Good morning, everyone. Also, a warm welcome from my side to our today's new food conference. I can see that the audience is filling up. Most of you are coming over from the KWS meeting now. As a second presenter, we are happy to have GEA Group with us. Maybe it is not known to everyone that GEA is actually a big player in the new food industry, but I am sure we will learn more about that from Rebecca Weigl, Deputy Head of Investor Relations. Some housekeeping: as you may know, the presentation will last about 15-20 minutes. It will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A. The presentation will be recorded, and as usual, you can put your questions into the chat box on the bottom right. Without further ado, I would like to hand over the word to you, Rebecca. The floor is yours.
Thank you very much, and thanks for the invitation today. I'm delighted to give you, in the next 20 minutes, an introduction to GEA Group. My name is Rebecca. I'm the Deputy Head of Investor Relations, and let's kick it off. What is GEA? GEA is a machinery and equipment provider dedicated to the food, beverage, and pharma industry. If you have ever asked yourself, who is actually producing the machines on which Danone is producing their yogurt, or Nestlé is producing their dairy powders, this is exactly GEA. To a certain extent, you could say GEA is a derivative to the food and beverage manufacturers. We are quite a big company. In the meantime, we have more than 18,000 employees generating more than EUR 5 billion in sales, with an EBITDA margin of 15.4% last year.
We are in the MDAX, listed in the MDAX, and have currently a market cap of almost EUR 10 billion. We have become quite a big company in the meantime. Why should you invest in GEA? What makes GEA pretty attractive? First of all, we have leading positions and are very attractive in resilient markets. It is about the food, beverage, and pharma industry. Second, we are considered a sustainability frontrunner. We have developed ourselves really into a sustainability pioneer and have a strong reputation in that field. Third, we have, with our Mission 30, our strategy until the year 2030, a very ambitious plan for growing further our top line and to accelerate our profitability. Fourth, very strong free cash flow generation potential. Last but not least, very attractive shareholder returns. I will go through these five things in the next 20 minutes.
I was talking about GEA as a machinery and equipment provider to the food, beverage, and pharma industry. We are clearly B2B. We are selling our equipment, our machines, our engineering solutions to the big multinationals in the world, but also to the local manufacturers of food or beverages. Although we are really a B2B business, almost everything that you can buy in the supermarket, if you go for grocery shopping this afternoon, or what you had for breakfast, if you go out in a restaurant for lunch, there is a quite high likelihood that these things have been processed through our technologies because we are a leader in many of our markets. We just got here a couple of examples to give you a feeling of how much you are indirectly in contact with GEA actually every single day.
For example, this morning, when you enjoyed a coffee, you can think about GEA because every third process line for instant coffee is coming from our systems. This evening, if you meet friends and you go out for a beer, every second liter of beer is coming from our equipment. It is always important to have two glasses of beer because basically then you can be sure that one is coming from GEA. Or spaghetti. I mean, everybody is enjoying good pasta. Every fourth packet of spaghetti is also an example here. Leading positions and very resilient and attractive markets because food, beverage, and pharma, as you all know, are markets where people need to eat and drink and take their medicine no matter what is happening in the world economy. We are also quite diversified.
While I was giving the example of a Nestlé or Danone as a customer, you can see on the chart below that actually the single largest customer of GEA is about 2% of our sales. Our top 10 customers do account for roughly 11% of sales. Super diversified in terms of client base. Why is that the case? First of all, yes, we do business with the big multinational ones, but we are a global business. Think about Thailand, think about Vietnam, go to Africa, wherever you are, there are a lot of local manufacturers of food products who are actually producing the product, selling to the supermarkets, selling to the restaurants, and we are also delivering machines to them. Therefore, a highly diversified client base, which enables us to have a clear price over volume strategy.
Also in terms of the regional profile, you can see that we have quite a nice share in terms of where we do our business. You can take away very resilient end markets in which we are active: food, beverage, and pharma, and at the same time also a very diversified setup in terms of clients and also in terms of regions. Sustainability pioneer. Why are we considered a sustainability pioneer or a frontrunner? I do not want to go into too much detail here, but to just give you some ideas, GEA has a very comprehensive ESG strategy, and we were one of the first companies in Germany in the industrial space already coming out with a climate strategy in the year 2021 with a net zero target by 2040.
By 2040, we want to be net zero in all three scopes: scope one, two, and three. Our strategy or our targets are validated by the SBTi and also our net zero target until 2040. Last year, we went even a step ahead because we were the first company in the DAX index family with a say on climate at our AGM. What did we do? We asked actually our shareholders whether they approve our climate transition plan 2040 at our AGM last year, and we got an overwhelming support of 98.4%. We got strong support from our shareholders that they actually support and join our journey in transforming the company into a net zero company by 2040. We have a very strong recognition for our sustainability leadership. We have a triple-A rating in MSCI. We are low-risk rated at Sustainalytics.
In ISS, we have prime status, EcoVadis, Platinum. You can see that all our efforts are basically also appreciated and honored by these rating agencies. The other thing I want to highlight is also our management team has skin in the game. They are incentivized on our ESG targets. The reduction in our emissions is clearly linked in their long-term incentives. This is actually just in short why we are considered a frontrunner in terms of sustainability. What are we doing actually in terms of sustainability for our customers? When people talk about climate change, it often is linked to risk. What is climate change for a risk for a company?
We rather see climate change as a big business opportunity for GEA because, again, we are operating in the food and beverage industry, and the food and beverage industry is highly energy intensive. They need solutions to decarbonize their business. We are supporting our customers in their decarbonization journey. There is, for example, a nice example here of Heineken, where we are actually supporting our customers on their ambition for their net zero strategy. By using our technologies, in this case, it is about huge industrial heat pumps, we can actually enable Heineken to save more than 5,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Because we think it is such a great opportunity for us as GEA, we also have a clear KPI linked to that. Currently, we are generating more than 40% of our sales with sustainable solutions. That is clearly linked to our EU taxonomy sales.
We have a target by 2030 to even have more than 60% of sustainable solutions. We have a very clear mission, our Mission 30, very clear strategy for growing actually our top line, our bottom line, and also by creating an impact to the world, to our planet. Our strategy, Mission 30, is based on three pillars. It is about growth, it is about value, and it is about impact. Growth is about growing the portfolio by more than 5% on average until the year 2030. Value is about optimizing further our costs, having more efficient processes to enable even higher profitability in the future. Impact is clearly linked also to our sustainability strategy. It is about leaving a positive impact to the planet. As you can see below, sustainability is really the foundation of everything what we are doing.
Clear plan for the future, also in terms of top line, as I just mentioned. Because the conference is called New Food Conference, I also want to have a strong link here created to new food because how do we want to achieve this on average more than 5% top line growth? This is partly based on our service business, which has been a strong growth contributor also in the past and continues to remain a growth contributor for the future. Then also our new machine business. Our new machine business will actually benefit from the new food business because we are actually targeting that by 2030, we will generate an order intake from new food of more than EUR 400 million per year. The topic of new food is one of the main topics also in our Mission 30 to continue our top line journey.
There are also various other aspects, as I said, actually further acceleration of our sustainable solution sales. It is about innovation. It is about our digital portfolio. Just to give you an idea, what are the main growth drivers in terms of top line? In terms of bottom line, and I think that is also very important to mention, a huge part of the profitability increase, which we are targeting until the year 2030, so coming from 15.4% in 2024 to 17-19% in 2030, will be linked to, I would personally call it, self-help. To measures which are in our own hands, which are in our own control.
This is on the one hand on our COGS saving program, so cost of goods sold, where we are optimizing our manufacturing footprint, where we are actually working on our suppliers, on our procurement activities to bundle more volumes, to renegotiate frame agreements. We are targeting from this program savings of EUR 120 million until the year 2030. Second, we are also working on our G&A ratio because we know we are currently not best in class here, and we are working here on optimizing our processes. It is about automatization, digitalization. It is about our ERP rollout, moving everything under one ERP system until 2030. That will generate another EUR 100 million of savings until the year 2030. Two factors, the COGS program and the G&A program, which are self-help, which are in our own control.
We have the growth side, obviously the positive top line growth will also come with a positive volume and margin impact on the profitability side. If we then go further to the strong cash flow generation potential, this actually attractive EBITDA margin improvement will lead also to higher free cash flow in the future, combined with lower CapEx going forward and net working capital improvement. We are coming out of a phase where we have quite heavily invested into CapEx, or heavily might be a bit exaggerated, but we had a, let's say, more elevated CapEx level, and we are planning to bring that down towards more 2.5-3% in the future. Also in terms of net working capital, we have a clear target here of 7-9% of sales going forward.
All these factors will lead to a stronger free cash flow generation in the future. We already had EUR 500 million free cash flow last year, and we think we can do even better in the future. Last but not least, what I mentioned, attractive shareholder return. GEA has not only a strong strategy and strong positions, but we are also focusing on our shareholders and to remain an attractive investment for them. First of all, the dividend side. You can see here the history of our dividend per share. We just updated our dividend policy that we are planning to distribute 50% of our net profit in the future. We did in 2025 already a major step in the right direction here, having now a payout ratio of 43%.
As you can see, we increased the dividend per share by 15% in the year 2025. As we just discussed with the higher profitability we are targeting, that will obviously then be reflected in the dividend per share. Next to dividends, we are also doing a couple of share buyback programs in the past. We had a EUR 300 million program in the year 2021 and 2022. We just finished the EUR 400 million program, which we were running since November 2023. These shares which we bought back were just canceled. We just lowered now the number of shares outstanding. Actually, if you take together both programs, we actually had a share buyback of almost 10% of our market cap.
This is also nicely reflected when you look into our total shareholder returns since 2019 and compare that to the MDAX or to the DAX 50 ESG, where we are also included in, or the Stoxx TMI Industrial Engineering. You can see that actually the nice performance in terms of strategy, in terms of financial KPIs, but also the focus on shareholder return is appreciated by the market. I would also just quickly, because it's called New Food Conference, just go a bit more into details on the topic of new food. Why is it an important topic for GEA and why are we invited today here for this topic? Because in the end, new food will be the answer.
How do you want to feed a growing world population knowing that we are restricted in terms of production capacities, in terms of environmental impacts of the agricultural what we have? We need to find ways to have actually the protein demand which is out there to satisfy it and actually by using fewer resources and having less environmental impact. That is why we as GEA are also positioning ourselves quite strongly in that market because we think that is actually the future. What is exactly new food? New food can range in our definition from plant-based beverages or plant-based food over plant-based intermediates, cultivated meat up to insect proteins. That is the whole range basically what new food is about.
In our view, personally, we think that the cultivated meat market and precision fermentation will be the markets with the most attractive growth potential in the future because here actually it's really meat which you cultivate in a bioreactor to produce basically real meat from an animal cell. GEA is nicely positioned in this market because we are offering really all solutions here. We are a one-stop solution provider, offering all technologies which you need to produce new food. I want to pause here now for the Q&A. I hope I was able to give you a brief overview of what GEA is about and why actually new food is a relevant topic also for us.
Thank you very much. Just in time, 20 minutes as planned. Very interesting.
I will follow your advice and have two beers tonight, just to be sure to drink the beer on one of your machines coming out of your machine. We have a couple of questions already from the audience, and it is nice to see that most of the questions are already centered around the new food topic. Maybe we can just kick off the Q&A with one question from my side. You mentioned your strong cash flow generation, and you nicely showed us what you are planning to do with the cash. Investments are going down, at least in percentage terms. Dividends and share buybacks go up. How about future M&A perspectives? Is that part of your strategy going forward?
Yes, very fair question. What are our capital allocation priorities?
Our, let's say, first priority is clearly CapEx, to invest into the business what is needed. I just mentioned in the presentation that we are coming out of a phase where we actually have invested quite a lot into our operations. We are just actually building currently in Germany, for example, a new pharma production site. This is expected to come down over the next years. In terms of second priority, it's the dividends, which we also just updated our policy here. The third factor is exactly as you mentioned, would be M&A. We are quite cash rich. We almost have no debt on the balance sheet. We definitely have opportunities to actually go for external growth. Here we are actually screening the market, looking for opportunities. The clear aim is it needs to be in the food, beverage, and pharma space.
It needs to be in our core markets. I mean, sweet spot would probably be something between EUR 300 million and EUR 500 million in size in terms of sales. The question is always the availability of these targets because a lot of these targets which we really like and find interesting are family-owned private health companies. That is always the question then of timing or when things will change in terms of a new generation taking over. We are in close contact with a lot of companies here. I would say while we have done our homework very much in detail, checking really what are good targets for us, it is more about now an opportunistic approach. Whatever comes to the market, we will look at it and check whether this could be an opportunity.
If they're not, so if there are no nice deals out there in the market where we could actually, which we could acquire, then we would also might consider in the future another share buyback. That would be then the fourth priority. Perfect. Thank you very much. Talking about partnerships, I think that brings us to the first question from the audience. The first question says, can you share recent partnerships with new food companies and/or clients and their impact on your businesses? Yeah. I mean, what I can share with you, and I don't want to name now customer names here, but what I can share with you that, for example, we have in Germany a test center for new food. We have opened that, I think, one and a half years ago or one year ago. That's actually close to Hannover.
This test center is actually a dedicated center for startups. I mean, it can not only, it can also other companies be used, but especially startups are pretty much interested here. They rent the test center and they try their ideas on our machines because what we want to have here is a partnership exactly as the question is about, that they can try their ideas on our machines and often investment to directly buy new investment or new equipment. The idea is not working, does not really make sense. They can try and we can support them in their development of their products in our test center.
Of course, our idea is then if they are, let's say, developed enough in terms of their idea that they can scale it up or want to scale it up, that they will use it, then do it with our equipment. Because this has been so super successful in Germany and it's all the time rented out, we are just in the process of opening another new food test center in the United States. This is actually due to open quite soon. This is actually how a lot of partnerships are working in that regard, that we are supporting our clients and testing their ideas and giving them the opportunity also to talk to our food engineers, our experts on giving input on the process.
Okay. Thank you. Another question is more like, yeah, it's a technical question, I would say.
How is GEA leveraging data analytics and IoT with your new food equipment to help customers optimize yield and reduce downtime? Not sure.
Very fair question. I would not link it specifically to new food, but rather to actually in general to our machines. We have, and I mean, AI is a very interesting topic here and data analytics because that's exactly a very interesting product which we can sell to our customers. We have at the moment, I would say, two main versions which we can sell to our clients. That's on the one hand, we call that Inside Partner.
The Inside Partner is exactly a data analytics tool, a software which we can sell to our customers and offer them where we can, based on all the data we are using from this machine, also standing at other customers, we can make recommendations how to use the machine. For example, when to switch it on, off, how to run the machine properly. Actually, the customer can still, or the controller of the machine, the one who is steering the machine, can then decide whether they accept the recommendation from the software or whether they would still do it in a different way. That is the Inside Partner. The next level is actually our Opti Partner. When you decide for the Opti Partner version, that is basically your machine is on autopilot.
Everything is based on data analytics and AI is actually analyzed how you run the machine in the optimal way. That is then exactly what we are doing with the Opti Partner, doing it on an autopilot. That means the customer, the software is no longer making the recommendation, but it is directly acting in that way. That is increasingly a very attractive tool for our customers because especially in terms of energy efficiency, it makes a huge, or actually in the meantime has a significant impact what you can save, for example, in terms of energy here.
Understood. Thank you. There is another question centering around your own capacity and how you scale up your capacity and resources in the new food sector. How do you do that actually?
How we scale up our capacities and plan for that?
That's a fair question because the new food sector, I will have to say, we have probably to divide it into the plant-based side and into the more, let's say, startup side because the plant-based market in the meantime, I would consider it a more mature market. If you go to the supermarkets today, you have plenty of offerings in the supermarkets. A lot of, let's say, multinational companies are also in the market here. It is already a bit more mature market, the plant-based side. While especially the cell-based side or precision fermentation, this is a lot more startup-driven. It is a lot more dynamic. It is a lot of R&D happening on that side. That is different areas. Especially the R&D or the startup side, they need really our test centers.
They need support from our engineers, from our food engineers, which equipment could help them in order to scale up their ideas and in order to make them successful. Here in terms of capacities, it is absolutely important that we have the expertise in-house. As I was just showing, we have really this one-stop-shop solution because due to the fact that we have a lot of know-how from the pharma industry, from the food industry, we basically have all the technologies in-house. In terms of capacities, it is not like that we need to invest in additional products or equipment in order to satisfy the demand in the market. It is all in there. What we need is then actually personal capacity in order to support our clients on the journey.
Great. Thank you. Rebecca, actually, we are running out of time.
There would be another two or three questions in the chat box, but maybe we have time to address them at a later stage or via email. We're happy to provide you with the questions. For our participants, I'll just put in the link to the next meeting. It's actually Delivery Hero. Just tap on that link and you will directly be linked to the new meeting. Rebecca, thank you very much for your participation. Very interesting to see what GEA has done in the last couple of years. For all participants, have fun with the reminder of the conference. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Thank you.