Welcome everybody to our Capital Markets Day 2022, Generating Sustainable Value. I'm so happy and excited that so many of you dialed in today. It has already been two years since our last Capital Markets Day. Be assured, a lot has changed within the company. The transformation from a commodity provider towards a growth company as innovation leader, solution provider, and system integrator clearly advances. Today, we will explain what sustainable value generation means for us. Our management board, CEO Dietmar Siemssen, Dr. Lukas Burkhardt, as well as our CFO, Dr. Bernd Metzner, will give a strategy update, elaborate on formula g execution, as well as our value creation model. Afterwards, we will have a short break before we enter our Q&A session. Now it's my pleasure to start our short introduction video before I hand over to Dietmar.
Yeah. Hello, also from my side, welcome to our virtual Capital Markets Day 2022. I hope you enjoyed the video. You will have the chance to see it one more time just before we go into the question and answers. Yeah. The first Capital Markets Day after 2020, and the second actually since I'm with the company in Gerresheimer. A lot has happened in Gerresheimer since we met here on this virtual level at the last Capital Markets Day at the end of exactly 2020 .
Actually, it's four years since we have started with our transformation, started with the implementation of our strategy, formula g. Our strategy process and its implementation has changed the company into a strong, profitable growth mode. Today, that's at least our intention, we will share with you the status of the achievements and the further dynamics within Gerresheimer. This is, like Carolin already said, about how we generate sustainable value. The disclaimer I ignore, I just go over it, yeah. It's not only about value, it's also delivering the status on the transformation. Yeah. Let me go back to the start four years ago when we started with a new fresh management team in 2019. Actually, we started with a very simple goal. How can we bring the company into what we call a sustainable, profitable growth path?
How can we develop a base capability for our Gerresheimer company to a total different size, EUR 3 billion, EUR 4 billion size? How can we inject the capability of a core growth, organic growth of 6%-8% per year? How can we bring the company into a level of 23%, 24%, 25% EBITDA margin? This is why we started to look for a vehicle, as we call it, a strategy, the strategy process that we call formula g. It's only then when we recognized it's going to be hard. How can we do this in a company where you have a commodity, a volume approach?
How can you grow into a market over proportion strong, where the market is growing probably 2% and you want to grow 6%, 8%? Especially together with the clear goal of bringing the company into a different profitability margin. This will not work if you just push into the commodity market. There's something you have to change. It's clear that you have to go into new segments of the business, into new niches, into areas where the market itself is growing much stronger, and the profitability of the products you can gain is higher.
It became clear that we have to transform Gerresheimer not only into a growth company, but you have to come up with new innovational products. We have to become innovation leader. We have to go deeper into the value chain of our customers. We have to get into the area of solution provider and also system integrator. This is why we set up, and this is how we set up our strategy. This chart makes it relatively easy. We said, okay, it's easy.
You have to go from commodity provider with a fast follower approach. You have to go into this growth company, as I just mentioned, innovation leader, system solution provider. We have the vehicle of formula g, and we are using it. What we did was pretty basic. We set ourselves very ambitious goals in four in five key areas, guided with a very strong vision. The five areas are growth, which is clear. If you want to grow, you have to put a clear goal for growth. Innovation, as I mentioned, you have to make sure that you have the right products and the right topics to discuss with your customer if you want to have a different level of interest. The excellence is basic homework, but essential to work on this.
Also, the leadership was important because if you want to bring the company in a different level of growth, you have to have the mindset, the understanding, the empowered employees that are intensively working on exactly the mission you are bringing the company onto. Sustainability, fifth very important goal where we set very ambitious goals. Why? Because it was clear to us in 2019, 2020, you're setting up a strategy for a company for the next 10 years. It must be clear sustainability is a core part of this, and that's how we proceeded with these five goals. Before I go further into detail, maybe especially for the ones that listen to us for the first time, some basic facts about Gerresheimer. What is Gerresheimer? You have this on the headline here, very nice system and solution provider.
You could also see that the old Gerresheimer was seen. They have some plastic vials. They have some glass vials. They have syringes. They have devices like inhalers and pens, pumps. This is Gerresheimer. That's not the way I would see it. I would rather frame it in the way as you see at the top it, supplier. We actually are the company that is bringing the drug to the patient and also into the patient. There's no doubt we have a very strong focus. Our prime focus is the pharma and the biotech markets, where we have the vast majority of our sales, more than 80%. We also have some high-end cosmetics and some others, which is food, beverage, and so on. The portfolio of Gerresheimer is very broad.
In many of the markets, we actually have very strong and leading positions. You have here on the right side of this chart, left side of the chart, a couple of examples. We are worldwide number one in inhalation devices and pens. We are number two in syringe systems. Number one unbeaten, ampoules, vials, cartridges, and number one in plastic packaging. The company itself is completely global. 36 plants, 16 countries, 98 countries where we have sales activities across all six continents. Very strong customer relationships, some 1,500 customers. As I mentioned and indicated before, and you will see this all over the presentation today, more and more growth, especially in high-value solutions. The last topic is a pretty interesting one. It's actually the marketing department had found out. I didn't even know this.
I knew that we actually produce roughly 17, 18 billion of products every year. This actually means that we are producing 500 products every single second, 24/7, by the way. That's as basic information on Gerresheimer. It was good to set up an ambitious strategy. That's how we started, as I indicated. We recognized very fast it's nice to have a good strategy and work on a great future, but it will not work, and it will not be successful if you're lacking a very solid, healthy foundation. What does it mean, a healthy and solid foundation, huh? Healthy and solid foundation means something that's not so super strategic because I call it you have to do your homework. You have to do your homework.
That means you have to permanently, continuously working on the improvement of your competitiveness and your resilience. What does it mean in detail? You have to make sure that your pipeline is filled with innovative products, with a broad product portfolio addressing the mega trends, we will come to this in a second, and of course, the interests of the customer. The customer centricity, cross-divisional innovation, sales leveraging on your synergies is something the company was missing. We've significantly improved this and as such, have a significantly better perception coming from our customers. I mentioned it at one of the earlier charts, the leadership, yeah.
The full commitment and empowerment of your employees with the right growth mindset needed to be developed. Basic homework, your operational excellence. We always use operational excellence as it would be the quality in the plants, but that's not all. By aside the quality, your processes have to be in shape to be able to quote aggressively. This means your cost efficiency has to be top-notch. The business is more fun if you're the cost leader.
If you're not the cost leader, usually the business is lesser fun. That's the basic things that we also improved in Gerresheimer. That's what we call, we have to make sure the foundation is under control. Let me come to this basic picture, and it's very simple, yeah. We have a very strong strategy. Very good, And w e are building this very strong strategy on a solid foundation. You might now say, everything is fine, yeah. Everything is fine and this is enough. As always, and very often in business and in normal life, there is always a but.
The but is coming very soon, and it came actually with the start of 2020. 2020, all of a sudden we had COVID, a pandemic rolling over the world. With this, step by step, several challenges actually came up. The world is changing around us. A lot of global challenges. I actually learned a new word last year, which is scarcity. I didn't ever use this. It was not part of my business English. And there's now a kind of scarcity everywhere. There's one thing that is very clear. We don't see any scarcity of crisis. What are we doing and how does this look like? As I said, 2019, we started with a strategy. 2020, the pandemic. We said, "Oh, pandemic. That's a tough year.
We have to manage this. 2021, we still had the pandemic, in parallel, the first inflation topics came in. Resin materials, also the energy. Actually, everyone talks about the energy inflation in 2022. We actually saw this already coming up strongly in 2021, which helped us a lot. One of the reasons why we have this very stable five years hedge. In 2022, you still had the pandemic, you have the inflation, you have on top, if you didn't have this enough before, geopolitical tensions in between different regions that needs to be considered. Supply chain challenges coming up. What I said before, the scarcity. There's no labor, there's no transport, there's no raw material. You see, there's a lot of challenges that actually needs to be managed.
We did this very well. We do this very well. How do we see this? We will, I cannot say for the total year, but you saw this. We will go in the clear record year, 2022, which is a clear confirmation that we are able to show that we are managing these topics very well. Come back to the earlier picture with a nice strategy based on a solid foundation. You see now a third picture coming on top. That means we have a strong strategy based on a solid foundation. With the help of both strategy and solid foundation, it's of course easier to manage the external challenges, and we actually manage them very well. And again, you could say, fantastic, huh. Why, well, it is easy. I do whatever it takes. I have the strategy, solid foundation.
I'm managing the external challenges. Everything is nice. Again, we see a but. The geopolitical challenges and the other challenge that come along are not only a concern to what we call the base business and needs managed. They actually are also concern to the market, to our investors, yeah. What we see as a consequence is quite a challenge because there's volatility in the share price. Where does it come from? The geopolitical developments, for example, in regard of the gas supply, makes the market nervous.
Our comparatively high energy intensity makes the market nervous. Our comparatively high debt levels in an environment of now rising interest rates make the market nervous. The consequence, the market is looking at strong focus on free cash flow in times of war and geopolitical challenges. It's something that is pretty interesting to see. Not a surprise, but it's interesting to see. What does it mean for us? The classic challenges in principle are all attacking my base business. I have to manage them because they are threatening my cost levels, my availability of components, and so on.
They need to be managed. This topic here is for the first time in principle questioning our general strategy. This is what we actually did. We raised the question, in a time where the markets is nervous, war and geopolitical tensions, yeah, should we continue to push forward with our growth strategy or should we instead freeze it or any other alternatives? We definitely raised this question internally in the strategy discussions and evaluated different scenarios. Take the left side here, and there are a couple of more scenarios we actually investigated, but take the left side here. Freeze of the growth strategy.
Is it possible to bring the company back to the old commodity approach? Yeah, it might be possible. Absolutely. You might not generate the necessary value because you will not be able to get the margins up again, and you will definitely not generating the necessary amount of margin improvement. The short-term effect would be visible, but the value generation would be gone. We even investigated scenarios like shutdown of individual business units or de-invest, we all came to conclusion that this is far too short-term. I would like to bring your focus on the right side here of this chart, the push forward of the growth strategy. There's one thing which is very important, we needed to understand it ourselves. The strategy itself is not about growth, classic growth.
The strategy is about to grow the company into different product mix, into different margin levels. This means grow over proportion in areas where the margins are much stronger and also the markets are growing in a stronger way. Otherwise, we will lose this focus on profitable growth. The shift to higher value, higher margin product mix requires the growth into these segments of the business. The conclusion, and you probably heard it already, was relatively clear. We clearly saw a commitment to our formula g. It reaffirmed the commitment. The strategy is proven strong. It's a valid strategy. It's proven as a strong vehicle, and it's delivering in all key elements.
This mix shift I spoke about towards high-value solution is not something on PowerPoint, something we were dreaming about for the future, because it happens now, and it's becomes visible more and more with every single month. There's no doubt we have to consider the market dynamics. Geopolitical changes. Some of them are so dynamic you have to go, in German you would say, "You have to see them on site," Which means, careful, short-term activities. A couple of areas where we are a bit more careful to invest at the moment to see what happens over the loop of the next months and years. Not everything is kind of negative. There's also opportunities coming up with these different challenges and crisis that we see in the markets. The last two topics are good examples.
Take our switch of our oven technology in the molded plants to hybrid ovens with hydrogen, green hydrogen utilization. The support of a government towards this technology, the chances for support now have now significantly accelerated and improved. You also see this very clearly on the last point here, the pandemic itself. More and more of the governments are actually protecting themselves for this or actually the next pandemic. You get government support for investments in capacity in Germany and France and U.S. Lukas will later talk about especially this invest in Morganton.
Another try to bring this to a conclusion. We have a very strong strategy for sustainable, profitable growth. We have a strong foundation as a basis for the strategy. Both are actually necessary to master, also very successful, the external challenges. And on top, we actually still successfully implemented the transformation process. So w ith this. I need to drink it also. With this first part of the presentation, we wanted to explain the strategy logic behind our activities and the rationale .
We, means me and later also Lukas and Bernd, will now, I call it, lower the helicopter a little bit and share with you what the implementation of our strategy actually means in much more detail and give you more insights in the progress of the implementation. Let me look at the picture, four years of formula g. This picture just shows the growth. We come from a long period, we have here 2015, but you can in principle expand the period over many years of what I call stagnation, flattish behavior, no growth, a cake of one or 2 % every year.
2019, we started with formula g with a strategy. In 2020, in spite of COVID, we had the first time what we call the beginning of a start of reasonable organic growth, 3.5%. 2021, 7.6%. Should not forget, we had the first impacts of the inflation, so 2% out of this probably were driven by a tailwind coming from cost adjustments. Nevertheless, mid-single growth. In 2022, we have just finalized the year, but we will come out at 15%-16% organic growth, which is definitely above the 10%. Let it be 6% driven by price increases, tailwind, but it still remains a very solid high single-digit volume growth.
This means we are on a growth path, very successful. The chart actually is pretty impressive, especially as you see the planning for the next years that also will be pretty strong and at least in a ballpark, as indicated here in this chart. Again, you could raise the question, what did they do in detail to actually achieve this? It's not so much rocket science. As we showed to you at the last Capital Markets Day, we started the strategy relatively simple. Where are the markets that are growing over proportionally strong? Where are the markets where I can gain better margins?
And we looked at the mega trends in a changing world, and don't worry, I will not go through all the mega trends on this chart, but I would like to bring your attention to the ones that are here, dark highlighted dark. A couple of them as examples. The increasing importance of biotech, and it's obvious to each and everyone. We in Gerresheimer never had a really strong access to this market because we were so driven in thinking product by product, silo by silo. The biotech market needs a full utilization of the full portfolio and the skill set of the total company. Doing this so, with the right focus on this market, we are growing very strongly, and it's one of the key drivers of our growth. I will show this in a couple of more charts later on in the presentation.
The key driver of our growth is the biotech market. To the left here, from my side, the increasing level of outsourcing of pharma costs, non-core for the pharma costs. The cost pressure in the healthcare and pharma industry is pushing the pharma costs to look for release, so they are pushing responsibility down into the value chain. A good opportunity for us to gain parts of this value chain, deliver higher value products, expand our value chain, and benefit from this. In the middle here, you see more self-medication and individual medicine, and Lukas will later elaborate on this topic a lot. What does it mean, more self-medication, home care? You have probably a multimorbid patient at home. The device you need for this patient needs to be very robust and very simple to use.
But on the other side, it also needs to become and be very smart because it has to communicate with the patient, with the patient aid, maybe with the doctor, with the hospital, with the payment system. This is what we work on. That's an area where definitely we have a good opportunity. It's not the drug that will become smart. It's the device that has to carry the intelligence for the drug. Another trend some might see, others not, it's pretty interesting, and it's helpful for us, the cosmetic becomes health. All of our cosmetic customers are steadily upgrading their products in more and more higher standards, healthcare standards, which is fantastic for us because that's what we do for a living every day.
We live in the pharma healthcare world, and it's significantly easier for us to upgrade the product instead of some of the competitors that are not active within the pharma industry. That just as a couple of examples on this chart. With this, I come to another chart. Looks very busy. Ignore this because it's not even a fraction of the activities that we really successfully implemented. Along with the strategy implementation, a lot of changes have to take place because the transformation of the company, an upgrade of the capability level, is in the end nothing else than successful implemented change, hopefully in the right direction.
Here are a couple of examples. 2018, everyone knows we acquired the company Sensile Medical. It was before our time. What we did out of this acquisition is we built the new division, Advanced Technologies. What you hear now, it's really just picked examples to give you an indication of the dynamics that is going on in the company. New facility, North Macedonia, for the medical systems.
A new facility in India for plastic packaging. Acquisition of the smart inhaler respimetrix. 2020, another capacity expansion in Pfreimd. Another new facility, Changzhou, plastic packaging. Expansion of small batch production, Wackersdorf. Why is this so important? It's important because we started to focus on smaller lot size businesses with higher values. Of course, if you run the small lot size businesses on your highly automated, highly fancy lines, it's actually bringing your OEE down. You have to have the capability to successfully do fast changeovers, and that's what you requires a small batch production capabilities for syringes and also devices. That's what we set up in Wackersdorf.
2021, one more time, it's just examples here. The new pump, large molecule, biologic pump, SensAIR, the own IP, own IPG injector, new autoinjector, Gerresheimer-owned. The expansion of the vial capacity that we injected or started in 2021. The construction of a new plant in Kosamba, which opens the door for us in India and Asia for Type I glass. In 2022, a couple of further examples, all in the direction of extension of our technology network. Acquisition of parts of Portal Instruments, the needle-free injector, and Adamant Health, the sensor that we need for the Parkinson's applications. Partnership with Merck, also here, Lukas will talk about in a few minutes. The strategic partnership with Zollner to get access to the electronic capability and Nelson Labs for all the services in the biologic.
The launch of the new EZ-fill Smart, another topic that Lukas will address, expansion of the vial capacity in Morganton, supported by BARDA. Another example here, the expansion of a new facility or expanding of a facility in Berlin, Ohio, for plastic packaging. Significantly dynamic, in spite of one or other crisis, took place and boosted the company into a different level. It's not only internally in the company where you see change is taking place. From my point of view, a more successful and significant change happened actually on the customer side. The way the customers actually are perceiving Gerresheimer has changed significantly.
There are more and more customers that is using Gerresheimer as a one-stop shop, enjoying the highest quality standards, using the value add of our solutions and services, benefiting and giving us business with new innovation ideas, new innovational product, and the flexibility we are now generating in the customization of the products. The scalability, size of the facility, the global footprint, and its flexibility is something that is adding to the story. Impressive to me is that we are now perceived as a strategic partner and solution provider already today by many of our customers. Why is this relevant, and why is this important? It's relevant and important because we are now discussing on a total different level with our customers.
It's not only the purchasing department we are talking to, but it's the technical department, the strategy department, and the board about strategic partnership into the future, which leads to much earlier start of our partnerships and negotiations, but it also leads to a lot of different businesses that we, I have to be honest, never had access to in the past. Something that is also very helpful, the terms and conditions that we are now negotiating and we are closing the businesses are significantly better and different to what we had in the past. It's another busy chart. I have to drink a glass of water before I go to this. It looks a bit busy, but what we try to do here is to show you the value chain of the pharma industry.
You see here the top line, the drug development process, which is clear the pharma core. You have the API invention. You have, of course, the formulation. You have the drug manufacturing. You go over into the process like marry the whole thing with the packaging, washing and sterilization, fill and finish, the marketing and sales, also the whole topic of patient adherence, physician support. On the lower side, you have here the development of the, call it, primary packaging. From concept design, prototyping, the clinical trials, the stability testing, the commercial production itself of the packaging, the washing and sterilization. If you look into the old Gerresheimer, the nice circle that we created here, this is indicating the activities that the old Gerresheimer used. Commercial production of the drug.
Sorry, of the primary packaging of the product itself and for syringes, the washing and sterilization. That's it. That was our old activity. If you look at the changes over the loop of the last year, four years, it's actually pretty significant. It gets more tricky now, but just focus on the two red line bubbles or three, actually, three red line bubbles. The part of the process that we are now involved in is significantly broader. We are involved in the very early phase, in concept and design phase. We are involved in prototyping, in clinical trials, stability testing, which does not mean that we are actually doing the clinical trials, but we are strongly supporting the clinical trials with stability test documentation, and, and.
The project and quality management, clinical with regulatory services, and plastic engineering equipment line support is coming from Gerresheimer. The washing and sterilization is now expanded away from just syringes to vials, cartridges as well. The last point is a pretty important one. The patient adherence and physician support, and here, as I indicated before, Lukas will talk about. This is the area which is absolutely key. This is the area of, for example, patient compliance. Did the patient take the drug? Helpful information. When? When did he actually take the drug? Now comes the next level. Did he take enough drug? Or more complicated, did the drug actually arrive in the body? Does the medication actually have an effect on the patient? That's the important information.
Of course, further information, Lukas will talk about this, about the health condition, yeah. Does he need to be treated? Does he need drug? How much drug does he need? Does the patient have to go into the hospital? Is he in order? This information will come from smart devices, a very important wide area that Gerresheimer is intensively working on. Where does this bring us? Actually brings us to a strategic partner of choice for global pharma and biotech solutions, which, and that's important, a continuous expansion of our margin, because the product mix is shifting towards higher value solutions.
The thinking, as I indicated before, goes now into we bring the drug to the patient. The containment solution, with all the challenges you have in the process to bring the drug to the patient. It's cold and warm and light and dark. It's shocks. It's all these kinds that are covered within the various products we have in the portfolio. You have to come to the next area, which is we bring the drug into the patients.
The drug, the device and delivery systems. It's easy to imagine because when you, for example, take the syringe, because you can imagine, okay, the syringe is kind of bringing the drug into the patient, but it's significantly more within our portfolio. It could be a syringe, it could be an autoinjector, it could be a pen, it could be a pump, but it also could be an inhaler. It also could be a nose spray, an eye dropper, an ear dropper. That's all in this segment of drug to the patient. The digital ecosystem of digital therapy support.
I will not do the presentation of Lukas. He will not be happy if I do this, but he will do this in a few minutes from now. With this, I come to a different point, which is kind of just explaining what we mean if we talk about high-value solutions in Gerresheimer. What we rate in high-value solutions is not just because it's a nice name, it's because it's generating a higher value to the customer. It's also generating higher value to us because we have higher sales, but also higher margin. We conclude all products that we serve into the biologics. The IO biologics. We also have all the high-value vials, which could be Value, ready to fill, Elite.
The other products ready to fill, like syringes, for example, we have the products for the Advanced Technologies, the pumps, but also the other own IP solutions. We have a couple of new glass plastic combination solutions, complete solutions, that are definitely falling into this group of high-value solutions and selected others as well. With this, I come to another busy chart. It's a bit busy, but it's very, very interesting, and you will see this chart a couple of more times because both Lukas and also Bernd will use it. I would like to highlight your focus a little bit on the left side. What is this actually showing, this chart? What we did is, instead of focusing on individual products, we actually looked at individual end markets, the biopharma diagnostic markets and of course beauty and cosmetics.
We looked at the biologics and injectables and the other end market like diagnostics or diatherapies, for example, ophthalmic or respiratory. If you look into the growth pattern of this market, you see that, for example, antibody on proteins are on the very left side of the chart, the market is actually growing 5%-10%. Cell and gene therapy is growing 30%+. The vaccines and mRNAs actually growing by 10%+, and the insulin by 2%. That's important because our intention was and is to grow with the areas that are growing the best, because that's where it's easy to grow. You see our share of total sales within Gerresheimer, where we are today at 39% for this biological and injectables, will grow over the group of the next years to more than 50%.
So we are growing in this segment with high-value solutions and especially the biologics. You see here on the last line of the chart, the high-value solutions in share of amount of sales, total sales Gerresheimer, the high-value solutions go up from 24 to 35%. Very important, because that's where we wanna grow. Yeah. The biologics grow from 14 today to 25%, that of course results in a strong growth, as I already mentioned, of the injectables from 39 to more than 50%. That's why it is so important to focus on these high-value solutions and biologics and injectables. Over the loop of the next charts, I will go into detail of a special group of this, which is the biologics. Let me do a deep dive into the biologics and explain why they are a key driver for the injectables.
The biologics are pretty relevant within the pharmaceutical industry. I don't think I need to explain this to each and everyone here, because I think it's common knowledge. It's the fastest growing sector of the pharmaceutical industry. Already today, seven out of 10 top-selling drugs in the world are biologics. What are these biologics? What do they mean for us? What does it mean for the primary packaging solution? You could also call this biologics large molecule formulations, the divas of the business. On the one side, they are extremely sensitive. Yeah. They're sensitive to temperature, to light, to our kind of ingredients, to metal, to the wrong surface, yeah. Very sensitive. On the other side, they're pretty aggressive. They are so aggressive that they are even delaminating certain glass if you don't take the right packaging.
What does it mean? This means the demands, the challenges for the selection of the right solution is a high value containment solution. It's a segment where the fulfillment of these demands is significantly more important than the price, which leads to better margin. The demands and direction of the drug delivery systems are very high, which is perfect for us because we believe we have the right solutions for this. On top, of course, the services give us another area of additional opportunities to do good sales and serve the customers better than we do in the past or did in the past. We are continuously expanding our biological solution portfolio. We have a very broad solution portfolio, and some of this you see here.
You have the syringes, you have medical devices, and you have the vial cartridges. I will just from my side concentrate on syringes and then hand over to Lukas, who will then talk about the vials and cartridges as well. Let's start. We'll ignore this and jump into the middle of the syringe business. We have a very broad solution portfolio for high values in this. If you take your eye on the right side here, we have the right solutions for biologics, for these highly sensitive drugs.
Yeah. We have metal-free systems, silicone-free systems. We have all the systems that you actually need. We have the bypass dual chamber syringe, which is, by the way, a very relevant topic for GLP-1. I will come to this in a couple of minutes. We have the needle protection system here for the InnoSafe, and we have the right solution for the very sensitive topic of ophthalmic. If you think about a syringe into the eyes, that's usually not something where you would like to mess up.
We have the right solution with COP syringes for the deep cold storage for new type of drugs, for example, the mRNAs and vaccines that we spoke about. This is actually the portfolio and the solutions we can provide to the customers. That's what is actually driving our capacity, but also global expansion with, within, in the syringes and also of course the mixer fed. It's pretty obvious if you see this on the next chart. We will over the loop of the next years actually double the capacity within syringes. That's what you see with higher value syringes, we will actually more than triple our revenues for syringes. The footprint optimization capacity expansion is pretty significant. Today, we are primarily with some Querétaro business.
We have the business in Bünde, yeah, with all the high-tech lines, and that's where the center of excellence is. On top, on the very right side here, it's Wackersdorf, another center of excellence for the industrialization. We have now established the small lot sizes, as I spoke about before in Wackersdorf. Pfreimd is the location where we have the biologic hub, where we produce the COP syringes. Skopje will be the next site as low cost facility for the volume syringes, because it's important. You have to have, be the technical leader with innovation of solutions. In parallel, you should not forget, you have to have the right cost-efficient solutions for the volume syringes that you can provide your con customers, in a very efficient, cost-efficient way, and we will be able to produce them profitable in Skopje.
Also Querétaro, strong new site, we will build significant capacities for biologic syringes over the next years. The freed capacity for Bünde, which we relocate into Skopje, actually will also be fully utilized by biologic syringes. On top, that's in the discussion, that's why I'm a bit careful with disclose this, huh. We have kind of delayed the Asia expansion for syringes at the moment for a couple of years, looking at the global situation. The greenfield expansion North America is something that is not finally decided, but it's on the horizon.
One more time, the capacity increase is significant. We will double the capacity and triple the revenue, confirming the strong mix shift towards higher value products. Let me come to the medical devices. You have the classic medical devices, which is own IP, huh, the auto-injector in the middle. Autoinjector that is able to deliver higher volumes, but also drugs with higher viscosity, perfect for biological re-requirements.
Of course, the pump solutions we have on the lower part here, the SensCore, but also the SensAIR, with both are very good solutions for either high volume or high viscosity or the combination of both. I will here talk about the contract manufacturing, because significant business wins are done in the contract manufacturing over the loop of the last years. If you look at the contract manufacturing, where the order intake in 2017, 2018 was very low, the business was in a kind of downturn, and we had to turn it, which we did very successfully. We have very mature and established markets, for example, for inhalers and pens.
The contract manufacturing is what I call back in attack mode, with different focus on quality, with different focus on the global footprint, with different focus on the flexibility of your customers and the need of your customers. We are now back in what I call full attack mode. We'll further expand our market share with pens from 35% today to 40%. The inhalers from 40- 50. It's all booked business. That's not a plan, by the way. We were not so strong in autoinjectors. We were pretty strong in pens, inhalers, and not so strong in autoinjector. We've been successful, especially here with the focus on biologics with autoinjectors.
We're up in 2022, we are very small, but the booked orders that we have now in the books will bring our market share very soon to 10%, and by 2028, we expect market share of roughly 20% for the autoinjectors. We are in key position for the autoinjectors and pen for GLP-1. We are very strong and stable demands, and the own IP business is actually increasing in relevance day by day. The growth topics, and Bernd will talk about this, is coming with a significantly lower risk profile, especially to the co-terms of conditions that we are negotiating now. Let me come to another topic of the pharma industry, which you might be able to call the next big blockbuster of the pharmaceutical industry.
And a key driver of some of the growth in medical devices and also syringes for biologics. Innovating for a better life is also means fighting obesity. We bring the drug to and into the patient, and the market potential of fighting obesity is seen to be above $50 billion market. Pretty not only the packaging, but for the total market as well. It's clearly seen as the next blockbuster within the pharmaceutical industry, and it's called GLP-1. Obesity is seen to be a pre-stage of diabetes. More than 650 million people worldwide suffer from obesity. We believe chronic obesity is considered a precursor of diabetes, and thus the next widespread disease. It's not only diabetes. Obesity is associated with more than 200 possible health complications, whether it's strokes, heart attacks, kidney disease, arthrosis, and so on.
So the fighting obesity are considered absolutely, especially drugs that are considered the next blockbuster of the pharma industry. Why do I tell you this most likely pretty interesting information? It's not because the market, as I indicated, is more than EUR 50 billion. It's because we in Gerresheimer are actually extremely well-positioned to serve the key winners of this GLP-1 race with our solutions. The syringes, the vials, the pens, the autoinjector capabilities, our close relationship and access to the key customers here, and our strong and global footprint. The impact only on the contract manufacturing with some other business wins as well, is significant. Significant large business opportunities leads to expansion of global footprint. The risk-return profile with limited downside risk is extremely attractive.
It confirms our leading position in pens and inhalers, but now also in autoinjectors, and leads to the expansion of the facilities, as you can read in this chart. It will actually boost up the sales in the contract manufacturing from 2020, EUR 350 million to above, clearly above EUR 600 million in 2028. That's why you have the eagles here, because in contract manufacturing, you're always aiming for the big eagle platforms. We've been very successful over the loop of the last months and years to win and secure these platforms for Gerresheimer.
With this, actually, I'm at the end of my part of the presentation, which does not mean the presentation is over. It's still some ongoing activities. Lukas, you have to warm up a little bit now. That's because I will hand over to Lukas now, who will give us further details on the execution on the strategy. I'm happy to be able to relax now for a couple of minutes. You have to do the work, Lukas. Thank you so far for your attention.
Thank you, Dietmar. Thank you very much. Dietmar started to elaborate on the execution formula g. I will continue that, and I will mainly focus on three topics. First, high-value products in glass. Vials and cartridges. Second, digitalization. The last one, but not least, I will give you an update on sustainability. The vials and cartridges are playing a very important role in our high-value product strategy, especially what we call RTF vials and cartridges, and also Gx Elite vials are playing an important role of our growth story. Obviously, they are also crucial for our increasing market success with biologic customers. Yeah, I have good news for you today. With the EZ-fill Smart platform, we basically have the best-in-class product in our hands.
Over the last couple of years, we developed EZ-fill Smart, and we filed some significant IP around it, by the way. We launched it this year at the CPhI in Frankfurt, and we believe that it will be a very strong market success for several reasons. First, EZ-fill Smart will set the market standard for RTF vials and cartridge products because it was developed in very close collaboration with all the main fill and finish machine vendors. Second, it provides the optimal cost of total ownership to our customers, which is crucial obviously for the transformation from bulk to sterile vials.
Third, last but not least, it significantly improves the quality level that is on the market available today as the level of particulate, the load of particulate is significantly lower than any other product which is available today in the market. Dietmar mentioned it, our pharma customers and also our biologic customers, they will focus on outsourcing. They will outsource all the non-core competencies, including manufacturing, to other players like Gerresheimer.
They will focus and invest their money on drug development. Sterile vials, cartridges, and syringes, they offer a significant total cost of ownership advantage to our customers. However, it is, I think, remarkable that except vials and cartridges, actually all primary packaging components in the pharma space have already transformed from bulk to sterile. Vials and cartridges, not yet. You can see here on the chart on the left side what happened with syringes. Syringes about 20 years ago have started at a very low level of sterile syringes or RTF syringes, about 20%. Over the loop of the next 20 years till today, almost all syringes are now in an RTF format.
With our EZ-fill Smart platform, we will actively drive the market transformation also in the vial space from bulk to RTF, which obviously will bring us a lot of more value and a lot growth potential over the next years. The only difference to syringes, and I think that's important to understand, the only difference to syringes is that the vial market with about 15 billion pieces is almost four times as big as the syringe market, so the potential is even bigger. We have successfully managed to capture the leading position in the vials market over the last two-three years by our significant capacity expansion that we did, and we are now having more than 30% of the total vial market.
Together with the EZ-fill Smart platform, this brings us to the perfect position to be at the forefront of the transformation from bulk to RTF vials. Conservatively, we estimate the market in 2030 to be about $1.2 billion. I can guarantee you, Gerresheimer will have a significant portion of that market. That's only the starting point, because that is by far not yet the 15 billion vials market in 2030. The transformation from bulk to RTF vials will go on and will give us long-term growth potential. The trick with the RTF vials is obviously it is higher value, but also for us, much higher margin than the bulk vial market. What does that mean? We are significantly investing in RTF vials and cartridge capacity over the next couple of years.
We're actually increasing the capacity by 10 x compared to 2021. We are convinced that with this will not only lead to disproportionate sales growth, but also at the same time to disproportionate margin growth. We see significant potential in Europe, in the U.S., and already even in Asia. This is one of the major growth drivers that we are moving forward with short-term, midterm, but even long term. Let's move to a second major growth driver that Dietmar already touched upon, which is the digitalization. Digitalization will be the next transformation in the healthcare system. Data-based connection between doctors, hospitals, and patients will both improve therapy outcome, health outcome, how we call it here, and at the same time, help to manage the exploding healthcare costs on a global level.
If you have a look at the costs only, you can see that the costs for non-adherence to therapy prescriptions globally is about $300 billion-$500 billion. We believe that with digitalization, we can bring this $300 billion-$500 billion down by about 10%. At the same time, digitalization will also help to reduce unnecessary hospital stays and reduce costs, also with this measure. On the other side, but equally important, digitalization in healthcare will enable personalized drug dosing, will enable patient monitoring, and will also improve the diagnostic potential that we have. With this, we'll also increase the health outcome, therapy outcome, therapy efficacy, but also the quality of life of many, many patients around the globe. Gerresheimer is committed to play a very important role on that transformation of digital healthcare.
Because of that, we are right now setting up our Gx healthcare platform that you can see here. It basically has three levels. First, patient adherence, second, patient monitoring, and third, emergency prediction and also prevention. We will connect all our products sooner or later, devices, but also primary packaging to the cloud. With this connection, we will connect patients and doctors and hospitals. It is clear for us that we will not do this alone. We will do this with very strong partners. I will introduce some of them during the course of my presentation. Let's jump into business fields that we are currently developing. respimetrix. We call it here valuable data from every single breath. Yeah, this is true. We are expected to go with respimetrix now in 2025 to the market.
The respimetrix solution automatically connects COPD patients with doctors and hospitals, also with disease managers to ensure correct patient compliance. We have done intense market testing of the value of this solution, I can tell you today it was extremely promising. We believe, for example, that COPD cost hospital stays, which by the way, account only in the U.S. for about $13 billion of costs. We can reduce the COPD cost hospital stays by 80%. On top of that, we also can help disease managers and care organizations to significantly reduce their processing costs. This is another value that respimetrix brings. You can see the immense potential that only this digital solution has for Gerresheimer. A next important project is revolutionizing the Parkinson's treatment.
We have announced to the market earlier this year that we have invested and partnered up with Adamant Health, which is the most sophisticated biomarker that is available in the Parkinson's field today. The life of Parkinson's patients today is characterized by ups and also by downs. The biomarker of Adamant can actually monitor the condition of the patients throughout the day, throughout every single minute. Our personalized solution, together with our pump, ensures send the exactly right drug dosing at the right time to the patients via our pump. These signals are, let's say, triggered by the biomarker. What does this, what is this, what can this be used for? This will actually lead to a significant reduction of hospital stays. Once again, here we estimate about 20% in Germany and also decrease significantly the side effects and symptoms.
All together, this solution will significantly reduce the treatment cost for Parkinson's for every single patient in the U.S., but also, for example, in Germany. The revenue stream of that solution will be very similar, by the way, to respimetrix, that we get paid by doctors or hospitals for every connected patient, a certain amount per month. That allows us to at very high margin, and by the way, lower CapEx investments grow our top line further. This will go to the market already in a couple of years. It's not a vision which is far out there is something very concrete that we are working on, and we have a very clear path to market, and this will hit our top line already in three-four years.
Another important project is what we call a digital twin, or you can also call it track and trace, where, for every single Gerresheimer product, individual part-specific product, production, and also quality data is stored on our products and can be shared via the cloud with our pharma customers. This solution will optimize some of the very costly business processes at our customers. For example, incoming inspection, goods receipt process, or also the complaint handling. It has a significant value to our customers, and we are very proud that we are developing this, or we are partnering up to bring this to the market also with Merck. How can we bring all these different business fields and different initiatives together? How can we create our Gerresheimer digital health platform?
As I mentioned before, we know that we cannot do everything by ourselves, so we partner up with strong partners. I mentioned a few of them, like Omed Health. Another one on the platform side of it is Philips HealthSuite, and this has not yet been announced to the market. We have partnered up with Philips HealthSuite, who already has a very established platform and is present in many, many hospitals around the globe, in Europe, but also in the U.S., and where already thousands of devices are connected via Philips HealthSuite to hospitals. We have partnered up with Philips HealthSuite to, in the end, reduce the time to market and also reduce the investment which is necessary to bring our solutions to the market.
What you can see there on the middle layer, where is extremely important because Philips HealthSuite is providing to us the base to connect our products to the hospitals. The individual disease-specific solutions will be created by ourselves and will be added on top of the Philips HealthSuite. This gives us a significant advantage because we can use an existing platform, but we can still customize our solutions to the respective disease field or to the respective solution that we are providing to our customers. Altogether, we can say in digitalization, it will be the next growth driver for Gerresheimer.
We have made huge steps forward in the last two years. We are now to a point where we have much more certainty on the market potential, on the individual business fields, and we are convinced that this will drive our growth from 2025 onwards, on top of all the other initiatives that we are taking. I come to last but not least, I come to give you an update on sustainability. We have already communicated our sustainability strategy to the market. I'm very proud today to announce to you also that our efforts are rewarded in the market. For example, a couple of weeks ago, we got awarded with EcoVadis Gold, which has never happened to Gerresheimer before. It will put us on the top leading companies in terms of sustainability.
Also customers give us a very positive feedback on our sustainability strategy. Actually, we are winning RFQs thanks to our clear roadmap and commitment to ESG. It's not something that we only do to be a good citizen, but also gives us a clear competitive advantage. One more important message. On the back of the energy crisis, many other companies are forced to invest again in oil or in LPG with a significantly highest footprint. We are not doing this. We are sticking to our CO2 targets, minus 50% by 2030, and also to our CO2 reduction targets over the next years. We believe that the energy crisis actually accelerates our investment into new technologies that will make us less and less dependent on gas.
And it's also obviously clear that our long-term hedge that has been communicated already gives us a absolutely competitive advantage. This long-term hedge is also important for sustainability because it's exactly the hedge that helps us to not being forced to invest a lot of money back into the past, into the times of oil and LPG with a higher CO2 footprint. What are the key takeaways of my presentation today? First, shift from volume to value. We will accelerate our investments into high-value products in tubular glass. This will lead to disproportionate growth, but at the same time, to a disproportionate increase of the margin in tubular glass.
Second, the next big on top growth potential that we are elaborating is the digitalization. We are on a very good track, and we have a clear path to market, and this will hit our P&L in the next years. Third, we stick to our sustainability strategy. It has strengthened our market position, our competitive position, and we are sticking and still committed to this CO2 footprint reduction. Thank you very much, and with this, I will now hand over to Bernd.
Thank you, Lukas, welcome also from my side. Today, I will talk about three topics. First, our investment program. Second, our financial guardrails. Third, how we want to maximize shareholder value. For the investment program, I would come back to the market niches as a starting point, on which basis we're actually investing. This is a slide and a brief recap from what Dietmar already said before. Dietmar illustrated, based on this slide, the attractiveness of our markets where we are in, and which we serve with a unique product portfolio. The core of the analysis was around biologics and injectables with an approximately growth in average of more than 10% per year. This area was, is, and will be one of our core focuses of our investment program also going forward.
We are leveraging on the global mega trends with investments. We are catching the wave and investing into these right niches. We are doing this with high-value solutions, capacity, and regional expansion, and contract manufacturing. One of our areas where we are also investing in are obviously R&D investments. To expand our innovative product portfolio, we invest around 2%-3% of our sales per year into R&D. We innovate for better life. We put our money where our mouth is. Not new. We followed the path of catching up the waves which were described before with formula g over the last four years with a quite good result.
What you see here is actually the EBITDA payback over the years, the development here. What you see is that the EBITDA payback was significantly reduced over the last couple of years. What does it mean? EBITDA payback shows how long it takes to match the investments with traditional EBITDA. The underlying assumption is you invest today. You start seeing the first EBITDA contributions two years, with a delay of almost two years.
The key message is our investments since we started our formula g really paid off. You see very nicely year by year that we could reduce, based on this formula g, our payback. For example, we started first with our CapEx in 2019. In this investment cycle from 2017 to 2019, we could reduce then, based on this, our EBITDA payback from 60 to 32. With the two investment years, 2019 and 2020, so basically it's investment cycle 2018 to 2020, we could reduce it further from 32 to 8 years.
Now, in the full cycle of our stewardship of our formula g program from 2019 to 2021, where we had CapEx to sales ratio of 12%, we had a EBITDA payback, I expect one, of six-seven years. The new investment cycle going forward, so 2022 to 2024 or 2023 to 2026, we expect a EBITDA payback of four-five years. Quite interesting to notice that actually if you take out the base CapEx, I'll come later to this, the real EBITDA payback of our actual initiatives and our future in-investment program is the growth CapEx is almost only three years. It comes. It comes basically with a very rigorous and targeted capital allocation management system, which we have here at Gerresheimer. I just elaborated on this. We invest into attractive growth markets with a priority on margin-strong, high-value solutions.
We're doing this and apply a very rigorous and holistic capital allocation process. We look at internal rate of returns. We look at payback period and net present value. We are continuously improving our CapEx to sales ratio with less CapEx-intense business models. What is very important, we strive for a ROCE over the next couple of years of 15%. After tax, it would be 11. In the last couple of years, we moved slightly and get slightly better. We are now at 10.2%, something like this. We expect in the next couple of years to steadily improve the ROCE over the years based on this targeted capital allocation model. We are doing this on the back of a CapEx formula, which you see here. What you see here is actually our CapEx formula in real-time application.
Before I showed you that we have invested in the investment cycle 2019 to 2021, 12% CapEx to sales. You can basically split this CapEx to sales into 4 percentage points base CapEx to sustain the actual revenues which you have and 8 percentage points in gross CapEx, where you really invest into your growth opportunities. The CapEx formula is in the end, the demand and the formula to convert gross CapEx one-one into sales growth. Practical terms, if you invest 8 percentage point of sales into your company, you could expect 8 percentage points of growth. Quite remarkable. By the way, the investment cycle under formula g, the first one in full from 2019 to 2021, where we had, as mentioned before, 12%.
We had a CAGR, not of eight, what you should have expected, 8 percentage point of growth, but in reality, One, a CAGR of 11 percentage points per year. We are convinced that this formula will also apply going forward with our attractive niches where we are active in. Now comes a new growth accelerator project, which I would dig into detail deeper later on. We got on top on our 12% of CapEx to sales, a unique business opportunity which we want to capture. As Dietmar Siemssen mentioned before, we won a large Gx Elite contract, which confirmed our leading position in both syringes and also contract manufacturing. This development is pushed by diabetes, GLP-1, and the therapeutic area of obesity.
We are investing in addition around EUR 150 million CapEx for the next two years for this unique business opportunity. On the back of this growth opportunity and growth accelerator project, we will lift our guidance from high single-digit growth to a growth of at least 10%. What is it? What is this growth accelerator project? We cannot go in too much details for secrecy reasons. In the end, what you see is these are new orders with a particular focus on biologics solutions. The contracts that we are talking about relates to biologics in both contract manufacturing as well as syringes. It has a very, very attractive risk-return profile. It's a long-term contract. It's basically evergreen contracts behind it. It has limited downside risks. It's also based partially, at least on customer financing. The internal rate of return is beyond 20%.
We will invest EUR 150 million over the next two years. Obviously, it will basically accelerate and be accretive to our EBITDA margin significantly, and will be one of our steps to go into a margin range of 23-25 percentage points. This also demonstrates that we really handpicked our strategy and handpicked our CapEx project to really be able to get into unique, profitable business opportunities. Ladies and gentlemen, we should not miss this game-changing opportunity for Gerresheimer and invest into this growth accelerated project. On the back of this project, in total, what you see is that we really put our money where our mouth is. After this investment cycle or in this investment cycle, 2023-2025, we invest more than 50% of our gross CapEx in high-value solutions.
We invest around 25% in capacity expansion and 25% in our contract manufacturing area to execute on our record order book. What does it all mean for our profitability? Let's deep dive into high-value solutions. The high-value solutions sales share of our total sales is increasing steadily from 21% to 20 and over and beyond 35%. High-value solutions has different various features. We explained before that it has a significant high underlying market growth. The EBITDA margin is beyond 30%. It comes with all these attractive, innovative products which we have. Be it in the area of syringes with ready-to-fill ClearJect platform. Be it high-end syringes or our bypass dual chamber syringes. In the area of vials, it's EZ-fill Smart. It's Gx Elite vials, and obviously, also mentioned by Lukas before, our smart and connected devices.
What have all these innovative products in common? They deliver in total a margin of more than 30%. What we should not miss and what is also important feature for us, one path or one aspect is that we increase our high-value solutions, and with this comes a higher EBITDA margin. We should not forget that we have also to do our homework with operational excellence and further expand our margin also in this regard. Partially, it's homework, the measures to increase the productivity, but partially, it's also areas which are quite new and where we are pretty strong. For example, this area of implementation of smart factory. We want to use the data in the factory smarter and more intelligent.
This based on prescriptive and predictive use of data up to a closed loop system, we will be able to really reduce our scrap rates and our downtimes. Also, in the area of cost of non-quality, we believe that we can do better going forward and basically improve also in this regard and based on this, our bottom line. How does it elaborate now all to our new guidance? I will show it in the next slide. On the left, you see the current guidance, what we have in place. On the right, I will now explore where our new guidance is heading to. With our investment program, we're improving and increasing our revenue growth from high single-digit revenue growth to more than at least 10%. Speeding up the revenue growth also midterm. Long-term, having a revenue growth double-digit.
In the area of EBITDA guidance, we also increased our EBITDA guidance. So far, we always guided for high single-digit growth. We expect that we will be able to at least grow also 10% in 2023. At least 10% in 2023 EBITDA growth. By the way, we should be a little bit growing faster than our sales growth. Why? Because in the long and midterm especially, we want to go to a EBITDA margin of 23%-25%, which we are confirming. Now let's go to the guidance for the earnings per share. The midterm guidance didn't change. Also for the year 2024, we expect to have a double-digit EPS growth. In the year 2023, however, we expect with this environment that we will have a low single-digit growth in earnings per share. How comes?
We have in 2022 financial expenses of around EUR 25 million for the total year. We will increase our financial expenses to EUR 40 million. Why? Very simple. The underlying interest is basically significantly went up in the last 12 months. Just for reflection, we have around gross financial debt of EUR 1.2 billion. EUR 1.2 billion gross financial debt. In the end, in the average, our interest went up compared to the previous year, 2022 and 2023, by 100 to 200 basis points. That's basically the reason why you have an increase in the interest by EUR 15 million in 2023, therefore we can only guide for a low single-digit growth regarding EPS. It's not surprisingly, by the way, because today in the morning, I looked at the development of the three-month Euribor.
It's really quite remarkable. 12 months ago, it was almost minus 1 percentage point, three months Euribor. Now he is almost at a level of +2%, so an increase of 3%. With this, I would like to come to relevant feature as far as our funding of our investment program is concerned. We, as you know, we launched a promissory loan, and we successfully issuance this promissory loan two weeks ago. We were totally oversubscribed, two times, almost oversubscribed. We wanted to have EUR 100 million. Actually, we got EUR 300 million. This three maturities, three years, five years, seven years. What is very important and makes us really proud is that we have done this based on an investment-grade rating by our debt investors.
Actually, we paid, around 170 basis points for our five-year maturity. This will basically full fund our investment program on attractive terms. Just, as a side remark, our debt profile, 60% of our total financial debt is actually based on fixed rates. If you look at our target leverage, which is between 2.5 and 3.0, we should reach this by the end of 2024. We have now end of 2022, we should have around 3x leverage, financial leverage. We should get lower of this in the end of 2024. Now I would like to come to the summary slide and bring the key concept back to your mind.
We want to deliver on our investment program in front of us, which is really basically supported by a significant attractive mega trends. Selection of attractive investment opportunities. We really accelerated our Gx Value generation model with our impact CapEx formula, base CapEx 4% plus, growth CapEx of 8% and our unique growth accelerator projects. We are maximizing our shareholder value by strict investment criteria, margin accretive investments, IRR beyond 20%, for example, in this case of growth accelerator projects, where we're striving for a ROCE of 15% midterm and significantly having reduced our payback period.
We are doing this margin improvement basically on a much better product mix than today and operational excellence initiative in our bottom line. The whole thing, our activities, are backed, based basically on a solid balance sheet and reliable business performance, which is really facilitating our growth strategy. We recently issued a promissory loan with a bank grade rating, and we got a lot of support by the credit markets. For this, our investment program is fully funded at attractive terms. With this, I would like to hand over back to Dietmar. Dietmar.
Yeah. Thank you, Bernd. Don't worry, I will just sum up the summary. Conclude a little bit before we finally go into the Q&A, and let me go for the outlook and guidance, yeah. Sum up, yeah. What does it mean? With the successful implementation, our strategy, formula g, and the successful transformation of our business, we are now generating sustainable value for Gerresheimer, but we're also generating sustainable value for our stakeholders. What does it mean? The transformation, the repositioning of our business is leading to higher value. Continuous executing on our strategy, as we showed over the loop of the presentation, the strengths that we are building through very solid foundation, where we've done our homework.
The sizing of unique growth opportunities that are coming on top, is the fact that innovation, the digitalization, and sustainability are actually open new opportunities which we are grabbing. We have a very strong value creation model and, as Bernd just indicated, we have secured the refinancing on pretty attractive terms. That is leading to. I think it's nothing new because just Bernd showed it, I just will reconfirm it. If you look at 2023 outlook and guidance, we clearly see another double-digit year, 2023, in terms of growth. The EBITDA will grow by more than 10%. It's also very clearly the goal. The adjusted earnings per share in a single year, 23, hit by a single impact, as just Bernd elaborated.
In the midterm, this is clearly an upgrade to the former guidance, the revenue growth will stay in the ballpark of double-digit sales growth over the group of the whole planning period, makes us very proud. The adjusted EBITDA will move towards the indicated 23%-25% margin, and the adjusted earnings per share from 2024 onwards will stay ahead of the 10%. With this, actually, we came to the end of the presentations. Thank you for your interest and after 100 three quarter hours, also your interest and your patience in the presentation. I wanted to say we now take 5 minutes break, but I think it's better as we are a little bit ahead of time.
We take a break until 4:00 German time. Then we meet back here in a different forum together with Bernd , Carolin, Bernd, and Lukas. We are ready and looking forward to your question and answer. So far, so good. Thank you so much. See you in a few.
All right. Welcome back to this year's Capital Markets Day and to our Q&A session. I'm very happy that some of our analysts dialed in and that we have them obviously live here within the room, and I hope that everything works. For all the others, our chat tool is still open, and you're absolutely invited to submit your questions here. Let's start, and I hope that the operator can hear me right now. Please open the line for Falko Friedrichs from Deutsche Bank. Falco, very happy to have you.
Hello. Can we begin?
Yes.
Perfect. Thank you very much for the event and all the info. My first question is, I'm trying to understand your CapEx guidance a little bit better. On slide 65. Am I understanding it correctly that over the next two years, 2023 and 2024, you plan to spend 12% plus EUR 150 million? That comes out at about 15%-16% of sales in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 and 2026, you plan to spend 12% again. That's my first question.
I would take it. Hi, Falko. I would take the question. Basically for the next two years is correct. We plan to invest 12% CapEx to sales plus EUR 150 million over the period of two years. In the planning period, however, we expect in total, so we have the planning period from 2023 to 2027. We expect in the average to have a CapEx to sales ratio of around 12%, including also the investment adjustment, 12.5 or something like this.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Can I add? I don't know whether my microphone is on. I think, Falko, you have to see it in this way. These EUR 150 million are for excellent business opportunities that are actually very accretive to the story itself. Over the loop of the planning period of the last year, in principle, nothing's changing on our base rule, which is 4% base plus growth. Over the loop of the next years, you will clearly see the growth, plus 4%. As we are now guiding for double-digit growth, and we will deliver double-digit growth, whether it be 10% or 11%, you can expect that the average CapEx is o ver the period is more in the ballpark of the 14%. Yeah.
Okay, thank you. My second question is whether you can provide some kind of free cash flow outlook for 2023 and 2024. It sounds like this will be more weighted towards 2024, but can you provide a bit more color here?
Yeah, Franco, in the end of the day, it's quite difficult. We don't guide for free cash flow for 2023 and 2024, as you know. Because a lot of, let's say, variables included, especially you cannot predict precisely when do you can invest what and how much customer loans you actually get. It's quite difficult to really guide on the free cash flow. Yeah, that's basically the key thing. What we expect if the plan is working, the most likely assumption is that it will be moderately negative in 2023, then very positive in 2024 again. But again, yeah, it can be a shift from one year to the other, so it's really quite difficult to really pinpoint it down to a precise amount today.
Okay, thanks. My last question is, your 2023 guidance doesn't point to a lot of margin expansion, adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. Can you talk a bit more about the moving parts here and why there shouldn't be a bit more margin expansion next year? Thank you.
Didn't we guide 10% plus or double-digit plus? Yeah, we are guiding. No, indeed. I see. Basically, we are guiding here with a 10, at least 10% EBITDA growth. What we also can say is that we will grow faster with our EBITDA growth than our revenue growth. We expect really year by year to really improve our EBITDA margin. Quite interesting, just to come back also to your first question, the EBITDA growth. We have seen in the EBITDA payback how we really are able to improve our EBITDA back.
With this increment of EBITDA based on our investments and the CapEx program, this EUR 150 million, for example, or the growth CapEx now in the next two years, 2023 and 2024, will have an average EBITDA payback of three and a half years. Very attractive projects for us.
Okay, thank you very much.
All right, next question comes from Oliver Reinberg. Oli, can you hear us?
Thanks so much. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Perfect. The first question will be on the Eagle project. Can you just talk about when you expect the first phase contribution from these? Is it just a 2025 event, or will this be coming earlier? Any kind of color in terms of the phase and the margin ramp here, please?
Yeah. Actually, we are already benefiting from Eagle projects that we did win successfully in 2019 and especially 2020. That's expansions of resembling, of find. These are actually the businesses that are launched this summer. Yeah. Ramping up now steadily, for example. We will see clearly strong growth in the contract manufacturing this year, especially next year, but also over the loop of all the next years. The contract manufacturing will growing strongly and contribute strongly to both top but also bottom line increase.
Right. Perfect. On this mid-term guidance, generally in terms of framework, you talk about stronger EBITDA goals and top line goals. Can we also assume that adjusted EPS goals is expected to grow stronger than EBITDA on the back that we've now done this kind of one-time step up in terms of interest cost and that the tax rate should come down?
Yes, most likely, but only slightly, at least in our plan. It should be slightly better. Taking aside the year 2023, taking the next year aside, it's accurate that we see a stronger growth in EPS than EBITDA.
Perfect. Just in terms of housekeeping, can you just put any kind of color, what is the fair assumption now for clean depreciation growth in percentage terms, please? Not at the percentage of sales, but, how much depreciation is going to increase on average. And also can you just provide a color on the tax rate for 2023 and mid-term, please?
As for the Just to start with the tax rate. As a tax consultant, I'm always happy to talk about it. No, you can expect with a tax rate of 25 percentage points, 26 in this ballpark. The depreciation, I would always calculate between 8 and 9 percentage points of sales. This should be basically if I would make the model, I would do it like that.
Just to clarify, the 25, 26 is mid-term or for next year?
Basically 26 for next year, and then we should strive for 25% going forward, beyond 2023.
Okay. To this rate depreciation, is it fair to assume rather 12% growth or 15% growth going forward?
It's basically. It depends. It depends from the revenues because we have the ratio here. I would always assume you're growing with the revenues and we are growing stronger than at least 10%. Then you have to make a bet. You should do this in the range of 8%-9% depreciation to sales is how we structured the budget.
Okay, perfect. If I can squeeze in the last question, moving away from boring financials. The growth potential in synergies and why we talk about is actually quite encouraging. Can you just talk about the visibility that you have here in terms of any kind of hard commitment from clients, and also how you think about the kind of pricing development in this kind of area, please? Thank you.
Yeah, I think I take this. It's actually also really very nice to talk about this. That's what I tried to indicate when I spoke. We are discussing on a different level with our customers now. The contracts that we are signing now are under complete different conditions. This means they have a couple of clauses in where even in the case the business would not come, we have very high level of protection against any downside. The visibility that we have is many years, long years contracts, with high volumes. This business are a little bit what Bernd tried to say, game changers in the business. It's not that we just double the capacity in syringes and triple the sales, but it also has a very positive impact on the bottom line as well.
We are really moving in a different field. It's actually similar with the new business that we are bringing in for the contract manufacturing. We always talk about this CapEx in high values, and then we the share of the CapEx we put into the contract manufacturing. Meanwhile, though, more and more of the so-called eagles that you heard about in the questions before are developing a direction where the margin profile is more and more similar to what we also achieve in the high-value products. The businesses, you might see the CapEx now, but what we're doing at the moment is really moving the company in a different ballpark of fields in both top, but especially also the top line. That's really fun, what we see here.
Thanks so much. I'm expecting the queue.
All right. We take the next question by Sven Borho. Sven, can you hear us?
Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. It's two questions.
Can you speak up a little bit?
The first one is on the contract.
I'm sorry, can you speak up a little bit?
Sorry. I'm speaking already very loudly. I don't know if there's some technical problem. The question is the aim of development in contract manufacturing. Can you hear me now?
It's a little bit unclear, yeah.
Can you repeat the question?
Yes. Yeah, just send it on, I'll send it on the chat.
All right. Thank you. I'm sorry, Sven. We move forward and take the next question from Oliver Metzger. Oliver, can you hear us?
Yes, I hear you very well. Good afternoon, everybody. First question is on the segmented focus. You provided the chart with pharma and biotech spends currently at 81% and cosmetics at 12%. You haven't talked a lot about cosmetics and the related growth potential you see there. Where do you see the distribution in sales over the next years? Second question is about your manufacturing footprint. Right now, you're operating 36 plants in 16 countries. I know there are some limitations of the transportation of glasses and also the respective technologies you offer. Could you also elaborate about the potential to streamline your manufacturing footprint? My last question is just a quick one. What do you expect on energy cost in 2023 compared to 2022? Thank you.
I can start with cosmetic. Then for sure Lukas will take over. We have to see that there are two aspects that are helping our competitiveness in the cosmetic. One of them, we actually started in 2020 to move up the sustainability story. We have a lot of customers that are very happy to have someone that is serving the sustainability story. We should not forget, we are the player in the world that can use the highest amount of post-consumer recycled glass within our facilities. That really brings business in. That's one factor of competitiveness.
The other thing is something that we have to look at. We have, since end of 2021, a five years hedge, which is very important and relevant, for example, for the moulded facilities. Everyone was kind of in a certain way hedged in 2022, but few of our competitors are actually hedged in 2023, and we have to see how our competitiveness, how we can benefit in our competitiveness in the cosmetic business segment, from 2023 onwards with the strengths of our hedge. Lukas?
Maybe to add on that, I think our clear strategy in cosmetics is very much in line with pharma, where we add, we go up in the segment. From a, let's say, rather mass production segment to a higher value segment. That's what we are doing at the moment, which will help us also here to improve and increase margins in the future. On top of that, I think our unique position in front of the customers is that we can actually leverage our entire product portfolio, which we are only doing now since about two to three years.
They have really a big momentum, as we are selling not only the moulded glass but also tubular glass, plastic packaging. We can really offer a solution to the customers which others cannot, and that also helps to gain additional business. By the way, again, very profitable business in that other segment besides molded as well. On cosmetics. This is kind of where we are in the cosmetic business segment. Very promising as well.
Do you expect the share to be higher than the 12% right now or at a similar level?
No, we expect it to be at a similar level. We are growing in a similar level than in the other businesses.
Yeah, If there is a reduction of share, as I showed on one of these broad charts. The other high-value products are going up, the biologic injectables are going up. That does not necessarily mean that the other businesses are not growing. As we are growing very strongly and over proportion strong in the area of biologic and injectables, I think this is kind of shifting the share into this area. Now, we always forget about, it's also cosmetic, we also forget about our plastic business, which is by the way a business where we are highly competitive. It's a very attractive business. We are growing maybe not 10%+, but a solid mid-single digit with good margins and low CapEx. It's a pretty good, attractive business.
All right. Now I received your question, Sven, and it's about contract manufacturing and the margins. The EBITDA margin development and contract manufacturing over the next years. This was his question, if you can elaborate on that.
The second question is, if you look at the digitalization features, do you think that we are leading there? Are we close to the competition? Can you give them a little bit more color on the competitive landscape?
You take the second part or?
Yeah.
That's great.
It's all yours.
I think Lukas is happy to take. I could take it, but I can't take it away from Lukas. Yeah, maybe to the contract manufacturing. I think it's similar to what we see in the whole business, what Bernd tried to say. There will be a solid, strong CAGR over the loop of the next years on the top line in all businesses. It's exactly the same in the contract manufacturing, where you clearly see double-digit growth on the top line over the loop of the next years. If you look at the bottom line and the CAGR growth of the bottom line will be clearly stronger than the top line, which is exactly the right direction, and it is what we wanted in the strategy.
But we now see with the businesses that are in the pockets or in the books that things become reality, and that's very important.
Yeah, on the digitalization question, I absolutely believe that we are ahead of competition in that area. We started probably four-five years ago. We should not underestimate that we really have a competitive advantage because most of our competitors, they focus on one product or the other product. The player in the market that really serves, both own devices, contract manufacturing, but also primary packaging, we have, here the advantage to our competitors that we can actually offer the platform that others cannot. We have focused on very specific business models which we believe has the highest value in the market.
That we believe is the key to success, that they really go from the top, let's say, from a high level, really, to specific business models and bring them to the market like we introduced today. We are on track to do that with respimetrix , but also in the Parkinson's field and in other fields that we have not disclosed today. Yeah, we are, as I mentioned before, we are here very confident that we are ahead here against competition, we will see that revenue and bottom-line contribution already very soon.
All right. We move to the next. The next question comes from Thomas Schießle. Hello. Maybe you have to unmute. If you cannot hear us, actually, we cannot hear you. I'm happy to provide you with a chat tool and that you can provide your question over the chat tool. Okay. We have actually some questions left in the chat. I will move forward with these. One question comes from an investor, and it's about our investments into high-value solutions. The question is as follows: If more than 50% of the gross CapEx is invested into high-value solutions which are margin accretive, can you examine what the impact on group EBITDA margins will be? Why it did not make you increase the midterm EBITDA guidance?
In the end of the day, we should not forget that we stand now at a EBITDA level, EBITDA margin level of 20% in 2022, and we steadily want to bring it to a level of 23%-25%. As you know, and as you always know, we never overpromise, but we really are doing this in a very, let's say, realistic but very confident manner that we really can bring this margin to the table. That's basically the background. We should also not forget, we talked about it before, in the P&L line.
We also need always some cushion to invest into our R&D. We should not forget this, and this is also a feature that you should take into consideration. Step by step, we come with these high-value solutions projects and products into a level and territory of 23%-25%. Plus, we need to do our homework, especially in the area of operational excellence, to also make sure that we can here and there improve our bottom line. This brings us to this EBITDA margin level of 23%-25% in a very realistic and robust way.
All right, next question. A number of large players are expanding capacities and vials, syringes, cartridges and auto-injection devices. How much of your expansion is backed by firm contracts, and how do you think about potential overcapacity in the market once all these capacities come online?
Syringes, and autoinjectors, that's easy because it's completely covered by orders, including some downside protections that are actually provided by the customers and in the contract. It's what Bernd tried to say, very protected investments. It was slightly different with some of the investments we are not doing now, but we did in the past for vials, for example, cartridges. Here we, by the experience of the business, we clearly see the demand also long-term.
You can also see the numbers of vials, quarter-over-quarter, that despite the reduction of COVID demand, the market is still very strong, and.
Yeah
... we can see the continuous growth, that is there. At the moment, and also into the future, we don't see an overcapacity in the market.
You might not see this because you say, "Oh, these guys are spending a lot of CapEx." As a matter of fact, the reputation and the customer perception, the base we are discussing with our customers now actually leads to the fact that we are in the luxury position to become more selective. We can select the businesses that we are going to take, which is of course, very helpful for the conditions and then we close the deals.
All right. We have a rather long question from our analyst, Beatrice from Berenberg, who has actually a worth line. Quite a few questions on moulded glass. Obviously, not a core growth area for you, but how should we think about pricing going forward? Given your strong hedge, which protects your cost base, what do you expect to happen regarding competitive landscape? Are you seeing others already push prices higher than you? Do you expect this into 2023?
Would you rather take volume share or also raise prices and take margin? If volume, could you give us some sense of how long it would take for pharma customers to shift from a competitor to Gerresheimer, given the regulatory? Could this already contribute to strong volume growth in the first half of 2023, or would this take longer? I'm sorry, this was a question.
It's a long question.
I just wanted to give you some time to think about that.
What we, what we don't, definitely don't do and don't have to do is to buy volume or to buy market share. That's not something that is our intention, and we actually are completely sold out. That's not our intention to do. About pricing, there is a market pricing and, you know, we increase. It's obviously different customer by customer, segment by segment, but I think we have a very strong market position and can also increase pricing according to the market.
Yeah. Where she's right is that the regulatory in pharma does not give us too many opportunities to immediately switch back and forth in between the customers. Nevertheless, and that was referring to the question we heard earlier in the direction of cosmetics, that might be different. We have to see how all the different protectors that different governments are now working on energy with gas price cap, something is working. We have to see how this develops with the beginning of 2023, and then see, and then we will act accordingly.
All right. I can still see Oliver Reinberg in the line. Oliver, is there any follow-up question from your, from your end? Obviously not.
Do you hear me?
Yeah.
Do you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay. It's Oliver Metzger of BHF.
Oh. Hi, Oliver Metzger.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you have a follow-up question?
Basically, I ask for three questions. One, the first one was answered more intensively, but I also ask about the 36 plants in 16 countries. I know there are some limitations of the transportation of glass, also the differences of the respective products, but could you still elaborate about the potential to streamline the overall manufacturing footprint? The other question was on the expected energy costs in 2023 versus 2022. Please.
A tricky question. I think the transport topic is not a topic, yeah. We are producing in the region for the region, serving the customers in the region for the region. We even supply in our supply bases in the region for the region. That global footprint is kind of natural hedge and gives us quite a protection. It's the right thing to do. Streamline the facilities is something we always look at. It's not so easy in a regulated market, but you have to see, it's not a one product company. With the very broad portfolio that we actually have, we clearly see the need of more than one plant or one plant per region.
Nevertheless, the growth that we will see over the loop of the next years will generate a total different challenge for us. It's not about reducing costs and streamlining thing. It's really how can we manage the growth? How can we set up the lines? How can we, ideally set up the footprint and optimize the footprint? That will be core challenge of the next years. That's exactly the problems I love to have because that's growth problems. That's my favorite challenges to face.
And don't forget, when we are not adding additional facilities and actually making the existing ones larger with the growth, that also helps to improve the overhead absorption and, in the end, improve the bottom line. That's also kind of streamlining if you make the existing plants much bigger than in the past. That also helps of course. Here and there, like Dietmar mentioned, for sure there are some opportunities to streamline, and we are continuously working on them.
The topic refers very much to the basic questions of our strategy, yeah. How can you get the company into a real growth mode, and how can you really bring the profitability level significantly up? There's no doubt. I tried to explain it, you have to do your homework. You have to have your cost under control and work on this. The cost control, the cost consciousness and the working on your productivity will always help, and you have to do this. This will not bring the company into level of 23%-25%. This EBITDA improvement will only be achieved with a mix of the product mix or the switch of the product mix. This is the reason why the company is so strongly focused on higher value products and higher margin products.
Maybe Oliver, to come back to your second question regarding the development of the energy costs. We have actually a long-term hedge in place and which covers the significant portion of our actual energy costs. On the back of this, we just expect a moderate increase for the energy costs on the back of the fact that we have the majority, much more than the majority already hedged and fixed going forward. It's not really a, is a thing which is really at our core of our concerns.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you very much.
Now we have an ESG related question. Can you expand on your approach to decarbonization? You mentioned a hybrid solution briefly during your presentation.
Lukas, you want to?
Yeah. I think we are, you know, the main contributor to our CO2 footprint are obviously the furnaces that we are running. Not only, but it's the main ones. In all businesses we, or for the furnaces we will go into two directions. One is certainly that we go away from the gas, and we'll use more and more electricity. The other one, like you mentioned, we are elaborating also the use of hydrogen for the furnaces. For the power consumption we have basically in all businesses, we are focusing on renewable sources. Yeah, that's basically our decarbonization strategy. It has two main measures that I just explained.
All right. We have a more financial question, related to Q4. Obviously, we are reporting our results in February, nobody expects a precise answer, but maybe you can give an indication how Q4 developed.
Indeed we release our numbers in mid of February and expect that the trend, what you have seen now in the first nine months is continuing as we have actually, as I've actually predicted it and guided it for 2022. From our side as we stand today, there are no surprises. All good.
All right. Yeah, just give me one second. As this is a live event, I have to read the questions up front. This challenges me a little bit at the moment. Well, okay. With regards to your patient-based revenue model for digital solutions, for example, charging per connected patient. I understand the ultimate payer will be health insurers. They are known for being reluctant to pay for something where the benefit is not crystal clear. Have you had discussions with health insurers where you could obtain reassurance that this type of revenue model will be accepted?
Maybe there is a misunderstanding at the main. I mean, there are two types of customers that we are looking for for the digital business models. One is certainly the doctors and hospitals. They will pay per connected patient because they have the benefit. In the end, they have the benefit of the reduced cost. They then partly will gain through reimbursement the money from the insurances. Our direct customers in the end will be mainly hospitals and doctors, and in parts like respimetrix, the care organizations like this is just who have use cost. It's not the... The direct customer in the end is not the insurance because the beneficiary of the value of our solutions are actually the doctors and hospitals mainly, and not the insurance companies.
Who's planning to pay for it? We see this, you have to see it's not necessarily like in Germany because we have a lot of products planning to launch them in the U.S. first. Why is this the case? 'Cause here you have a slightly different system. You have so-called disease managers. You have call centers with 250 people that are not doing anything else, just calling the patients every day, asking them, "Did you take your drug? Is it okay?"
Because the pay is high, it pays off to make sure that the compliance or adherence of the patient is something relevant. Meanwhile, you have also opportunities that are now distributed and given out, where the adherence and the control of the adherence is actually a payment method in the US. That's what we are also calculating on and speculating on, that we get a certain share of this.
Maybe just to add on that, I mean, I mentioned it in the presentation, but we extensively had tested the market with interviews, with other types of checks. We have tested the market, the disease managers, but also hospitals and doctors. We check with them what is the value of our solution, and are they ready to pay for it? These interviews have been extremely promising and have reassured us that we are exactly on the right track to bring this solution to the market very soon.
Thank you. Can you give a bit insight on what to expect in the Advanced Technologies segment in the next years? How much CapEx and R&D is attributed to it, and do you have any royalty targets in the midterm?
I can take this question. I think we have the business that we have, and we can talk about with customers that we have in place, are going to be launched over the loop of end 2023 than 2024. These businesses are all more or less extremely attractive. In a total different ballpark of the margin and with royalties, there's no doubt about them. They will be changing not only the top line, but also the bottom line. That, by the way, is not included in the guidance today.
All right. There is one more questions on integrated solutions. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on what integrated solutions are. The question is related to additional capabilities. Do we feel comfortable with the capabilities we have in the company, or is there still capability missing?
If I feel comfortable is a good question. I think about one boss I once had, I told him, 'cause we were very successful in achieving a goal, I told him, "We were so very successful, but I'm still not satisfied." He said me, "That's good, because if you're ever satisfied, I have to fire you." Do we have enough capabilities in the company? Not satisfied yet, huh? We are permanently adding up capabilities and further developing to requirements, and that's very clear that we are working on this. The integrated solution, they can start pretty simple, yeah? If you have an autoinjector, you need the cartridge, yeah?
If you need the cartridge, you probably need the stoppers, yeah? That's already an integrated system. Integrated system that we are doing is also the integration work, all the regulation, the testing, the documentations work that we are doing in these solutions. Very good example, we spoke about solutions in cosmetic, where we have a competitive advantage, yeah? I think we can talk about the new, what is this in English, the pipettes, t he dropper.
The dropper. Yeah.
The small droppers of the pipette, yeah? We used in cosmetic only to do the moulded glass portion. Now we do the droppers, yeah, where you have a tubular glass part with a plastic pump, and you actually fill this in a moulded glass container. This is an integrated solution. A simple one, but it's an integrated solution that, for example, we are able to provide, and there's not many others that can do though this.
All right. Let me check back if there are any further open questions in the line, in the conference line. Please let us know. Otherwise, I would say, we have been very happy to have you here in this virtual Capital Markets Day. I would love to leave some more words to Dietmar to close this event. This is it from my end.
Yeah. Again, another sum up. I'm happy to do so. Actually, I have to thank you for the patience, for the interest in the company. I think we are on an extremely interesting path. The next years will prove and show that our transformation is in place and, from my point of view, the development is still underestimated by the market. It's good that the customers are seeing it, though.
It's a very exciting journey that we are taking. I would be happy if you join us. For the team here, thank you for the work. I think we've done a good job so far. I wish everyone a very good and successful rest of the week. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye.