities of hot air to rapidly evaporate the water in the milk to leave a fine powder product.
This hot air is generated by the burning of fossil fuels, and in this case, natural gas. The spray dryer is probably the highest energy consumer within the dairy processing plant. The challenge for us is how do we reduce the energy consumption of a spray dryer to evaporate water? What we've done in this case, we've collected waste energy, waste heat, which is discharged from various different processes in the dairy. We collect this, and then we use a high-pressure heat pump system to increase the quality of that energy, so we can heat air using electrical source, which then displaces the air, which is produced by the fossil fuels. In this particular example, we have been able to reduce the gas consumption of this spray dryer by 50%, and hence the carbon footprint by 50%. Now, just an interesting anecdote here.
First of all, I have to thank Arla for allowing us to use this as a reference installation, and we're able to take prospective clients to have a look at this system to understand how it works. We were there only two or three weeks ago, and the Arla representative mentioned to us that their utility provider actually contacted the site to ask if they had any issues on that site, and of course, they responded, "No, we've got no problems here at all," but the utility provider had actually recognized that the whole site gas consumption had dropped significantly, so perhaps not everybody's gonna be a winner out of our sustainability efforts here, but nevertheless, look at the impact we've managed to achieve here. With this system, we managed to achieve a reduction in CO₂-equivalent emissions of 2,500 tons per year.
The second example comes from our sister division, Food and Healthcare Technologies. This is a baking oven, which was supplied to one of the world's largest food producers for baking of biscuits and cookies. The original installation used natural gas to create an indirect radiative heat to bake the biscuits and cookies. Our challenge: how do we reduce the energy consumption of this machine? So our team developed an innovative, direct radiative electrical heating system, which would replace the gas heating system. The first thing we had to do, of course, was ensure that we maintained the cooking and baking characteristics to maintain the quality of the product, which we did, and in this case, we managed to reduce the energy consumed by this oven by between 14% and 25%, depending on the type of biscuit or cookie that we are processing.
Here's the impact, a reduction of over 200 tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions per year. My final example is another one from my division, Liquid and Powder Technologies. It's an evaporation process. This is an evaporator supplied to one of the world's leading food ingredients suppliers. Its objective is to concentrate an organic acid, which is then used to produce a vitamin as a food ingredient. Now, how does this work? It uses steam, which is supplied on one side of a heating surface, while the liquid to be concentrated flows down the other side of the heating surface. As the heat is transferred from the steam to the liquid, water is evaporated and is discharged from the system as water vapor. That steam is produced in a fossil fuel-fired boiler.
The water vapor, which is eliminated from the evaporator, it's kind of like the steam you see coming out of your kettle at home, then needs to be contained for further treatment, and the way we do this is we condense that water by using cooling water, so we can then treat those products discharged. The challenge here: how do we reduce the dependency on fossil fuel and reduce the cooling water requirement? So what we did, we took that water vapor, which we evaporate from the organic acid, and then we pass it to an electrically driven mechanical vapor recompressor, and that elevates the pressure and temperature of that vapor, and then we use that on the heating side of the evaporator to create more vapor, which is then recycled and comes back as heating.
As the heating side transfers its energy, it condenses, can be collected and treated. And in this case, we have completely reduced the need for fossil fuel-generated steam and significantly reduced the amount of cooling water requirement. And you can see here, 94% energy saving, 95% saving in cooling water requirement, and an 80% saving in OpEx. And look at that, the impact, over 9,500 tons equivalent of CO₂ per annum. So we have the technology, we have the capabilities, and for sure, we have the passion to make this happen. But how do we now influence our customers to take a more holistic approach to managing their own pathway to net zero? Here, I'd like to pass over to my colleague, Kai, who will give you some insights in how we can support them on their journey.
Thank you very much, Ilija, and a warm welcome also from my side. Before we talk about our area of influence, I would like to talk a little bit more about the topic of waste heat, and I would like to make it very tangible by taking the example of boiling an egg. To boil an egg, you will need roughly 20 kJ of heat energy. For the entire process, however, you will need far more. You have to heat up the pot, you have to heat up the water in the pot, and you have to keep it boiling for up to 10 minutes, depending on how you like the egg, and at the end of the process, you have produced round about 700 kJ of heat energy.
So remember, 20 kJ needed and 700 produced, and the data is simply lost. Gladly, industrial processes are far more efficient. However, for example, in some dairies today, still up to 60% of energy is simply lost, and this has a price tag. EUR 140 billion, EUR 140 billion are literally burned every year. And while this certainly is a huge financial burden for our customers, it certainly represents a huge ecological burden for all of us. Why? Because 40% of the energy-related CO₂ emissions can be associated to the generation of heat. The good news is, we can do something about it, and here, GEA is actually uniquely positioned in the industry. We know exactly how to plan and build state-of-the-art process plants. We know exactly how to harness waste heat and turn it into value for our customers.
We know exactly how to ensure business continuity while doing so. That makes us unique in the industry. This combination of competencies is truly unique in the industry. There's no other company that combines this process competence that GEA just has explained, with industrial heating and cooling competence on the other side, under one roof. With that unique positioning that GEA is having here, we also consider this a responsibility. That is what we will do differently now. Let's talk about our area of influence. Firstly, we will engage earlier with our customers. With a better strategy consulting, we will be with our customers when they take their very first steps towards the decarbonization roadmaps.
We will help them to understand and comply with regulatory challenges which are coming towards them, and at the same time, help them to understand all the different levers that they have to decarbonize their companies. Once they embark on that journey, they also need to have concrete plans for each and every site that they have in their portfolio. Here, again, we will bring in the different competencies of GEA. We will bring in the team, for example, of GEA and my team, to provide a holistic site assessment. We look at waste heat potential, at sustainable technologies to be implemented, and also to bring in technologies which will replace, for example, fossil fuel-based technologies, and at the end, the customer will have a clear concept for the decarbonization of a specific site. The next step is then the realization of those concepts.
Here, again, our core competencies in GEA come to play. We know how to provide the detailed engineering, the site erection, the commissioning, et cetera, of those plants, and at the end, the customer will be able to see the benefits from those concepts. This is what we call a NEXUS project. So the realization of those sustainable concepts that we have holistically developed together with different divisions in GEA, for the benefit of sustainability, are called NEXUS projects. And once those NEXUS projects are realized, the customer can start to harness the value also from sustainability. And last but not least, we will also stay with our customer throughout the entire life cycle. We will help them to further improve the productivity and availability of those sites.
Here also, for example, the digital products, which will be highlighted by Tom later, as well as services that will be highlighted by Lucas later, will play an important role. With that unique combination of competencies, we are targeting an order intake of more than EUR 300 million in 2030. That this is also not just an idea, but actually already reality. We can demonstrate with very nice examples from our customers. Our customer, Heineken, for example, has a very clear plan to decarbonize the Scope 1 and 2 emissions for their production sites. For their site in Manchester, U.K., they have chosen us as a partner to realize those targets.
Here again, a team of GEA and my division joined forces to assess that site, to look for waste heat potential, and to bring in technologies which will help them to reduce the carbon footprint. Here, for example, our industrial heat pumps play a key role for the realization of those plans, and at the end, the customer will be able to save more than 5,000 tons of CO₂ emissions annually. Another great example is our customer, Innocent, and you have all some nice juices on your desk right now. That is also what you will see later, how it's being produced. Firstly, it's a great pleasure for me to invite you on behalf of Innocent and GEA to see really firsthand what is possible today, and Innocent can really be considered a true pioneer in the industry.
They have been at the forefront to really push for sustainability in the beverage production, and we as GEA were their partner of choice. So we have really responded to their wish. We have provided clear plans how to decarbonize a beverage factory, and that is really impressive for me every time when I go on site to see what they do and how we have done that really together. I'm fully convinced that this will become the new norm in the industry going forward. I look very much forward to seeing you later during the site visit. Thank you very much, and with that, back to Nadine.
Thank you, Kai. You see, we want to create an impact to the world, and therefore, we are not only reducing our greenhouse gas emission footprint in the company, we enable our customers to reduce their footprint. And with our activities, we want to save the world until 2030, 125 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. And to put that into perspective, the country, the Netherlands, where we are currently running our Capital Markets Day, is causing 125 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually. And by saving this amount, we believe this is engineering for a better world. But we do not stop here. We continuously working on the transformation. So by 2030, the sales share of sustainable solutions is expected to be larger than 60%, combined with the above-average profitability.
Climate and our climate action is one driver to reaching our financial targets, but climate is not all. Sustainability is much more. Did you know that in 2050 , there will be more than 1-2 billion people more in the world? At the same time, the middle class is steadily growing. And did you also know that the planet today is not enough to feed all the people? So the question is how to feed the people in 2050? The answer to that will give my colleague, Frederieke Reiners. She's the head of the business line, New Food.
Thank you, Nadine. Let me now introduce to you one other growth lever of our Mission 30, called New Food. The global population is expected to grow up to 10 billion people until 2050 . Those people will need to eat, and we cannot continue to expand our existing production any further, like we're doing it today, without significantly harming the planet and facing social consequences. Humanity needs lower impact alternatives to our conventional meat, seafood, dairy, and egg production that we have today. At GEA, New Food has one task: to feed more people using fewer resources and reduce the environmental footprint of our customers. We differentiate New Food in six different sub-applications that you see here. The first three ones are in the area of plant-based. Those are the products that you already see in the supermarket shelves today, and most of you are familiar with them.
For instance, in plant-based beverage, it's oat milk. Plant-based food is something like veggie or burger patties. Plant-based intermediates could be something like pea protein that's going to be often processed further. The other areas on the very left side, insect proteins, which are often not processed further and mainly used in countries like Asia or South Africa. I would now highlight the two areas of cultivated meat and precision fermentations, where we see the biggest growth going forward until 2030 and even further. One area is precision fermentation. Here, we take an organism, we put it in a fermenter, and it's pre-programmed to then produce the protein that we would like to have. This is, for instance, whey protein, casein, or something like egg white.
The other area is cultivated meat, and here we take a cell from an animal, we put it in a bioreactor, and we let it grow in order to produce meat. I know this sounds very strange when you hear it the first time. I have tried it myself already a few times, and I can assure you the taste is very, very similar to conventional meat. I couldn't even taste the difference, and when you've tried it, you see what a revolutionary impact this will have in the industry. As you can see, this is a very young market, the ones that I've just highlighted, and I will, in my presentation, explain to you a little bit more on what we as GEA are doing there, but before I do this, let's have a look into the market.
We're talking here about a young industry, so we see very strong and good entrepreneurs, and also first multinationals tapping into this field. They are relying on investments going into this field, and this is why I show you this curve. Here you can see the venture capital funding going into the field to drive the production of alternative proteins. And as you can see, we had some technological breakthroughs which were causing the investments going up. And you are familiar with this curve called the Gartner Hype Curve, usually it goes up, it drops, and then the market normalizes. What you do see here, it crashed. And this is due to the geopolitical conflicts that we have seen with the war in Ukraine, the war in Middle East, with high inflation rates, with the energy crisis, and so on.
However, we do see first signs of recovery coming in. So here we are showing some of the investments in Europe and in the U.S. since the beginning of this year, which is why we are projecting a normalization coming in and kicking into the market, soon. Additionally to the venture capital funding, we see the green curve occurring, where governments are funding the transition to alternative proteins as well, driving the industry. Now, I will highlight some of our achievements in the area of New Food to you, to show you what we have done so far. At our Capital Markets Day 2021, we already introduced the project that we've done at that time with Novozymes, now Novonesis, where we've built a turnkey plant for the production of a functional protein. This plant is live. It's up and running at continuous stage.
“GEA is a trusted partner, supporting the development of biological solutions for the future,” is the quote of the customer, and to put it even more into perspective, this was one of GEA's biggest projects ever, as it was in the highest double-digit million numbers, so we have proven that we can build those massive factories at a full satisfaction of our customers. Another great example is the world's first pilot plant for building a revolutionary way of a natural protein called Solein. We are working with a customer, Solar Foods, since they are a small startup. Today, they have a funding of EUR 65 million, and since a few weeks, they are listed on the Finnish NASDAQ. We have supported them in their process of coming from the lab, going into the pilot plant, which is running since the beginning of this year, where they produce Solein.
Additionally, we have integrated our NEXUS solution for their cooling and heating demands that my colleague, Kai, has introduced to you earlier. Let me now show you a video of their CTO, Juha-Pekka, to introduce to you how we've worked with them and how Solein is produced.
Hello.
Hi!
Welcome. 95% of the chemical elements that the cell needs to grow, we can source from air. This is what food out of thin air means. The bioreactor is the key in cellular agriculture, and the specific thing in our bioreactor cultivation is the utilization of gases as the main ingredient. So hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, these we can all source from air. With direct air capture, we can start even from one cell, so then that can multiply and finally reach production volume. We grow the cells, and we pasteurize it, and then remove water, but then this powder can be used to produce food products. So we could make yogurt-type products. We could make sausages, pasta or bread or whatever. GEA is able to provide us the whole solution from upstream to bioreactor cultivation to the whole downstream, and also going up to the full factory size.
I've now given you two examples of the area of precision fermentation. Let me now show you what we're doing in the area of cultivated meat. We are right now building the first scaled production for the production of cultivated chicken cells with our customer, Believer Meat. This will be a milestone of the industry, and annually, this factory will produce 12,000 metric tons of cultivated meat per year. Two weeks ago, I've been at the site myself, and I've seen how we are progressing there, and I'm telling you, this is a milestone in the industry to get this up to scale and to get this to market. I will now show you a video of their founder, Yaakov Nahmias, of the company formerly in the past called Future Meat, now Believer Meat.
Then take the cells from an animal, make them immortal, essentially allow them to grow forever, and when you're doing that, you can produce, well, everything you want to eat.
Yaakov Nahmias is the founder of Future Meat, one of the companies furthest along in their practical implementations.
This is where the real magic happens. Media is being prepared in one tank, and then it feeds these two huge vessels, and together, they can produce about 500 kg of meat a day at peak production efficiency, so this is essentially a cow a day in a room that is more or less the same of people's living room, right? Or a large, relatively large kitchen. If you think that the cow needs about 10 months to grow and reach maturity, you can imagine, you know, what type of size will be placed here.
In one tank, muscle cells are created, which give the meat its texture. In the others, fat cells are grown. These carry the aroma.
The temperature is kept constant at 37 degrees Celsius, which is the temperature of the animal. Essentially, the cells just grow, so you just need to get energy to keep the temperature stable and to continuously and slowly mix the cultures, so allowing the cells to grow. So we don't need to grow everything as well. There's no need to grow the brain or the skin or the central nervous system or the internal organs. We're just creating the meat. Essentially, you can have 100 million cells in a volume as small as this. Okay? Almost the natural density of meat. This is a planetary revolution, not a national one, not a cityscape one. We need to produce this everywhere.
Sounds very impressive, and I'm proud to say that last week, we also announced our strategic partnership with Believer Meat, in order to drive the development of this field jointly, doing joint developments, and also building new business model in order to bring this to market. Why are we, as GEA, so confident in this field? It's because we are one of the only suppliers that are owning most of the equipment in-house, and having the expertise in-house of this. Here you see an exemplary process chart of the equipment that you need to line up, very high level for cell-based proteins.
We have the experts on an equipment level that can ensure to get the right equipment, to have the right processing parameters, and to have, give, also give the right consultation to our customers to tell them what they need and what are the right parameters. On top of this, we have the processing capabilities, where we can talk about process KPIs along the whole process when we have the equipment aligned, which also gives insurance to our customers to have a solid process and a scaled process there. Also, they often need this to get financing from partners, because as I said, it's a young industry, and we as GEA bring in the capabilities and the knowledge which our customers are required to have in order to scale.
Last year, we've opened our test and application center in Hildesheim, Germany, where we work hand-in-hand with our customers to scale their processes. Often, they come from a lab scale, and what we do is we understand what their processing is, and we help them how does it work scaled on our production, and we test their process on our equipment and our production lines in order to show them how is it scalable, and what are the processing KPIs that I've just mentioned, which our customers need, again, to build their business case. The test center, since it's opened, it's 100% booked. We are already booked out until the end of the year, and right now we are therefore also building a second test center in the U.S., in Janesville, which will be opening next summer.
One other achievement is the launch of our bioreactor, the Axenic portfolio, which is 100% modularized solution in order to be cost and delivery-wise, time-wise competitive, and to have a solid product in the market. Additionally to the bioreactor, we offer the service of virtually testing, how does the scaling of the process look like? How does the organism or the cells, how do they behave from a smaller scale into a larger scale? There you need to consider, for instance, the pH level, the temperature distribution, the oxygen distribution, and so on, to mitigate, again, the risk for our customers, but to also give them parameters at hand to take the right decisions in terms of CapEx investments, in order to also keep their OpEx on low costs.
I have mentioned on the other slide a little bit the topic of technological breakthroughs that we've seen. I would like to give you some more perspectives on this. In 2013, a burger patty itself cost around EUR 330,000. Today, it can be produced below EUR 10, and those costs need to become even lower in order to reach price parity, and this is what we're working on with, for instance, our perfusion technology. The highest cost in the process is the media, the media that is needed to feed the cells to grow. So what we are doing here in the process is we are removing the used medium with the low nutrients that are stopping the cell from its growth, and we feed it with new nutrients by retaining the cells in the process.
Very simply said, we are imitating what our liver is doing in our body. So I have now, in my presentation, given you some examples of what we are doing and why we as GEA believe in this industry, and why we see the breakthroughs here. In the very first slide, I've shown you why there were some difficulties in the market that we've seen, some challenges. I've explained that we see first signs of recovery coming back, and that we're projecting a normalization coming in. Also, I've explained something about the technological breakthrough and about our unique positioning that we have as GEA. We also have a very strong pipeline with strategic partnerships. We work hand-in-hand with our customers, and therefore, we are very confident in what we see. Investments are not getting stopped, they're postponed, and therefore, we can speak about the solid pipeline.
We are now therefore projecting our order intake in 2030 above EUR 400 million, and we're confident that this will come in. We as GEA have the task and see our responsibility also to feed the world using fewer resources and doing it in a sustainable way. I'd now like to hand over to our Chief Digital Officer, Tom Oelsner, who will talk about digital platforms and customer solutions.
Thank you, Frederieke, and also welcome from my side here in Amsterdam. I want to take you with us on the GEA digital journey, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to the program, what we have achieved already, and what will be our ambition in Mission 30. Digitalization is a very broad topic, of course, and this is why we talk about digital enterprise transformation for our internal digital projects. You will hear a lot about this from our CFO and COO later today. I will focus my presentation to external digitalization, what we are doing for our customers. We talk about digital platforms and digital solutions. At the last Capital Markets Day, we have announced that we will launch a new organization, GEA Digital, and this is what we did.
Today, more than 200 digital experts work hand in hand with our engineers to develop a digital solution portfolio. We have good reasons to do this, because one thing was clear, and this is underlined in the customer survey, which we did last year. Already today, our customers say it's decisive for their investments in new equipment and in plants, that a digital solution portfolio supports excellent engineering. 68% of the customers, even more underlined this by saying these digital capabilities are getting more and more important in the future for making their decisions. What are customers expecting from us as an engineering partner for their production? There are clearly three topics. First, Availability, second, Productivity, and third, Sustainability. This is what a digital solution should add on top of excellent engineering. Our digital solutions are mainly based on AI.
Of course, everybody talks about AI today. There are three ingredients that are needed to be successful in this market, and I will show you the GEA way to go to this AI solutions and what makes us really special. The first thing is the GEA Cloud. The first ingredients that you need to be successful in the AI world is technology. We have established a modern, secure, scalable digital platform with our own brand name, GEA Cloud. It's an open platform also. You can connect every product line, also from competitors, so the whole plant can be connected: products, process lines, plants. You see here a selection of products, and four of them I will use in my examples.
There is one, you see a chiller here, what Kai introduced during our factory tour in Innocent, just when we talk here, there is the installation of a digital solution for the chillers in Rotterdam. In more than 50 countries today, these solutions are sold and used, and this is the way we want to go on. We will roll out this on a global scale. The second ingredient, which is even more important than the technology, because technology everybody can buy today, is process and domain know-how. That's key to be successful in the market, and process and domain know-how brings the customer value. In addition, it allows us to apply AI and AI solutions in a way where environmental effects and economic benefits for the customer really comes together.
Nadine talked about this already, and I will show you with this, for example, how it works. Content-wise, we start our journey with intelligent assistance. Some companies market this under the name Co-Piloting. Second, we go one step further. Here we talk about autopilots, because then the process, the machine flying fully autonomous. Digital solutions are also the door opener for new business models, and I have two examples for you to show you how a traditional machine manufacturer can go in new digital business models, including subscription. Let me start with the first example, and this is the GEA InsightPartner, in this case, for separation technology. GEA InsightPartner is a family name. It stands for assistant systems.
That means we have an AI that makes recommendations how to maintain and how to optimize a process step, but is still in the hand of the customer to use this recommendation, applying this or reject this. It is based on actionable insights. What is important, this AI solution is getting better and better because we use the data of the installed base for a self-learning system, so the recommendations are getting better over the years. Such solutions are usually not commercialized standalone. They're coming with service level agreements. My colleague, Lucas, will tell in the service session more about this, because it's not only to make recommendations, it's very important that the customer really get a full package of help, seven by 24 hours access and all these things, and how we commercialize this, we will hear from Lucas. Second thing is the GEA OptiPartner.
Now we enter the field of autopilots, because an OptiPartner takes an energy-intensive process from the customer, you push a button, and then the AI takes the control of the process until you push the stop button. And this is the example for spray drying. You heard from Ilija already about the spray drying, very energy intensive. And you see here also the Add Better solution logo, because the digital solution is in addition, what we do with AddCool, a digital solution that reduce energy consumption of this process step. You have more output with less energy. And this is significant because you see in this reference installation, we talk here about the energy mix in Germany. 14% less energy consumption means roughly 1,440 tons CO₂ per year, and I think this is significant on top of the engineered solution.
Let me show you a third example, and now we enter a field where I can demonstrate that with digital solutions, we have potential even beyond our core markets, like food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industry. Now, we enter the world of a wastewater plant. And this example is about a city, a wastewater plant of 400,000 inhabitants. When we go by bus to Rotterdam, we will bypass the city of Den Haag This is roughly the size, what we talk about here, the city of Den Haag . So to enter new business model, it's very important if we talk about profit share, value, value-based pricing, and things like this, to understand the total cost of ownership of this market and the customer precisely.
You see the total cost of ownership of sludge management in such a wastewater treatment plant. There is a dominant factor, and this is the disposal. Disposal of sludge, it's very, very expensive. It's special disposal needed, and we talk about EUR 60 per ton. Doesn't sound so expensive, but keep in mind, this solution saves more than 2,000 tons per year, and here we talk again about an equivalent of EUR 135,000 , what you can achieve just by applying AI with this wastewater treatment plant. The last example, and here we have a small video to give you a little bit tangible what happens there, comes from our division, Farm Technology.
You see here a farm, cows entering the milking robot, and we are in this business with a new software, which we have launched 2021 already, and this is DairyNet. This is our trademark based on the GEA Cloud for herd management software, so we are also a software as a service provider and installed in more than one thousand locations already. Now, we add business on top because we bring new software modules in these installations. One big threat for farmers is lameness of cows. So we monitor this, the AI recognize the cow, and on this picture you see a score, a healthy score of this cow, and this is coming from the movement.
So today, we add this solution to the installed base, and in this case, we do not talk about connected machines, we talk about connected cows, and we have more than 100,000 already in the field. It is a good example for subscription business because this is what we are charging on a monthly basis per cow. So this is where we are today. All what you have seen is live, is in the market, it's scaling. But what are now the plans for the future? And here you see the outlook. Because I talk now about the third ingredients that we need to be successful with AI on the long run, and the third ingredient is big data. To create a superior AI, it's important that you have access to a very broad database.
And this is what we will get when we turn our iBASE to a connected iBASE. We name it CBASE. Where are we today? Stefan introduced already, more than 7,000 machines are connected already today. This is a big trust from our customers. It gives us confidence that our solutions really hitting the market need, but we want to go on this. More and more smart serviceable equipment goes in the market. This is what you see with these gray bars. But our connectivity ambition is even higher, so we set us one goal: 80% of our smart equipment in the market will be connected by 2030, and this is then, if we talk about absolute numbers, 35,000 machines. You see the spiral on the right-hand side of this slide, and this is what I want to underline.
This is not only that we talk about commercials here, selling more digital solutions. We talk about the quality of this AI. AI is learning with this data. So for us, it is really key, it's decisive, that we achieve these goals. Let me summarize now the digital journey, and I hope you could follow this path from our last years and what is coming. The first message is clear: there's a key enabler for successful engineering business in our digital area. And the last picture you see here, you can scan this code, is the digital nameplate. All GEA equipment will be equipped with such code by 2030. We started already with valves and pumps this year, and this gives access to a digital twin of every GEA equipment. What do we store in this Digital Product Passport?
Now this, let's say, small example of a digital twin is named. So we talk about circularity of material, service documentation, energy footprint, and much more, what is in as a digital life cycle, accompanying the physical world. Second point, our AI-based solutions addressing the market needs, availability, productivity, sustainability. This is why we come to topic number three. This is, of course, also in the commercial interests of GEA. Today, we achieve roughly EUR 70 million digital sales. Digital solutions are the fastest-growing element in our service business. The CAGR will be close to 20%. That means and brings us to more than EUR 200 million in 2030.
Finally, I want to remark, and you see this with the green bars, especially interesting, the majority of this revenue is recurring revenue, so it is interesting in cyclical markets and gives us even more resilience. And now we are at the end of this digital journey, and there are things we can much better have in the real world, and this is why I want to invite you now to the coffee break. Thank you.
At GEA, we believe in a holistic approach to reaching sustainability targets, an approach that not only meets today's needs, but anticipates the demands of a constantly evolving tomorrow. Picture a production process where both your energy consumption and total cost of ownership drop by 30%. 90% of your factory's heat demands can be met through upgraded waste heat, and your CO₂ emissions will drop to zero if green electricity is applied. This is NEXUS, a holistic engineering solution that leads the way to a world where production does not come at the cost of our planet's health. The smallest detail in one area can make the biggest difference in another, so the trick is to look at the greater whole. GEA NEXUS combines our in-house heating and cooling and process expertise, merging benefits of sustainability, productivity, and operational costs.
With GEA, it's not just a vision, it's a reality we're creating now, one plant at a time.
I think it must be around three years ago when we first came together. It's really great to catch up with the project team again back at the blender. When we started the journey of building this factory with huge dreams and with the idea of how we would inspire wider change, we had no idea of the pathway we were going to take.
Of course, we have done big projects before, but in this case, I remember we all knew right from the beginning that we have to go much further than usually. The big task was here to get rid of fossil fuel completely, which we achieved by pushing each other.
In a traditional way of design, we would have approached the process side and heating and cooling separately. Here, we've brought them together right from the start, and that's where the opportunity lies.
I remember drawing on the whiteboard in the meeting room, and how everybody turned their heads and realized how important it is to think about heating and cooling at the same time during the design phase.
For me, the scariest moment was calling up the Port of Rotterdam and asking them not to put in the gas line to the site. That was a moment in time where there was no going back. We were making a completely fossil-free site for the future.
We all really wanted to build that first carbon-neutral factory. That's not to say that the design process was easy or simple. We would describe it as a bit of a zigzag of a process as we went through.
In the end, we want everyone to know it is possible. So I encourage you to make the change, carefully pick your sparring partners, and take that leap. The people in your business, the planet, and also your profit, will definitely benefit from it.
Cheers! Cheers. Yeah, thanks.
And sit down, that we can continue with our Capital Markets Day. So, may I ask you to get slowly back to the room, that we can continue? So going back, yeah.
Directly in.
May I ask you to get-
Yeah, we got it.
Slowly back to the room?
Yeah, yeah.
We continue.
We continue.
So please come in and take your seat again. Great! So it's now my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Lucas Rigotto, to you, the Chief Service Officer of Liquid and Powder Technologies, telling you about our service business.
Thank you very much, Oliver. Hello, good morning. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. As said, my name is Lucas Rigotto, and I will share with you our ambitious plans to continually contribute with GEA's success. Let me paint a clear picture of how service will look in 2030. We will continue to be a relevant lever of our growth and profitability for GEA. In this direction, we are going to add close to EUR 1 billion in sales from services, and we will continue to expand our services sales share to close to 40%. With a higher profitability profile, that's truly important for our ambitious goals as a company. How are we going to get there? Performance partnership. Today, I'm going to talk to you about performance partnership, which is our enhanced value promise to our customers. We'll get to them.
Recurrent revenue is very critical for us. It's how we work with our customers on the life cycle of their assets, and truly unlock potential for them during this time. Services is a people business, but it is a business, and therefore, we need to sell with intensity and intention to execute on the potential of our installed base, of our digital products contracts, as my colleagues mentioned before. And finally, excellence in everything that we do. Not only to generate seamless customer experience, execute flawlessly, but also do it with more efficiency and more productivity on a daily basis. So I'm giving you the picture of 2030, but why do we have confidence that we will achieve these objectives? We have been consistently outperforming our Mission 26 objectives. As a company, we achieved our objectives two years in advance.
In services, we achieved our Mission 26, three years in advance. We have promised a 5-6% CAGR by 2026, and we have been growing more than 10% for the last two years. For the first half of this year, we confirmed and we continue growing more than 10% again. From a services share standpoint, we have promised 36% by the end of 2026, and we delivered 36% last year. We are going to close this year close to 38%. In the next minutes, what I really want to do with you is then to show you how we are, and what we did, to become such a relevant growth and profitability level for GEA, and prove that we can achieve these ambitions that I said on the very beginning.
We set our transformation journey back in 2021 to become a profitable and modern service organization. To do it, we established plans to increase the maturity of services in all of our business units, and we worked on this based on these building blocks, executing really well in our base services, core to our performance. We really invested and worked to deliver operational service excellence, and as I said before, we focus on our recurrent revenue business, locking our customers through the life cycle of the products. I want to explore with you in details what does that mean to achieving results three years in advance? Achieving results in three years in advance. What are the key driver performers, drivers of this performance to get there? If services as a business, we enhanced our portfolio significant throughout the last three years.
We launched over 50 service products. That alone represents an increase of 20% of our service potential. To execute on this incremental service potential, we have to sell to our customers with intensity. We can do it because of our largest visibility of the installed base. We know name and last name of our installed base of more than 90%. We have a focus on selling with intensity and with purpose, and we are also not selling on a cost basis, but our highest profitability come from selling with value proposition. We sell based on the benefit for our customers, and our intention is to continue expanding on this direction. Executing with excellence in everything that we do means optimizing our processes, our footprint, and the way we work.
For example, we have implemented 24/7 remote support in many of our countries, business units, and areas that we work. We have continued to expand our global distribution network, and we have a very solid repair workshop network that is present in many parts of the globe to support our customers. If service is a people business, and we are very proud that we have over 4,000 people in our teams, we have to continue scaling up the skills of these teams. And to this date, we have certified over 600 of our technicians and engineers in our most complex technologies. The facts are, that we promised that we would grow in recurrent revenue, in service share, in service coverage and share of wallet. And in service coverage, we have grown more than 8% in this period.
Our share of wallet expanded in more than 25% to this date, and our recurrent revenue has grown more than 77%, which alone is a CAGR of 21%. With higher profitability, with more digital products, with service agreements, we are very confident that we can achieve our ambitions. So I told you that we are going to add EUR 1 billion in sales and expand our service share by 2030. Let me tell you how we are going to get there. We are elevating our services to a new life cycle model. We are becoming an even more customer-centric organization, aiming to deliver value, to unlock the potential of our customers, becoming their partners, and this will come through execution on our fundamental building blocks and introducing performance partnership. Today, I'm going to introduce to you performance partnership, which is very important for us.
I'm very glad to introduce to you performance partnership as our enhanced value promise to our customers, built on the three pillars: Availability, P roductivity, and Sustainability. All of this enabled by digitalization. Why? How? What is that? Genuinely creating services that unlock the potential for our customers, partnering with them to guarantee maximum performance through service and expertise in everything that they do, we deliver phenomenal service solutions for their entire life cycle. This means seamless customer experience, higher customer loyalty, but it means business outcomes for us. It means growing more, growing faster, and growing more profitable. We take the responsibility of this CAGR growth of more than 6% for 2030, and supporting our company objectives, because we are set up to achieve this already, and this is a key message that I want to reinforce together with you.
It's not something that we will start in 2026 or we will start now. It's something that we are already doing. Our customers are already experiencing this value from us. We are now going to scale this up and scale it further to the vast majority of our installed base. Let me give you a few examples and comment to you on how we do it. I just want to tell something else on this slide before we move. Performance partnership, unlocking the value for our customers, and delivering this great experience, is also why our customers are going to buy GEA in the future. We want to be the reason why we are differentiating GEA in the marketplace, because our customers recognize, and they are super satisfied with our services.
I am sure that our examples are going to give you perspective on what I'm telling here. I told you that performance partnership is based on three key pillars: Availability, Productivity, and Sustainability. I want to explore these examples, but it's important that you know that this is aligned with what the market expect from us. The market is expecting reduced cost of ownership, no surprise, faster response time, high availability, and real performance with the partners that work with them. To get this kind of benefit, our customers are willing to invest more in services. That's the message that we get by talking with our customers and confirming that we are not aiming on an inside-out direction. Our ambitions are aligned with what our customers want. An example on the Availability side.
This is a real example, scalable to the majority of our installed base, and I want to spend some time with you exploring the benefits of working with our customers where it matters for them. Boosting growth and efficiency for our customers. How can we do it? Actually, service agreements, remote support, is one of our possible answers and one of the things we are already offering to our customers, and we want to scale up. This is an actual example of a dairy customer in U.K. They receive milk, and they end up in the process by shipping finished products, and they are a premium customer in this market. They care about their reputation, care about their values, match very much the values of GEA, and they really care about the products they are offering the market.
We did not come to them and just say, "Hey, I want to sell you something." Engaging with our customers with higher intimacy, understanding what's important for them, we could identify these four key pillars for them. They cared about plant Availability, they cared about the quality of the product they put in the market, they care about Sustainability, and they care about Health and Safety. By understanding what's important for our customers, this is one customer, and we can replicate this to over 35,000 units on our installed base. By understanding what's important for our customer, we put GEA at the side of our customers at what's most important for them. We put GEA on the core of our customer operation to help them address the most pressing issues.
For example, with this contract and working with them with service agreement and the remote support, when a customer have a problem today, in less than 12 minutes, one of our experts is talking with them. On an average, in less than one hour, we have solved the problem for them. If product quality is important, if this is a food customer, we help them to guarantee and avoid risk of contamination with the working together with them on the instrumentation calibration on a yearly basis. And if sustainability is important for this customer, our energy efficient audits and the performance audits we do with them, help them save, avoid 120 tons of CO₂ emission on a yearly basis. By now, you probably already read my slide, and you are curious about this greater than 80% customer spend.
Bear with me for a second, because there's something important first to tell you. Creating this kind of experience, intimate with our customers, create a raving fan from GEA. They talk about their relationship. They are happy, they trust in our people, and they are talking in the industries that it works to be partner of GEA, and then that generates 80% more spend from the customer, because we can cross-sell, we can up-sell more spare parts, more services, more consultants, more training, because they truly trust us. It's a win-win performance partnership. We deliver great experience for our customers, and we gain more healthy business with them. That helps us to grow more, to grow faster, and to be even more profitable, and that is why GEA Services will be the reason our customers are buying from us, because of this kind of phenomenal experiences we can deliver.
Let's talk about Productivity. Tom mentioned that performance partnership is enabled by digitalization. I'm really excited to talk to you about GEA InsightPartner Dairy Powder Suite, which is a condition monitoring solution, where we use thousands of data points from our customers' operations to provide them with real-time insights, guidance on how to see and take actions on the health of their assets. We are actually putting in the pockets of our customers very high-level information of their assets' health, and we help them dig into the details to where is the problem, what are the required actions to take, so to solve and recover the system even faster. This is a way for us to expand the service contracts in subscriptions.
It is an opportunity for us to up-sell and cross-sell, because being part of the customer, providing the maintenance, connecting our customers with our experts in real time, give them again the trust in GEA. And that is really a way of delivering value for our customers, right? There is one thing to add into these solutions that we are adding. These are not inside-out solutions that we say, "I'm going to create something." These are co-created with the customer. Before we launch it, the customer is already expecting it and rooting for it, because it's co-created and it's delivering value for the customer where they need. And it's really important that we go in that direction for faster growth.
In terms of sustainability, sustainability is on our DNA, and this example relates to our international repair network, where we provide our customers with extended life cycle support for their assets. In a very customer-intimate relationship, we add value for them on their daily operations, and that happens by increasing the machine lifetime, guaranteeing continuity of their operations, and being present close to them in more than 20 locations globally. With this kind of offer, we rent more than 450 bowls in a year, and we repair over 2,000 bowls in a year for our customers. I hope that with these examples, I have built for you the understanding of what performance partnership is. It's measurable, it's quantifiable, it's real impact for our customers in total cost of ownership.
That's what matters for them, in availability, in trust on their suppliers, and they are ready to invest money on the companies that support them. On the other side, for GEA, we have more customer intimacy. We can sell value, not on the price basis, and we can unlock and execute significantly on this potential by having products and being partner of our customers. So we are really transforming the way we do services. We are already doing it and are going to expand on it. That's in summary, and to conclude my time with you, just to reinforce the message. I started by telling you that services will continue to be a very relevant lever of GEA's growth and profitability, and we are going to add this EUR 1 billion of sales by 2030 because of this, that I have explained.
With this higher service share at a higher profitability profile, we truly contribute with our sales growth greater than 5%, our EBITDA objectives of, uh, between 17% and 19%, and also as well with our ROCE. This is based on these four pillars: Performance Partnership, Recurrent Revenue, Sales Intensity, and Excellence. I'd like to thank you for this, and I hand over back to Stefan Klebert to talk about our growth pillars.
Thank you very much, Lucas. It's always great to feel your passion for service. Thank you very much. So the last presentation showed you what are our ideas to boost our growth. We spoke about what can we do with sustainable products, how is sustainability helping us to grow. We spoke about the opportunities in New Food, alternative proteins, what we can do in digitization, and last but not least, also what we can do in service. I think it was also quite impressive. Let me now put it in a bit more broader context, and I would like to show you some more verticals and technologies and regions where we also expect on top additional growth above average.
And I would also like to remind you that we in GEA are in extremely resilient markets, where we also have a lot of mega trends, which helps us to grow. For instance, we have a growing world population, also Frederieke mentioned that. We have a continuous increasing trend to more food safety and more food quality. We have a growing middle class, and therefore, also, more need for medications, and there is also a growing urbanization. All these trends are kicking into our growth strategy, because all these trends create a higher demand for processed food and medicines. We made a deeper dive, as I said, in some of our technologies, some of the verticals, some of the regions, and we defined where do we expect above average growth. This is what you can see here in that list.
You see the technology, you see the vertical, and you see the region, and you see also the CAGR we expect with this technology and this vertical in these regions during the next years. And you also see a information, what is the size of the topic we are talking about. Let me give you a deep dive here, a deeper dive in one example. It's about our pharma business. It's about tablet pressing. So far, tablets are produced in a batch process. So the material, the ingredients are mixed, and then this batch goes into the tablet press, and at the end, you have the number of tablets which are produced. Either they are all good, or you can throw them all away. That is one risk. And it's also when you are developing new medicines.
First, normally, the pharma customers start with a small equipment, with a small tablet press. Once they feel and they see that this medicine is good, they scale it up, and this takes time. We are here developing, and we have developed a continuous tableting system. It's already sold to seven customers. This is really a breakthrough innovation in the pharmaceutical business, because so far, as I said, everything was produced in a batch. We own significant patents, and by doing so, we can help our customers to scale up faster. That means they have more usage time when they have a patent of the medicine. And due to the fact that they can also take out of the machine every minute, every second, a sample, bring it to the laboratory, check it, if it's everything okay, they can interfere and step into the process whenever something goes wrong.
Sometimes the ingredients for the tablets are really expensive, and therefore, they can also save money. That is something, one example, where we expect an above average growth in the next years, and that also, you saw the indications. I flip back here. 15%-20% is the CAGR we expect here, and that will create for us a sales bucket, EUR 50- EUR 150 million during the next years until 2030. Another deep dive I have is environmental business. You know that we are very strong in separation and decanting technologies, and there is an increasing demand to treat wastewater. This is also because of the growing world population, of growing urbanization, of growing health and safety demands worldwide, and it's expected that the amount of treated sludge doubles almost between 2020 and 2030.
Or to say it in different words, the percentage of wastewater which is professionally treated will increase from 56 to approximately 80%, and that opens up great growth opportunities. We have the right portfolio in our decanting business, and we also have combined it with digital solution. It's a kind of artificial intelligence behind that. We can really control and monitor that device, that at the end, we have the optimized sludge with as less water as possible, because the sludge needs to go away from the wastewater treatment area, and that causes logistic costs. And this is, of course, then something where we can save money for our customers, and less logistic cost is also, again, less CO₂ footprint. Yeah, let me sum that up.
I mean, how do we achieve this 5% growth or above 5% growth as a CAGR in the next years? It's a mix of new machine and service. Service will grow a little bit faster than new machines, but we will have a support from the sustainable products. We commit to increase our share of sustainable solutions from 41.5% to more than 60%. We expect a business of about EUR 400 million in the with New Food, with alternative proteins. We see huge growth opportunities also in digital business. We have already 7,000 machines connected, and we are targeting for more than 35,000. Tom explained that also to you. Service sales is increasing. That's a huge step, again, from 38% - 40% of total sales, and in total numbers, it's almost EUR 1 billion of service sales we intend to add.
And this is, like I said before, it's a very resilient service sales, because this is normally recurring revenue, and there is also a high profitability behind. We have also a clear plan for above-average growing verticals. I gave you two examples from a huge list of ideas we have, and we follow up here. At the end, last, but not least, the Vitality Index. That means the number or the share of products younger than five years, we will also increase to 30%, and that brings me to the next topic, and is the handover to Johannes. You know Johannes. I also wanna say he's a very great and valuable member in all this transition we made at GEA.
He joined GEA shortly before our last Capital Markets Day, and that was also the start for us to align all purchasing and production activities on a group level. Because, you know, we spend a lot of money for suppliers, and that was never ever coordinated before. Johannes and the team did an excellent job in really finding additional money, which you can see in our profitability, and he will tell you more what comes in the next years. Johannes, stage is yours.
Thank you, Stefan. And before we come into the more cost-related topics I would like to present a little later, I'd like to start with innovation. And the good news on innovation is it ties everything together. When you see our claim, Mission 30 it's about growth, value, and impact, and what's needed for that is innovation. Just looking to the numbers, and Stefan mentioned that already, our Vitality Index, we are measuring our share of new products not older than five years, has come up in the last coming years already significantly, and we will be reaching 25-27 percentage points by the end of 2026. That is basically from a starting point, 21, that 10% a significant improvement and also needed in order to fuel our future growth.
We will have ambitions to that, and so we agreed in the Board to say: Let's focus on having 30% by the end of 2030 as a Vitality Index targets. That is only possible if we are continuously investing in innovation, and you have seen here on the upper side of the graph, we have continuously increased our investments in innovation, and not only percentage-wise, as a percentage of growth, but also net-wise. So basically, at the end of the day, from 2021 to 2030, we will be increasing our R&D spendings or innovation spendings by 90%. And that will provide us the products, that will provide us the innovation which is needed to grow, and it's not only growth. Innovation is not needed for growth only.
I would like to present you or introduce you three dimensions where we think we need to be innovative. It's for growth, definitely, yes. We need to have new products, we need to have new solutions, we need to address new customer segments with innovative products, but we also need to innovate for sustainability. We heard that quite a lot, and we even saw many great examples in that area, so that needs to be done in addition. We must not forget our competitiveness, though, and that we call value innovation. So we need to have products which are tailored to the market, which are meeting the customer requirements in emerging markets at potentially a lower price level. So we need to also look in the cost side of our products.
So all three elements needs to be covered at the same time with innovation, and in the next couple of minutes, I'd like to introduce you to a couple of examples and structures we are implementing as we speak, and we have implemented them already during the last couple of years. Starting with innovation for growth, enabling the growth. When you look into growth and innovation for growth, we need to distinguish a couple of key levers. One is about customer-centric innovations, and here we are talking about co-creation with our customers together. We are talking about customer proximity in new markets. When it comes to digital innovations, we saw many examples already from Tom, which have been done already, but still we need to do more.
Here, we're talking about creating a backbone of all our products, which are digital, to our customers, to connect all our products, which creates scalable solutions and AI-powered solutions. That's all about digitalization. Life cycle innovation. Here, we talk more about connectivity, predictive maintenance, upgradeability, really changing the life cycle of our products proactively with our digital solutions. Rethinking business models, that's. The world is changing, and we need to look into what can we do different? How can we make our money different with our customers? So the different models we can apply can only be fostered and fueled by innovative solutions. Last but not least, there are also many radical innovations we need to do. It's not only incremental improvements of that what we're doing, we need to also rethink the way we are doing things completely differently.
Just giving a couple of examples for customer-centric innovations. We have 40 test centers around the world meanwhile, and Frederieke just introduced the test center in Hildesheim for the New Food, but we have 39 more in different areas, and here we are using those customer centers, customer test centers, to together with the customer, co-ideate, co-innovate, and co-develop products. It's helping us to address new markets, to really understand the customer requirements, and to enlarge our ecosystem of innovation beyond that, what we can do also to both our customers and our suppliers. A good example for a digital innovation comes again from our heating and cooling environment. Basically, we introduced two digital InsightPartners. InsightPartners, you heard that already. That is basically our word for our support systems, and we have one addressing the availability and the performance optimization in our heating and cooling plants.
We call it InsightPartner Blu-Red Care. And what that's doing, it is proactively analyzing and provides us a predictive remote control of more than 65 parameters in our heating and cooling plants, and helps us to proactive manage the service. It's AI-based, it is self-learning, and therefore, we can optimize together with the customer, or the customer itself can optimize the service. One area, which is a life cycle innovation, is more in the sustainability. So we have created a support function, a support digitalization solution called GEA Blu-Red Energy, where we are, again, AI-based, have a diagnostics of our heating and cooling plants to help significant delivery, the significant energy efficiencies in the plants. So that is one part where through digital innovation, we can help our customers to succeed in their marketplace.
When it comes to radical innovation, a new business model, I would like to introduce you our cooling and heating-as-a-service. So the idea is to have an on-demand cooling and heating delivery. It's again, AI-based, again, a digital solution, and we can leverage our GEA expertise with that. We have a significant improvement, when it comes to the efficiency of the plants. We can extend also our equipment lifetime with that by, for example, predictive maintenance, and it is from a cost-based to a value-based. We are also changing from CapEx to OpEx. It's a new business model. We do that together with an external partner, and this business model is changing also, our business in a very CapEx-intense environment, where we can address customers, with that comprehensive solution. Another radical innovation, it's that example here.
We do that together with a small start-up called Better Juice, and Better Juice, they came up with an idea how to use enzymes technology to naturally reduce the sugar content of juices. You can use those enzymes to reduce 80% of a sugar of, for example, an orange juice, and we helped the Better Juice start-up to industrialize that process, because in a lab is something else than doing it in an industrialized approach, so our expertise is how to scale, how to industrialize the process, and together with them, as a core partnership, we developed a new plant where they can now produce this kind of juice, and that is a starting point, an innovative starting point, partnership, to healthier solutions and healthier options in that area, so it's a radical innovation, which we are part of, and we are learning through that, too.
That was all about growth. The second dimension I wanted to introduce about sustainability, and we heard a lot about sustainability, and everything what we do has a certain sustainability component in it. Also, obviously, the innovation. When you look into that, that is our roadmap, how to integrate sustainability and circularity into the GEA solutions to meet our targets Nadine has introduced. Since 2023 already, the sustainability is already inbuilt in our engineering process. So in our standard process, every engineer is asked to consider the sustainability in the way they are doing R&D. From 2025 onwards, all new GEA innovations need to contribute to sustainability, and that will be measured, and that will also boost our GEA Add Better portfolio. Those are the products which have a certified, which have a testified.
I need to be careful with the word certified, kind of approved concept that they are much better from the sustainability perspective than before. And that Add Better product portfolio will also help us to boost our sales. In addition, in parallel, we are also focusing now on circularity. From 2025 onwards, we will establish circular product design principles in our R&D process, and all our new products will be circular already from 2030 onwards. That is a significant step into that direction in the second dimension of sustainability. How we do this? Because we also need to change the way we are doing. We need to change the way we are being innovative, and what we did last year, and we will continue to do this, we instituted so-called Sustainathons. It is a word mixed between a hackathon and sustainability.
So what we did, a Sustainathon tries to find radical innovations for specific customer-specific solutions and challenges we have in the company. We have taken our most difficult products from sustainability point of view, and tried to find, with a cross-functional team, a solution for that, a radical innovation for it. We put the teams together, and in more than eight events, with more than 100 participants, we have created more than 60 ideas, and many of them are now in the pipeline to be introduced as a product in 2025 or 2026 already, which is great. The idea and the recipe for success was really bringing cross-functional teams together, young talents to come together in a physical place, doing those hackathons, Sustainathons, and succeed with that.
The side effect was to motivate the people to bring the sustainability into the company, and everybody is really talking about it, and that gives a lot of purpose into what the people are doing. It results in a portfolio we call Add Better products. So all of those products you can see are labeled as Add Better, and you can see them here. Many of them have significant energy or resource savings compared to their previous products. Give you an example, our aseptic blower saves up to 31% of energy compared to the previous blower. Or, let's take the carbon capture here, is 21% less energy, and you can read all those other examples, and many more will come. The Add Better product portfolio goes through an internal control process.
We are really kind of working hard to be very clear what we mean with that, and only the best ones get that label. Last but definitely not least, we are talking about value innovation. Value innovation should focus on the cost of the product, because we need to be also, through innovation, competitive in the marketplace. And I want to give you only one example for that. That is our Decanter Pro series. We invented or we redesigned completely our decanter series. We modularized the system. It has a higher performance, at the same time, with a lower energy consumption. We standardized a lot of interfaces, which was then allowing us to produce it also in India. So we localized it, also with the local help of local engineers in India.
What you can see here, we more than doubled the sales since 2020 for the decanters. That was only possible by taking down the costs, by addressing that what we needed to do in order to localize the business, and what you can see here, it's by taking down the cost, we can help us also to grow the company. Just to summarize it, innovation is the glue of the Mission 26 - 30. It was the glue of the Mission 26 anyway. It's about growth, value, and impact, and you see it here in the growth, sustainability, and innovation. Those are the three elements. Just to summarize the impact, we are committing to increase our Vitality Index up to 30% until 2030.
All new products will contribute to the sustainability and will be circular already, and we will contribute big time with our innovation to the COGS levers, to our product costs. That's basically a great overview or bridge to my next presentation, which is focusing on COGS. COGS stands for cost of goods sold, and the idea was to also announce the value part of our presentation to focus on growth. We've covered innovation, now we're talking about grow, value. Just looking a little back, we started in 2021, and Stefan said that already significant measures, significant progress to address our cost baseline in both the manufacturing and the procurement.
Accumulatively, we will be achieving a EUR 140 million, a EUR 140 million contribution to the EBITDA of this company, which is pretty close to the Mission 26 already. So only EUR 10 million left in two years, so we are pretty much done. In addition, we have contributed with that program, with a lot of measures in both production and procurement, also to the cash targets of the company. So we've increased our procurement days by 12 days already, which is helping us on the cash side. The third dimension we were focusing on in the Mission 26 was on the sustainability, and our target of 60% reduction in the Scope 1 and 2 has been about to be reached already in 2024. So we, in total, are two years ahead of our plan.
53%, we have now reduced in the Mission 26 targets for the Scope 1 and 2. The next chapter in addressing the costs needs to be broader. The next chapter cannot just focus on production optimization and procurement levers. We need to look at more holistically, and therefore, in the board, we said we will decide on, let's focus the entire product costs. And the product cost, and the addressable product cost, what we can really address with the different programs, you can see here, it's broken down into four different areas. It sums up to EUR 3 billion as a cost block. That is our cost block we call COGS, cost of goods sold, and EUR 2 billion out of it, it's material. That what we are purchasing from our suppliers. EUR 400 million is the value that we are creating in our factories.
Another EUR 400 million is the value that we are creating through engineering towards our customers, and another EUR 200 million is on distribution network, transportation, and warehousing. So altogether, that's the cost block we would like to focus on in the next coming years to address and to optimize. How to optimize it? It needs to be a collaborative approach of production, supply chain, engineering, and procurement. It cannot be done by one function. It needs to be done end to end, and therefore, what we did, we started, and we have defined a comprehensive program to tackle those EUR 3 billion. You can see here. Again, the three major areas, functional areas, it's production, it's engineering and procurement and supply chain, and very important, the middle block, engineering and procurement, that is the key recipe.
We need to work together with the engineers and the procurement people in order to address the costs. What we did, we came up with eight different core programs in that overall program. You can see them here in the middle column, underpinned with major levers, and as we did in the last, in the last couple of years, that we set up a program, we have a plan, we are executing on that plan, we are measuring the progress. The same will happen with that program. Just to highlight a couple of things here on that page. Production optimization, it's about production network optimization. For example, in the last couple of years, we closed 19 sites, or we reduced 19 production sites, and that will continue. We will further localize, and we will further flexibilize our production network.
The next generation production, though, that's more about digitalization, having a backbone of digitalization in all our factories. Some of them are still very small and not very digital, so we need to improve there. And we need to focus more on sustainability within manufacturing. That's also a part of the journey. Sustainability is weaved in everything what we do here. The third part is we need to take our people with us, because to manufacture differently requires, especially when you go to digital manufacturing, you need to have an educational program for our people. So we need to take our people with us, so we started here a training journey and program, how to elevate our workforce there. The second block, and remember, that's the biggest cost block, we can address the EUR 2 billion with engineering and procurement, that is divided in four different areas.
We have the digital procurement excellence. That is just continuing what we anyway do. It's supplier management, it's negotiation, it is bundling, it is basically bringing new suppliers in. I would say that's the day-to-day's job of the procurement, together with a procurement localization, that we need to accelerate big time. The two middle blocks here, value engineering and engineering efficiency, that is exactly where the magic happens in the next coming years, because we need to focus more on design to value, on supplier-driven innovation. We need to have an ETO to CTO, that means engineering to order, to a configure to order program, that we are walking away from, the single entity being engineered customer-driven, rather to a more modular design. And we need to focus on our project excellence. How can we do more efficient engineering?
That all contributes to the engineering and the material block. Last but not least, the supply chain is about distribution, network optimization, transportation management optimization, transportation cost, and packaging optimization. And all that together comes in a program we will steer centrally, and we will decentrally then orchestrate and execute, because that is about living the matrix. Now, I would like to give you a couple of details, a couple of examples, where we have been making success already and progress, and where we still need to focus on. One topic on the localization. We think that localization of both production and procurement and engineering is the key to further growth on the one side, to address the markets, but on the other side, also to take down the cost.
You have seen already the example of the Decanter, which have been not only taking down the cost, but also having helped us to grow the the business with. It is but also about customer proximity. It's about lead time reduction, and it will help us to reduce also our CO₂ footprint, because if we are closer to the customer, we have less transportation costs. We will focus further on that. You see here the four factories we are having right now, and that will continue to be expanded. Currently, we have 1/4 of the production hours are produced in those factories, which is already great, and we have recently announced that we are further investing in our factory in Bangalore.
You heard me talking about digitalization of the production, and the core program we are starting, or we have started a year ago, is to introduce a manufacturing execution system, which is helping us to have a real-time production visibility. Which is helping us to data collect, to have an active worker guidance, to have a detailed shop floor planning. So that program is on the way. The first factories are live already, and until 2030 , we will be reaching out to 85% of all factories having an implemented manufacturing execution system. It's the backbone of the digitalization of the factories. It's a precondition on the one side, and will provide us a lot of profitability and productivity out of the factories.
It's a big program, but we are very well on the way, and with a very speedy team and with a very welcoming attitude of the factories, because everybody sees really the value add. Now we're coming into that middle block. Remember, basically, when it comes to the engineering and procurement optimization. One example of a localization of a product through value engineering is our steel fabrication in Farm Technologies. Historically, it has been produced in New Zealand with 45-50 weeks of lead time, and it was not competitive to be sold in the U.S. So what we did, we localized that completely in the U.S., and even the U.S. is not a low-cost country, we were able, through localization of the supply landscape, to reduce our cost by 20%.
In addition, it is not cheaper and faster in the shipping, 50% less shipping cost and 50% faster, and we also had a sustainability impact on 60% less CO₂ footprint. It's a very good example of one specific product we have localized, even in a high-cost country, to help us to be more competitive in the marketplace. That needs to be industrialized. The process needs to be industrialized, and therefore, we have started a design-to-cost initiative. You see on the left side, the levers. We are talking about materials substitution, materials reduction, modular portfolio, part simplification. All those levers we can apply to our existing product portfolio.
Design to cost is always addressing the existing product portfolio, and with dedicated expert teams, with a proven methodology and toolboxes we have now created, we will roll out that through the majority of our high running products in the next coming years. The first products are in the pipe already, and we are expecting significant cost savings or adjustments in the value, proposition to the customers, through that. And that, again, will help us to not only increase our profitability, but also to address markets which are price competitive or, to face our fierce competition, for example, in China. When it comes to the new products, the value, design to value, is more on the old products. Here is the modularization that comes to the new products.
We need to focus more on modularization of our product portfolio, and we did that very successfully in both areas here in the SFT homogenizers, but also in the FHT and the thermoformers, to really kind of have a modular design from the beginning. But it starts with sales. It needs to be embedded in the engineering and in the product management. So it's a chain which needs to be optimized throughout the entire value chain to really kind of be faster to market, to have a zero touch in order processing. We are also talking about support processes we can lean with that, and to scale up the impact from everything which we have in the customer side.
So that while we are focusing on the design to value on the existing product portfolio, on the modularization, we are going into the new products we are also developing. Now, going into the supply chain side, and I would like to introduce a very interesting thinking. We started a program on end-to-end lead time optimization. So we are looking from the order configuration, from the first ideas of a customer until shipment, and we are measuring the lead times, and we are trying to reduce the lead times. And by reducing the lead times, you find a lot of inefficiencies in the process. It's about missing guided selling, it's about missing modularization, it's about too much engineer to order, too many inventories, and so on.
If you really significantly shrink the lead times throughout the entire process, you will be able not only to reduce the lead times and having a, a shorter time to market with the customer, but you are immediately also reducing the costs. You see here four examples where we have reduced the lead times between 30% and 60%. 60% lead time reduction is significant, and by that, we were able to boost the profitability of that specific product by, sometimes two-digit numbers. And that is impressive. It is a longer process, but we have a lot of projects now in the pipeline, where one after the other, we also look to end-to-end process. Another example of.
Another example, that is our new distribution center in Hanover, fully automated, and that's the first of its kind in GEA, where we have a GEA-wide integration for many different business units. It's fully automated. It is reducing our throughput times, big time, our costs, and by the way, it's also, again, sustainable because we really built that to the latest and greatest sustainability criteria. We need to have more of those, and many more of those are in the pipeline, and that will address that cost block of the EUR 200 million on the distribution and networking part with those kind of new ideas. So to summarize it, from those levers, those eight different core programs, we will commit or we are committing to a net contribution of EUR 120 million to the EBITDA of this company by 2030.
We are pretty sure that we can reach it, because we have an underpinned plan. We know exactly what we need to do and stay tuned to measure and see the progress. With that, I would like to hand over to Bernd Brinker, our CFO, which will introduce more levers how to address our cost baseline.
Thank you, Johannes, and hello from my side as well. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to go into more detail on our G&A program, so general and administrative expenses. I think we have, I think, shown you impressively how we developed the profitability of the company in the course of the last years, and you have closely followed this development. And what you can see is that this improvement, which is evidenced by the gross margin development as well as by the EBITDA margin development, is impressive. But at the same time, there was no improvement in the area of G&A. And the question is: Why is this the case? What we have done since 2019, we have focused on the business fundamentals of GEA.
We have changed the setup, we have stabilized the company in order to be ready to improve profitability and to grow the company. What we have done in the course of this, is we have invested significantly into state-of-the-art instruments to improve financial transparency, despite our scattered landscape in the ERP environment. We have also invested in new functions, so you have just learned our progress in sustainability. You have learned our progress in digitization, which is very important to drive growth and to have introduced new business models, so therefore and we have also invested in things which are basically a little bit new, such as information security, with the big threats which start to happen since some years, and we have also invested in our global ERP program.
But now, we believe it's time to address also G&A, and that was the reason that we decided to start a G&A initiative in order to tackle G&A expenses. And I will show you, in the course of the next slides, what we have already planned, what we have initiated, and where we are, and what our expectations are. We have basically defined three initiatives to drive G&A in the future. The one element is Transform 360, which is the new name for our global ERP program. I will tell you more in a minute. The second initiative will address simplification in our organization. We are aware of our complexity, of our internal complexity, and we want to reduce internal complexity. And the third thing is automation and digitization.
We want to boost our internal and external efficiency by introducing new technologies which are available in the market already today. So let's go a little bit into the details. The global ERP program. We have already introduced this global ERP program, the Capital Markets Day 2019, so we have started also back in 2019. And the question is: What have we achieved since then? We have developed a very stable and strong foundation, and we have developed prototypes which are available to be used going forward. We have eliminated burning platforms, which means systems which are not supported anymore by suppliers. And already today, we have brought 30 legal entities live into our new system, so they are already working in the new environment. But honestly, are we there where we want to be? Are we there where we plan to be? Honestly, no.
We are behind schedule, and the question is, again, why? First, honest feedback, we underestimated the complexity. And second, we had to deal with many crises, and we have seen, during the former presentations, already a lot of geopolitical things which impacted our business. We had to deal also with the inflation, and we had to deal with COVID-19, which was not visible at the time when we started the program. When I joined in October last year, it was quite obvious that this global ERP program is the most important transformation project within GEA. So therefore, what we did is we started a strategic review in order to identify whether we are on the right track and what we might need to adjust in order to be successful going forward.
There are some good messages and some messages which we had to digest and which we had to implement in order to change something. The first message, which is a very positive message, the strategic direction of the program, which has been decided back in 2019, is fully confirmed. One global ERP program, one template approach, everything fine, state-of-the-art, exactly what GEA requires. But there was also the clear feedback that we had to shift away from a very much technical focus on rollouts to a more holistic approach in order to address the entire processes end to end, in order to be able to really crystallize efficiency. So therefore, we also decided to change the scope of the entire program. So we have included many more aspects in order to have this more holistic approach.
It is also quite obvious that we have to change our cost estimate on the program. We now plan to be ready by the year 2030, and we believe that based upon today's planning, we have to increase our annual spend until 2030 by EUR 10-EUR 15 million. At the same time, there is also a good message, because, as I said earlier, we want to focus more on value creation. As part of the business case analysis is what quite obvious that by the more holistic approach, we will also be able to realize much more value. So also the value case looks now more attractive. We expect roughly EUR 15 million per annum, so recurring savings once we have implemented the entire program. So what you can hear from that, we have repositioned our global ERP program.
I think this is most evidenced by the new internal name, which we call Transform 360. This is addressing enabling business excellence. It's not an IT project, it's enabling business excellence, and I would like to read the longer term because we need to onboard everybody within the organization to be part of this exercise, to be part of this journey, and to become an ambassador. So therefore, creating business value for all process stakeholders by seamless end-to-end harmonization and optimization. And we've made progress already since we repositioned this program. So therefore, we have a, as I indicated, a high expectation on the contribution of Transform 360. We believe it will create much higher efficiency. On the one hand side, operational benefits. Those operational benefits are, for example, a significant reduction in process time and process costs.
We will have state-of-the-art technology, which will create much, much better transparency from the top to the bottom of any process. We'll be able to accelerate our manufacturing process, which has also been covered by Johannes earlier. From today, very much focused on engineer-to-order processes into a variant configuration in order to reduce complexity and increase efficiency. And as I mentioned earlier, we will be able to introduce even more attractive new business models, which are based and built upon digitization. And last but not least, it will significantly help us to reduce our, or to improve our IT life cycle requirements. But there are also tangible financial benefits which come along, and we clearly believe that on the one hand side, this will be available once we have finalized the rollout, again, 2030.
We believe the full run rate of those financial benefits will be available roughly one and a half, two years after we have finalized the rollout, so basically in the financial year 2032. The financial benefits, two-thirds, we believe, will be allocated to COGS, and one-third will fall into the G&A bucket. Let me address the second initiative, which we have defined in the past weeks. It's addressing simplification within the organization. We are aware that internally, we are quite complex, and we want to reduce this complexity. One important element is the number of legal entities which we have in our setup. You can easily find the number by counting in the annual report, and you will find 221 legal entities in 59 countries. The ideal setup would be one legal entity in a given country.
If we do so, we are perfect in 30 countries. So we are now addressing 184 legal entities in 29 countries. And the target, the objective, is to significantly reduce this number of legal entities, because we are convinced that there is significant operational and financial benefit in order to do this simplification. And you can read out some of the main elements where we believe this will help. So, again, internal simplification, but we will also be able to reduce internal governance bodies, we will take out redundancies, we will optimize the span of control, and we can focus on our management organization much more than on our legal entity setup, which is also only, let's say, a vehicle to manage the business. The third element is process optimization and digitization.
This is more designed to drive future growth, so to leverage future growth. Already today, on the bottom of the slide, you can see process optimization, which we have done in the course of the last years. Business process management, shared services, cloud management, and business system, all this is available now, and we make efficient use of it. There is much, much more, and we want to introduce, we are in the course to introduce a new toolkit for digitization and process optimization. One element, which is very close to my heart, is fostering optimization in repetitive environments, so mass transactions. I'm talking about Robotic Process Automation, so RPA. Beyond RPA, there is much more. One example is service tools, as has been introduced by Lucas earlier. We want to drive this also by using generative AI.
Very easy to be applied and significant boost to the business. And the last area, which is, again, much more my home turf, financial planning and forecasting, where we can use big data and AI as well. So therefore, those digital initiatives, they are able, they will enable us to drive future growth without really increasing our G&A going forward. Let me go a little bit, one step deeper. So robotic process automation. Here, when I joined last year, I tried to familiarize myself with the status which we have achieved, and it was quite obvious that RPA offers significant potential. But it was also obvious that we have some internal pockets of excellence, and this pocket of excellence was in the North American region, and I very much interacted with those colleagues.
What we have established since then is a very strong, what is called Citizen Development program concept. We have now a group of people, already more than 80, in 55 legal entities of the GEA world, in more than 20 countries, who are addressing mass transactions in the area of finance, procurement, and customer service. You can see on the right-hand side which processes we are already addressing. Today, we started back in 2022 with 60 bots. That was something which I became aware. This was the pocket of excellence, which I described. Today, we have already 100 bots, and we have very ambitious plans to move that forward in order to address mass transactions, to take out manual costs, and to improve efficiency and stabilize the outcome of processes.
It is basically that we enable people without being a clear expert in coding, to this, to do this on their own, as you might do this on your home computer with establishing some nice macros, but again, in a bigger environment. How does that translate into financials? Starting again with our G&A ratio in the year 2023, we are at 11.4%. We are aware that we have to address also regulatory requirements, and that we have to introduce other strategic initiatives which will cost some G&A. So that is something which we included into our initiative, but we will be able to overcompensate those costs by our Transform 360 contributions, by the simplification of our legal entity set up, and by leveraging growth through applying digitization and optimization.
Our clear ambition is to reduce G&A ratio until 2030, to below 10% of sales. Let me summarize our G&A initiative. It is already today a solid foundation. We have defined clear initiatives, where we have clear view what we can achieve in the course of the next years. We haven't done that in the past, so therefore, there is significant potential, and we will drive this initiative in order to reduce G&A when we grow the company until 2030. And our expectation, but also our commitment, is that this will contribute 1.5 percentage points to EBITDA margin improvement until 2030. With that, I'm at the end of my section. I would like to hand back to Stefan.
Thank you very much, Bernd. Before we go to lunch, let's spend 15 minutes to talk about impact. This is a topic you might normally not hear at a Capital Markets Day, and I will use the next minutes to don't talk about growth, and I don't talk about value creation. I only want to talk about impact. What does it mean? Our purpose is engineering for a better world. You know that is our claim, our purpose, since many years. And we want to create a positive impact for our communities, for our employees, and for our customers. That is what really drives us every day. And we see three levers here: community engagement, thriving employees, and responsible innovation. What does it mean in detail? Let's talk about our community engagement.
So the towns and communities which are in the area where our production sites, our sales sites, this is an important cornerstone for our success. We want to contribute, we want to have an impact on these communities. And it's not only that we have clear goals for water treatment, for management of emissions, we also want to make and have an impact on the social community, on the engagement activities in those areas. Therefore, in all our sites, we engage and we encourage our employees to contribute to these communities. How do we do that? We do that with volunteering activities. So all our employees have the freedom that they can spend up to one day, which we pay, where they bring their knowledge into a good purpose. So let me make an example.
For instance, a marketing specialist goes to an NGO and help them to develop an advertising campaign, because it's a good purpose. It helps the community and the society. This is what we are fostering, this is what we are pushing, and where a lot of our employees are already engaged. We also want to donate 1% of our annual net profit, and we have clear targets what we do with that money. So for instance, we support since years, an organization in Tanzania who provide seven schools with safe water. Those of you who are based in Germany also may know the famous TV show, always in short before Christmas, Ein Herz für Kinder, where about 7 million of Germans are seeing that TV show.
And we spend every day, every year, also significant money, and it's about supporting children in need. We also donate to support people for education, especially in STEM, where we have also a benefit in our organization later on. Let's talk about employees and about the culture we want to create and what we do here. First of all, it's about leadership excellence. It's that we are setting an environment where our leaders can do a great job, where we train them, where we enable them to really be in a position to manage our people. The second thing is, we want to create high-performing teams. So we also give a lot of support here for the people to train them. I can also give you one example.
Last year, we sent 150 top managers for one full week to the famous IMD Business School in Lausanne. We had a clear syllabus, what to teach, what to learn, what to discuss. It was a great thing to have a good network between all our international managers build up, and a lot of know-how and knowledge could be transferred here. By the way, we also spent half a day about value pricing, which is a very important thing also for all our managers. Performance and engagement. We have introduced a clear process that every employee gets annual feedback, what we expect from him or her, how he or she can do better, and this is also important that people can develop and that we give a clear feedback and a clear frame. Pay for performance, we also spoke about that.
I spoke about that in my introduction. That's also important part, because we want to give something back to the people if they perform. We want to also tell them, "You did a good job," and that has also something to do with money. But not only, and that is my last point here, it's also about recognition and appreciation. So we started, I think three years ago, was it, Jill, when we started with our Better Awards. So we introduced a process where everybody, every employee, can nominate a colleague because he or she thinks this person had done an outstanding job in terms of sustainability, in terms of innovation, in terms of caring about others. We have different categories. And then we select these people and we invite them, doesn't matter from where they are, from Argentina, from China, from Germany, from Netherlands, doesn't matter.
We invite them to a central place where we make a huge celebration, and we celebrate the good performance they do. This is an outstanding event, where a lot of motivation goes out to the company, not only to those who win, also to those who watch it and see it. The third thing is about responsible innovation. You know, when I told you that this is a cornerstone of our overall strategy, not only because we strongly believe we have an obligation to save the planet, it's also that it is a growth opportunity for us. Innovation means we have a clear target to have 30% Vitality Index by 2030. Johannes spoke about that, and that is also, of course, helping us to have more sustainable products.
Because you can imagine, if 30% of our products are new, not older than five years in 2030, that there is always a focus on resource efficiency, and that will also contribute, and this is what we understand as a responsible innovation. 100% of our new products will be circular ready in 2030, because, you know, the circular economy is also a very important thing to save the planet and to give an impact on our future. Digitization is also very helpful because with digitization, we can optimize a lot of processes, we can save money, we can save resources, we can make processes more efficient. I think you remember many things which Tom presented.
And of course, service is a very, very important lever to be more sustainable, because if we can enlarge the duration, our, the lifetime of our products with a good service, that also means that there is less waste and less resources which are lost. And last but not least, our commitment for sustainable solutions. We are targeting for a share larger 60% for sustainable solutions. So altogether, once again, our Mission 30 agenda, and that is really important also for me and the team, that you understand it's not only growth, it's not only value, it's also about impact. We want to make an impact to the community, for our people and for responsible innovation. And with that, I think it's time to have lunch. Thank you very much for listening, and we continue at 12:55 P.M.
At GEA, we believe in a holistic approach to reaching sustainability targets. An approach that not only meets today's needs, but anticipates the demands of a constantly evolving tomorrow. Picture a production process where both your energy consumption and total cost of ownership drop by 30%. 90% of your factory's heat demands can be met through upgraded waste heat, and your CO₂ emissions will drop to zero if green electricity is applied. This is NEXUS, a holistic engineering solution that leads the way to a world where production does not come at the cost of our planet's health. The smallest detail in one area can make the biggest difference in another, so the trick is to look at the greater whole. GEA NEXUS combines our in-house heating and cooling and process expertise, merging benefits of sustainability, productivity, and operational costs.
With GEA, it's not just a vision, it's a reality we're creating now, one plant at a time.
I think it must be around three years ago when we first came together. It's really great to catch up with the project team again back at the blender.
When we started the journey of building this factory with huge dreams and with the idea of how we would inspire wider change, we had no idea of the pathway we were going to take.
Of course, we have done big projects before, but in this case, I remember we all knew right from the beginning that we have to go much further than usually. The big task was here to get rid of fossil fuel completely, which we achieved by pushing each other.
In a traditional way of design, we would have approached the process side and heating and cooling separately. Here, we've brought them together right from the start, and that's where the opportunity lies.
I remember drawing on the whiteboard in the meeting room and how everybody turned their heads and realized how important it is to think about heating and cooling at the same time during the design phase.
For me, the scariest moment was calling up the Port of Rotterdam and asking them not to put in the gas line to the site. That was a moment in time where there was no going back. We were making a completely fossil-free site for the future.
We all really wanted to build that first carbon-neutral factory. That's not to say the design process was easy or simple. We would describe it as a bit of a zigzag of a process as we went through.
In the end, we want everyone to know it is possible. So I encourage you to make the change, carefully pick your sparring partners, and take that leap. The people in your business, the planet, and also your profits will definitely benefit from it.
Cheers! Cheers. Yeah. Thanks.
A bottle of nutritious formula, a refreshing glass of low-sugar orange juice, a bowl of gluten-free pasta, a precious vaccine to reunite an elderly woman with her grandchildren. GEA technologies are working behind the scenes to improve quality of life for people around the world. Working behind the scenes towards a cleaner, healthier environment, turning waste into fertilizer to grow food, safeguarding clean drinking water for millions of people, helping food manufacturers use less plastic, enabling industry to emit less CO₂e and recycle more carbon, and decarbonizing cities and businesses through waste heat recovery. Across industries and around the world, GEA is behind the scenes, ensuring production processes are safer, smarter, and more efficient.
We're putting this into practice across our own operations, adopting science-based targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2040, and by making our existing operations climate neutral through investments in wind, solar, and biomass projects around the world. Safer, smarter, and more efficient production and processes. GEA is engineering for a better world.
Back into the room, taking your seat.
Can I? If I click, can I? Now we are closely getting to the final band with a financial ambition.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back from lunch. Microphone. Okay. Does it work? Okay.
Mine's on.
Welcome back from lunch. It's now time for the dessert. I'm going to present to you, in the course of the next section, our financial ambition, which is basically a combination of all what you've learned today. This is already very familiar to you in terms of growth. We are committing to an organic sales CAGR of more than 5%, and for value and impact, our EBITDA margin is expected to grow into a range of 17%-19% until 2030. At the same time, the return on capital employed will move ahead, more, to more than 45%. Let's talk about restructuring. I would like to start with a view on what we have discussed back in 2021.
Even already back in 2019, it was quite clear that the company requires a lot of restructuring in order to stabilize the structures, to stabilize the business. And as a result of that, we have defined very clear restructuring buckets, which we believe are necessary to stabilize the company. This was also part of the Mission 26. There we indicated that we need to continue the restructuring in order to stabilize. We also committed that for the period 2023 until 2026, there is a magnitude of roughly EUR 150 million of restructuring expenses, and all of this is confirmed. But at the same time, we are now we intend to end a separate disclosure of restructuring expenses. So we, in the future, beginning 2027, we will not have any additional separate recognition of restructuring expenses anymore.
You will not see us referencing to an EBITDA before restructuring. We will only report an EBITDA margin, that's it. Why is that the case? Because we have ended, in twenty twenty-seven, the phase of the need to invest into stabilizing this company. What is also important here, as a takeaway, is that the Mission 26 consisted of seven pillars, where the majority was self-help measures. This was important in order to give us confidence that we will be able to manage the profitability targets according to our commitment. But it was also, from our point of view, important for you, that you have a high level of confidence. Now, I think we have established a track record where we want to build upon, and even for the Mission 30, we still have measures which we call self-help measures. It's not all about self-help anymore.
We are also addressing structural growth opportunities. You've learned that from previous presentations. But we will continue to have self-help measures, but without a separate recognition of restructuring expenses going forward. So let's talk about growth again. What are the concrete initiatives to achieve these ambitious growth targets? On the one hand side, we expect our new machine business to grow by more than 4%, while our service business, which have been presented in much more detail by Lucas earlier, has the potential to grow by more than 6%. What are the main levers to achieve that growth? You have listened today to Nadine. She has presented, in combination with Ilija and Kai, our ambition and our options and our opportunities to grow in the area of sustainable solutions.
You have listened to Frederieke, who has, I think, strongly emphasized that while the market has not developed in the way we originally expected, there is so much potential and that we are a clear leader in the market, that we have everything technology-wise to drive that market, so New Food contribution. You have listened to Tom, who has shown our ability to deliver on digital growth. You've also listened to Lucas, who was able to show you the next level of service contribution, building upon a high level of success, which we have established since 2021. You have listened to Stefan, who has highlighted certain areas where we believe, in certain verticals, there is above-average growth opportunity.
Last but not least, Johannes has shown our ambitions in terms of Vitality Index, built upon our innovation potential, where we believe that this will also be a driver for future growth. This gives us the confidence to be able to deliver more than 5% growth until 2030 as a CAGR. What's in, in terms of value? Again, the bridge here, we are, for this year, our current guidance is 14.9%-15.2%, and the ambition is to achieve 17%-19% in the year 2030. What are the key levers here? First of all, I would like again to start with the area where we need to invest. We are fully aware that we will need to cover regulatory elements, they will not reduce over time, and we need also to cope with inflationary environment.
At the same time, we are even happy to invest further into sustainability and into innovation. This will help us to grow the business to support structural growth opportunities. But this will be by far overcompensated by what we have shown you during the course of today. On the growth side, the value and the volume and margin expansion, the service business will contribute significantly here. The digital solutions are a key lever. The HRT presentation, which we have learned, they all will support the growth element. Then we have the COGS savings, which we haven't really addressed to the extent possible. We have started in the procurement environment. Now we are going more for a holistic approach in terms of COGS, and last but not least, the G&A potential.
We haven't addressed that yet, therefore, there is significant potential, and we are sure that we can deliver on our commitment. So therefore, we are aware that these financial targets are ambitious, but they are realistic at the same time. I would like to introduce an additional topic which we haven't discussed today in more detail yet, and this is EBITA versus EBITDA. We are fully aware of the ongoing discussion in the market, and we are aware of the preferences, and we have also internally discussed this, and we have decided to continue our EBITDA KPI reporting. But at the same time, we have internally recognized the value of introducing EBITA as an additional KPI for internal and external reasons. Obviously, in the area of capital allocation, there is benefit by focusing on EBITA, especially in the area of business steering.
EBITA also provides a much stronger accountability for capital investments in the business. For obvious reasons, we need to make the managers responsible and accountable for what they want to do in their business environment. And last but not least, we are fully aware that the capital intensities throughout our divisions vary. We have differences here, and we want to improve the comparability and the transparency. So therefore, we'll use it internally for decision-making processes, but we'll also report externally in order to give you additional information on our development. In the middle of the chart, you can see the reconciliation from EBITDA to EBITA. And you can see that based on the financials for 2023, our EBITA margin before restructuring is at roughly 12%.
When we translate everything what we have shown today, we are also committed to deliver an EBITA margin in a range of 15%-17% until 2030. Now, in the course of the next slides, I would like to focus more on capital allocation. Let's start with capital investments. You are aware that we invested a lot in the course of the last years, and even this year, the year 2024, is a, let's say, has the highest level of capital investments. Why is that the case? Because based upon the quality of the asset portfolio, we have identified that we need not only to restructure in certain areas, but also to invest in certain areas in order to stabilize the quality of the portfolio. As a result of that, we have introduced a Factory of the Future in Kozienice, in Poland.
This happened in the year 2021. We have also invested a lot into our homogenizer site in Parma. This happened in the year 2023, and now we have decided to invest in the pharma business, so lyophilization in Germany. And this is the main driver for those high investments. There will also still be a relatively high number in the year 2025. It will again be in the magnitude of, let's say, EUR 200 million. But beginning after 2025, or even including this year, if we see the drop to 2025, we are committed to reduce the CapEx investments to a ratio down to the range of 2.5%- 3%. This is possible now because we have significantly increased the quality of our asset portfolio.
The second contributor in the area of cash flow is the net working capital. I think you will all agree that we have made huge progress in the area of net working capital, and that we are, let's say, a little bit of best in class here with the level which we achieved. The current corridor, which we guide for, is a net working capital corridor of 8%-10%, and we have made progress in almost all areas. Now, we believe we can be even a little bit more aggressive here because we believe there is potential, and the biggest potential which we see today is in the area of inventory. So therefore, there is a commitment to have a little bit more aggressiveness in the area of net working capital. There is also a contribution from net working capital in the Mission 30.
How does this translate into free cash flow? First of all, I would like to start with what happened in the past. We were able to generate a free cash flow in the period 2019 to 2023 of EUR 2.2 billion. Quite an impressive number already, and the, let's say, best news here or the best information is our cash conversion rate, where we achieved almost 50% in the year 2023. But now, based upon the higher profitability, the lower CapEx, and the net working capital improvement, we are even more ambitious. And here, the indication is we expect a free cash flow generation for the period 2024 until 2030, in the magnitude of more than EUR 4 billion. And the target for the cash conversion rate in the year 2030 is more than 60%.
So I believe also a very significant improvement in the area of free cash flow. What's in for our shareholders? We want our shareholders to be part of this journey and to participate in the success. You can see what we have done in the course of the last years. According to our commitment, we have slightly increased year by year the dividend per share, now to something of EUR 1 per share for the year 2023, which we decided in 2024. Now we have decided to update our dividend policy, and there is one change, but still there is significant impact. Now, we want to distribute approximately 50% of the net profit.
In the past, it was up to 50%, and you can see clearly from the payout ratio, which we have had in the past. We were below 40%, so there is a clear potential for an uplift in the dividend going forward. 50% of the net profit, approximately, should be available for distribution. As we have highlighted, our journey also implies an improvement over time, so therefore, we expect also the potential for the dividend to increase over time until 2030. There is an additional element, I think, which was well-received by the markets in November 2023, where we introduced the second share buyback program after we have finalized the first one, EUR 300 million in 2022. We are now working on a EUR 400 million share buyback program, which will last until February next year.
So now we are executing this in order to take out surplus cash, which is really not efficient in our balance sheet structure. And there is a view that we will continue to use this or to consider this option if we have the same situation in the future. As a side remark, we decided also to cancel all those shares, so the shares of the first share buyback program have been canceled already, and once we have finalized the current share buyback program, we intend also to cancel the current volume. What is the big picture in terms of capital allocation? The first, the fundament, is a clear commitment to continue with our commitment to maintain a solid credit rating in the investment grade area. If this is the underlying assumption, then we have four priorities, and they are ranked in terms of priorities again.
Number one, the clear number one, we want to invest in our business, organic growth being driven by very strong capital expenditure in the area of high value potential. This should support our growth. The second priority is dividends. We want to be attractive in terms of dividend payout, and there is value for shareholders involved. We want them to be part of our success story going forward. The third priority is we continue to look for M&A. You are all aware that we haven't done really acquisitions in the past, but there is still the intention to do M&A, to do acquisitions going forward. However, it needs to fulfill two criteria. The first criterion, strategic fit. The second criterion, once we have agreed upon strategic fit, is value creation potential.
That, in the past, was always the issue, that the combination of those two did not really match, so therefore, we did not do anything in that area. We are still committed to pursue this option if there is something available in the market. Today, we have EUR 2 billion as firepower available. This firepower will grow over time, with increasing profitability for obvious reasons, and we are most interested in strengthening our portfolio in our core areas, which is food, beverage, and pharma. The last option, number four, is share buybacks. As I already introduced, this is an option in order to improve the efficiency of our balance sheet if there is surplus cash available, if there is no option being available to really spend it in a way which is value creating, then we are willing again to consider share buybacks going forward.
Let me conclude. This is our set of financial targets for the Mission 30. Again, ambitious targets, but in my view, realistic targets. We have defined those targets as a team effort. We have worked on it for quite a while. It's a very consistent financial ambition, which is built upon clear plans, clear commitments from all members involved. And we are here to commit, and we are here to deliver in the course of the next years, and we are happy to report on an ongoing basis on the success of our journey. With that, I conclude my section, and would like to hand back to Stefan.
Thank you, Bernd. We are almost at the end of the presentation. I hope we have been able to explain to you what we intend to do during the next years, that we are on the Mission 30 now, that we wanna achieve additional growth, more than 5%, an EBITDA margin 17%-19%, which translate in the EBITA, 15%-17%, a ROCE above 45, and that we also wanna make an impact to the society, to the communities. It will be a good place for our employees, and we will do responsible innovation. You know, when I joined GEA about five and a half years ago, the company was in a quite different situation, and I'm really proud and happy that together with this excellent team we have, we could deliver, I would say, probably the most impressive turnaround story in the German stock-listed markets.
We are meanwhile at the highest profitability level ever in this company, and we have presented you what else we can do, and let me also make a remark. I'm also extremely happy, like I said, about the team we have here. Many, many things changed in GEA during the last five years. All of the people you saw today from the top management have less time in their current top management role than me, and many of them are coming from the organization. They have been at GEA before, like Ilija, like Kai, like Nadine, but they are now playing on a different level, and this is combined with other people which came from outside, and I think this combination really helped us to deliver the performance you see today.
And I'm very happy and optimistic that we will continue with this journey. GEA is an attractive investment opportunity, and the question is, of course, why to invest now? We have leading positions in very attractive and resilient markets. Our markets are really growing. We have all the megatrends you heard about, which are kicking in and helping us to grow. We are a sustainability pioneer, number 33 worldwide, number 3 in Germany. We do something which impacts the world. And we will continue to grow our highly profitable service business from 38% to 40%, which is, for a machine building company, also a very, very outstanding value. We will create a strong free cash flow of about EUR 4 billion, and we think, and we are convinced that we have an attractive valuation.
That's also the reason why we are, at the moment, buying our own shares, because we believe that this is a great investment. That all concludes our presentation for today. We will have a short break now until we continue with the Q&A session. But please be seated. We just need to change something here.
We are now ready to start the Q&A. First of all, thanks again to everybody here in the room in Amsterdam for following our Capital Markets Day, but also from the webcast. There will be the opportunity for sure, here in the room to ask questions, but we also are happy to take questions from the website. For those being online with us, please be reminded that there is, in the upper left corner of your screen, a button where you can also ask questions and send questions to you. I will then read your questions here in the room. But if the team is prepared, I would suggest that we start here in the room, taking the first questions. There is my colleague, Rebecca, with a microphone that will then-
Is it working?
Come to you. And just some rules, if you ask a question, please tell your name and company name, and please not more than two questions at a time. I already see Klas with their hands up and thenK
Can you please switch off the beamer? Otherwise, I'm blinded by the lights.
So I think Klas, I think, was first, and then-
Just-
Sebastian, I think.
Yes, it's working finally.
Thank you. Klas at Citi. So, first on the growth target, the sustainability push is new this time. Are you making it more commercial? You have New Food, and then you have digital. When I add this up, I get over EUR 700 million of revenues. That explains about 2 percentage points out of the 5% growth. I add in service, EUR 1 billion, I get to five. That basically is pretty good because it basically tells me that there is no real equipment growth baked in. That sort of becomes a bonus. But one thing around this is: How do we make sure that this is achievable? Are incentives changing in the front end? Are we changing also the business model on the sustainability side to include performance guarantees, et cetera, in partnering with customers, as you've done on the service side?
I'll stop there. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for the question, Klas, and thank you for making the math. It's right. I mean, if you sum up all the idea, it is absolutely feasible what we promise. That, I think, is a very, very important message. And some of the ideas or development are new. We've put a lot of R&D resources into sustainability. You saw also examples like the AddCool spray dryer, for instance. We also changed many, many things in the sales organization to really make the sales organization more pushy. So it starts with better reporting and making clear who is doing what. We are also about changing the incentive scheme, that it is not a yearly-based payment, it's a quarterly payment.
Many, many things are helping us to really boost the growth situation, and therefore, we are quite optimistic. And you are absolutely right, we also, th at's also what we said. Service will grow faster than new equipment, so new equipment, larger 4%, service, larger 6%, altogether, larger 5%, and we feel quite comfortable with that number.
Thank you. My second one is on G&A, Bernd, for you. You said that you had underestimated the complexity. You're beyond schedule on ERP. So I'm trying to understand a little bit more what's different this time. I totally get that self-help stories, they happen in steps. You've done the gross margin journey first, and now it's time for G&A. But G&A and these sort of zebra companies have always been the big problem in GEA. It's been a very complex journey. So how are you, again, changing this in terms of incentives, getting the organization behind it? Because it feels like a difficult task. Thank you.
Yeah, so I think there are two elements which I would like to highlight. The first element is outside-in, and that was basically the same what I did. If you do outside-in analysis, it's quite obvious that GEA's G&A performance is not in line with best practice, so therefore, if we do really a benchmarking, then it looks there is really potential. Second, when I joined in October last year, and I shared that also in the meantime with some of you, there were some very obvious areas, but it also needs the right level of attention. While everybody would agree that GEA is a complex organization, be it from an external point of view or internal point of view, you need to drive initiatives.
And I think in the past, the majority of the energy has been spent to do things which you have seen, and this was a great success. So now, my commitment is to work on those areas I have shown you today in more detail, because this is untapped potential. And so far, I can share with you that internally, there is obviously concern, but I would highlight that there is even more support and appreciation of those ideas to remove internal hurdles, because nobody wants to start in the morning with the impression that it's quite complex, but let's continue to work as we did in the past. So therefore, there is potential, and we will address that, and G&A will contribute significantly to the journey we've just highlighted.
Okay, then we had the second question over there from Sebastian.
It was actually first Sebastian.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, another Sebastian indeed, Sebastian from BNP Exane. The first questions I would have is around the sales ambition, the more than 5% CAGR that you have put forward. If one looks back at the last three years, and one looks at the growth in new machines and then also in services, then it strikes me that new machines has only been growing because of price hikes. So the first question then that comes to mind is: What sort of also pricing tailwinds is embedded in this more than 5% CAGR? And if you could decompose that into what is new machines and then also in services. And if I may pick your brain on services, you have emphasized a lot, I think, around recurring revenues from services.
So could you just share with us what is sort of the current split between recurring revenues services versus ad hoc ones? And also walk us a bit through the sort of ambition levels in terms of the growth rates for the two buckets?
Okay. I mean, yes, price increase will also play a role in our growth. That's a part of the growth. However, you know, inflation is going down at the moment worldwide, so we have to, we don't expect this kind of large inflation rates in the future. And all the things we explained today, all the ideas, all the additional buckets, they will help us to grow. And that will be the, y eah, at the end, the combination, yeah, which brings us to that number. That is the first question. The second, what is recurring revenue in service? I mean, at the end, I would say, even if there is very little guaranteed recurring revenue, it's at the end, almost 100% recurring revenue.
Because if a customer is operating with our machine and equipment, then it's also clear that they need spare parts, they need consumables, they need also other help and support. And, of course, it's not all based and integrated into long-lasting contracts, but at the end, if a customer bought our equipment, is operating the equipment, then there is also a very large dependency to buy the things from us.
Okay. The other question I had is around EBITDA and more the margin trajectory. So we have now been given here six years our targets. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts and thinking around the sort of slope of that very margin expansion. And what springs to my mind is, on the revenue side, it sounds very much like you have levers like New Food, which are more back-end loaded. The same I would take from the slides applies to also the COGS, because COGS is very much closely linked, I think, then also to the ERP rollout, which you put at 2030. So if you could help us a bit with the slope, that would be great.
Yeah. I mean, that's the nature of our mission targets, that we give what we wanna achieve in the year 2030. We don't give now a breakdown on each years. We will, of course, give a guidance every year. I wouldn't say that this is back-end loaded. Of course, we need some more time to change our ERP systems, and when it is about G&A, that might come rather later than earlier. But all the other things, we are already in, yeah? We do the COGS programs, we do our optimization and production. It's already continuing, and it's not that we start tomorrow after we have told you what we do. So, and that will balance. Of course, you see cycles from the economy, but, I don't expect any backloaded situation.
I think we will have a continuous improvement, like you also could see during the last years. Despite all the crisis we had, GEA walked the talk, and we always deliver what we promised.
Good. Then over to-
Sebastian?
Sebastian, and then I would say we take the first question from the web and then back to the room.
Yeah, Sebastian Künne from RBC. My first question is for Mr. Brinker. You already mentioned some of the additional spending, EUR 10-EUR 15 million per year. Can you just say if that is only relating to ERP system rollout, and what other costs you have for digitalization and reducing complexity? That'll be my first.
Okay. So, you've seen from the presentation that I referenced the EUR 10-15 million additional cost clearly to Transform 360 with which is our global ERP setup. So, what you might have in your models and what we've spent in the past was roughly EUR 30 million. Now this will be increased by this EUR 10-15 million and it will last until 2030. There is. This EUR 10-15 million does not include any additional contribution from other G&A initiatives, so this legal entity reduction program will have its own dynamics. There is, from my point of view, clear and significant potential. However, we haven't done all the analysis yet. We have done a top-down, and I would not say desktop analysis, but we have a clear understanding on the potential.
Now we will work with the business to identify a clear business plan for each merger situation or reduction, situation. And there will be most likely the one or the other one-off cost element, which is not included in this EUR 10-EUR 15 million. But we will only do things with a very attractive business case, and I believe there will be majority that will be attractive.
And the third element, RPA, just to highlight that, RPA is an incredible instrument, so the business case and business payback is sometimes, on average, below half a year. And so this is negligible, so this is a resource which works on certain situations. So this does not really, you will not even see that in terms of cost. What you will see, you will see that in terms of benefit.
Understood. Thank you. My second question is for Mr. Giloth. You now have an EBITDA margin target of 15%-17%. That basically implies that you reduce CapEx and depreciation load compared to revenues, and it seems that GEA wants to be less capital intensive and maybe outsource more production. Is that the right interpretation of that number?
Yeah.
Mr. Brinker.
You can start with the CapEx, and I can say something about the production.
Okay. The CapEx indication which you've given, the 2.5%-3% range relative to sales, is something which is built upon, I would say, unchanged patterns, so it's a going concern situation. We will not change structure. It will be built upon what we have as an asset portfolio as of today.
And concerning production, we are continuously investing in our production, like we did in bakery, like we did now in Elsdorf, like we announced the factory in Bengaluru. So there is no significant change. It's a consolidation, a localization, so it's a stronghold of our company. Nevertheless, we have been investing in our production facilities, also in the machines, quite well, and we think now we are well invested, and we can also reduce the CapEx investment in the factories also going forward a little bit.
Okay, understood. My last question is a brief one. So the Mission 30 targets, they run beyond Mr. Klebert's contract as CEO. So I was wondering, who will be accountable when we come together in 2030 and look at the numbers and run the numbers? Is there any financial implications, maybe even for Mr. Klebert, if those targets are not being achieved?
First of all, it's not only the CEO who's doing something here. You see, it's a competent and large team. Second, it's of course a board member contract always ends, but it also could be that it is continued. That depends on two parties, let's say. And of course, it's also that I'm a long-term investor in that company, also with our LTI shares, which have a duration of four years. So I have skin in the game, minimum until the end of 2030. And that's, like I said, also a teamwork, which we do here together, and independent of who is the CEO, this company will perform.
Okay, before we continue here with the next question in the room from John Buckland, and then last from Clef, I will read the first question from the webcast. It's actually coming from one of our analysts, Sven Weier from UBS. He's asking, "LPT is 1/3 of your sales and have a 13%-15% margin target for 2030 versus a group target at 17%-19%. Two questions. First of all, this will translate into EBIT margins of 11%-13% for LPT, and even at the China dairy peak ten years ago, the business did only 11%. How do you get to new record highs? And the second question is, does the group margin target somehow limit the growth potential of LPT, as too much growth in LPT would dilute the group margin? Thank you.
Maybe I start with it, because it's also addressing overall topics for GEA, and then Ilija might step in and give some more details. But all the programs, all the things we explained to you are kicking in in every division. Service growth is kicking in in all the divisions. Also, New Food is taking place in many divisions. Also, our COGS programs are playing a role in every division. Also, G&A reduction plays a role in boosting the performance in any division. That's important, and I think, yeah, maybe you can add something, what we all changed during the last year's project management and all the staff and service, what should make us Sven also optimistic that we achieve that numbers which we guided 13%-15%.
Yes. Excuse me. I can completely confirm that. If you look at the position of LPT, at the moment, we have, relatively speaking, the lowest service share in the group. But we are increasing that year on year. Lucas is my CSO, and I'm sure you agree with me, his passion for service, he's gonna deliver significant growth within our division, and that will be a major contributor to our profitable growth, and as Stefan said, the other programs. I think what Stefan also alluded to is the improvements we have made to date and will continue to make, which is in our gross margin recognition from our projects.
What you see today in LPT is a very, very different organization to what existed in 2019, 2020, and at the core of our activities is excellence in project delivery, and that will also contribute significantly to the profitable growth of the division.
Okay, then John?
Thank you. It's John Buckland from Waverton. I'm gonna go back to this growth rate of 5%. You've told us a lot about all the opportunities in growth and the reasons behind that, and I think it's a very good story. But you talked, o kay, you said pricing plays a part, inflation is going down, but there still is inflation, there still is positive pricing. So there must be some areas which are not growing or actually declining. So I want you to talk about that and what you're doing about it, because it just seems too conservative.
Yeah, good question. I mean, you know that we have a huge portfolio. Yeah, we do a lot of businesses, the majority focused on food, beverage, and pharma. And of course, you always find smaller niches which are not growing so fast or which have a slower growth. So we had, for instance, some years where brewery business was not really growing, and then we have other years where it is again picking up. So it's difficult to really slice and dice it into single buckets. But what the message from today should be, this company has a lot of ideas and good opportunities to continue to grow, simply also because the overall markets are growing, world population is growing, middle class is growing, growing organization. So that all drives the demand and the need for food, pharma, and beverage.
All the buckets we showed to you and we told you makes us extremely confident that we can achieve that. Also, think about the service potential we have. 5% larger 5%, including an average inflation, is nothing which appears like a miracle to us.
Okay, thank you. The other question, on the sustainability, you make a big thing of that. You talk about the Vitality Index, you talk about the sustainability solutions reaching 60%, and you show a chart of all your Add Better products. But I just wondered what the Add Better products are gonna contribute in percentage of those numbers, and what they do for the customers and the company in terms of value and profitability. Is it a transformation or is it something that doesn't really make a massive difference to margin?
First of all, let me mention that we started with the Add Better products about one and a half years ago. At the moment, it counts about 4%-5% of our total sales already. It's also not the case that everybody can put a sticker, Add Better, on a product once the person has a feeling that this is Add Better product. We have a clear definition what we need to achieve. It needs to have a significant improvement in resources, either energy, water, or any other resources which we save. Then we give that to the German TÜV. They have an independent opinion, they certify it or validate it, and then it gets, in a final decision at the Global Executive Committee, the approval, if you make it a Add Better product or not.
So it's not an easy process, so we have quite hurdles, quite a high hurdle to give this appreciation to a new product. And as I said, we just started one and a half years ago. It's already quite a mentionable share of our sales.
What will it be in 2030 ? What's Add Better gonna be in-
We don't guide that. It's that we say we have a sustainable share of larger 60%, but this is not only Add Better product, this is also all the products which account for the EU Taxonomy, for instance, and that all together will be larger than 60% in the year 2030.
All right.
Last from-
I think there are a lot of questions here in this area.
Okay.
I've just seen Akash and Uma, so-
Yeah, so we said last from Clef was already-
Okay
Longer, but then let's go to Uma and then to Akash, yeah?
Okay.
Thank you very much. It's Uma Samlin from Bank of America. I just have one question. So in your presentation, you mentioned some new areas of growth, such as wastewater treatment, district heating, et cetera. Am I right to assume that, you know, if you were to go to more wider range of verticals, then you would potentially be more exposed to the more commoditized part of the market? And, you know, how should we think about pricing in those market and, you know, also in terms of competition?
A lot of questions. I think what is important, yes, we identified this kind of verticals where we see above average growth. It's not completely new. We do district heating already today. Maybe Kai can give you also example about that afterwards. We also do waste treatment already now, but we see that these markets are growing above average in the future because the demand is significantly higher, and this is what we wanted to explain and what we wanted to show, because we are very well positioned in this market. We have the technology, we have the market access, we have examples where we can prove that we do that, and that also gives us the opportunity to grow further. Maybe, Kai, you wanna add some stories about the district heating?
Yeah, just maybe what you said regarding commoditization. I think it's rather a market where we can differentiate with the technology that we are having, for example, by efficiency, but also the use of natural refrigerants, for example. So that's actually a market where we can differentiate ourselves.
So, Akash, your turn?
Hi, it's Akash from JP Morgan. I got a couple of questions as well. The first one I have is on sustainability. So, I mean, you gave us today that around 41.5% of revenues are coming from sustainable products. I'm wondering if you can help me better understand, like, what are these sustainable product and other products which are not sustainable, why they are not sustainable, and how are you going to increase that share? Like, can you just change non-sustainable products and do something with them? Or, so, yeah, that's one. And then maybe attached to that, you also say that you will have circular design product principles by 2025 and all products circular ready by 2030.
So, I mean, I want to understand this dilemma for customers that, I mean, we are in today's environment, which are not really that great from macro environment standpoint. And if I'm a customer, and if I have to invest in sustainable solution, does it make sense for me to wait until you also have fully circular offerings? So not only you are giving me sustainable product, but you're also giving me, like, you know, fully sustainable, fully circular, offering as well. So that's the first one to start with.
I hand that over to Nadine. Yeah?
Yeah. To your first question, what are sustainable solutions? We have a very comprehensive definition in the slide deck, in the food note, but to keep it short and crisp is, it's a bucket of three. The first one is the European taxonomy, because this is an objective catalog of definitions. What is a green business activity? On top of that, it's our Add Better product portfolio, and the, as Stefan already mentioned, behind the Add Better product portfolio is a clear standard. It's an ISO standard, we apply in order to file the technical documentation. And we get that validated by the TÜV, so a third-party validation in order to avoid any greenwashing. Yeah, you know, everything is green. Wherever you look in the Internet, everyone wants to be green.
Third-party validation behind the Add Better product portfolio. Then, there's a third bucket which we claim as products which are not yet labeled as Add Better, because as said, behind that is a long-term technical documentation filing. We need to apply it to the TÜV, so it takes time. That's the reason for the third bucket. Also, to answer one of the later questions, we extend that, and not by default, all of our products can be claimed today as Add Better products. Johannes mentioned earlier that we have implemented in 2023 sustainability criteria into our engineering development process, and more and more products to be developed will integrate sustainability. We make it mandatory. That's what's also Johannes said, as of 2025, all new products must contribute to sustainability.
And then, Stefan, to you, I mean, the second part of the question: Do you see any risk of, like, you know, customer coming a bit later to place orders because they see that not only you are making it sustainable, but also more circular? Like, is this a risk or,
Yeah.
You don't see it coming?
I might say, this is the same question when I'm thinking about buying a new iPhone. Should I wait until the next release, or should I buy now? I mean, there's always a continuous improvement process, it's very clear, but customers are also under pressure to invest, so I don't think that customers might say, "I wait now until March next year, because there will come something." It's also not that we announce very much in advance what we produce or what we release, so I don't think that this will have any impact.
My second one is about, I think you mentioned in one of the slides that you are working on the consulting for customers, given very few of your customers have a net zero roadmap plan, and many of them are not sophisticated enough to do it on their own. I mean, can you elaborate, like, how big is this opportunity when it just come from consulting part? And, how easy for you to get in with these customers? And let's say, if it is not you, then who are the competitors just for the consulting part, so to speak?
Yeah.
Do you need to add up some cost here in order to grow the business, or is it already you have the all know-how and expertise already in the organization? Thank you.
Kai can elaborate on that in more detail, but let me set the frame. We decided to do that because we also want our customers to feel that we are the right partner when it is about accompanying the journey for sustainability. We are not only a product deliverer, we help our customers to improve the processes, and the visit we will do later to Innocent is a perfect example of exactly this, what we did here. That is what we try to build up, where we. It is not our intention to become Germany's or the world's largest consulting company, not at all.
But it is, for us, a kind of holistic approach to serve our customers whenever needed, and especially in the food and pharma and beverage, and pharma not, but food and beverage industry, you see a lot of medium-sized companies. It's not only Danone, Mondelēz, Nestlé, and you name it, because we have hundreds of medium-sized, family-owned companies. They are all under pressure to deliver their CO₂ targets, to make a strategy. They have very often no clue, and if we can step in here and help them, they have trust to us.
And at the same time, it builds up customer relation, and it's a good combination and marketing tool also to sell our products later on. But, Kai, maybe you can add something where we are, what we do, and maybe you have also some examples on top.
I mean, regarding the operational consulting, that was the second pillar that I talked about, basically. Here, I would say that we are already quite advanced, and what I tried to also bring across earlier today is that we are really uniquely positioned. And that is basically, on one side, this cooling and heating competence that we have in our organization, and on the other side, that very deep process competence that, for example, Ilija's team is having. And really, to bring in these teams together, working together seamlessly, looking at all the different levers that we have to decarbonize a specific site, is truly setting us apart from other companies in the industry. And when it comes to strategy consulting, it's something what we are about to set up, so it's in the startup phase, let's say.
But this will be another important lever to really create more awareness among the customers what is possible, and that will also, in the end, help us with our 3.11 emission portfolio.
So now, last from Clef.
Sorry for letting you wait.
All good. I'm glad to see that everything is running efficient at GEA. Two quick ones in the interest of time, I promise. The first one, you mentioned this Vitality Index on various slides today. I would be curious to find out, do only new machines built from scratch count as an innovation, or would a kind of, let's say, face-lifted machine also count as an innovation?
Johannes, would you like to elaborate?
Yes. Basically, we have a very concise process around that, what qualifies as a new product. Otherwise, you can just change the color of a product and then count it a new product. So there is for each and every product, and we have a vast majority, variety of different products. We have a very clear process, what counts and what doesn't count, and then that's included in the Vitality Index. So it's product by product, business unit by business unit.
Thank you. And then, Bernd, I promised it yesterday, SAP, yeah, the SAP integration, crucial for the simplification of the structure. You mentioned 30 entities are included now. What percentage stake of your group revenue does that represent at this stage, and when do you expect to have all entities included in SAP?
Okay, you're absolutely right. It's exactly one of the most important projects or programs which we are performing these days. With regard to the 30 entities, we, as you might recall from the presentations back in 2019 and in 2021, we emphasized at the time that we will start with, based on T-shirt sizing, with the smaller and less complex entities, and surprise, surprise, they don't have so much revenue with it. Therefore, today's revenue share is less than 10%. It's still the ramp-up phase, where we concentrated on establishing the platforms, so what we call the template work.
We are now in the process to prepare, and maybe one sidestep, we have just finalized the rollout for the first production sites in Belgium, two sites, so this was our wave two, where we also made additional experience with the fit of our current template. Now, we are approaching the very complex and fully fledged entities and sites, and this we call Template Enhanced. And this is something where we want to be ready by the end of 2025 with the first pilot, and also with continuation of our wave three activities for other companies where the current template already fits. So our assumption, as of today, is that by the end of 2025, we have additional 5,000 users. So then we are talking really about big numbers and a very big step forward.
So then, also, the coverage in terms of revenue is, has by far jumped to a very high level already. Then we have also a solid base to do the final execution. Readiness, as you have seen from the presentation, we believe that we will have covered everything. There was a discussion whether we should cover everything or whether we should only cover 80%. In terms of efficiency, we decided to have a full coverage in order to have really the end-to-end view throughout the entire organization. So therefore, the, we will be ready by the year 2030. That was also presented.
What you should also anticipate in terms of value creation potential throughout this journey, for obvious reasons, today there is no benefit in terms of financial benefit from the low number of legal entities which are on the platform. But we believe once we have done the big step, which I've just described for 2025, we expect, let's say, 15 months later, already seeing the first impact. So the value contribution starts already in the year 2027, 2028. So you will, we will not wait for value contribution until 2030 or 2032. But the full ramp-up of value creation potential will be available in the year 2032.
So there's one more question here, coming in from the web. It's actually from Klaus Kehl, Nykredit and the question is: "Thank you very much for your presentation. I do understand that today's focus is on the long-term potential for GEA. However, could you comment a bit on order intake in Q3 current trading?" That's the question.
Okay, we are very close to the close period, therefore, and you also know that we don't give any quarterly guidance. What I can repeat, what I also said during the last analyst call, it's very clear we expect that the second half year of this year is higher than last year's second half year, and it will be higher than the first half of that year. That guidance, let's say, remains, and we are also confident that we can deliver what we promise here.
Good. Then there's one more here on the net: Can you elaborate on the mentioned planned investments in 2025?
And so, I've only indicated that we expect magnitude in the area of EUR 200 million for 2025, so I have not really given any clear indication on projects. But we will still have the finalization of the pharma investment in which we do in Germany, so there is a portion which will fall into 2025. And we have also already approved certain projects for sites in Germany, such as in Oelde and in Büchen, in order to improve the quality of the sites. And we have also decided to expand our business in India, which I believe is an important also signal that we want to make use of the potential in those areas, not only as a low-cost country environment, but also in order to participate in the local growth.
So therefore, there is also a part which comes from investments in the Bangalore site, and then also the other site which we have in India. So therefore, there is a bunch of investment activities, and I think you will all understand that once we change a certain investment behavior, we need also to have a little bit of a ramp-down phase in order to be able to manage that. So therefore, clear indication, we expect this new corridor to apply only in the year 2026 going forward.
Okay, very good. That concludes the Q&A. Yeah, Stefan?
Before you do your housekeeping-
Sure.
Let me just say a big, big thank you to all of you that you came here to Amsterdam. And the majority of you spent the evening with us yesterday. It was really a pleasure, and I know that's also for you; it's an effort with some exceptions to come to Amsterdam. Very few are living here, but thanks for that effort. Thanks for spending the whole day with us. It's highly appreciated that you are interested in our company. And I also don't wanna miss to thank all the teams which are behind that presentation today, also especially our I nvestor Relations group, our Corporate Communications, and also my CEO office who helped also significantly in preparing all the things. So thank you very much to everybody.
That is important for me to say thank you to all of you. Now I hand back to you, Oliver.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Stefan. Yeah, there's not much to add from my side. Again, those of you that have signed up for the plant tour to Rotterdam, to the Innocent plant, the bus will depart in around 10 minutes, at 1:15 P.M., in front of the hotel. We have also prepared some small presents for you. You'll find in front of you on your desk, so please do not forget to take this back home. Maybe also remember the Capital Markets Day 2024 of GEA. Yeah, thank you very much, and have a good time, and stay healthy, and talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
Stay tuned.