Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to all of you to our Capital Markets Day 2020. We have a live webcast. Also greetings to you watching us via webcast. It is good to see you all, a lot of familiar faces. We're happy that you are accompanying us with our Bilfinger journey. Before we start the presentations, some safety instructions. We are here located on the 21st floor. There are two emergency exits here left and right to the podium. There are green arrows showing your way to the staircases.
Please meet in an emergency case down on the ground level at the meeting point. We have today with us our CEO, Mr. Tom Blades, our CFO, Mrs. Christina Johansson, and our COO, Duncan Hall. Shortly, we will start now with the presentation of the preliminary figures 2019 and the outlook 2020. Afterwards, we would like to give you an insight into our plans for the strategy 2020 plus. With this, I would like to hand over to Tom.
Thank you, Bettina, and also from me, a warm welcome. Good afternoon. As Bettina said, we're going to kick off with the obligatory looking backwards before going forwards into the Strategy 2020 plus. Some of these slides are redundant. I think you know who we are, and you've seen us live, we'll skip that one. Introduction, beginning with year-end 2019. Four check marks, we made it. I think people had some doubt during the middle of the year, even after Q3. I must say it was a little bit nail-biting to some extent, we made all of our targets. We delivered on our outlook. 6% organic growth, 6% last year, too. Two years in a row, 6% against a strategy of five, a little bit ahead of plan in terms of the revenue.
The EBITDA, significant increase, from EUR 65 last year to EUR 104 this year. That's a 65% organic growth. Again, check the box. Net profit, same as last year except now there's a plus rather than the minus, we're at plus EUR 24. That's good because it's the first time since 2016 that we have turned a net profit, and of course, 2016 was heavily influenced positively by the sale of Apleona. The last of our key milestones there, free cash flow reported. Reported rather than adjusted at EUR 57. Again, check the box.
We made, as I said, all of our commitments for 2019. Looking a little bit further, the headlines. Orders received that's probably the only kind of mar on the copy book. We're 4% down on 2018. You've heard the story, we're going to repeat it several times. We're not worried. Not at all. We can explain it. These are a couple of major orders, and major really does mean major, which were moved from 2019 into 2020. We're still feeling very confident on the top line, both order intakes and revenue, as you'll see in our planning going forward.
As I said already, the full-year revenue was good, 6% up, Q4 slightly down. Again, not concerned, to be honest. EBITDA, tremendous improvement. We're at 2.4 w e'd like to been a little bit higher. When I say like to have been, that's when we entered into this in 2017. I think we made our plan, we made our budget, and again, a great thank you to the Bilfinger team out there, hopefully watching this as well. Finally, net profit. We had a real turbo close to the year.
As you can see there, EUR 15 million, so a total of EUR 24 million for the year. If you look at our liquidity, again, reported free cash flow there at +EUR 57 million. A lot of that was driven by working capital improvements, especially DSO. DSO is always one of those things where you have this year-end push. Our challenge is to get that more even through the year. Which of course, will improve our liquidity, but also here, the guys and girls did a great job, 10 days down in Q4 and delivering then a solid reported positive free cash flow.
The balance sheet remains strong. You followed the recapitalization, the payback of the bond during the course of the year. With that strong balance sheet, with the performance that we delivered, we are going to recommend a one euro dividend per share, as we did in the prior years. That recommendation goes to the board, and of course, the board then puts it to the AGM in April. Again, we're feeling confident about our balance sheet, not only today but also forward, and therefore we maintain the one euro dividend floor.
Our outlook for the coming year hasn't changed since the last time we talked about this at the end of Q3. Revenue will be relatively flat. Maybe some upside, but flat because again, we're living off the backlog. We see what's happening. As the backlog grows, we're feeling even more confident on 2021. For now, we're forecasting steady revenue. We are forecasting a substantial increase in the EBITDA, so from the 2.4% that we achieved in 2019 to around about 4% in 2020.
Then we will continue to grow going forward, but that's the next section. Finally, likewise, that improved operating performance is not only reflected in EBITDA but also then in cash flow. I'm being fairly quick because I think you know the numbers, and I'm going to hand over to Christina to begin to walk us through the details.
Thank you, Tom. Also, a warm welcome from my side. I would like to present, first of all, 2019, a little bit more on 2020. Starting off with the orders received. The picture at the end of the year is fairly similar to what we have seen during the last quarters. In total, we are finalizing the order intake at the level of EUR 4,159, which organically is 4% below what we had in a very, very good year, 2018. We clearly see that, especially in the segment Technologies, but also partly in E&M International, that we are a bit weaker than we planned and expected and wanted. Its major driver behind that is a number of projects that time-wise will go into 2020 for order intake.
I'm also very happy to say that out of these few number but large size project, a couple of them have now been moving forward in January and February. One of these projects that we expected in the order intake last year is a project with a German subsidiary of BP, Ruhr Oel. In this case, we have now been commissioned to do engineering, procurement, and installation of pipes and pipe racks at their refinery in Gelsenkirchen. This is a size in above EUR 100 million order intake, that we will see in quarter one. We will also hear more about Hinkley Point C, where we also in quarter one now finally will have the first sizable order intake.
Obviously, these orders were missing in the closing of 2019, looking then at the weakness in technologies we will make up for in the first quarter 2020 in North America, it will still require a couple of months to pick up on this. I think this is not a concern for us looking forward. Looking at the book-to-bill, we closed at one, looking at the order backlog, we here are closing organically 7% below the very strong level that we had when we started 2019. Proceeding to the revenue line. As Tom said, we managed to achieve an organic growth of 6%, even above our expectation in 2019, the second year in a row with this organic growth.
We managed to take the EBITDA adjusted up to the level of EUR 104 million from EUR 65 in previous year. We also had a similar number for the adjustment, EUR 72 million in 2018, also EUR 72 million in 2019, but brought the reported EBITDA to EUR 32 million in 2019. In the EUR 72 million of adjustments, the two major positions being the IT rollout, our system harmonization that we have been working on for a number of years, and we will finalize in quarter one 2021. We will also see a number here, and we'll show it later in the presentation, for adjustments on the system harmonization coming through in our guidance for 2020, and then a very small number in the first quarter of 2021.
In addition to that, EUR 40 million of restructuring expense. After our announcement after quarter three, we obviously were increasing this number, so we now have also covered for the sub-seven, the latest restructuring program that we have initiated in last year. All the cost for driving this SG&A program further down has been covered with provisions in 2019. Obviously, the cash out would, to a large extent, only follow in 2020. EUR 40 million is that, and a bit more than EUR 30 million coming from system harmonization.
Looking at the two main drivers for the improvement that we have achieved, but also above all the improvements that we intend to achieve in 2020 and 2021 to bring Bilfinger up to the sustainable EBITDA, and I say deliberately EBITDA, not adjusted, not reported, one EBITDA of 5% in 2021. The first one being the gross margin. I like to be transparent because I know that you see everything that we see. Looking at the gross margin developments over the last years.
We achieved an improvement in the last quarter, so we closed the last quarter with 11.3%, a significant improvement versus the last quarter in 2018. Looking at the full year, we are only at 9.5%, so a small improvement versus 2018, which was 9.4%. In this area, we see most of the improvement that needs to take place. We also will hear, especially from Duncan later on, what we are going to do to bring this 9.5% in the next coming two years up to the level of 12%. You will also see later on that a big part of our business today is already at 12%. We just need to make sure that the remaining part of the business will improve to also make sure that we, in total, get to the 12%.
Operating margin or gross margin improvement visible in quarter four, but a big step up required here in the next coming two years. The second most important lever is then the SG&A ratio. Here we have, over the last years, proven that we are able to reduce this. We have closed 2019 with a ratio of 8% versus the year before 8.7%, starting off with above 10% in 2016. Year-by-year, a clear improvement and a good track record. We will continue this journey with the restructuring program announced in autumn last year.
We will bring this ratio now with a flat top line down to 7.5% in 2020, and then down to 7% in 2021. Trying to target, even if we start to grow again, to stay below the 7%. These two, SG&A ratio and the operating margin being the most important steps forward to make sure that we move on this journey from 2.4% to hopefully above 5%. Looking at the three segments that we are reporting externally. First of all, the largest segment, which is Engineering & Maintenance, E&M Europe. Another year of a very sound performance throughout the year.
This part also making sure that we, during this year of 2019, were able to make up for the downside that is visible in technologies. So E&M Europe bringing more to the table than we originally expected to make sure that we are keeping the promise for the whole group. Looking at orders received, slightly below. Organically, a decrease for the year of 5%. However, we have here also the effect that I mentioned, Hinkley Point, but also the BP project in Gelsenkirchen, that partly will bring a benefit to technologies, but also E&M Europe units being involved.
With the strong order intake in quarter one, we are not concerned about the workload in E&M Europe for 2020. Book-to-bill, still closing at one. Revenue, an organic increase in 2019 of 2%-3%. EBITDA adjusted closed at EUR 101 million, which is in line with previous year, a 3.7% margin on EBITDA adjusted. Solid performance, continuous improvement, but we still see potential here for further growth, but also for further profit improvement. For 2020, our guidance for E&M Europe is a fairly stable revenue development, but a significant positive development of EBITDA adjusted. That is, of course, a stronger focus on continuous improvement, but it's also the mix.
We have a large number of what we call in Bilfinger turnarounds, larger revisions in the maintenance business. These are normally generating a very solid and good profitability, and we have increasingly, for the next coming two years, more and more turnarounds that also will pay back in the segment of E&M Europe. I also would like to mention that leaving 2019, going into 2020, we have four legal entities in E&M Europe that we have strategically decided that they don't fit in our portfolio, and they will be transferred into the segment OOP from January 2020.
That represent a sales of approximately EUR 200 million, and an EBITDA adjusted of around EUR 5 million. The performance though, the EUR 5 million, that low in 2019, was hit with some one-time costs. Four legal entities moving on and having an impact of EUR 200 million sales less in 2020. Moving on to the second part of E&M, E&M International, where North America is the larger part of this. In this part, we were extremely happy with the developments. We had a strong organic growth in sales. Revenue organically increasing with 15%, thanks to U.S. and some very successful projects.
We managed to get to an EBITDA adjusted of EUR 42 million, EUR 10 million more than in previous year, a ratio of 4.6%. A very, very strong performance, especially in North America in 2019. Looking into 2020, given what I mentioned in regard of the order books, that North America, especially when it comes to the project business, has got some time delay here before the next larger project started. We are expecting that the top line that was achieved in 2019 will not be possible.
We will have a slight decrease in revenue due to the order book situation in North America. We expect, nonetheless, an improvement in regard of the EBITDA further, especially coming from the Middle East, continuous improvement, but also a more favorable portfolio. Last but not least, our problem child, Technologies, that we already, after quarter one last year, had quite in detail to explain what is happening. Segment Technologies, with five legal entities, have in 2019 had a difficult journey. Three entities not generating poor performance.
I stress that three entities were profitable and meeting the expectations for the year of 2019, even if we expect more growth and more profitability also from these three entities. Two legal entities being in focus, one hurting us badly in the first half, and in the second half, the second entity. This has been a difficult journey in technologies. I confess that we, after quarter three, jointly still expected that the final result in technologies would still be at least better than in 2018, where we had a loss of EUR 26 million. Some happenings on some of the projects and also the need to take some additional provisions here, to be cautious, we were forced to say minus EUR 28 million is the result of technologies in 2019.
This is not satisfactory at all. I think it is important to isolate these two entities. I know that Duncan will also speak a bit more about what additional actions we have taken now to make sure that this story will not repeat in 2020. The first one we started to stabilize in quarter three and four, actually had losses in quarter three and four, very small losses. The whole segment of technology was, however, profitable in the last quarter of 2019, but it was less profitable than we had forecasted due to one legal entity and a couple of projects.
Looking into 2020 and with this track record, it is difficult, I think, to convince you that a problem that we have now had for a number of years, we are really going to be able to turn around in 2020. We are expecting, not the least, also thanks to a very good order intake in January, a significant increase in revenue here and a positive result for EBITA adjusted. That goes back to turning these two remaining two legal entities around and making sure that we at least get them to break even in 2020.
We are coming back more to some insight on the reasons behind it and also additional actions that we have taken. Strong cash generation, especially in the last quarter, as Tom mentioned. Between September and December, we reduced the DSO with 10 days. Very, very strong movement forward here. A pity that that movement is not coming during the year. We have a track record here of being very, very strong also in the cash generation in the last quarter.
What are we doing about that? We are actually changing our incentive system for 2020 so that we stop measuring cash flow only by the end of the year, and we will now measure it quarter by quarter to also make sure that we have the maximum effort earlier during the year to drive the cash flow. Looking at the adjusted operating cash flow here, we are achieving a clear improvement for the year, EUR 181 versus EUR 110 in previous year. A strong positive step forward. It doesn't mean that we are happy with the cash generation.
During the next coming years, we need here to make sure that we are moving forward and reducing the working capital, improving the EBITDA to support the cash, but also making sure that these adjustments are not happening anymore, that we don't need further restructuring, that we don't need any kind of adjustments, because that's also having an extreme impact on the cash flow generated. You see the net trade asset. I don't need to talk about that.
On the net profit side, you see the net profit, the swing from minus EUR 24 in 2018 to plus EUR 24 in 2019, and the adjusted net profit moving up from EUR 36 to EUR 49. Also here, a very strong performance in the last quarter. Not good enough. We will continue to drive this topic. Last but not least, the outlook for 2020, confirming what also Tom said before, and we already announced after quarter three, we are expecting on the basis of our existing backlog and top line that is flat, organically stable. We are expecting that EBITDA adjusted will move up to around 4% in 2020, a big step up from 2.4%. In regard of the free cash flow reported, our guidance is a significantly positive development. With that, I would like to pass on to Tom again.
Okay. Thank you, Christina. We commented on our results as well. Pleased but not yet satisfied. I think, again, when you look at the hit we took on T and the fact that we made our forecast, that shows you that we are robust. We are able to take some blows along the way and still deliver on our commitment. I think that's really the message to take away going forward also. Which is what we're going to do now. We're going to move into the forward-looking part, into the strategy. I think the best place to start the strategy going forward is where we began with the strategy in 2017, February 14, 2017, to be precise. At that time, this is the picture we showed you, so no change.
What is interesting is that at the beginning of 2019, Christina, new on board, said, "Convince me the strategy still holds." We actually had quite a few sessions early on in the year testing our assumptions. Bottom line is, yes, it does hold. We're going to show you why. At the time, we told you two, four, six. Two segments, four regions, six key industries, and then the recipe to win through our people, customers, innovation, organization structures, and delivering on the financials. That really hasn't changed. We showed you at the time as well the three horizons.
In the stabilization phase, that was 2017. We had one legacy project then that really took us down. We made a profit warning in Q2 of 2017. Since then, we've stabilized. As I said, events such as happened in T, although they set us back, they don't knock us over. We still deliver to our commitments, and I think that's our mantra going forward. We deliver to our commitments. We've gone through the stabilization phase. All of those lines have a check mark beside them. We did the same on the build-up phase. Now what's left ahead of us with a little bit of delay, but it's still ahead of us, is the build out phase.
The build out phase, when I look at that, the first question you ask, well, what did you make in between? What did you miss? Just summarizing, where we wanted to be at the end of 2019, where we committed to be at the end of 2020, and this is again going back to our original February 14, 2017 Capital Market Day. We said we would grow the top line on the base of 2017 at a CAGR of 5%. Okay, you've seen we're growing at 6%, a little bit stronger than that. But again, give ourselves a check mark. That one we achieved, and I think we'll continue to do so going forward after a pause on the order intake 2019 converting into revenue in 2020 for good reasons.
On the gross margin, we failed. Quite frankly, we failed. We said 200 bips pickup. We're more or less at zero. There's a nice trend that Christina Johansson just showed you in Q4 and a smidgen of a trend on 2019 over 2018. We face it. We haven't delivered there. There have been headwinds against us. We're not going to sit here and moan about the past. We're going to look forward and that really is our major target, our major to-do and we're going to explain to you how we're going to achieve that. SG&A, well on the way.
We said 300 basis points, down from 10.5 to 7.5. We closed the year around eight. 250 of the 300 are in the bag. This year we'll do the remainder. We will make our 300 basis points reduction in SG&A and we'll take it further from there. Again, check mark, we delivered. On the target margins, we said the target margin for maintenance was 3%-5.5%. We're there. We're at four. We will improve upon that. We're not sitting back and just saying we delivered.
Likewise, engineering technologies, we gave you at the time a target of 5-9. We failed. We're at 0, even a little bit below 0. If you break it down into the five companies, different story, but we're not complaining. We're just sharing with you our report card and as Christina said, we are absolutely transparent on this. Finally, on the free cash flow, again, check the box. We said by 2018, we'd be adjusted cash flow positive by 2019. Reported cash flow positive, check the box, EUR 57 million. We achieved it. What's left is to deliver on the remainder of our commitment.
This is why we gave the strategy a little bit of a twist. We'd call it now 2020 Plus. Early into the next plan period being 2020-2024, we will hit the mark and we will deliver on our financial ambitions. I'm going to go more into the forward mode. To set the scenes, we have prepared a small film just as an emotional stimulator. I think it'll give you a little bit of a preview of what I'm going to talk about and therefore it's a good backdrop. With that, if we could show the film please.
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Time to move around a bit. When we reviewed the strategy and decided it was the way to go forward, we spent some time looking at the global trends, and of course, everyone has these, but we focused on the ones that we felt were particularly applicable to us and that would change and drive our business going forward. I think no surprise in the first one, aging assets, asset integrity. This is, I think, no surprise. If I go back to my early days in the North Sea, the assets I worked on then are alive today. They're written off. They're being extended.
The same as on land. Companies are stretching their asset lifetimes. At the same time, they're stretching the assets themselves. They're trying to drive efficiency. They're driving emission reductions. All these are areas where Bilfinger can step in and help. At the same time, as these assets get older, like people, they of course need more maintenance, so the maintenance costs continue to climb. Therefore, this is a prime focus of what we do. What I described covers the asset base in Europe and in North America. If I go to the Middle East, the assets are more like teenagers.
They're still young and strong. The customers pay a lot of money for those assets, so they bought top quality. Those assets are being run by quantity rather than quality, and therefore, when they look at their benchmarking, they see they're not on par performance-wise with other parts of the world. Therefore, again, there, they're looking at people like Bilfinger to come in and begin to drive performance. The second driver, ESG, climate change. I think the G part, governance, we've learned our lesson. We've gone through that.
Check the box. Social, yes. Environmental, we have a role to play. We help our customers achieve their own goals. We deliver on reduction of CO2 limits, emissions and air pollutions, clean energy, distributed power generation, power to liquids. We were asked this morning, what is that? It's if a windmill is driving power generation, driving electrolysis to generate hydrogen, for example. That's what power to liquids is. Circular economy, converting waste into materials, into chemicals, or converting waste into power.
All of these are projects that we are engaged on today with our customers, helping them achieve their goals. We also noticed that the flow of finance is changing. People decide where to put their money, and ESG is a prime factor in deciding where that money goes. We like our customers to have money because then they can give some of that to us. Finally, of course, is the Green Deal. You will see it coming later on this year from the EU. Again, it will play in this direction. The third trend, this is not something we make up to drive pricing, this is a fact.
There is a skilled labor shortage. There's one in Europe driven by demographics, so people getting older. Also driven by the younger generation's appeal to digitalization. They want to go work almost everywhere except in plumbing or welding or in scaffolding. Now, we're very fortunate that we have a good reputation. We can still attract these people. It is a fact that in Germany, almost a third of these typical skilled labor apprentices positions are empty. In the U.S., it's a little bit different.
It's not the fact that the people are getting older, it's because the demand is higher. If you look at the U.S. and look at some of the headlines, you'll see that plumbers are being moved, relocated across country. A plumber that would have grown up in the town where he was born is now being paid tens of thousands of EUR to relocate to another part of the very large U.S. Again, shrinking unemployment is driving that, and that drives a craft labor shortage. We have that craft labor. In the Middle East, I alluded to it, the asset part of our trend.
In the Middle East, problems were solved by quantity. If you had a plant that wasn't performing, you threw another 100 people at it. It really wasn't expensive. That's changing. As they begin to benchmark, look at performance, and also begin to squeeze their assets, they're saying, "We need to upgrade our people." There, again, Bilfinger can help. Finally, I think again, no surprise, and I think none of these really are a surprise, but these are the ones that drive our business. It's all about data. Data is everywhere. Artificial intelligence in terms of machine learning, that's beginning to have an impact. It's early, but it will have an impact.
Machines will learn and replace the experts that we're losing. Predictive and prescriptive maintenance, we've described that already to you. I think virtual reality and augmented reality, combining the virtual world with the real world at the same time, one eye here, one eye there, and then being able to access machine learning to do a better job and drive performance at the plant. We look at OEE, overall equipment efficiency, and again, there, as people try to sweat their assets, as they try to squeeze out more from the existing plants, this is where digitalization plays a key role.
Also, if you understand your plant and can model the data and predict, it means you have a better handle on risk. I think understanding risk around plants opens up new business models that I think you'll hear from us a little bit later on the year what exactly we mean by that. These are the four trends, and I think you'll agree, these trends all affect and drive aspects of our business. What do we do with that?
There are three core capabilities we have that we believe are needed to address those trends, and again, which make Bilfinger a little bit different from some of our competitors and position us well for growth. The first, of course, is our very strong, skilled labor base. We are number one in Europe. I'll show you some numbers. We have a leading reputation as a good employer. We invest in branding, employer branding, which means we actually go looking for the right recruits. Before, you could sit back and wait. Now you have to go and look for them.
We have an academy, so we not only get people, we train them. We invest in those people. That makes them stronger, better, and again, it's an attractive feature of Bilfinger as an employer. We have accreditation for our trade craft. We had at the end of last year 34,120 employees. Those are full-time employees. At any time, we can add thousands of part-time. We have a very large register of people that want to work only on projects and then go home again. We have what's new. We have the skilled labor base.
We have domain expertise. Customers like working with us because we're engineers. We can go into their plant, we can talk to them about processes. We can talk to them about where to drive efficiency, about debottlenecking plants. They like that interface. This is also why we like the engineering reputation. Now we're struggling and fighting with it. We're not giving up, but I think, again, that's key to our makeup and our credentials vis-à-vis the customers. We focus on the same key industries. You know what they are. We're close to our customers.
We're intimate with our customers. We collaborate, and I think the long-term contracts we have, they attest to that. Our longest customer is 75 years they've been with Bilfinger. Our longest term contract is currently running 14-year contract, Equinor in Norway. Once we win a customer, we rarely lose them. If we lose them, it's rarely, very, very rarely for quality or not achieving the cost reductions that we committed to. Our stick rate is more than 90%. Something we can do that others cannot do is we can work across borders.
If there's a large turnaround in, let's say, Antwerp, we can mobilize hundreds of people from across Europe to that turnaround. When it finishes and there's a turnaround then in Schwechat in Austria, we can move those people and add to them in Austria. We are cross-border. Not everybody can do that. That makes us a little bit different. Finally, digitalization. We created Bilfinger Digital Next two years ago. It's a startup. It's consuming money. We planned for that. We said we have a three-year horizon to get to break even. They're on the way.
What we're realizing is they're actually a very strong marketing weapon. They differentiate Bilfinger again from others. Duncan will point to an example where we won a contract just very recently because we have this. Not because it's doing something wonderful, but because the customer says, "You're innovative. You are forward-thinking. We want to work with companies like Bilfinger." We converge BMC, Bilfinger Maintenance Concept. This is our numerically driven approach to doing maintenance, now augmented by digital towards digital BMC. Not only do we try to benefit the customer, we also want benefits from digitalization.
Some of the shots you saw in the movie, they're around electronic workflow, where we drive internal efficiency. If you're on a unit rate contract, you're paid a fixed sum for a pump or a motor. If you can lower your own cost by being more efficient, that's profit. Therefore, again, we use this internal to drive forward our margin expectations. We also have AI. We have PIDGraph, which we've shown a few times. What is PIDGraph? These big A3-sized piece of paper that describe a process in a plant. P&ID, piping instrumentation diagram.
Some of them handwritten changes on them. We can feed that into our PIDGraph machine. It reads it. It converts it into a process flow and puts that into a computer model. We're able to archive old manual process flow charts, but also use that to build digital twins. Finally, as I said, when you understand risk and how a plant performs, and what the consequences of that risk may be, it opens up new models for you. We're having discussions with a couple of people to see if we can use that to develop new partnerships for Bilfinger and take us into new business models. Not promising on that yet. It's work in progress.
It shows you there is more under the blanket than meets the eye. These two dimensions fit together, and we could put a lot of pictures on this chart, but I'll walk you through them. Fabric maintenance, North Sea, that hasn't changed. We're a lead in that. We're very numerical with our maintenance analysis. We build twins in order to drive digitalization and to do predictive and prescriptive maintenance. In terms of ESG, climate change, we support our customers, help them reach their goals. The picture you see here is a circular economy where recycled plastic is being converted into a fuel, which is augmented in the cracker feed in order to drive, again, circular economy.
We do something similar with municipal solid waste, which is turned into sludge, and then again goes through a pyrolysis system to generate power. These are still prototypes of drawing board projects where we support our customer with their targets, their goals. Again, it shows you that we're, I think, a little bit ahead in doing things that some others would like to do. Biomass-fired fuel stations, easy. Non-cellulosic ethanol, yes, doing that too. There's a lot of stuff we're doing around ESG and climate change. Pollution. For many years, we've been doing desulfurization in coal-fired power stations. You know the scrubber approach.
I'm sure you're going to have a few questions on that later. Also, we use scrubbers in cement works. Just down the road here in Ennigerloh, we have a project where we're actually taking the sulfur out of the cement emissions. We're being contacted by many customers who are focusing on CO2. Last but by no means least, we do a lot of work on water. The picture you see here is Thames Water. We're working with them on their efficiency drive in the U.K. We also maintain and also operate partly desalination plants in Kuwait and in Saudi Arabia.
We are very present here, and as this develops, we think this will be a very strong driver. We have the answers. We have the people, we have the domain expertise, and we have the digital answers in order to put this together as a chain. I mentioned this already, employer of choice. We have the right training and concepts. We can go a little bit further by making the job more interesting through augmented reality. We do cloud analytics. We have AI, and we have now Digital BCAP. I think we have the recipe in order to deliver on the kind of strategy that we're showing you here.
We spend quite some time discussing the essential elements, like the assumptions. Making a plan going forward is fine, you need to make certain decisions. What are you assuming is going to be a constant through this 2020 through 2024 period? For us, and bear in mind, this is our organic plan. It's not talking about adding to the picture through acquisitions. This is the organic growth plan. We still remain focused on the three key regions.
Our house that I showed at the beginning is intact. Europe, North America, Middle East. Our industry focus remains the same. Six industries, the top three generate 80% of our revenue. Digitalization we see as an enabling opportunity, not just per se, but enabling, driving productivity internally and opening up new opportunities for partnerships and different business models as we get mature and show that we can really anticipate risk and predict events in plants. We're assuming that we will be engineering and maintenance for a while yet.
We're not defining which companies are inside of the technology part. I'm sure that's a question later on, too. Again, as I mentioned, there is a good overlap there. There is a credibility aspect to it, too. We think that we can grow further in E&M, strengthen our strength. The war for talent, blue collars, we do make a difference on the market, and we do believe that we will have to fight for good people through the entire five-year period as do other people. We think the cards are stacked in our favor. We think we have the right tools to do that, and therefore, this is something that we will continue to do well, I hope.
That is attract the right kind of people to deliver on our business model. We went into the imperatives. What are the essential must-haves we have to deliver? I know margin, okay, but we also have some other factors, integrity and HSE. We learned the lessons made through mistakes in 2003. That was a hard lesson, the DPA. It took us five years. I think this is the strongest anchored culture element throughout Bilfinger. Talk to anybody in Bilfinger, all 34,120 people, they will recite to you our compliance rules. We will not compromise on integrity or on HSE. People, attract, motivate, retain, develop. Unique service offering.
We want to be able to offer our customers not just one service, but a number of services. We want to be innovative, we want to, over time, extend our portfolio. We focus on the asset-light model. We're often asked about M&A. We have a vision of what M&A looks like. We could describe the animal to you. We couldn't put a name on it because we're not there yet. What we can tell you is that it would be asset light. We're focused on ROCE. ROCE is one of our primary factors of success.
To drive ROCE, of course, not only being asset light, but strict working capital management and very disciplined M&A criteria, which Christina will touch more on as we step through the presentation. Margin growth. It's not just pushing for pricing. Of course, as there is a shortage of good people on the market, we've got to be able to push back on pricing. A lot of our managers over the years have become a little bit soft and let themselves be rolled over by the customer.
That's changed. It's changing. I was very happy when at the beginning of the year, we renewed a contract in Europe and we told them, "You're not renewing unless you increase the margin." At first they were saying, "Are you serious?" Customers always expect a deduction, a reduction. We said, "Yes, we're deadly serious. You don't get it, we will not renew the contract." Surprise, surprise, the customer renewed at a higher rate than before. You got to drive that behavior throughout our organization because people are a shortage. We have them. We have good people. We will make a difference. Likewise, project execution.
You know my song and dance on that. We're not done yet. There's room for improvement. Again, we know where to apply that improvement in order to generate the margin pickup that we promised. Finally, portfolio rotation. Something I mentioned last year, not off the agenda. We will continue to look at that, taking out the low-performing, but low-performing companies, replacing them with more interesting margins. SG&A, not going to go into depth on that. We're on the way. I think also important is our geographic footprint.
We know what to do to grow our business in North America. We want to leverage our existing customers and market position. We want to push more into maintenance using what we have in Europe, also now with digitalization approach. Likewise, in the Middle East. We've been in the Middle East a long time, more than 60 years. If you look at our revenue base, it's about 80% is energy and utilities. Only about 20% is oil and gas. Surprise. Biggest oil and gas market in the world, we can grow there. We have our first contracts with Aramco. We mentioned that last year, the Berri Gas compression project. We've just won a great project in Ruwais, in Abu Dhabi, working for a well-known customer there. Again, Duncan will touch on it. It's working.
We're on the way to driving our oil and gas profile up from where it was in the Middle East, and that's an essential part of our growth. Now, it is a small part of our business, but nevertheless, it's growth, good growth and profitable growth. When we sit down with most of you one-on-one or in other parts of the world, the first question that we're always asked by the analyst community is: How do you see the market? What are your customers telling you? The way that you ask us these questions, you expect us to come with a negative answer. Sorry, we don't have it yet. Our markets are thus far robust. If you look at our markets deeper, and I'm sure you do, you know them better than we do sometimes, they are long cycle markets.
When they do tip, when there is a recession, we see it coming very early. Our customers go through a longer cycle. We see it coming earlier. We have to react, of course, when that happens. It hasn't happened yet. If we look at some of our main businesses, if you look at the chemical index, petrochemical global index, in the five year period 2020-2024, it shows 5.5% CAGR. Now, a lot of that is in the Far East, okay? If you look at Europe, look at Middle East and North America, it's a little bit less than that, but it's growth nonetheless.
That market continues to grow. Really, it's growing with population. People want to have more chemicals, textiles. Population growth is driving the petrochemical business, and it's not going to go down, even with a blip in China as we're seeing today. CapEx, OpEx around E&Ps, exploration producing or oil and gas companies. People are saying, well, the oil price is down a couple of dollars. Are you feeling it? Total is a great example. Total is a major customer of ours across Europe, in Germany, in Leuna, in Antwerp.
Total, again, you know it better than I do, last quarter, $7.2 billion of cash. That's 20% up on the same quarter one year before. Despite a $2 oil price reduction, they're driving more cash. They have their costs under control. They're driving productivity. They're generating cash, that goes into asset life extensions, making sure that maintenance is working. Our customers, for now, touch wood, are solid. Our industry is robust, we're confident that we will generate revenue growth going forward for those reasons.
The old reasons, asset base refineries are old, more than 20 years. If you look in Europe and North America, 60% of those refineries and assets more than 20 years old, they need us. They keep adding new ones. It's not that the old ones are being torn down and new ones replacing them. No, the old ones are left and new ones come in addition. We see 45,000 assets in our space, and we see new projects, even in Europe, which is a mature market. Look at Borealis, look at Ineos investing each a couple of billion EUR in Antwerp again.
We're in Antwerp, this is good for us. Climate change, okay, you know the story better than I do. I don't need to dwell on that one. We're the ones that help our customers reach their climate ambitions. Today, I think it was on Bloomberg, Mr. Looney being interviewed. BP wants to be CO2 neutral by 2050. That's a tall order. I'm happy and waiting for the call. A few more credentials. We say we're number one in Europe. We think the European E&M market is roughly EUR 25 billion per annum. If you look at where that money is spent, a large part is in the North Sea.
A large part of that is on the U.K. side, and that's why the single biggest market, and we're looking at the size of the little factories here that my colleagues put together. You see the largest factory there, the largest market is in the U.K. That's driven by oil and gas. The largest land market, of course, is in Germany, and then so on and so forth. You see our position. We're number two in the U.K. We have some big peer groups in oil and gas. Number one in Europe. Look at the Lünendonk study year for year.
We're number two in the BeNe, Belgium, Netherlands. Number one in the Nordics. Number one in Poland. Number one in Austria and Switzerland. We didn't just do that to make Christina happy. That's a fact. When you put it all together, we believe we are the number one E&M company in Europe. As I said, we're a people company. Bilfinger is a people company. We don't have factories or manufacturing in large scale. We do small modules. We're all about people. Therefore, our people are seriously, they are not only our most important asset, they're almost our only asset, and that's why we protect them, nurture them.
If you look at the numbers down here, bottom right, we ended up the year with 34,120, to be exact. That's down from 35,900 last year, despite higher revenues. We're driving productivity. The main delta there between the 35,900 and the 34,100 on my chart is that we have been selling companies, including large manpower companies in Austria, for example. We're focusing on efficiency. Again, if you look at the chart and look at the balance, we have a good mix of white collar and blue collar, again, driving our credentials, working with our customers.
The E part of E&M is engineering. The customer says, "I need a modification. I need improvement. I need less emissions. Can you engineer them? Can you implement them?" That's why the two go hand in hand. What have we been doing to protect our most valuable resource? Well, we've done a lot of things and continue to do so. Some of the more recent ones is focusing at the top end on management. I shared some numbers with you last time. We have changed a lot of managers. Where change management doesn't work, we change management. Critical entities, right sizing.
That's part of the technology story. It's one of the companies there, taking it down to the point where it's right size, but not too far, so it doesn't come its way up again as the orders come in, as they're doing now. Hercules. We've invested a lot of money in SAP SuccessFactors that we call HRcules or Hercules. We have the Bilfinger Academy. We consolidate LEs because, I said it last year also, I think that five times EUR 60 million is not as good as one time EUR 300 million.
A stronger management team, stronger delivery model, of course, a more focused approach to the business. Finally, SG&A efficiency. It's not just about cutting heads, it's actually being more efficient. Checking off the boxes, empowering the people. As we go forward, we have a very active skilled labor strategy. We're beginning to focus more and more on first-level leadership. These are foremen and shift leaders, I'll show you why that's so important. Critical positions remain project managers for execution, also here, this one, contract manager, in order to claim.
Customers like to take advantage of you. If you're not prepared before you start the job, you will be eaten for breakfast. That's happened a few times. As you know, it's going to stop happening in the remainder of the company. Most of it is fixed. Cross-border opportunities. I mentioned that we can move around, others can't. Entrepreneurial empowerment. Duncan will dive into that one. Pay for performance. Christina mentioned a quarterly approach to cash management in order to get away from this bathtub profile.
We want to see four nice peaks through the year or ideally a flat line. To show you some real numbers and some real evidence of what we're doing. This is from social media. This is the kind of thing we do out there to attract the right kind of people. Is it working? That's over here. We've had 23,500 applicants since we went live with this, and live was at the latter part of Q2 last year. We've made offers to 1,900 of the 23. We are picky. We don't just take anybody. Picky is Christina's word.
We've accepted 1,400 people into the company, or rather, they accepted to work for us, is probably the better way to explain it. This is 75% hit rate on what we select. We have in the machine now 30,400 candidates that we can go to. Employer branding is critical, it's important, and it's part of our makeup. It's what drives, a little bit, our thinking going forward, because this will not change in the next five years. I think I mentioned some of these issues. Wage arbitrage, we move people around Europe also for wage regions, and they like that. It's motivational.
The graph on the bottom left of the chart, interesting one. The first part, the four sites, this is where we actually went in and worked with the foreman. The people that have four or five people working for them, building a scaffolding tower, for example. We went in, we spent time with them, we talked about motivational principles, KPIs, morning briefings, performance targets. After only a very short period of time, we saw a 30-plus % increase in productivity. Then again, we went forward and measuring that in terms of cubic meters per man hour, a 56% increase in the amount of scaffolding that people can manage.
Once you begin to pay attention to the people, give them KPIs, treat them like managers, invest in them, amazing things happen. I'm going to try to finish off with a little bit of where the revenue growth will come from. I've shown you why it will grow. I've shown you why our markets are intact, why we think we have the right recipe and resources to address the markets. Our model going forward will sustain 5% CAGR. We commit to that.
We see that within our geographic horizon, the biggest growth on a smaller base, of course, will come here from North America, rolling out E&M, followed closely by technologies. I think you understand why. Middle East, 7%, and Europe, our largest base, grow a little bit slower, but we think here this is a profitability challenge. This is a top-line challenge. All of that together adds up to the 5% CAGR. We've broken it down also by industry, our six focus industries.
This one sticks out. That's the Hinkley Point effect. It's also why then, in technologies, there's good growth, Hinkley Point coming in, turning from orders in 2020 into revenue in 2021. With that, I'm going to pause. I'm going to hand over to Duncan. Duncan will dive a little bit deeper to give you examples that substantiate what I've been showing you.
Thanks, Tom. Afternoon, everybody. I'm going to build upon the ideas that Tom put up there, give you some insights into the key activities that we do within the business, and demonstrate our confidence in delivering our targets. We know what they are, and we know how to deliver them. We'll go through this. First of all, before we would do anything, we talk about safety and integrity in our business. It's the core of what we do. It is our license to operate. All of our employees who are watching this now, they know those values.
There's a lot of similarities between managing safety and managing integrity. Strong governance, processes, systems. First and foremost, leadership. Tone from the top, walking the talk. No substitute for that. Our management know how to do this, and we do it day in, day out. In safety, 2019, we had a step change year. We had two periods where we had 104 days without a lost time injury, and 127 days without a lost time injury. A lost time injury is where you can't attend work the day after because you've hurt yourself.
Just to give you an idea what that means, give it some reality, 127 days is 40 million man-hours. That would mean you could work for 23,000 years and not hurt yourself. More realistically, 23,000 of our people could work for a year and not hurt themselves badly. That is world-class. That's why you're seeing us in the green. This is a competitive advantage for us. This is why we win work. This is why we don't lose contracts, because our customers need us to be safe. When it comes to integrity as well, great achievement this year.
We signed off the DPA. Enormous amount of work by everybody in the business to achieve this, and we achieved the sign-off. A great milestone for us. The key to it now in both safety and integrity is this is now part of our DNA. It's part of our operational behaviors. It now drives throughout the business day in, day out. It doesn't have to be driven every day by people in different places. It is part of what we do. Also, what's another part of what we do? We grow and make money. That's core to our business as well. If we don't do that, then we're failing.
We are going to grow, and we are going to increase margins. The targets are very clear. 5% compound annual growth rate on revenue, 2% increase in our bottom-line gross margin. We've made good progress, we still have some challenges. We know that. Part of this on the top line is winning work at the right price and then delivering it to those prices, or better. When it comes to our margin challenges, we actually have two distinct challenges here. We have incremental gains in our engineering and maintenance business. It's stable. Tom's already talked about that. We'll show that again later.
That's incremental management, continuous improvement. We have to complete the turnaround within technologies, and we'll visit that again and give you a bit of an insight on some of the things that are happening through there. I want to take you through some of these examples of how we're doing it, some real-life ones, bring it to life a little bit and show you this. We'll start by how we reduce complexity in the operations at the start of the year. At the start of 2020, we changed the operating model, made it more compact, less layers.
Now the operating units report directly into the COO, CFO. More compact, enabling faster decision-making, empowerment into the businesses. A greater focus externally, less internal bureaucracy. Streamlined reporting, really got to move that forward quickly without losing the core governance that we have, that we've learned about, but also less approval requirements. Approving the projects that have the risks, not just that have the value. We can't just do that. We've also got to make sure we continue to improve and actually accelerate that improvement. As you've seen, we haven't been doing it quick enough.
This is part of the change as well, to introduce what we call the global excellence team. This team drives growth and it drives margin improvement alongside the daily operations. This is a team of in-house experts that will ensure in every region there's clarity on the targets and clarity on the actions to grow and increase margin. Because that's tough when you're delivering every day. We always need to be pulled back. Remember, this is what we're going to do. It's not that pretty, it's not that sexy. It's just hard work.
Let's have a look at some of these areas that we do. Let's have a look at global development. This is about the future. It's about securing the future. Yeah, it doesn't happen dramatically quickly. I'll show you some examples, though, soon of where we've won work and we're on the journey, and the value is to come. We're in progress here. Part of the key area here on growth facilitating it is we bring our companies together. We have a great portfolio of services, and we have a great network where we work.
We bring these companies together to provide services to customers that reduce the interfaces. They have to do less and we do more. That provides value to the customers. It provides us both with additional value. We get better margin, they get lower cost. We talk about digital, and we'll get into a little bit more detail there of where now is the time to deliver on our digital portfolio. We're bringing it into our core offering so that, again, we can drive efficiency, not just for the customer side, also for our internal side.
I'll show some examples of where we've won that. Let's look quickly at that digital landscape and what does it actually mean about bringing together both sides of this. It's our digital expertise and our domain experience. I'm not going to go down all of them, you'll probably be pleased to hear. Just going to talk about a nice, simple example, which is industrial tube. It's a great example of where we use the latest technology to make, I still call them videos, make a video, put it online, people can learn from them. You can have your glasses out on site, and it takes you through how to repair something. That's been a key tool we've been selling to customers.
It's a key tool in engaging our workforce and improving their skills and improving what they do. By bringing that in now alongside what we do on every contract, we're exposing this to lots of customers who now see it, want it, use it. You can go down all of these lists, whether it's the BMC, the maintenance concept analytics, and we're able to predict the work more, and not just for the customers, for ourselves as well. Gives us both of these benefits. When we start looking at the examples of where we've used these, this isn't theory, this is now reality.
The one in the middle there is the best example we've seen so far of where this is. You can see the values. This is a significant contract. Major contract one key differentiator, our digital vision. That's not us saying it. That's the customer telling us, "This is why you got it." Do you see revenue in Bilfinger Digital Next for that? No, you don't. Do you see revenue in the U.K. business for it? Yes, you do. Have we got a pathway to improve the efficiency on that contract for the customer and for us? Yes, we have. All of these, as we go through them, you'll see the value is to come.
None of these are in the past. Not going to show you a single example that's in the past. All value to come. Christina talked about the contract with BP and very politely also pronounced where it is for me. I'm not going to go there. This was one of the orders that was delayed from last year into this year, was secured, signed up January the 15th.
Significant value, lower double, triple digit millions, I believe is the sort of phrase that we use. This was won because we came up with a concept. Two companies from Bilfinger, technologies business and the Austrian business, coming together with a concept, a modular concept for manufacture and installation. Why? Reduces the cost. We can do it very efficiently offsite. 180 pipe bridges longer than this room. 25 km of pipe within them, all manufactured offsite, trucked to the site, lifted in piece after piece after piece. Minimizes the amount of site work, which is more hazardous and more expensive.
We did that in collaboration with our customer. This wasn't a tender. This was an idea that we built together and went through that design process together. We produced a price together. That's by far the best way of getting work, working with our customers. Another area here, again, won't go, Tom talked about it very briefly. In Ruwais, our first major maintenance contract in the Middle East. Fantastic. A great job by the people out there to win this. We won two lots here. No other contracts won two. We won two. First major contract. Why would they give us two? Customer coverage.
The major shareholder of that particular asset works with us all across Europe, has confidence in Bilfinger, knows us, and that's why we're able to do that. First contract. There'll be more to come. Been waiting for this piece. Bit of a project called Hinkley Point. We've been talking about this for a long time. We're a strategic supplier to Hinkley Point. We've been receiving orders throughout 2019. Progress has been being maintained. We have got lots of work going on. We've got engineers on the ground.
We're accelerating it. When will we get the big orders? We got one yesterday. Contract, first big order, EUR 68 million was signed yesterday. You'll see it in the press next week. Can't be released because EDF are having their results day tomorrow and don't wish us to do that. They've kindly allow us to voice that here. That's the first one. It will happen in half one. Contracts are well drafted. Everything is agreed. That's underway. We'll win more work on there. Not as sizable as that, but we'll win more work, probably above the estimates that we have here. We're on the ground. Our resources are increasing. We're a key partner to EDF, and we have the first major contract.
Let's talk then about after we win work at the right price, how do we make more money out of it? It's these differing areas. First of all, talk about how do we do incremental margin improvement. Deliver the year. Always been the mantra. Deliver the year. I just want to pick up on a couple of areas here. Operational KPIs. It's an area we have to do more in to enable us to look forward more, to change what will happen rather than react to what has happened. Whether that's in utilization or efficiency of our people, we need to be able to plan better how we use them.
This is a key part of what we need to do. An area as well, Tom briefly touched on it about performance culture. Got examples of both of these to come. This is about not only the attitude of people, but it's about training them as well in lean processes. How do you drive waste out of the businesses? How do you analyze? How do you look at these things properly? Also really importantly, rewarding them for success. I get my fun and kicks being in this business by being successful. That's the enjoyment. Lots of other people do as well.
We want to reward them for that. They want to be successful. They have the ambition and drive to do that. Let's look at a couple of examples. Not going to go through all of these. Let's look at KPIs in action. Tom Blades already referred to it very kindly. In Antwerp, this is a Total refinery. Actually, the business that operates here is one of our best industrial services businesses that we have. By far one of our best. We had a contract there was not delivering on margins or delivering satisfaction for the customer. We weren't happy either, obviously.
We went in, identified the problem, admitted to ourselves we need to improve. Started measuring KPIs down to the basic levels, the daily output. How much are we putting up per hour? How much are we getting back per EUR per person? What's the waste? Real detailed waste analysis. Where are we losing time? Start mapping that out. When you have those measurements, you can start to standardize the processes of how do you get the logistics right in the morning. How do you get the materials to the right place?
We start work. I do this run with people quite a few times. We start work at 7:30 A.M., 7:00 A.M. It could be a horrible day. It could be a beautiful day. You've got to get to site. You've got to put your overalls on. You've got to get your toolbox tool. You've got to get out there. You've got to have your safety briefing. You've got to get put to work. Boom, and you're ready to work. That takes 15 minutes. Now you got 15 minutes to get 2 tons of scaffold over there. You can't do it. You got to do it the night before.
Yeah, these are the logistics and the challenges that not also how do we manage our people, how do we get the customer to manage their process to enable us to do that? Otherwise, we're always going to fight a losing battle. It's that pushback, working together, customer collaboration. What do we do there? 35% improvement. Fantastic. Took us up to a level we can cope with. More importantly, customer gave us two contracts. They saw what we did. They saw how we worked together. Turnaround this year is happening on that site.
Just won a three-year extendable by two-year maintenance contract. Same site. That's how you win work with customers, make your performance better, make their performance better. Last one of the examples is about performance culture. If you remember, a few years back, we had the slump in the oil price. Really went down in terms of spending in the North Sea. Lots of margin pressures and we had to cut prices to keep work. We had to cut prices to win work. You can't carry on like that.
How do you get back? You have to increase your efficiency. This can't just come from a few people at the top thinking how they do it. It's got to come from everybody in the business. This business set off, it was the BTOP Program, started this, kicked off, and right from the bottom up came up with some great ideas. I'll just talk about a couple of them. One of them, quite high level. We had our own in-house training school, used to train our people within that, and it was great, worked well. When you've got less people, less work, you've got underutilization.
You got fixed assets you're not using and whatever. What did we do? We got a group of people together, competitors and customers, outsourced our training school, and now that trains people in the industry. No longer a potential underutilization for us and of huge value to the business. Saves us about EUR 500,000 a year. A nice big example, also makes us more agile. If we take out those underutilization impacts, we are more agile. The other example, one of my favorites. This is bottom up. We had a suggestions scheme. Suggestion came in.
We have transient workers, so they might come in five, six, 10 weeks in the year. Very simple statement. Why do we give guys who come in for the summer the standard start pack? Because it contains a winter coat. As simple as this. We're having people working all summer, and we give them a winter coat, and they take it home and put it in the garage. This was one of the lads who experienced this. It saves us GBP 3,000 a year.
It's not about how much it saves. It's the attitude that everybody was getting involved. How can we make this business better? They succeeded. They put 1.9% back on the margin, back on the EBIT line in a very tough environment. These guys are number one in industrial services in the U.K. side of the North Sea. Let's talk about technologies. We briefly referenced its five businesses. Three of those businesses are good businesses. They're growing. They're above our average profit. Good, sound businesses. We are in good, high-value markets as we go forward.
We've got two that are still challenges. One of them, out of the old power units. It's taken longer than we thought to do that. It's been through restructuring. What have we now recently done? We've, at the end of last year, made the decision to exit what is called the conventional power performance market. This has produced, over the last few years, a number of the legacy projects that we've had and also some of the difficulties. Where we've been taking performance risks for steam and things like that, we've exited. People will be leaving the business, no longer doing that. It's too high risk, and there's not the levels of reward the other side. We're out.
That business will concentrate on the nuclear market, and you heard that. Hinkley Point's coming through. The nuclear market's profitable for them. Hinkley Point will keep us going, and then there'll be other ones after that. The emissions control market, which isn't just the maritime scrubbers. It is also what we do in the cement. It is also general sulfur dioxide control. Again, we have agility in that market to deploy our resources into other places as those markets change, and they do, as everything does. Also where we are continuing to do industrial work, we are partnering that business up with other Bilfinger businesses.
The BP contract referenced before, use the technology skills, but with a great delivery team from within Bilfinger to support as well. Minimize, reduce, eliminate the risks. The other one is a family-owned business based in France. Probably not too difficult to isolate which one it is, and that's had some troubles. The family left. A lot of management left there, and it left us with some real problems. It left us with a poor order book and processing systems that weren't up to the task. We've had to rebuild this. We got new management in, started at early end next year.
They're cleaning it up. Processes and systems are getting in place. We're trading out the low order book, and we're gaining control. Here again, there's a small piece of that business that we've exited the market. There, the local petrochemical market is just cutthroat cost plus. We're out. It's not worth winning work in that. That business now, three business lines. Nuclear again, pharmaceutical, and for them, LNG gas. All of those, again, high value, high margin businesses. We're making changes in portfolio, reducing our risk, but we still have to trade out some of these poor margin contracts that we have.
That will happen in 2020. They'll be traded out in 2020. The last one around that, and I'm not going to, again, go through every single item on this. Where did we start and where are we now within technologies? There's been a lot of changes. On the delivery piece, we have changed people. We've changed the leadership at divisional level. A new executive president and a new finance director. We've changed leadership in the two businesses that are struggling. We're bringing in partnerships to help with the delivery end, and we're strengthening our front end to make sure we estimate properly.
Proper stage gate processes to make sure we have the right prices and then the right processes to deliver. Sounds easy. It's tough. We're getting there. Less mistakes, more ambition, more confidence coming back in those businesses. When it comes to weak margins, we're exiting those problem sectors. We're exiting those areas. Stay in three high-value sectors, yet with growth potential, nuclear, pharma, emissions control, and a bit of gas within France. Where does that leave us? I'll slowly take you through this.
Here is our gross margin achievements. This is what we do. This is right now. We show here, these are our activities, engineering, industrial services, insulation, scaffold, painting, the maintenance work, multi-service, construction. Here's our target line for gross margin. You can see 85% of our revenues are on, around, or above our target margin. This is where incremental margin improvement works. Under control, yet low volatility on the margins, you can build. We keep contracts, you can grow. It's very hard to grow when you're losing contracts. We keep them.
This area, solid. Careful I don't trip over. In the auxiliary area, talked about it, there's two types of businesses in here. There's some that we've tried to make work. We've brought them back to okay margin performance, but they're not going to get any better, and they're probably best being with another owner. We've moved them into our OP, and we'll look at making sure we can get the best price we can for them. There's others that still remain here. Margins are slightly low, but they have a place because actually customers need these services, and we need to change how we sell them and start to link these up with some other areas of the business.
Otherwise, some of these areas won't be able to win work. Insulation being a particular challenge in there. Making money in insulation, you link it up in the full cycle within the scaffold areas as well, and painting. We have technologies. The margin potential is still there, and we see it. We just get dragged back by the challenges that we have and the failures that we have. We've got to reduce those and eliminate those.
We have the people in place to do that. We have the processes in place to do that. There'll still be the occasional stumble, but we're well on the way to doing this. Very briefly, that's why I'm confident. Woo. These guys are confident. We've got the actions in place. Get the gross margin to 12%, and then we'll see where we go after that. 2% on the gross margin by 2021, and then we move on. Okay, over to Christina for some financials.
I'm sure you are almost grounded after one and a half hour in there. We tried, especially Tom talking about our key markets, oil and gas, chemical and petrochemical, utilities and energy, how they are developing, what they will require going forward. Also trying to tell you how we see our role, being in Europe, the market leader in what we're doing, and the opportunities to also adjust our portfolio to even better meet the requirements and the needs of our clients. Of course, Duncan talking about how we are very committed, are very prepared to make sure that we deliver the year 2020 and secure profit and growth by on 2020. Where will this journey then lead us? Our planning period is, of course, by on 2020.
It's 2021 to 2024, even if we are digging deeper in 2020. We have target setting ambitions and plans for the next coming years. Looking at the financials going forward, our ambition, our plans are built, as I said before, closing the last two years with an organic growth of 6%, now expecting a flat top line for 2020. From 2021 to 2024, we are committed to deliver a 5% organic growth every year on year. That will take us, as Bilfinger organically, above the EUR 5 billion revenue line. On the EBITDA side, closing at 2.4% in 2019, now guiding and being committed to deliver a big step up to 4% in 2020, and then 5% from 2021.
You see here a commitment that we will be in line with 5% and then above the 5%. Looking at numbers, we will exceed the EUR 250 million EBITDA. You also see down at the bottom end, the EBITDA reported. Here you see that we are, from quarter one, convinced and committed to deliver one EBITDA. We will have a smaller amount, and I come back to that, of adjustments also in 2020, and then phasing out in the first quarter of 2021. Leaving the adjusted and the reported world to one real EBITDA. On the free cash flow reported, we see the EUR 57 that I mentioned for 2019, and taking this year by year up to above EUR 200 million in 2024. This is our commitment.
This is what we are working hard on, and this is what is motivating and driving us to really keep our promise, not only for the last two years, but also going forward. Looking at the two main drivers, we have spoken a lot about the need to improve our gross margin, that we closed at 9.5% in 2019, and in the next coming two years, we are taking up to 12%, thereafter, even above 12%. How do we do that? We do that with a more solid execution, more commercially driven, but a better contract management from the beginning, setting the scene so that we are making sure that the contracts are set up in such a way that we will generate more and better margins.
Also making sure that claim management, which is an essential part of project management, on a continuous basis actively is driving us forward. Also what was mentioned, being what I say a bit picky in good markets with good growth, that we are making sure that we are driving for the right contracts and that we sometimes also have the strength to say, "No, thank you," if some of the contracts are not offering the opportunities to get up to the 12%, even if we do our utmost. Utilization in a people's business is essential. Also working harder on making sure, not only due to our seasonality, but also in general, that we have solid, better, stronger utilization rates.
On the SG&A ratio, continue to build on the success that we have delivered, getting this number from 8% last year down to 7.5% this year, and then to 7% or even below in this planning period. How do we do that? We continue to do it in the same way as we have done so far. We try to be more efficient in the organization, to be leaner. We try to continue to reduce the number of legal entities, because that will take out complexity and improve efficiency, economy of scale in a lot of the SG&A areas. Also making sure that the system harmonization with the same joint IT support will be finalized and that we utilize that joint platform more and more efficient. This we have done, this we continue to do.
Looking at the special items. I'm picking out the two main items here. I said to you that in 2019, we had EUR 40 million for restructuring and a bit more than EUR 30 million for the IT or system harmonization. Looking now at what is left to come on adjustments. What is left to come on P&L, it's EUR 30 million. We are expecting that we will have a little bit of restructuring, as you always have in a transformation, much smaller amounts in 2020. We will have the finalization of the rollout of ERP, our SRP platform, also then having an impact on 2020 and a small part, EUR 5 million, in 2021. These are the adjustments we are expecting in the next coming two years phasing out. There is, as always, a certain delay in the cash effect.
As I said, we provided and took the P&L effect of the restructuring in 2019. Most of the cash effect we will only see in 2020 as we implement our plans. This is our commitment in regard of adjustments, and then from quarter two 2020, one single real EBITDA. SG&A efficiency, I mentioned the continuous drive to reduce the number of legal entities to reduce complexity and lower the overheads. You see here our track record. We had 279 legal entities in 2016. We closed last year with 160, and we are confident with what we are doing right now that we will get below 150 by the end of this year. Right now, we are merging entities in U.S., we are merging entities in the Netherlands, trying to drive for less complexity.
Of course, also, if you have larger entities, you will also have more skilled people. You can afford to have more professional people focusing on different tasks. Looking at the system harmonization, we finalized the HR platform, the project that we call Hercules, last year. The rollout was finalized in December 2019. We are well on the way for also the ERP, the SRP implementation. We have decided based on our experience in the rollout, to expand the scope. Originally, 66% of our total revenue was foreseen for SAP. We have now expanded that with 28%.
When we have finalized the rollout, we cover 94% of our revenue with the SAP joint platform, which is helping also the integration. It is helping us to work together. We had a number of projects, Hinkley Point, BP, Gelsenkirchen, where companies from different Bilfinger countries are working together. Having the same system platform is making it so much easier and so much more efficient. Looking at the rollout here, we have done 70% by the end of 2019. We are planning to have 90% of it done by the end of this year.
Also here, proceeding in accordance with our plan. Last but not least, in regard of the system harmonization, it is extremely important for the transparency to make sure that you really talk about the same things. You have the same definitions. Talking about this entity in technologies that hurt us so badly in the first half of last year. Only when SAP was implemented, we got full transparency of the projects. Not only efficiency and cost saving, it's also about transparency. Looking at our, what I call bread and butter, our E&M, our engineering and maintenance segment.
These numbers you see in the reporting, we are simply adding up the segment E&M International and E&M Europe. That brings together almost EUR 3.7 billion of our sales. Here we are convinced that we will continue to grow. From 2021, we will see 5% organic growth in our bread and butter E&M business going forward. Looking at the profitability today, if you add up the results here, you will see that we last year were around 4% EBITDA adjusted in E&M. This, we are obviously then taking up above 5% until 2024, of course, this journey will go faster, the 5% will tick in here during the next coming two years. I think in E&M, it will not even require that we get to the end of 2021 before we see the stable, sustainable 5%.
This is very much what we are good at, and we need to strengthen our strength. Working capital management, a story that never comes to an end. If someone working on this is taking more than two weeks of holiday, I see the traces. That's the hard thing. Working capital for us today is a bit different than it used to be because the old Bilfinger was having a very good working capital, thanks to very high prepayments from the construction business. That's over. The amount of prepayments in our business is actually year-on-year because the clients are more conscious about cash reduced. Nonetheless, we are trying to use the opportunity for prepayments in projects wherever we can. Accounts receivable, we have very solid clients. When they get the invoice, they normally pay on time.
We can't complain that we are losing money on bad payers or on companies that are not surviving. The main area for further improvement here is the work in progress. That is generating 32 days of the 74. How can we improve that further going forward? Awareness. Cash has also got a price tag. All the projects, they do not need just to pass the profitability, they also need to pass the liquidity and the cash planning. Looking at contract and claim management, that should be fundamentally important part of our business and of project business in general. We have recently started to employ more and more people specialized on contract and claim management to give this more focus.
That will help us to reduce the WIP, to set the contract in a different way, but also to drive the claims during the projects and not only at the end of the project. We also look, of course, at any possibility to improve our payments term in the contract area. Of course, the clients do the same, but the awareness that cash is also with a price tag, that's something that we have been driving this culture, and we continue to drive. Of course, on the DPO side, we see the 69 days that we, I think quite healthy achieved by the end of December.
That is a number that we also continuously need to get up. I don't want to say how far we can get it because that depends also on the amount of large projects that we have. By making more and more procurement together, increasing the bundling, but also work on the rates here, I'm sure that we will also be able to improve our track record on the DPO side. As also mentioned, our STI system has been adjusted this year to not only measure the performance at the end of the year, but to measure it on a quarterly basis.
Looking at our financial model. We want to be, and we are, a low risk business with a recurring business, with a strong focus on Europe and a diversified customer base. We have a number of large customers, but we are not depending on one or two. This is our profile. We are representing a sustainable revenue growth. Back to the 5% organic growth again from 2021, and obviously the last years with even 6% organic growth per year.
Starting to look at bolt-on acquisitions, not only because of having the funds, but also having the stability in the company to successfully be able to integrate any kind of bolt-on acquisitions. We want to achieve industry-leading margins. The 12% gross margin, the 7% or even below 7% of SG&A ratio, these are industry-leading margins. A strong cash generation, a very asset-light model. In 2019, we had a net CapEx of as low as EUR 50 million. Also a strong awareness how we spend the CapEx. A strict working capital management, a high free cash flow that then can be utilized for dividends or bolt-on acquisitions. This is our financial model. Looking at capital allocation priorities.
On one hand side, we have a situation where Bilfinger is rated by S&P at double B with a stable outlook, but we are clearly committed and are working hard over the next coming years to get Bilfinger back to an investment grade. That requires that we are fulfilling the criteria, I have listed some of them here. If you look at 2019, we are not yet meeting these criteria. If we are achieving what we have set as our targets for 2020, we will be there. It will take a little bit longer because it has to be a sustainable track record to bring us back to investment grade.
Next time when we go for refinancing, we want to have an investment grade to also get a more attractive interest rate when we are going for the next funding. We have a clear dividend policy. During the last years and also for 2019, we are suggesting the floor dividend of one euro to give something to our shareholders in the transformation, but we are committed to then continue from 2020 with a 40%-60% of adjusted net profit. Making sure that the fact that we will have some cash will not send us out on a shopping tour, making things that will not make sense.
We have very strict M&A criterias for those targets that we are looking at. EBITDA, accredited one year after integration. ROCE exceeds VAC two years after integration. Asset light with focus on ROCE, as Tom said, an immediate start of integration when acquired. Very strict criterias, not always easy to fulfill, but based on being a conservative Swiss CFO, I think this will make sure that any acquisitions that we make will be successful.
We have learned our lesson from what Bilfinger did 10 or 15 years ago, and we should focus in the M&A strategy. Of course, we have started a bit more actively to look at this, as we also believe that we are now stable enough to have a clearer look at what would make sense. Bolt-on M&A priorities would be core geographics, where we see that a combination of an acquisition and organic growth would bring us much faster ahead. Also core industry, where we, as a potential new owner, see clearly strong synergies that would justify that we would make an acquisition. I also would have a close look at the margin.
It doesn't mean that these companies have to be at 12%, but we need to know exactly how we, within 12, 15 months, can bring these targets to a 12% or even beyond 12% operating margin. Sources of funds beyond our own ability to improve our cash generation is, of course, the fact that we have the 49% investment in Apleona, where the market and rumors are saying that EQT will try to sell that. We know that we have a balance sheet position of EUR 240 million. By the way, the same amount as we have showed previously, so we did not adjust in the last two quarters anything. EUR 240 million, which we regard to be a conservative number if EQT would trigger and sell and Apleona would be sold. These are the funds.
Our own ability, spending less on working capital, improving the profitability, spending less on adjustments, and then to some extent, if the money from Apleona is coming in, these will be sources of funds that could be used for a justifiable M&A. Of course, could be used, but I also try to convince that we're not going to spend the money for the sake of having the money. We will have very strong criterias before we are going ahead and making further acquisitions. We are convinced in the management team that there are acquisitions that really would bring a strong additional value also for Bilfinger and also to the shareholders. With that, I would like to get back to Tom to summarize.
Thank you, Christina. This will be quick because you've seen it already. Two, four, six lives. We stick by our guns. Our strategy is working. You've seen the assumptions behind it. For those of you that are very eagle-eyed, you'll see that we did give a little twist here in the middle. Rather than four regions, we have four business units, Europe, North America, Middle East, and Technologies. Also, our recipe to win, people, assets of our customers, and data. We shared with you our view of the world. Our global trends, the ones that we think are applicable to Bilfinger.
We shared with you our key competencies that we use to answer these trends. With that, our assumptions and even more important, our imperatives. These together make our strategy going forward, 2020 plus effective 2020 through to 2024. We shared with you a lot of data and facts. These are not made up. These are real numbers, and we evidenced that with many examples, especially from Duncan's section. We showed you Bilfinger is a people company, and I think the message on margins is quite clear.
This is our biggest focus going forward, and it's why we are going to deliver on our commitments and on our targets. That's why we say we're going to be predictable, reliable, and sustainable. It's not a one-off effect. It's a continuing sustainable effect. Again, those are the numbers that Christina showed you. When we do that, then this is what it yields. Again, you've seen the numbers in the various parts of Christina's section. 5% CAGR will take us over the EUR 5 billion organic in 2024. We are going to have a baseline minimum EBITA reported of 5%.
Why do we call it a minimum baseline? While we see businesses will fluctuate with cycles, we're not immune. We see them coming a little bit earlier. We have more time to get ready. If we can exceed the 12%, remain under the 7%, you do the math, we're a little bit above 5%, we leave that leeway for good times and maybe not so good times. That is the minimum threshold we want to achieve going forward in a sustainable sense. The ROC focus we've talked about, that will yield significant cash flows. How we use them, again, opportunity-driven and what happens at the time.
Important is, of course, if we do all that, we want to be investment grade, so BB plus, and we want to be known as a reliable company that delivers on dividends in the range of 40%-60% of adjusted net profit. With that, the last slide, the obligatory slide. We create, we care, we can, and we make what we showed you, we make it work. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much, Tom. We start now our Q&A session. Please raise your hand if you have a question. We start with Norbert Kretlow, Commerzbank.
Ladies and gentlemen, I had a question on the losses you named, which impacted the 2019 and in particular Q4 2019. Can you somewhat more quantify the losses and the projects which you indicated? While it looks a little odd that all of these project problems materialized in 2019, do they have anything in common? Is there anything structural which is a problem? During the presentation, I clearly received the impression that the rollout of SAP in the group might be a major contributor to solving these problems and ruling out further major project losses going forward.
Can you confirm that? If not, what would be your action to avoid this? I had one additional question regarding the pricing environment. You mentioned that you pushed a client for higher margins, I wonder, does this mean that the project has a higher margin, or does this mean that input cost headwinds are compensated? As a follow-up, do we have to think about your efforts to increase your pricing as an industry-wide trend, or is this something which is rather specific for Bilfinger?
Okay. Thank you for the questions. I think, Christina, you're best positioned to answer the first two, then Duncan, yourself?
Yes.
Christina, do you want to try to catch the impact on Q4 of the losses, if we're able to quantify that? Of course, how we're going to fix that going forward by having stronger SAP systems in place.
Okay. Looking at quarter four in technologies, we have to say that it was actually the first quarter since technology was created that they had a positive result. Yes, we had specifically one project in the last quarter that came as a surprise where we were in a situation on this project where we tried to find a settlement with a client, but the client decided to proceed to arbitration. We are not expecting that anything in the view has changed in regard of how we see the claims that we have and the claims that the client has got.
Given that the client took the step and went to arbitration, we had to put some money aside for the cost of an arbitration case. We are still hopeful that this arbitration case will not take place, that we will be able to find a settlement. Given the short timeframe before Christmas, we were forced to put some EUR million aside here for an expected arbitration case. That's the main reason that we, in the last quarter, had a number that was lower than our expectation, and obviously also then slightly worse than what we had a year before.
The last quarter of 2019, technologies was actually positive otherwise. Looking at the SAP rollout, yes, I am a big fan of having standardized systems, sharing definitions and policy. It is so much easier then to move from one entity to another and speak the same kind of language. I think the entity that was giving us a hard time in the first quarter, it's not a surprise by now that that entity is in France.
That history was actually started off only at the end of 2018, after we in 2018 had rolled out and implemented SAP. It was not possible, deliberately or non-deliberately, to hide the truth anymore. I think for the transparency, for the consistency, a joint platform, if it is SAP or another system, that helps a lot to make sure that we also have full control and integration.
Thanks, Christina. Talk about pricing. This is a maintenance contract that Tom referred to specifically, not an isolated one-off project. We'd had this contract for quite a number of years. Sometimes over that, you get margin erosion through negotiations, especially when you're coming from tough environments. We had the opportunity here where the customer wanted to continue that trend. We obviously didn't. We proved to him two things. One is the market position, so around where wage inflation is going, but more importantly, the efficiencies and benefits we'd brought to that site over the previous years.
There was a level of understanding and transparency we needed to bring to him, that his overall cost was not increasing. If you want to just look at the price of a person, it is going to go up by inflation. We don't have a lot of control about people costs at times. We made that clear. We went through it. It was a good discussion, a positive discussion, and everybody understood at the end of it where we were going to go. Now on that contract, we have annual increments in place for annual escalation. That's part of our core areas that we've implemented annual escalations on contracts.
This is the market, if I move now on to the wider market position, it's a bit more realistic on those sorts of areas now. With the labor shortages that we have, the realism about ensuring that not only that you can have the right company doing it, but also that you can attract the right labor with the right rates, because it's a combination. There is a war out there for good employees to attract with good employment rates as well. We're seeing more realistic key resources getting booked up. The biggest area we see this in is turnarounds.
We're seeing companies, because we have a great process on turnarounds, our Bilfinger Turnaround Concept, where we train our people, we get them out there to deliver the high risk, as in shutdown periods are the highest risk our customers have when they're not on production and they need to get back on time, otherwise they have to buy product in. Yet, we are reliable on delivering those on time. They want our key resources back year on year. We've recently had a customer book us up for five years, the next five years of turnarounds.
Thanks.
Okay, next question from Christian Korth, HSBC.
Thank you very much. The first one would be if you could please elaborate a little bit more on the Hinkley Point project with regards to revenue recognition. When could that kick in, and when could we see the full impact for the first time? The second one would be if you could give us any statements of use on Apleona, and also why you did not adjust the value of the business to some extent. Does that indicate anything on the underlying business, or is it just a precautionary measure? The last one would be if you could please update us on the scrubber situation, with regards to maybe the number of vessels and the total order size, and maybe also the current capacity and maybe production volume in January 2020. Thank you very much.
Duncan, maybe on Hinkley Point, then maybe I would add a comment or two at the end of that.
Very happy to talk about Hinkley Point. A positive progress, yeah. We won't have the challenges with revenue recognition. The contract is largely a type of materials contract with target costs and incentives that come on top of that. Yeah, it's a good contract. We'll be able to take revenue as it comes in, as we process from day one. When is that revenue going to come hasn't changed. The project is still on time. It's never been delayed. I know our orders have drifted, but that's just due to the priorities that EDF have with other people.
Yeah. We still got smaller orders, and we kept on having that, and we've had revenue coming in in 2019. 2020, we'll have revenue significantly increased over 2019, but still in the very low double digit millions. 2021, we'll start to see significant revenues, where we'll start ordering significant materials and fabricating significant amount of pipe. Towards the back end of 2021, early 2022, the site resources will ramp up significantly.
If I can add to that, and maybe address a little bit the credibility question that was recently posed in a letter that was sent to us on Hinkley Point, having done some due diligence on that, et cetera. I was in Hinkley Point for the last time last week, on the 5th of February. My discussions with EDF were that things were on track. We would be awarded the NSSS. That's the big order that we've talked about for quite a while. We put that order in the EUR 250 million ± range, and that is coming. That wasn't different when I was with the head of the project last week in Bristol on February the 5th. The order that Duncan mentioned today is not part of that 250 million. Okay?
That gives you a feeling for the kind of scope and the confidence the customer has in us. Again, as Duncan said, we're on track to deliver or to receive from the customer that order for another EUR 250 million somewhere in H1. I say that because, as I said, I was with the customer last week in Bristol on Hinkley Point, and therefore have a high level of confidence on that order. Those are the facts. With that, Christina, Apleona.
In regard of Apleona, I have to make clear that our role keeping the 49% investment is we are a financial investor. We are not involved either in running the Apleona business, nor are we involved in selling Apleona. It's a clear cut between our role and the role of EQT. We have not received any new updated planning years from Apleona. On the basis of what I have, and also especially in the light of the fact that EQT itself disclosed that their 51% that they have has not changed in value during the last six months, we decided to keep the same value. I think it is a cautious approach, and I want it to continue to be a cautious approach.
We are still confident that the value of that shareholding is higher than EUR 240 million, but I don't think it's the right approach to start to speculate what the right value would be in case of an exit. On the basis of EQT's own treatment of their part, we decided not to adjust the value because we haven't got any underlying changes in what we have received. That's the reason why we keep the same valuation. We have only adjusted for EUR 3, 4 million during the year on the basis of the numbers we have received.
On scrubbers, again, very interesting market dynamic. As we went into 2019, we actually expected a continuous pickup in demand going through the year, as did our peers, our competitors. We all saw a pullback, not in demand, but in realization of demand. When we try to sit back and analyze that, it does appear that the first wave of scrubbers went to cruise ships, cruise liners, people concerned about the air of the passengers. The second wave, in parallel, went to the VLCC charterers, because they knew that their customers, in turn, would look for vessels that had scrubbers installed.
There then came a lull, that lull was or is the actual owner-operators of ships. They're kind of sitting back and waiting to see how serious are the authorities about policing this. They can always fill with low sulfur fuel oil, currently at a delta of roughly EUR 250 per ton. That's a high premium to pay today. If you are concerned about the police or the marines coming and checking, then you can get over a short-term bridge. That's happening. I think if the authorities really do what they say and police and channel this, then we think the latter part of the wave, it was a limited wave, the latter part of the wave will come somewhere towards the end of 2020.
Now today, we have roughly 110 scrubbers. That's cumulative. We have facilities that can deliver between 15 and 20 scrubbers a month. Those are in Germany. They're in Vietnam and in China. We can also back it up from our own manufacturing in Austria. We're confident we can meet demand, but the demand hasn't quite developed the way that we expected. Likewise, when you say if you're not meeting the demand, you have overcapacity. The manufacturing we have is outsourced, so there we're not feeling any pinch.
The good news is that the engineers that shrank down the technology to take it from coal-fired power stations into funnels, then develop the application work for ships and marine. These are the same engineers we use on other emission projects. I mentioned Ennigerloh down the road for HeidelbergCement. Desulfurization, we're using them on DeNOx projects. These are valuable people with good experience, and they're not in high supply. Although, again, scrubbers are not quite where we thought they would be, we see a potential pickup. We're not concerned because we have good people, and we have a good cost base for manufacturing where we're not stuck with fixed cost if there's a variation in order intake.
Next question from Craig Abbott, Kepler Cheuvreux.
Yes, thank you. Excuse me, is this on? Still trying to understand a little bit more clearly the bridge for the turnaround in earnings in technologies. I don't expect exact figures, of course, but if you could give us a bit more clarity on what the drag, i.e., what would the earnings roughly have been on an EBITDA level if we eliminated these two problem units? Just so we can get a feel for where the underlying profitability is and what the bridge is for when those two units hopefully are turned around over the next 12-18 months.
We are obviously not disclosing the results of individual entities, legal entities. What we can say, and if you listen to what was previously said, in technologies, we have five legal entities. Three of them are profit-making. That means that the loss of EUR 28 million that the segment generated was a lower loss than the two painful legal entities created. The turnaround, if we turn these two legal entities around to break even, which is not good enough, but probably, I would say a fair target for 2020, you would gain something above the EUR 28 million. I hope that helps you. Is there any further question? [Mrs. Yap], SCB.
I have a question related there. There's also a question for predictability now and doing the restructures next year will be about EUR 25 million. I suppose that these two entities, the turnaround restructuring costs are included in that.
In regard of these two legal entities, the first one in France is not requiring any restructuring, neither 2019 nor 2020. To be honest, there were quite a lot of people that left that company, so that solved the problem also of restructuring. The second entity, we have taken decisions in 2019 to restructure one department, and that will happen in 2020. The provisions, the cost for that were taken in 2019. We will have the cash out in 2020, but the pain in the P&L was taken in adjustments in 2019.
I've seen somebody raising his hand. Okay, Craig Abbott, Kepler Cheuvreux.
Yeah, just coming back to the scrubber issue, because about a year and a half ago at the CMD in June, that was clearly presented as being one of the key elements of the organic growth. I know you've given us the chart with a number of indications of where that 5% organic growth, how it should be comprised. You've given us a little bit of an update just now on the situation in scrubber. How significant is a pickup in those orders for you to meet your revenue growth target?
We're not relying on that. We've taken a very conservative approach. I think we're known for being conservative for all the right reasons. Therefore, if the additional orders don't materialize this year, there isn't going to be a major impact. If they do come, that's nice. We'll smile and take that, of course. But we're very careful in our planning. Again, you look back on 2019 and what we under-delivered in T, we were able to mitigate elsewhere through actually really hard work. There is a way to compensate shortfalls. It is hard work.
It's not that we're sandbagging and bunkering. People are flat out. We do deliver targets. We stick to our targets, and we do that by being just a little bit more careful than we would if things were in full swing and we cleared out all of the issues. Ha ving said that, I'm not covering up for expecting a lot more issues, but just to again make the point, we are conservative. We like to deliver on what we promise, and of course, what we promise today is to continue to grow that bottom line for all the reasons that I showed.
Any further questions right now? Okay. With this, we conclude today's conference. Thank you everybody very much for coming over, and we would highly appreciate if you would join us for a small get-together in the back of the room and get into the relaxed atmosphere. Thank you very much, and good afternoon.