Hello, and we will now continue our Industrial Technology Conference with a heavyweight in this industry, GEA Group, which is a DAX member. The company will be presented by Eduard Biller, who is Manager Investor Relations. Format, as with all the others, 20 minutes presentation, roughly 10 minutes Q&A, chat box for questions. We will record this event and then post it on Research Hub a little later today. If you have any questions, feel free to post them. I will now hand it over to Eduard for his insights. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hello, everybody, and thank you for the interest in the company. I've been here already the year before. It was a very good event. We're more than happy to do a recap and talk about how the company developed since last year and since the last meeting. Let's start with the overview, how GEA is or how big it actually is. Last year we had EUR 5.5 billion in revenue and a profitability margin of 16.5% as a percentage of sales. Going forward, we want to push these numbers even further. Targets up until 2030 will be to achieve sales of more than EUR 7 billion and the profitability margin of 17%-19%. Let's start with first things first. Some of you may know the company, some of you may not know the company. What does the company actually do?
We are provider of equipment or processing lines, mainly focusing on the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries. As you can see in the middle, one quarter of processed milk comes from their production system. Dairy is roughly 1/3 of our total sales, either in the dairy farming sector or dairy processing sector. If you're buying your Weihenstephan milk, Berchtesgadener Land milk, if you're in Germany or any other milk in Europe or basically worldwide, if you buy 4 L of milk, one of them will be basically done on our machines. We're also pretty strong, for example, in spaghetti processing. Every fourth spaghetti package comes from our machines, meaning if you're buying Barilla spaghetti or pasta, they're a customer of ours, it's already public. You can be pretty sure that it came from our machines. We're also pretty strong, for example, in cookies.
If you're familiar with the OREO cookie from Mondelez or with the Ferrero cookie, or with the Kinderini cookies that are now basically in every supermarket, they've all been tried and tested and developed with our machines. We sold process lines for them also. If you're buying the Ferrero cookie in the U.S., it came from our machines, also the ones in Europe and the ones in Asia as well. We're also pretty strong in the pharmaceutical equipment. What we do here is, for example, tablet presses. If you're buying painkillers like Ratiopharm or ibuprofen or something similar, it might be the case that the tablets come from our machines. Our focus here is also a little bit different. For example, we're pretty strong in the cancer treatment with tablet presses.
As you can see it on the right corner below, every second tablet to treat cancer is made in our equipment. We also produce other equipment here, for example, pharmaceutical separators. We also source our equipment to laboratories or R&D departments of Pfizer, of Merck, and help them develop new treatments, basically, for all types of diseases. Coming to the next slide. Last year, we had a very similar slide presented here. It was with five divisions that are four. What happened here? We didn't sell anything. We did just restructure it, meaning in the past, we had a Heating & Refrigeration Technologies division that was made up of two parts, the components business and the processing business, basically for entire lines. What we did is, we broke it off.
The components business went to Separation & Flow Technologies, which is now called Pure Flow Processing. The process lines went into Liquid & Powder Technologies, which is now combined called Nutrition Plant Engineering. Why did we do that? The solution is basically really simple. They were targeting the same customers. The discussions were very similar. It made sense to put them basically together. Now we have four divisions, Pure Flow Processing. This is the components business. We're having roughly EUR 2 billion of sales with an EBITDA margin of upper tweens, basically. We have Nutrition Plant Engineering. This is our processing business, meaning if you want to build a new facility for dairy powder processing, for a brewery or anything else that involves basically an entire process line made from the ground up, these are the guys that they're talking to.
Nutrition Plant Engineering has a very similar sales figure as Pure Flow Processing, namely EUR 2 billion. The profitability margin here, as you can see, is way lower. Why is that the case? On the one hand, the service share is lower, due to the type of the business. Also here we are sourcing third-party equipment in, and you can't put your own margin on equipment that you're sourcing. For example, if we're building a facility for dairy or for beverages, we buy piping and tubing. This is not our specialty. This is not that complicated to make them. We source them in and the customer knows exactly what the price for the pipes and the tubes is.
It's a little bit dilutive in that sense, but it makes sense because with these large facilities that we're building, for each order, we're getting relatively big down payments varying between 10%-30% of the total order value, basically. This division is run basically with negative capital employed because all the down payments help us finance the business. Pharma & Food Applications is actually the same as it was last year. Back then it was called Food and Healthcare Technologies. It was just a name change, and Pharma was put upfront. Because we also see more opportunities in pharma in general. Pharma here makes up 20% of total sales of the business.
If you take just EUR 1 billion of sales as an example, roughly a little bit more than EUR 200 million is done with pharmaceutical equipment, the rest is then done with cookies, with pasta, with chicken nuggets, for example, all these types of equipment. The last business that we're having that's a little bit different, it's Farm Technologies, meaning the first three businesses that I discussed, this is a B2B business, meaning we're discussing it here with procurement people from Danone, from The Coca-Cola Company, Heineken, whosoever.
The Farm Technologies business is a little bit different route to market here, because here we're using dealers to sell our equipment to all the dairy farmers in Canada, in the U.S., in Germany, Netherlands, you name it, basically. This business is a little bit different than the other three, as I said before. Nevertheless, it's still a highly profitable business, and growing.
If you look at the sales figures, it's three quarters EUR 1 billion already, the profitability margin is basically 15%, we're targeting here even higher figures in 2030, which we will discuss later on. How does our company look like regarding our customer base? As I said before, everybody knows our customers, as you can imagine, The Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, and so on. What's more interesting for us is even though all these names are our customers, and they might be somewhere in the top 10 customers or top 50 customers, depending who's buying the largest piece of equipment this year. We also have a wide variety of mom-and-pop shops, basically, companies that you've never heard of because they're not listed, but who are also producing either cookies or other goods. All of the customers are basically recurring.
In the year one, you're buying our new machine or new processing line, you are somewhere in the top 10, top 50. In the next couple of years, you buy our service equipment, meaning, for example, if the electrical engine breaks down, if the piping breaks down, you buy it again from us, you're then somewhere in the top 200, top 300 customers. Just to give you an idea how many customers do we actually have. If you would open the Excel sheet with all the names of the customers, somewhere around 4,000 rows should be a finish. We are also regionally balanced, meaning even though the North America and U.S. is the largest single market for us, 18%-19% is U.S. only. If you look at it worldwide, we're actually pretty much diversified here. We're a German company.
We have a pretty strong European focus with close to 50%. If you look at the growing figures here, we see growth coming also out of Europe, namely, for example, India, China, but also in the U.S. We're also pretty strong regarding sustainability. Sustainability for us is not only the rainbow flags outside, but for us, it means really total cost of ownership for our customers. How can we help them save energy? Because you can think about it this way. In the dairy business or in the food processing business, you usually have to heat something up or cool something down. For example, if you look at cookies, you have your bakery oven just a little bit bigger than yours at home. If you have milk, you need to cool it down to basically four degrees. We're talking about industrial scale figures here.
You just need, for example, then our heat pumps or our compressors. Since we either made the original equipment ourselves and the plant is already there, we can retrofit our heat pumps in there and save energy, as you can see, for example, with Heineken. We can also build you the entirely new plant, if you are talking about a greenfield project. The idea here is even though the equipment is then more expensive than it would be without the heat pump, the total cost of ownership for the next 10 years- 20 years will be significantly below the ones if you would buy it without the heat pump. Because on average, our equipment lasts 20 years, and this is just the average. If you would look at some of our dairy separators that we sold, they are already 30 years old, and they are still running.
They just need the service and maintenance, the machines will run basically for the next 30 years - 40 years without problems. Coming to the next topic. Just a second. Just want to open the next slide. Our plans to continue growing is called Mission 30 because it is supposed to last until 2030. The idea here is we want to grow the company with more than 5% on average. Last year we grew it by 3.7%, this year we are targeting 5%-7% organic sales growth, the more than 5% is just then the tailor. Year one was a little bit weaker, but if we look at the figures from this year, we have our order backlog that is actually a record high with EUR 3.5 billion. The pipeline is also pretty good, so we are pretty confident that we can achieve the figures.
Looking at profitability, last year we had a profitability figure of EBITDA before restructuring of 16.5%. Our goal is to grow this figure to 17%-19% EBITDA margin without any adjustments, just your normal textbook figures, basically. The last figure that we are having is we want to grow ROCE to more than 45%. Last year it was 36.2%. Again, higher profitability, more efficient use of the capital employed, hence you get the more than 45% figure. How did we do it last year? We increased our share of sustainable solutions. We achieved already a 45.7% of total sales. The heat pumps that I have mentioned before with Heineken or with Arla, they go directly into these sustainable solutions, for example. Also other pieces of business, it is either, for example, saving energy, saving water, all these contribute to the sustainable solutions sales share.
Another topic for us is we want to grow service sales to basically EUR 2.9 billion, so almost EUR 3 billion will be, of the EUR 7 billion will be service. Last year, we had EUR 2.2 billion, basically. We want to grow this in absolute terms by EUR 700 million. That is the room to go. New food is also an ongoing topic for us, meaning our idea is to grow protein not necessarily from the chicken or in the cow, but rather, for example, in a fermenter, basically.
The idea here is it is way easier and if you scale it up industrial-wise, it is also cheaper to grow protein this way instead of killing cows, killing chickens, and so on. Here we want to achieve more than EUR 400 million order intake by 2030. Last year, we had roughly EUR 70 million order intake, so there is still more room to grow.
We also have some technologies that are growing way stronger than others, we named them above average growing verticals. Automated milking equipment, for example, is such a vertical. Also heat pumps, the ones that I've showed before also. We saw more than 30% order intake growth in last year. This was an exceptional year. Don't expect it to grow every year by more than 30%, but we just seeing a good and healthy demand, especially coming for the energy efficient solutions. We also want to increase our digital sales. We are a mechanical equipment manufacturer here, but the idea is all of our equipment can be retrofitted with sensors, and we can sell you software to make the equipment more efficient. The idea here is to grow it to more than EUR 200 million by 2030. Last year, we achieved roughly EUR 80 million already.
The digital sales go directly into the service sales share, basically, and service sales in general. The EUR 700 million growth in service, roughly EUR 120 million-EUR 130 million should come out of digital sales, basically. The last topic here, how we want to achieve that is our vitality index. vitality index means equipment no older than five years. Our goal is here to achieve basically 30%. Every third piece of equipment should be no older than five years that we are selling. The more modern the equipment is, usually the more energy efficient it is. Also, for example, more automated. Now coming to the next topic of profitability, how are we going to achieve 17%-19%? First things first will be obviously sell more equipment and also higher service share.
We also have a couple of initiatives going on that are basically in our hand, because sell more equipment is also depending on the customers. For example, the COGS savings here with the EUR 120 million, they are entirely in our hand. Just to give you an idea how can we save on COGS. GEA has more suppliers than it does have employees, and we have roughly 19,000 employees. If you put the procurement volume on less hands, basically, you can negotiate better prices. The goal here is to save EUR 120 million in EBITDA contribution, and this should be a more or less linear development. Last year, we achieved a little bit more than EUR 20 million, but this year we're targeting then again around EUR 20 million in savings. The next topic is here, the G&A ratio.
GEA has a relatively normal sales ratio to sales, basically, but the G&A ratio is relatively high when we compare it to peers. Our goal is here to save roughly EUR 100 million. Last year, was basically zero. With our reorganization of the business, we're targeting EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million this year, and then again, further EUR 10 million in 2027. This will be more back-end loaded. If you can imagine that 2028, 2029, and 2030 should get the lion's share of the EUR 100 million savings. Coming now, what do we do basically with our money that the company's earning? First of all, obviously, we invest into our own facilities. Currently, the level is a little bit more elevated, so this year should be slightly above 4% of sales will go into CapEx. Our goal here is to lower this figure to 2.5%-3%.
If you think about it, by 2030, roughly EUR 7 billion of sales, around 3% CapEx of sales, somewhere around EUR 200 million. This should be the ideal figure. What we're also doing is generate a lot of cash flow, basically, free cash flow. Our target for this year should be similar to 2025. Our goal is, from 2024 up until 2030, to generate more than EUR 4 billion of free cash flow. We achieved already EUR 1 billion in 2024 and 2025. We have more than EUR 3 billion to achieve over five years. This gives you a rough indication. We're also paying high, growing dividends, and we're also looking for M&A. Honestly, so far, in the last six years, the company did only two M&A deals, and if you aggregate the sales figure, it should be somewhere in the low millions.
The company is also looking at share buybacks in general. Over the past years, the company executed two share buybacks with roughly EUR 700 million, bought back the shares, and canceled them. As you can see it on the upper side here, we did grow our dividend by 15%, from 2023 to 2024, and by a further EUR 0.15 in 2025. The goal here is to basically distribute half of the net profit to U.S. shareholders as dividends. The shareholder return speaks for itself. The last couple of months have been a little bit weaker, honestly, our business is steadily growing. We're not a SpaceX, we're not an Anthropic. Our gut feeling is that institutional investors made room for other higher-growing businesses. The weak share performance over the last couple of months had nothing to do with operational performance.
If anything, we actually grew the business further, and also our management, when the share price was relatively weak, they bought back shares themselves. Their own money, and not the ones that they have to buy back with their bonus, for example, but rather they just invested into the company because they know of the value of the company. Overall, the figure was roughly 20,000 shares that have been bought back, 11,000 by our CEO, Stefan Klebert, who now owns 111,000 shares. The rest was then bought back by his colleagues in the management. Looking at the time, I think we should start with the questions. I hope this gave you a little bit of an overview of the business.
I think it was an excellent overview, Eduard. Thanks so much for the insights that you shared. When I look at the questions, a lot of the questions you've already touched during your presentation.
Yeah.
I think we can there be rather brief. Starting out with the whey protein extraction. You talked about your growing protein business. Question reads, "Do you have equipment solutions for whey protein extraction and processing in your portfolio? What's the earnings impact of these systems?" You've already touched on that, maybe just one or two sentences on that.
Yeah. If you're interested in protein, we're actually the company to go to. We can make it both on the liquid dairy side. If you're discussing whey protein as a company like ESN is selling or Bodylab24 or you name it, if you talk about whey powder, we're actually your go-to guy. That doesn't necessarily mean that we get orders every single quarter here, because if it's a new facility, this can be a little bit more lumpy. My best guess is if you're using protein powder in your protein shake, the chances are pretty good that this came from our equipment.
Great. Thank you. Let's start talking about the pharma business. The question reads, "We're seeing cautious CapEx spending in the pharma/healthcare industry, as well as America first relocation trends towards the U.S. Does this also affect your company, and what signals are you currently receiving from your pharma customers?
Pharma was a little bit weaker in Q1 and H1 in general this year, this is something also of a seasonality. So far, if our customers are discussing relocation plans, for us, it's actually really interesting because if you're building a new facility, you are supposed to use the newest equipment that is out there. Here we can sell our customers, for example, continuous tablet presses. The idea here is to go away from the batch processing as is done, for example, with your own cookies at home. You make a batch of cookies, like 12 cookies, and that's it. You have to wait until the next batch is done. With the continuous tablet presses, it's something that we've built ourselves, and we tested it already with Pfizer, for example.
It's a well-known American pharmaceutical company where you can see that you can go way sooner into the market with your product. You need less people to make the tablets, for example. For us, if there's some sort of relocation and a new plant that is going to be built, for us, it's actually a good thing.
Great. Thank you. Talking about second half 2026, what upside or downside risks so you're seeing towards the second half in your guidance. Maybe as a follow-up in combination, are you seeing volume softening in order intake momentum, or is the pipeline rather stabilizing?
The pipeline was already stable before. The pipeline so far is actually pretty good. If you talk about our business, we have three income streams, basically. The service business, this is more of a recurring revenue business. Our machines have a certain timeframe that they're operating, and after a certain number of hours, they need to be replaced or at least serviced. This is a given, more or less. The equipment business is looking good. These are the single pieces of equipment that we're selling. We also have these large orders, for example. This is the ones that are the most difficult to predict. The pipeline is good, especially with these large orders. Only the timing is a problem. If you can remember, we discussed the Baladna order last year already, when we got the order in August.
The problem or the difference was just we got the down payment in October. It was booked in Q4 then, even though we signed it in Q3. Our CEO, Stefan Klebert, he made the handshake deal already one year prior with the head of Baladna. It took us one and a half years basically to go from handshake agreement with the boss of the company to really booking the order. Downside so far is if one customer pushes his down payment instead of the 25th of December to 10th of January, an order might be postponed basically to Q1 2027. This is the only risk that is out there. Honestly, for us, it's also not a real risk because we know our best guess is, if we can get the order or not, it's just our problem to get the timing right.
You saw it already in Q4. Last year, we got plenty of large orders. It was even more than we expected ourselves. If the customer is signing, we are the last people to tell them, "Please don't sign it yet. We want to push it to the next quarter." Since customer is king. The upside here is, it's really depending how the conflict in Iran is continuing to go. For example, the newest equipment that we're selling is more energy efficient. For us, it's actually a good thing, if the energy prices are high and, ourselves, we spend less than EUR 30 million in total on energy. We are a relatively energy-poor company so far. Our customers are very energy-intensive. For us, high energy prices are good, actually.
Great. Looking at the clock, we have one minute. I'm going to skip the question regarding your use of cash, because we've discussed that already, M&A dividends or buybacks. One last question, which I think can be answered quite quickly, is regarding insider purchases. We've seen quite a bit of those. Given that conviction, would it make sense to be more aggressive on the share buyback side?
Might make sense. It's just our company is also really looking into M&A so far. Just need to remind you, we have a slight cash balance by the end of Q1 this year. In Q2, we spent roughly EUR 210 million of our own money on the dividend. It's really tough to tell if we're going to be cash positive or slightly cash negative by the end of Q2. Looking forward, if the share price is continuing to be weak and we have a positive cash balance, management will definitely consider the share buyback as an option.
Great. Thank you so much. We are unfortunately out of time. On the nose, 3:30 P.M. Thanks so much, Eduard. Thanks so much for everybody who joined us, for your interest and of course, the great questions. We will continue with GEVORKYAN. I just put the direct link to that next meeting in the chat box. Feel free to just click it and join the next meeting. Have fun. I'll see you all again with Krones in about half an hour.
Thank you. Bye.